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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
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Australian climate defenders blocked coal export shipments in several ports.
Australian state governments complain about the momentary inconvenience of the protests, and threaten to use repressive anti-protest laws. Bravo to the courageous protesters!
There is no need for Australia to suddenly end all coal export. What it needs to do is cut down coal mining faster — and pressure the rest of the world hard to cut down faster. These protesters are calling attention to that.
Secondarily, Australia should stop imploring China to buy Australian coal rather than mine coal in China. Coal combustion in China will hurt the world (and especially China) no matter which country it gets the coal from, but begging China to buy it strengthens China's influence and weakens resistance to it.
*Mark Carney [recently retired head of the Bank of England] says Bank’s negative predictions about consequences of leaving EU "proven to be the case."*
China has built as much renewable generating capacity as the rest of the world, and it is rapidly building more.
This is not a race between countries to see which one will "win." It is part of a race against time for the survival of civilization and the natural world. Renewable generation is one of the things we need for that goal.
The whole world is in this together, and China shows what other countries do, if only we overcome the efforts of the fossil fuel corruption intended to stop us.
One bad aspect of China's progress is that it is still increasing its coal combustion. Until fossil fuel use decreases, we are still getting further away from survival.
In general, the one good thing about the Chinese system of government is that the state is more powerful than businesses, and will not permit them to get powerful enough to obstruct the state's plans.
The very bad thing about the Chinese system of government is that the state is far more powerful than the people, and will not permit the people to obstruct the state's plans. But it does consider the aggregate practical desires of people, despite its contempt for their views and freedom.
To oversimplify, a just state cows the powerful few while respecting the people. China does the first but rejects the second. The US does an insufficient job of each.
The Tory prime minister has de-prioritized the previous commitments for avoiding global heating disaster.
Yusef Salaam was one of the five falsely convicted "rapists" in Central Park in 1989, who were later conclusively exonerated. He seems to have won the Democratic primary for a city council seat.
*Samuel Alito’s Wife Leased Land to an Oil and Gas Firm While [Alito] Fought the EPA.*
*First UN human rights investigator allowed to visit since [Guantanamo prison] was set up says men subjected to "inhuman and degrading" treatment.*
*UN says Russian forces have tortured and executed civilians in Ukraine.*
Tasmania, under a right-wing government, is continuing to cut down the trees where the endangered swift parrot lives.
Turkey and Lebanon are deporting Syrian refugees to Syria, and some are being drafted into Assad's army.
The last resort of fragging your commander with a grenade is always available when there is actual combat.
Foxconn promised to invest in an Ohio company making electric trucks, but found an excuse to pull out of it, so the company is going bankrupt.
*If [the corrupter] wins, he’ll turn the justice department into a vendetta machine.*
The EU's proposed law to regulate AI and nonintelligent "AI" takes mostly the right approach: to regulate by laws the uses of these systems.
The attempt to control these uses by releasing trained neural networks under nonfree licenses is misguided: it is nondemocratic, unjust, and probably ineffective, just as it is for other software.
For the directive as described here, I am concerned that a fine of 6% of global gross revenue could be an acceptable business expense for very large companies. I think that individuals crucially responsible for flagrantly illegal decisions should be prosecuted and face possible prison sentences.
I am concerned that the proposal may enact a bad assumption about the breadth of copyright. When ChatGPT or something like it copies a small snippet of text that appeared in some unidentified work, or perhaps in many otherwise different unidentified works, that should not be copyright infringement on those works. it would not be copyright infringement if you did the same thing in your head. Therefore, the requirement to list the copyright of all the works used for training is excessive.
Fossil fuel company Santos owns "decommissioned" offshore fossil gas wells that are leaking bubbles of methane. It says that stopping these leaks is "not feasible."
Is that really true, or is it a bogus excuse not to seal them?
If it is true, this is all the more reason not to allow any more fossil gas wells to be made.
The Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act has been enacted.
*The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act requires that employers with more than 15 workers provide "reasonable accommodations" to people who are pregnant, postpartum or have a related medical condition,*
*Supreme Court Rejects Independent State Legislature Theory.*
The "Independent State Legislature Theory" claimed that state legislatures could decide how to decide arbitrarily how the state's electoral votes would be cast in a presidential election, disregarding the state's constitution and immune to correction by the state's courts.
This was obviously absurd, given that the state legislatures are created by the state's constitution. However, brazen right-wing legislators that sought to force a right-wing victory will try anything and see if they can get away with it.
Prigozhin and some of his troops have arrived in Belarus. The rest of the Wagner troops seem to be in Ukraine.
*Time is running out for Julian Assange. If MPs do not act, how can they say they value free speech?*
*Senior doctors in England vote to strike over pay.*
"Consultant" in the NHS means a specialist who takes overall responsibility for treating selected patients. Nothing like a "consultant" in business.
UK union-hampering laws imposed a deadline on the nurse union's strike vote so that it did not receive enough ballots for a valid result.
I have not seen anything which explains just why or how that particular deadline was imposed, or whether the union could now try again with more time for members to vote.
Kenyan women who survived domestic slavery in Salafi Arabia testified and demand Kenyan government action to protect Kenyans who work there.
Tape of the bullshitter gives the lie to his claims about a secret military document.
Bogus Johnson was judged to have violated the ministerial code by taking a private job with only half an hour's notice to the pertinent parliamentary committee. But this committee has no power to punish him.
Starmer appears to have broken a similar rule when he left government service.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the PRO act and protect the right to organize from union-busting tactics.
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 your congresscritter and senators to defend the right to abortion and birth control.
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 pregnant woman in Poland, carrying a fetus that had almost no chance of resulting in a healthy baby, died in a hospital that never informed her that her life was in danger or that an abortion could have saved her.
*Current heatwave across US south made five times more likely by climate crisis.*
Prigozhin's maybe-fake coup suggests that Putin's regime is not as secure as he would like us to believe. It follows that Ukraine has the hope of winning the war and kicking Russian troops out of Ukraine.
The article mentions the debate among historians about whether the hard terms in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, caused widespread suffering that helped Hitler seize power. I think there is a miscommunication in that discussion. The "humiliation" of Germany, that helped Hitler seize power, was the requirement for Germany to pay reparations that it could not possibly pay. Every German felt the suffering from this.
A total military defeat for the Putin forces would not amount to a humiliation like that.
The current Tory government has set a record for blocking the highest ever fraction of the freedom-of-information requests received.
Filipinas seeking jobs abroad are compelled to borrow money at high interest to pay illegal junk fees.
*Destruction of world's pristine rainforests soared in 2022 despite Cop26 pledge.*
Sea level rise, caused by human-controlled greenhouse gas emissions is destroying Tuvalu's land area. The country will be gone well before the end of this century.
What we don't know is whether other countries, that won't mostly be inundated by the sea, will survive the other global consequences of our way of life.
Robert Reich busts the myth that "people are paid what they're worth."
He presents this with illustrations in a short video, which (while the invidious proxies continue to function) can be seen here. (It starts with an annoying use of singular "they", but I recommend it despite that.)
For me, the statement he criticizes shows an even deeper problem: it presumes a narrow, purely economic idea of what a person's value consists of. I've decided not to use locutions that presume a person's "worth" is measured by the economic value of per assets.
How vampire capitalists use debt forgiveness to a poor country as an excuse to squeeze it to death. (From 2012.)
Palast uses the term "vulture", but I think that is misleading. Vultures eat dead animals; as long as animals die, vultures (or something comparable) are necessary. These capitalists, by contrast, drain live countries and their live inhabitants.
I would like to see more recent news about this.
High interest rates in the UK have translated into high mortgage interest, which is translating into higher rents, which is likely to make hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
I have a hunch that the Tories' voter-ID cards will stop many of them from voting. My hunch says that those cards have the voter's address, and that those who were forced out of their homes will need to get new cards. If they don't have a stable address, does that mean they can't vote?
Maryland's supreme court ruled that ballistic analysis has not been proved reliable enough to justify testifying that a specific bullet was definitely fired by a certain gun.
A survey shows conclusively that the root cause of homelessness in California is simple: homes are too expensive.
The same study established that 90% of California's homeless people were living in California when they became homeless.
The gig workers paid to provide verified data for training neural nets are secretly using neural net systems to get that data.
This overall system could magnify errors.
Rich people's paid flunkies say, "Now can Naples survive without attracting our bosses to visit?"
Seward County, Nebraska, makes a racket of accusing drivers based on no evidence of being drug traffickers, then threatening to put them in jail, unless they sign away all their cash.
"Drug-sniffing" dogs are often trained to follow the human handler's subtle commands. When the drug is told "find drugs here", it does.
When victims try to contest the seizure, courts are biased heavily against them.
To prevent this, we should make sure that it is (1) impossible to seize money from people for an alleged crime without first convicting them of it, and (2) when money is seized, absolutely none of it is available for the use of thug departments or the entities they are associated with.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax major sports leagues.
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 protect teenage workers from corporate exploitation.
I will not refer to teenagers of age 14 and 15 as "children".
Notwithstanding that point about language, I support the laws that stop employers from pushing them into excessive or hazardous work.
US citizens: call on Biden and Blinken to confront India's human rights abuses.
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 pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act.
Samuel Alito accepted lavish gifts and then failed to recuse himself from a very important case in which he ruled for his benefactor.
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.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Clarence Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court.
Everyone: call on Home Depot to stop selling Roundup.
If you have disabled the page's JavaScript, you may get a blank response after signing. That does not mean anything is wrong; your signature has probably been sent in properly. The blank screen has text that is rendered invisible by CSS; if your browser gives you a way to disable the CSS in the page (as Icecat does), that should make the text appear.
Prigozhin agreed to go to exile in Belarus, and Putin agreed to drop charges against him. Ostensibly, everyone is friends again. Despite the brief incidents of real combat, I can't feel convinced it wasn't just theater.
The exile agreement is no guarantee of Prigozhin's safety. If the coup was real, Putin might have him killed in Belarus. Even if it was theater, Putin might have him killed, in reaction to the enthusiastic reception Prigozhin received from the public — apparently because people hate Putin. I don't think Putin can forgive showing that on TV.
More speculation about the reasons for the events we have seen.
US beekeepers have to work very hard to make new colonies to make up for the ones that die.
Ralph Nader: US corporations have good reason to believe they are above the law, since crimes by corporations occur constantly and are hardly ever prosecuted. Government lawyers don't want to prosecute businesses because they hope to work for those businesses later.
We voters could stop them if we concentrated on the issue. That is why they create side issues (refugees, queer people, drag shows, sex education) to distract people with.
It is more or less impossible to do valid psychological experiments on whether mental manipulation tricks to help a person really do help. People tend to be helped by doing anything which they believe will help them.
Anti-abortionists try to crush defenders of abortion rights through phony accusations and proceedings designed to humiliate and impoverish them.
Democrats are turning their defense of abortion rights into election victories.
Amazon has subcontracted a lot of its deliveries to "separate" companies, to thwart holding it accountable.
The workers at one of them now demand Amazon negotiate, but Amazon wants to shut down that subcompany instead.
The easiest way to hold Amazon responsible. Don't buy from there, and ask your friends not to buy anything for you from there. Inform web sites that ask people to buy from Amazon through their pages that you boycott Amazon and suggest they choose another way to raise funds.
I go even further than this. I refuse to identify myself when buying products, aside from prescription medicines.
*3M pays $10.3bn to settle water pollution suit over [PFAS] "forever chemicals".*
This is a lot of money, but I think it may be too little. is it enough to pay for the costs of treating all the people affected?
What can these cities do to keep PFAS out of their water supply? They will have to do it forever, I think, since the environment is already full of PFAS.
*Draft EU plans to allow spying on journalists are dangerous, warn critics.*
Seeking funds for wildlife conservation in poor, indebted countries by trading debt for a commitment to spend on conservation.
I think wealthy countries will have to put money into this, and get it by taxing the rich.
Naomi Klein: *Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr's candidacy at our peril.*
An Australian senator calls for investigating whether any of Australia's "senior generals" bear responsibility for war crimes in Afghanistan.
The Collateral Murder video shows that rules of engagement can license murder. I hope Australia will investigate that too.
*Safety checks run down and boom time for criminals.* Tory incompetence/neglect is letting everything in the UK go bad. So any business might cheat you. You could lose mere money, or lose your life in the case of unsafe construction that might start a fire.
*Nature at risk of breakdown if Cop15 pledges not met, world leaders warned.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 1-202-224-3121 and advocate expanding the Supreme Court and imposing a code of ethics such as other federal judges have.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Procter & Gamble to switch to forest-free products to help save the boreal forest.
US citizens: call on Congress to boycott Kevin McCarthy's commission to cut Social Security (and 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!
Prigozhin's Wagner soldiers took over the city of Rostov without a fight, and some of the locals welcomed them.
Another Wagner column seems to have rushed towards Moscow, while Putin ordered real army units to stop them.
Ukraine welcomed the opportunity that an internal conflict in Russia might offer. However, I expect this won't give Ukraine much of an opportunity. Prigozhin was at pains to explain that the army centers he had taken control of were working on the war with Ukraine just as before.
Then he made a deal with Putin to abort the coup.
Prigozhin's attack seemed precipitously sudden, with too little public preparation to build up much support. His climb down seems unbelievably fast as well. I would not expect someone who has launched an armed rebellion and been accused of treason to call it off so quickly.
I have to wonder whether this coup was a kind of theater, agreed in advance between Prigozhin and Putin.
A train carrying toxic chemicals fell into the Yellowstone River because a bridge collapsed.
I have to wonder whether this collapse was caused by saving money by reducing regular maintenance. That would fit the railroad company's general approach, but I don't know whether it occurred in this bridge.
Three Texas thugs face murder charges for killing Melissa Perez, who seemed to be freaking out but was not in a position to harm them significantly.
Opponents to Atlanta's cop city project are running a referendum campaign which seeks to cancel it entirely.
The city government, which seems to be motivated by something we can only guess at, tried several times to sabotage the petition drive.
Surely the would-be contractors see an opportunity to profit, but I doubt that the profit would be big enough to motivate such stiff insistence from the city government. I have a hunch that something nastier is at work, something more deeply related to right-wing politics.
I doubt that the contractors who would build it have enough money to gain that they would find it worth while to put a lot of money into stiffening politicians' support for the project.
Six southern US states including Texas are suffering from an extreme heat wave.
When will Republicans admit that our actions are making this worse?
I have a hunch that northern Mexico is suffering from a heat wave too.
A private ally of Orbán has bought Hungary's main book publisher and bookstore chain.
Hungary, like various other countries, is exploring how to create cryptic fascism, in which the institutions of the state nominally continue to work, but democracy ceases to be meaningful, This reminds me of how Octavius Caesar gave himself personal control of Rome while keeping the Republic's institutions nominally in function.
*Malaysia to ask Interpol for help to track down comedian over MH370 joke.*
Many governments repress political dissidents, usually by falsifying nonpolitical charges against them. For instance, India does this.
However, overtly attacking foreign comedians is an extreme form of censorship.
*The sudden warming of Britain’s seas will tear through ocean life like a wildfire.*
This is going to happen around the world. Some marine species will be able to move — others will not. The result will be chaos. And then ocean acidification will wipe out entire classes, even phyla.
*The government should halt all new roads unless there are exceptional circumstances, the [UK] government's climate advisers are likely to say next week.*
Prigozhin seems to claim to be launching some sort of coup or civil war in Russia, but at the same time saying it is not a coup.
He says that there was no rational reason for Putin to attack Ukraine.
Any or all of what he claims about events could be bogus. He may be trying to seize power from Putin. Or it may be a stunt, planned with Putin. I can't come up with a rational explanation of it. But it seems unlikely to me that there will be room for both of them in Russia after this.
*Paris climate finance summit fails to deliver debt forgiveness plan.*
Texas has passed a law to nullify all local regulations covering broad areas including working conditions, farming, and banking.
In particular, this will eliminate the regulations in some cities requiring employers to give construction workers occasional breaks to drink water, to protect them from death from the extreme heat.
Republicans are determined to ensure that hard labor is no safer in one Texas town than in another.
US citizens: call on Democrats in Congress to refuse to lend legitimacy to the Republican's plan for a commission to cut Social Security and Medicare.
When artist Françoise Gilot broke up with Pablo Picasso, he went to great lengths to cancel her artistic career. In France, her career never escaped the damage that he did.
Picasso famously made many paintings of his wives and lovers. I wonder if that was a way of marking them as his possessions.
Picasso's arrogant treatment of women does not cancel his artistic genius; equally, his artistic genius does not cancel his arrogant treatment of women. They are two parts of reality, each as real as the other.
Accused "hijackers" on a cargo ship headed for Italy were simply refugees trying to get to Europe, say the prosecutors who were supposed to put them on trial as "pirates".
China has demanded Poland censor an art exhibition which condemns actions by China and Chairman Xi.
China carries out many parallel efforts to silence criticism and critics in other countries. It uses its economic power to pressure governments to help. We cannot take for granted that Poland will stand up to this pressure.
The mining company Adani threatened reporters who visited its coal mine site with legal action for meeting with indigenous protesters protesting on the site, and demanded that they not publish any photos they took there.
Companies that try to bully reporters should be shut down by the state.
This particular company is participating in mass murder. Pollution from coal mines already kills thousands. Global heating disaster will kill at least hundreds of millions, perhaps billions.
My main criticism of the Australian government is that it allows new coal mines to be opened. How much coal mine profit is your life worth?
Madison Square Garden is using facial recognition on everyone who enters, to keep out the lawyers representing plaintiffs that are suing it.
Laws to restrict use of facial recognition on the public should make sure to prevent this.
A number of musicians have vowed to boycott concert venues that use facial recognition on the public.
Bravo!
(satire) *Critics Say Submersible Should've Been Tested With Poorer Passengers First.*
Establishing fenced enclosures in the Australian desert, and eradicating invasive predators and pests, enables native species to grow again.
I support protecting the pre-colonization ecosystems this way. I question, though, whether it is correct to call this "rewilding". The indigenous people have been managing these ecosystems for 40,000 years, so "wild" is not an accurate term to describe what they were during that time.
More scummy subservience to business from Senator Sinema.
Yemen may find peace by splitting once again into two countries, but Salafi Arabia objects because neither one is under its influence.
*L.A. School Board President Gives a Lesson on [Queer] Inclusion.* I find it inspiring.
The US government is inviting Indian repressor Modi to visit, hoping to win his support against China. I fear this means the US will do as little to oppose Modi's repression in India as it does to oppose repression in Salafi Arabia.
Some car racing in the US still uses leaded gas. Researchers have found that it does significant harm to children growing up near those race tracks.
The effect of government-imposed poverty in the UK can be measured by the average height of five-year-old children.
For "smart", read "snoop". It is now advertised as a feature that a "smart TV" watches you. Sky expects customers to pay extra to be able to use the video themselves.
If I could pay extra to make sure nobody could watch me through it, that wouldn't convince me to tolerate that device in my house. (After all, it runs nonfree software and talks to the internet.) But it would eliminate one of my objections to it.
A London thug has been convicted for spraying a kind of pepper spray at a man who was climbing down a drain pipe on a tall building. By doing so the thug endangered the man's life. Fortunately for him, he did not actually fall.
The thug suspected the man of having committed robbery. It would have been reasonable for the thugs to have arrested him when he got down, but not to risk killing him.
*As D.C. Fêtes Narendra Modi, His Political Prisoners in India Are Forgotten.*
*I literally cannot say Imran Khan’s name on Pakistani TV.*
Robert Reich: *[The corrupter] is basing his candidacy on two Big Lies — that President Biden stole the 2020 election from him, and that Biden is orchestrating a prosecutorial witch hunt against him.*
*West needs strategy to tie Ukraine aid to corruption progress, thinktank says.*
Journalists accuse Ukraine of controlling coverage of the war.
In Watts, a ghetto in Los Angeles, there is a high school, and near it a metal recycling plant which emits a high level of pollution, including brain-stunting lead. That plant has now been charged with felonies for endangering the students.
As a side issue, I criticize the article for referring to high school students as "children" — they'd have to be prodigies to be in high school that young. Of course, that has no effect on the issue of emitting dangerous pollution.
Ukraine calls for setting up a system whereby the assets of a country that launches a war of conquest will be seized and used to fix the damage.
It is fair to take Russia's assets, and those of Putin's cronies, and put them into rebuilding Ukraine. Let's do it. But we should not suppose that other dictators who in the future start wars of conquest will be vulnerable to the same tactic. Once they have seen this response to Putin, they will take care not to store their assets in countries that might not be on their side in a war.
An algorithm Used in Jordan's distribution of World Bank aid funds uses incorrect measures to calculate who are the neediest.
*The Biden administration … proposed revisions to Trump-era regulations that severely weakened protections for our nation's most imperiled animals and plants, keeping in place some of the most significant rollbacks to the Endangered Species Act in the law's 50-year history.*
*The [right wing] believes the FBI is obsessed with jailing Trump. The opposite is true.*
Millions of Americans have student debt that, barring a miracle, they can't possibly ever pay off. Biden paused loan payments, but his surrender to Republican blackmail includes restarting payments. Many Americans are too poor ever to pay.
Republicans want to dump additional debt on them to cancel out the benefit they received from the pause in payments.
The miracle of plutocracy's media influence is visible in the fact that the millions of victims of this don't all vote for progressives.
Greenpeace says to reject the planet roasters' false choice between "the economy" and our health.
An additional level of falsehood is that when they say "the economy" they mean rich people's wealth — not particularly helpful for us. For non-rich people to have better lives, we must reject the rich people's trickle-down deals.
* Amazon rainforest and [1/5 of] other ecosystems could collapse "very soon", researchers warn.*
Perhaps even in a few decades.
In Britain, at least 14,000 people were denied the right to vote by the Tories' new voter-ID law.
They tended to be from demographic groups one might expect not to vote for Tories.
The actual number denied the right to vote could be in the hundreds of thousands, as many who did not vote said it was because of the voter ID.
Economic research concludes that the loss of income from shutting down fossil fuel extraction would fall mainly on the wealthy. We can do it!
(satire) *Coast Guard Sends Another Submersible Full Of Billionaires After The First One.*
*The fourth leading cause of death in the US? Cumulative poverty.* Cumulative poverty means having spent years of your life being poor.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the new Republican bill for tax cuts for the rich: "billions of dollars in tax cuts for wealthy corporations, private equity firms, the richest 1%, and investors from other 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!
US citizens: call on the EPA to restrict bee-killing pesticides.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: State your support for Biden's quiet nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
US citizens: call on the EPA to protect our communities from toxic air pollution from chemical plants.
US citizens: call on the USPS Inspector General and the Postal Regulatory Commission to enable public feedback on DeJoy's planned "dramatic changes" in the USPS.
*The Media Cares More About the Titanic Sub Than Drowned Migrants.*
When a few people go on a risky adventure and get killed, their deaths are regrettable — every death is regrettable, in and of itself — but it doesn't raise important issues.
The Senate Budget Committee held a hearing about the effects of dark money in keeping global heating going.
*Half of [all] Americans have faced [an alert about possible] "extreme" weather in the last six weeks.*
Some of the events warned about have a clear connection to global heating.
*Atlanta DA Opposed Indicting Cop City Legal Observer, but Georgia Attorney General Pushed Charges Anyway.*
Fanatical Israelis, from the camp that generally aims for ethnic cleansing, held a pogrom in an Arab town in Palestine and burned 30 houses.
Iceland has suspended its whale hunt and may stop the practice permanently.
Biden and the presidents and prime ministers of various other countries have signed a statement calling for a green transition for the whole world, together with debt relief for countries crushed by debt, as ways to reduce poverty.
Justice Alito accepted a luxury vacation as a gift, along with a right-wing billionaire who was pushing legal cases to give additional legal rights to billionaires (and less to the rest of us).
He did not report it.
*Oregon County [which includes Portland] Sues Big Oil for Climate Damages Caused by Heat Dome, Wildfires.*
The UK is proceeding with an "online safety" bill that would make it unsafe for Wikipedia to operate there.
The Federal Election Commission will consider a petition from Public Citizen to ban political use of deepfakes.
I think it is misleading to refer to the systems that make deepfakes as "AI", because they do not understand the messages they portray.
Business web sites are filling up with text written by chatbots to appeal to Google Search. This text is uninteresting for humans so humans generally don't read it.
It occurs to me that this could be profitable for Google. It will probably charge for the perverse service of writing the SEO text that will appeal to its search engine.
And it may be hard for other search engines to make sense of these pages enough to know when to show them to users.
Here's an idea: a chatbot-generated page could have a button saying "FOR HUMANS" that would take you to the version that humans would like to read.
Organized volunteers in Jersey are trying to eradicate the Asian hornets that have gained a foothold there.
In most of Western Europe these hornets are so established that there is little hope of getting rid of them with today's methods. Perhaps some day we will be able to eradicate them with an innovative genetic attack.
The International Labour Organization said that the UK's restrictions on strikes violate workers' rights.
*The Special Counsel Who Indicted [the bullshitter] Is No Democrat. They Never Are.*
Harassment of women in toilets by trans women is so rare that in effect it is pure myth.
In 2015, Media Matters journalists contacted 17 large school districts in states whose laws allowed trans people to use the toilets for their gender identity.
They all said replied that they had never seen a problem of harassment in bathrooms by trans people.
(satire) *Two Still Dead In Mausoleum Collapse.*
In Canada, wildfires are overcoming the capacity to rebuild the houses they destroy.
This is just the beginning of climate disaster. Each decade will make things distinctly worse.
Britons voted for Bogus Johnson knowing he was a liar.
This awareness was so thoroughly spread that even I knew that "Bogus" was the correct name for him. It seems that he has a superficial charm that motivates many Britons to like him even as he lies to them.
The bullshitter, in the US, has a superficially different approach and tells very different kinds of lies, but I am sure the two careers are fundamentally similar.
The owner of Reddit has made Elon Musk his hero and Twitter his example.
That bodes ill for Reddit.
(satire) *Study Finds More Americans Taking On Third Job To Help Keep CEOs Afloat.*
Republicans in Congress are harassing researchers who study disinformation practices, with investigations of made-up crimes.
One must suspect that Republicans are aware that their party lives on disinformation, and consider these researchers a danger to that.
*[Minister in charge] tells [UK thugs] to ramp up use of stop and search.*
Stop-and-frisk, as it's called in the US, is not very effective at reducing crime
but is wildly effective at making people of targeted demographic groups feel oppressed.
We must not ignore coalmines in the fight to reduce methane emissions.*
A UK agency will investigate whether eateries at train stations are gouging.
In the US, it is taken for granted that they will do so.
An Australian trans-man paradoxically found it easier to avoid prejudice (usually) as a foreign journalist in Afghanistan than in Australia.
He has published a documentary of his meetings with a group of Taliban that accepted being acquainted with him.
*Poor people hit hardest by Covid because of [years of pre-pandemic] NHS cuts, experts say.*
Everyone: call on the Museum of Modern Art to reject the sponsorship of fossil fuel magnate Henry Kravis
US citizens: call on the Dept of Labor to enforce federal law in states that try to let teenagers work more hours and doing increasingly dangerous work.
US citizens: call on the EPA to take bold action on plastic pollution
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US citizens: call on the Forest Service to protect the Thompson Divide.
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Arizona's legislators are drifting into unofficial establishment of Christianity by setting out bibles in their lounge.
One Arizona state senator expressed her disapproval of this by hiding some of the bibles within the lounge. Republicans tried to expel her from office for that.
Perhaps it would be more useful to set out copies in their lounge of Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell, and The Buddha and his Dhamma by Bhimrao Ambedkar.
When the boat carrying hundreds of refugees sank near Greece, it had not moved for hours. Greek coast guard vessels remained nearby but did not rescue anyone.
This contradicts the Greek claim that the boat was sailing towards Italy.
The Tories have canceled their plan to reform unjust treatment of British citizens who were brought from Caribbean colonies decades ago as children and have been threatened with deportation.
This is the usual Tory evasive response when their cruel policies arouse public outrage: they promise to correct the policies, dawdle for years getting started, and eventually figure that people have had time to forget the outrage — so they can disregard the issue.
*Power companies spend millions to fight Maine's proposed non-profit utility.*
I guess that is why they are called "power" companies.
The EU is investigating Amazon's use of its anticompetitive practices in advertising.
Amazon carries out auctions for ad space, and charges web sites for that. It also represents the bidders for the space, and charges them for that. Independent sellers are effectively compelled to use Amazon. So it has to be broken up.
However, laws that require proof of specific abuses before breaking up a giant company are too weak. Simply being so big as to have power over a market is ipso facto too big.
See also my proposal for a progressive tax on a corporation's gross income.
Olena Yahupova lived in Enerhodar when the Putin forces captured it. Perhaps because her husband is a Ukrainian officer — no other plausible explanation is mentioned — the Putin forces tortured her for days, then put her in prison for months.
Then they forced her to dig ditches and tell lies on camera. Then an officer in the Putin forces decided to release her and apparently gave orders that permitted her to go to Russia and from there to Estonia.
Some of the events in this story are puzzling — I can't see explanations for what some Russians did. But that doesn't mean they didn't do them.
*There is so much more for us [women] to worry about than men masquerading as women to access single-sex spaces.* (Which hardly ever happens.)
Philippine human rights defender Walden Bello: *Neoliberal Economists Should Be Recognized as Criminals, Not Prize-Winners.*
Global trade, unleashed from national frontiers, has proved extremely effective for converting the Earth's natural resources, and the work of the non-rich, into wealth to spread among the affluent few. That is what the World Trade Organization locks countries into.
*We can revile Putin’s violence in Ukraine, but we’re not at war with Russian culture.*
*If even the British establishment in the midst of an existential war with Nazi Germany could see German music as more than simply "enemy" culture, but as part of a common civilization, surely we should be able to do the same today?*
(satire) *Crypto Leaders Call For Infusion Of 20 Million Dopes To Stabilize Market.*
*Research has found those who use medications such as Ritalin without having conditions such as ADHD actually reduce their mental performance.*
India has banned several documentaries that presented oppression of Muslims.
It forced Twitter to censor tweets (before Musk took it over) that accused India of repressing protesting farmers.
UK thugs say that repressing Just Stop Oil protests cost them around 6 million dollars.
By comparison continued global heating will cost billions of dollars, if not trillions, and hundreds of millions of lives, if not billions.
Clearly the government should stop repressing Just Stop Oil and start heeding it.
(satire) *Wrongly Convicted Death Row Inmate Exonerated Mere Hours After Execution.*
Broadening historical preservation in the US to include homes of people who were not rich, and perhaps not white either.
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, usually because they have something to teach about racism or fighting racism. That article is one of the exceptions.
I disagree with one point mentioned in the article. I don't believe anyone living today needs to feel guilty over having had ancestors that had dealings with slavery or slave-owners. The test for our consciences is whether we support freedom today.
As the people of Hamtramck elected Muslims to the city council, those who make "diversity" their cause applauded … until they discovered that those Muslims were religious conservatives on social issues. I advocate equal rights, not "diversity."
The FBI is arresting fantasy terrorists again, protecting us from biddable young people who can be lured into playing a minor role in imaginary fund-raising for PISSI.
*Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers.*
US citizens: call on Congress to save millions of Americans from losing medical coverage — by passing Medicare for All.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on CNN not to give the bullshitter any more "town halls"
The lawsuit against the State of Montana for allowing businesses to contribute to ruining the climate for humans in the future has reached the stage of courtroom trial.
*US government toughens rules on chemicals used to break up oil slicks.*
What Billionaire Polluters used after the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to have caused harm to humans who touched it.
The German government has backed down on a law to prohibit installation of new oil and gas heating systems in buildings.
I support shifting the payment for protecting the climate from individuals to cities, but postponement of change needed for survival is most unfortunate.
*Outrage in Guatemala as crusading journalist given six-year prison term.*
Many countries nowadays silence opposition activists with charges of financial or sexual impropriety. It is hard to see in a glance that such charges are false, and that makes them serve repression's purpose.
*Why Should Drug Corporations Like Merck and Eli Lilly Even Exist?*
I don't think companies that big ought to exist.
*World Bank says subsidies costing as much as $23m a minute must be repurposed to fight climate crisis.* Its report says that these subsidies are harmful. They measure the power of business to corrupt governments.
Will the World Bank take concrete steps to stop this? I am sure it plays some role in those subsidies.
China seems to be concealing the number of people killed by Covid-19 there.
Remaining Tories aim to convince the public that Bogus Johnson was a fluke, rather than the natural culmination of Tory subservience to the callous rich.
Organized right-wing bullies making threats have convinced businesses from trying to demonstrate they are friendly to queer folk.
Parents let their child walk to a nearby store and gave her all sorts of protection as precautions. A busybody called the city thugs, who threatened her parents. Now they keep her a prisoner at home.
When I was 6 years old, I walked to nearby stores with just some money and my house keys. When I crossed a street, I took advantage of the traffic lights, which in midtown Manhattan are found at every intersection. There was nothing difficult about it.
US citizens: call on GOP State Legislatures to stop attacking voting rights.
Some Republican officials are following the wrecker in labeling law enforcement against the wrecker's crimes as military attacks in a civil war.
An overloaded boat carrying migrants sank in the Mediterranean near Greece. A Greek coast guard vessel accompanies the boat for hours, but someone on the boat who had a satellite phone insisted that the people on it did not want to be rescued, and eventually the coast guard vessel went away.
Did the Greek vessel do something wrong? If so, what should it have done?
Some say it should have towed the boat to "safety". Does this mean forcibly taking them to Greece? To Italy, where they wanted to go?
Would it have been safe to tow the overloaded boat? Would it have been possible to tow it, if the people on the boat tried to prevent towing? Maybe they could have cast off the towing cable or cut it.
I wonder if the boat had an actual crew, and not only passengers. Sometimes smugglers conscript one or more passengers to "run the boat", which (not being sailors) they can do only in easy circumstances. Sometimes that conscript gets charged as a conspirator in the crime of "people smuggling" even though perse was not given a choice.
But this was a bigger boat than usual, and maybe it had a real crew. If so, maybe the person with a satellite phone was one of them. Maybe the passengers would have been happy to land safely in Greece.
The official investigation into the Minneapolis thug department found a pattern of "aggression and discrimination" against blacks.
US arms companies are sponging more on the US treasury and spending less on research and development.
Killarney park, Ireland's largest national park, has suffered ecological disaster from invasive species. No new trees can succeed in growing there under present conditions. To correct this will require persistent effort.
Perhaps in a few decades it will be possible to develop biological killers that, when released, would eradicate rhododendron and sika deer in Ireland while being somehow unable to spread elsewhere. But that is just speculation. In the absence of that, the eradication of rhododendron will have to be done manually without cease.
Unsupervised reintroductions into Britain of butterflies that have to be brought from other countries risk bringing their diseases and pests too. It is well-meaning but dangerous practice.
ITER, the international fusion experimental reactor, will not be completed in 2025 as previously announced. It will be a decade or more late for its goal of making some experiments possible.
This is sad, but it doesn't really change the situation. If fusion power ever works, it will be decades too late to help avoid global heating disaster. We can keep the research going, but our plan to curb global heating should ignore nuclear fusion.
It must also ignore nuclear fission. Although fission reactors do work, they are so expensive that the main effect of building one is to waste the money we could have used to build more solar and wind power.
*The US debt-ceiling ‘deal’ was a giant exercise in bipartisan class warfare.*
2000 fishing boat crew workers in Africa went on strike, over the terms of work and to protest illegal overfishing by their European employers.
The EU accuses Google of taking unfair advantage of running advertisement auctions with favoritism towards Google's own ad generation.
US citizens: call on the US Forest Service to protect old-growth forests.
Republicans' tax plan would give tax cuts only to the rich.
*Developed countries continue to shirk responsibility at Bonn climate talks, say Friends of the Earth International.*
Bogus Johnson has been formally punished for misleading Parliament.
If only we could punish the bullshitter for repeatedly misleading Congress.
*Warnings as US and Russia Threaten to Deploy Depleted Uranium Weapons to Ukraine.*
Sanders and Jayapal have reintroduced a bill to tax stock transactions, and pay the tuition fees of community college for those who can't afford it.
It will also pay tuition fees for students at four-year colleges that typically serve students from minority groups. I am in favor of this, since those groups have faced a lot of prejudice, but really this ought to be extended to cover people of any racial background.
Taxing stock transactions has the benefit of damping down speculation aside from the benefit of raising more funds from people who can spare it.
The list of Bogus Johnson's wrongs against the UK political system.
The campaign of pressure against art that relates to Russia is fundamentally wrong and harmful.
US electric companies spent $200 million on political campaigning to increase electricity prices and impede adoption of home solar power systems.
The Guardian has vowed to reject all ads for gambling.
The Boston subways are full of ads for gambling dis-services. What stood out about them, when I first saw them, is that they did not say what they were selling, and I could not figure it out. Nowadays they do say "bet".
*From the oceans to ‘net zero’ targets, we’re in denial about the climate crisis.*
"Authoritarian" is inadequate to describe what the corrupter wants to do. The correct word is "fascist".
George Monbiot: right-wing extremism feeds on the misery caused by climate disaster, while it demonizes the efforts to reduce the disaster.
This is because right-wing extremism serves egoistic billionaires, many of whom profit from the businesses that we would have to limit if we are to survive.
US companies such as Apple, Spotify and Facebook are censoring Hong Kong's song used in 2019 to rally for democracy.
Google sells ads for bogus abortion anticlinics.
US citizens: call on the Justice Department to investigate governors Abbott and DeMentis for tricking immigrants into being taken to other states where they did not intend to go.
Twitter has a rule against posting statements of hatred, but paid accounts seem to be unofficially exempt from the rule.
Right-wing religious fanatics want states to fund Catholic schools. Would they fund other religions?
In Britain, having an abortion after the 24th week of pregnancy is a crime. A woman was recently sentenced to prison for this. So there is a campaign to repeal the criminalization of late abortion.
*Greta Thunberg: not phasing out fossil fuels is "death sentence" for world's poor.*
I think it will include more than just the world's poor.
Surveillance of DNA in the ocean can report how the thousands of populations of marine species in any given area are increasing or decreasing, and whether and how they are shifting position.
Tories plan to allow local thugs to ban all but the most polite of protests.
The UK is taking serious action against misleading advertisements that greenwash companies by disregarding the environmental harm they have done.
*[Bogus Johnson] was a symptom, not the cause, of a political culture that gorges on spectacle and trivia.*
*People with Nazi flags, signs supporting [DeMentis] gathered outside Disney World.*
I think it most likely that they are real Nazis and real supporters of DeMentis.
(satire) *Florida Board Of Education Bans Any Mention Of Outside World.*
Adidas has resumed selling the branded shoes of that great Hitler fan, Kanye West.
How Kanye?
Floridians, including teachers, students and parents, are pushing back against Governor DeMentis's right-wing censorship of schools and libraries.
San Francisco told a public library to switch off its WiFi system at night so homeless people could not come there to use it.
San Francisco seems to hold the championship for making homelessness extra painful.
US citizens: call on YouTube to block election denialism.
US citizens: call on US officials to meet and talk with the Russian ambassador about smaller disputes that might perhaps be resolved.
US citizens: call on Maximus to meet with its employees to discuss their demands.
US citizens: call on Congress to eliminate tax-exempt status for major sports leagues.
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!
*Methane reduction holds key to averting climate catastrophe [in the short term].*
Interviews with civilians and rebel fighters in Burma.
The US and Europe have little influence to stop the military repression, because China supports it and Burma shares a frontier with China. Chinese neocolonialism is much like American neocolonialism except that China has no worries about criticism from Chinese public opinion.
The rebels refer to the military government and its army as "Bamar". That is the name of the majority ethnic group which translates in English as "Burmese". What this says to me is that the rebels think of this as a war against the majority ethnic group.
I find that quite sad. It is much easier to defeat a government conclusively than to defeat the majority ethnic group conclusively. The former can have an outcome that is good for just about everyone except the ruling elite. It is hard to do that in the latter case.
Since 1961, chemical manufacturers' labs have several times observed experimentally that some kind of PFA was toxic. The companies covered it up and claimed PFAs were safe.
The failure to report this to the EPA (once that existed) was illegal.
*We Still Haven’t Learned the True Price of War.*
No army at war, no matter how careful and scrupulous, can avoid killing and injuring people that were not supposed to be targets. Sometimes soldiers motivated by a brutal spirit intentionally kill civilians. Sometimes an excess of zeal plays a role alongside possible bigotry.
But usually the killings that nobody ever specifically intended make up most of the civilians killed.
Since there is no way in war to prevent "collateral damage" to people's lives, every country must figure this in when deciding whether any given war is justified.
(satire) *GOP Megadonor’s Bat-Wielding Goons Remind Clarence Thomas He Still Owes Him 500 Rulings.*
*Nuclear weapon secrets in the bathroom: five revelations from Trump’s unsealed indictment.*
Governor Abbott of Texas plans to install a chain of buoys along the Rio Grande to make it impossible to cross it from Mexico to the US.
The people who try to cross that way are mostly desperate — they risk death by staying at home. When they cross, they look for the safest way, but staying home is too dangerous. They will tackle the buoys somehow even if some of them die trying.
The developer of ChatGPT is being sued for defamation because ChatGPT generated output that seems to defame the plaintiff.
In fact, ChatGPT is not really intelligent: it doesn't know anything and does not understand the text it generates. This ought to make it immune to accusations based on the meaning of the text it generates. But the company is trying to have it both ways, saying that the output should not be trusted while suggesting that it gives valid information. Perhaps because of that it should be found liable for defamation.
(satire) *"You Better Not Talk," Trump Warns Classified Document.*
(satire) *New Florida Bill Allows Guns To Start Businesses.*
The UK has an agency to monitor thuggish behavior by cops and recommend changes in policy. But mostly they just ignore these recommendations. The agency head has called for the power to require thug departments to adopt measures to control their violence and injustice.
China is drilling a very deep narrow hole in the Tarim basin, apparently with a view to drilling for oil there.
One deep hole for geological exploration is an interesting project. More oil extraction is murder.
Psychoanalyzing Russia: the idea of a "death wish" was adopted by Freud from Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein. The author sees this as the root of the atrocities of the Putin forces, which often have no other conceivable purpose except to cause suffering.
*Thousands of Afghan refugees in UK set to be made homeless.*
The problem is that Britain does not have space for everyone to live. Whether the ones left out in this game of musical apartments are natives or immigrants is a secondary detail.
What could the government do to make enough living places soon? One idea is to seize the thousands of empty luxury apartments and make them available for groups of homeless to live in. Maybe they could give thousands of people places to live. Then there are the underused office buildings. Since being homeless is an emergency, the government could suspend the usual regulations temporarily.
Evidence demonstrates that the Putin forces destroyed the Kakhovka dam with explosives planted inside it.
Driverless cars that are driving around in San Francisco are programmed to stop if they can't figure out what to do. This happens frequently enough that the resulting traffic jams are a big nuisance.
Fruit farming in the UK is suffering from the decline in pollinator populations brought about by human use of chemicals.
Warning that "AI software" can already be used to design bioweapons and to break computer security.
That seems plausible to me.
However, that doesn't mean terrorist groups will have the ability to make bioweapons. And the same "AI software" could be used to fix holes in security.
"Local food" as advertised in supermarkets is a marketing distraction.
Australia has decided to impose mandatory rules for packaging and recycling to reduce the amount of waste, especially plastic waste.
China has imposed strict regulations on bluetooth file sharing so that it can crush any communication of dissent.
* Former DoJ prosecutors say Trump will pack government agencies with sympathizers in effort to "secure his autocratic power".*
* Bromwich noted that Trump’s choices of Barr and Jeff Sessions as attorneys general ultimately disappointed him, "because there came a point for both of them that they couldn’t go as far as Trump needed."*
*Julian Assange "dangerously close" to US extradition after losing latest legal appeal.*
The UK government has trampled Assange's legal rights many times. It has never felt the need for a convincing argument to justify this; it is satisfied by pulling a thin curtain over the violations.
*Twitter Admits in Court Filing: Elon Musk Is Simply Wrong About Government Interference At Twitter.*
*UAE state oil firm able to read Cop28 climate summit emails.*
Today's Robert F Kennedy is a right-wing nut, like the corrupter.
(satire) *LAPD Warns Homeless Population Closer Than Ever To Completing Doomsday Device.*
(satire) *Every Professional Sports Team Moves To Las Vegas.*
(satire) *Eli Lilly Unveils Insulin That Doesn't Work On Poor People.*
Pence is less bad than the corrupter, but don't judge him by that weak standard.
*Enforcers Have Clear Path to Block [three golf championship series]’ Brazen Merger to Monopoly.*
Contention between Wagner (including Prigozhin personally) and the Putin forces (from the Russian army) has reached the point of actual physical fighting, though mostly not in the form of combat.
I can't tell what parts of Colonel Venevitin's statements I should believe, if any. But it puzzles me that Putin allows anyone in Russia to say what Prigozhin says.
Youtube has ordered the invidious proxies to shut down.
If you know of a campaign to pressure youtube not to do this, please let me know.
US citizens: call on Democrats in Congress to boycott the Republicans' "bipartisan" commission to plan cuts to Social Security.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the denial of food stamps to people with drug convictions.
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 remove Rep. Gosar's committee assignments
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 your senators to confirm FCC nominees Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks.
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!
Improvement of a highway through the Amazon rainforest threatens to speed deforestation and destruction of the whole forest. Right-wing legislators block Lula's efforts to protect the forest.
The surveillance-dating industry says, "Have your chatbot start the conversation that's meant to lead up to a date."
That way, when you first actually communicate with each other, it will be just one step beyond a blind date.
If (as the article says) only 10% of the users of dating systems find a long-term relationship with them, they are failures already.
*[It is] too late now to save Arctic summer ice, climate scientists find.*
A talk by a trans person in a library in Montana was cancelled on the grounds that her dressing as a woman (as she normally does) for the talk would make it a "drag show".
When a pregnant woman is exposed to PFAs, it tends to make the baby underweight at birth and overweight later on.
Some kinds of Long Covid degrade people's quality of life more than some advanced cases of cancer.
Reportedly some European intelligence agency informed the US that Ukraine had made a plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, a few months before the actual bombing.
The pipelines belonged to Russia, so as I understand it that made it legitimate for Ukraine, already at war with Russia, to attack them.
The Professional Golfers Association has merged with Crown Prince Bone Saw's competing golf tournament series.
Doesn't that violate European competition law?
Empires that are declining often exalt militarism. The US is doing so, at scales ranging from the neighborhood to the globe.
Robert Reich: Licht's idea of moving CNN to the "political center" was doomed from the start because the US has no such center. American is now divided between fascists and democrats.
A robot taxi being tested killed a dog that ran out from behind a parked car. The company said that the car's computers recognized the dog but could not stop the car in time.
So-called "autonomous" cars are not really autonomous, because they are "connected", and that is an injustice to the passengers and perhaps also the passersby. It should be illegal to operate a taxi unless it (1) can be called by anonymous passengers, (2) accepts payment in anonymous cash, and (3) keeps no biometric information about them or about people outside the taxi.
The US border thugs have installed stadium-style bright lamps along rural parts of the border with Mexico. Operating those lamps could devastate wildlife. Many species live in or migrate through the border; some endangered species live mainly there.
In some cases, the harm of border lights could extend far away from the border, as for instance when populations of jaguars in the US and Mexico can no longer mix and interbreed.
Warning: the right-wing rich that used to control Colombia are scheming to overthrow the elected leftist government.
Starmer is taking advantage of Tory gerrymandering to assure leftist Tory MPs are replaced by people we would in the US call "centrists".
*Five Italian [thugs] accused of torturing migrants and homeless people.*
Thugs anywhere might torture people they think are too marginalized to make a stink, but prosecuting thugs for that is a sign of officials who care about justice.
Minnesota has legislated many important new rights for workers. Now the challenge is to extend them to the whole US, and then to the rest of the world.
China's Communist Party accessed personal data of Hong Kong protesters using TikTok.
That is no surprise to me. No company will be allowed to operate in China unless it obeys China's demands to aid repression.
The beginnings of global heating disaster are driving up home insurance prices in regions that are becoming disaster-prone. In some regions, such as California, it may be simply impossible to buy home insurance.
The Biden administration took a step closer to endorsing the legal imposition of the flawed IHRA criteria for antisemitism. Its flaw is that it facilitates labeling criticism of Israel's occupation of Palestine as "antisemitism".
Snowden says that the surveillance of 10 years ago was "child's play" compared to surveillance today.
US citizens: call on your senators to confirm FCC nominees Anna Gomez & Geoffrey Starks.
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!
*How Starmer’s bullies took out Jamie Driscoll — and why it matters.*
Right-wing Christians' law for censoring books in Utah schools has resulted in banning the Bible except in high school. The Book of Mormon may be next.
Imran Khan alleges that in March, 2022, Don Lu, who was the US undersecretary of state, demanded that Pakistan force out Prime Minister Imran Khan.
I cannot presume that Imran Khan is entirely honest and credible. I don't know enough about Pakistan to have views on that.
Australia is still prosecuting the whistleblower who revealed that Australian soldiers in Afghanistan had killed unarmed people.
The right-wing billionaire CEO of the Warner Brothers conglomerate is behind the conversion of CNN into a right-wing tool, a competitor for Faux News.
CNN has fired its CEO, Licht. Unless the billionaire decides to value CNN's profits over his political goals, I don't think that will change much.
Labour proposes to end offshore fossil fuel drilling, but the union that represents the workers demands to keep it going.
Generally it is good for society for workers to have strong unions, but unions can do harm when they resist the elimination of toxic industries in the name of full employment. A good government can build up new industries with good jobs.
One current official in US intelligence and one former official turned whistleblower say the US has collected alien vehicles (perhaps spacecraft). The House of Representatives demands to be shown.
California governor Newsom suggests possible kidnapping charges against DeMentis for collecting asylum seekers on Texas and flying them to California. It seems they did not want or expect to end up in California. Apparently they were tricked somehow.
A Texas sheriff has filed charges based on the flights that DeMentis organized that took a previous group of refugees to Martha's Vineyard. The article does not make it clear whether these charges are against DeMentis, or someone who played a secondary role in setting up those flights.
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam is causing various follow-on disasters, and additional disasters are possible.
*Three scenes that sum up the classified documents case against Donald Trump.*
US citizens: call on Interior Secretary Haaland to support listing Monarch butterflies as endangered.
Bogus Johnson's lies have caught up with him, and he has resigned from Parliament rather than be suspended.
Russia has arrested many elderly old scientists who had successful careers in secret research, accusing them of giving away secrets and convicting them in secret trials. Now many Russian scientists who worked on such projects are terrified they will be the next chosen victim.
Smoke from wildfires in Canada is blowing in to major Eastern US cities and can cause real injury. To be safe, wear an N95 mask.
You can get partial protection outdoors by wearing an N95 mask. An honest KN95 works equally well; the problem with KN95 is that China does not attempt to certify each brand and each model. As a result, many kinds of KN95 masks are fake and won't protect at all.
Canada is now suffering over 400 wildfires, more than ever before. Climate scientists say that this is caused by global heating and will get worse. Anyone who has been paying attention had to suspect this, but it is useful that scientists report confirming it.
Alberta's government must be made to acknowledge that its tar sand oil exports are part of the cause.
The US supreme court rejected voting districts gerrymandered by Alabama Republicans, on the grounds that they deny black voters the possibility of influencing the outcome in proportion to their numbers.
At least one of the right-wing justices must have voted for this decision. I am surprised.
*First steps agreed on plastics treaty after breakthrough at Paris talks.*
*Shell's "green" ad campaign banned in UK for being "likely to mislead".*
The bullshitter/corrupter/saboteur has been indicted for taking secret documents and trying to conceal that he had them. I will post the details when we know them for certain. Here is an article about what that may lead to.
Plain-language descriptions of some of the crimes the wrecker is charged with.
Russia seems to have destroyed Ukraine's Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam. Substantial areas of land will be flooded; Ukraine is hurrying to evacuate people.
*Hundreds of thousands of mines and debris are flowing into towns downstream, while lack of water upstream will hit food production*, due to the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam.
The water from the wrecked Nova Kakhovka dam, which is inundating land near the Dnieper river, is sweeping away landmines. It can leave them anywhere in the inundated land.
The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam seems likely to cut off water supply to agricultural regions still held by Ukraine.
Russia is incompetently denying the flooding in Nova Kakhovka, a Ukrainian town occupied by the Putin forces. The "mayor" says everything is fine while the background shows flooding. People there, and in places downstream, report they are cut off and in danger from the flood.
Ukrainian forces have been infiltrating the south bank of the Dnieper; perhaps the Putin forces hope they will be drowned. I expect that the Putin forces are retreating from the flood and that the Ukrainian forces will advance behind them.
Meanwhile, Russian rebels, sponsored by Ukraine, seem to have driven Russian state forces out of the Russian town of Shebekino on the border by shelling it. The Russian state seems to claim this fighting is not really happening. This seems very strange to me; I can't come up with a rational explanation for it.
Could it be that Prigozhin and Putin are fighting behind the scenes?
*Seismic data adds to evidence that Ukraine's Kakhovka dam was blown up.*
US citizens: call on the EPA to make its new emission standards for cars quite strict.
US citizens: call on state legislatures to ban the sale of assault weapons.
Various minority groups in England and Wales got a disproportionate fractions of the fines for breaking Covid-19 lockdown rules.
This study strongly suggests that many thugs acted based on bias, but it cannot conclusively prove that, because it does not control for other variables — such as the actions of people who were fined.
For instance, the study found that poor people got a high proportion of the fines. Was this because they had to travel by walking and been seen by thugs, while wealthier people went by car? That would be systemic bias rather than individual prejudice.
Contrast this with the Massachusetts courts' study that showed blacks tended to get bigger sentences than whites for comparable crimes in comparable circumstances. By controlling for the other things that can vary between groups, it pretty much proved that bias was at work in the legal system itself. That showed that the legal system is inescapably to blame for the injustice.
300 volunteers joined in repairing a statue of a black woman at the beach which was vandalized with spray paint.
Global heating will ruin the Mediterranean region as a destination to visit in the summer, long before the current shore areas have been inundated due to sea-level rise.
Important cities (and archeological sites) will be inundated along with the beaches.
People cleaning Atlantic Florida beaches risk infection with a deadly strain of Vibrio bacteria. It arrives on clumps of dead seaweed, and people catch it from that, but it colonizes plastic in the ocean and people catch it from that too.
*Amazon and Google fund anti-abortion lawmakers through complex shell game.*
Recommendation engines that spread disinformation can be thought of as humanity's first major encounter with AI. Humanity is losing.
It is pertinent that these AIs are not autonomous; they do not have agency. They do not have emotions or goals of their own. They work under the control of very rich groups of people and those groups decide the goals they work for.
The plutocrats that mostly rule the US have a simple plan for what to do with people who can't ever find a job that can keep one alive: neglect them and let the consequences of poverty do away with most of them.
UK thugs falsely convicted 6 men of a bombing in Birmingham, they fiercely defended that decision against all the evidence showing it was false.
*According to Irish cabinet papers from 1989, the British Home Office had indicated that its main concerns about the potential overturning of convictions were "to avoid giving scandal” and “the credibility problems for police evidence in court hearings."*
Such determination never to admit that verdicts can be wrong occurs in the US too.
The New York City thug department operates a corrupt system of traffic enforcement, where friends and relatives of thugs get "courtesy cards" and thugs on traffic duty are told not to give tickets to those people no matter what they do.
One cop, who has a sense of integrity and may qualify to be called a police officer, rejected this system of corruption and gave tickets to privileged people just as he would to anyone else. He was punished for this and now s suing to put an end to the system.
He points out that one of the effects of this corruption is systemic racism.
Billionaire landlords are forcing English pubs to close by requiring them to pay 100% of the rent that they were allowed to put off during the Covid crisis.
More about Jamie Driscoll, the Corbyn supporter that Starmer blocked from running again for mayor of the (newly expanded) Newcastle region.
Almost all the US "think tanks" that comment on questions involving actual or possible war receive a lot of funds from military contractors including arms manufacturers.
Their unstated motto seems to be, "Think `tanks'."
We should not allow arms companies to have so much influence on how we use arms. There is an advantage in giving Ukraine plentiful arms; if they did not cost anything, why not give it a thousand tanks, a thousand fighter planes and a million missiles? But they do have a cost, and we need to consider the trade-offs.
What the invasion of Ukraine shows Americans is that the US needs to be prepared to greatly increase production of arms and supplies if the US is involved in a major war. The system we have is adequate only for the kind of war that the government starts quietly, the kind that makes the news only when things don't go according to plan.
* Internal documents from chemical giant Syngenta reveal tactics to sponsor sympathetic scientific papers and mislead regulators about unfavorable research… about [paraquat]’s link to Parkinson's disease.*
I have a hunch there are other instances of corrupting research about weedkillers and insecticides. Does anyone know of articles about others?
Meanwhile, we've seen many instances in which drug companies corrupt studies of the safety of drugs.
In 1970, Richard Nixon turned white-collar workers against antiwar students and civil rights and used them to destroy government support for workers.
Today's Republicans are trying to do it again.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is investigating some of its thugs for suspected membership in racist gangs.
Tennessee has prohibited cities from operating review boards to curb the violence of thug departments.
If cities cannot exert control over thugs, they may still be able to cut the funds to make the thug department smaller, and set up new non-police departments to handle traffic enforcement and dealing with people who are going nuts. That will do a lot of the same good.
I appreciate Wilhoit's law:
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Governor DeMentis has established a bounty for thugs who move to Florida. A number of them have been charged with serious crimes.
*A [thug]'s first words to a Black driver signal how the car stop will go. A Black driver is more likely to face being searched, handcuffed, or arrested when a police officer's first words are commands rather than a greeting or an explanation.*
The study shows that cruel actions of the thugs are not a response to anything that the black driver does. They flow from prejudice.
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 give important information about racism. That article is one of the exceptions.
China sabotages and harasses participants in events to commemorate the Tien An Men Square massacre in Beijing, even when the events are held in other countries.
YouTube has decided to permit posting trumpery about election fraud. Systematic liars are planning to make use of this immediately.
*British Museum ends BP sponsorship deal after 27 years.*
I hope this will let it begin presenting the dangers of fossil fuels without pulling its punches.
(satire) *World Rejoices As Batch Of New Billionaires Descends From Sky.*
US chemical companies are paying billions to settle lawsuits about contaminating water supplies with PFAs.
3M found out in the 1970s that PFAs were toxic, but sat on the knowledge for decades while continuing to sell them. This is one of many examples of the bad things that happen when companies get very large and government bends to them. This is one of the many reasons to elect progressive officials who will not hesitate to devastate their profits.
The Labour Party refused to allow the popular mayor of Newcastle and surroundings to run again, because he is a supporter of Corbyn. When the local party chooses its candidate, it won't be allowed to consider him.
Maybe the local party leaders should see whether if they can all quit the Labour Party and join the Green Party and run this candidate, or start their own local party.
(satire) *Emotional Tim Scott Tells Supporters About Time He Was Followed Around Walgreens For Being Republican.*
The mainstream US press is repeating right-wing propaganda about supposed "fetal heartbeat" detected long before the fetus has developed a heart at all.
If they can get the public talking about a supposed "fetal heartbeat" at 6 weeks of pregnancy, they have won a major propaganda battle that most people do not recognize is being fought.
Bernie Sanders: *I could not, in good conscience, vote for the debt ceiling bill.*
Sanders for President in 2024!
(satire) *More Hospitals Requiring Patients To Put Body Part Down As Collateral Before Receiving Services.*
(satire) *Police Claim They Thought 9-Year-Old Boy They Shot Was Actually 10-Year-Old Boy.*
*Pesticide Giants Withheld Brain Toxicity Studies From EU.*
*Adam McKay: 1.5C Is Terrifying But There Is Something We Haven’t Tried.*
DeMentis says he will "destroy leftism". That would entail abolishing democracy and the possibility of organizing to defeat his power. In other words, Fascism.
Worrying about the danger of hypothetical superintelligent AI today is a distraction. AI programs already used by big companies and states, though far less sophisticated that what those worries fear, have been doing harm to some people for years.
They are used within social systems, and we may be able to prevent some of these harms by changing some other parts of social systems in a feasible way.
*Starmer says nuclear power is 'critical part' of UK's energy mix.*
That will be true if a reactor goes critical ;-{.
*The Debt Limit Bill: Yet Another Triumph for Bipartisanship.*
"Bipartisanship" in the US tends to mean "plutocracy".
Los Angeles bigots have harassed a public school and teachers for holding an assembly to describe people of a range of different gender identities and their orientations.
The bigots demand schools keep children in ignorance about the existence and lives of those human beings.
The conference to start drafting a global plastics treaty have not even produced a draft zero.
It did the initial steps, but I think that plastic manufacturers and oil companies will fight hard to prevent anything effective from being agreed.
Internet delivery companies in the UK mark up supermarket products by as much as 1/3, then charge a delivery fee.
Does anyone know if they do this in the US too?
Everyone: call on Amazon to stop trading our forests for toilet paper.
There are many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon.
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to save our oldest forests.
One UK thug department made a success of deciding to shift various kinds of non-crime requests to other agencies.
One effect is that the department is better able to deal with crimes. I presume that the people suffering psychological crises are safer now, too, for not having to deal with armed thugs who might wound or kill them.
The article describes the sorts of planning, advance notice, training, and pressure on other agencies that were necessary to make this a success. It also required some other agencies to hire people to do the visits that the thugs no longer do. It would be worth doing, but the Tories may not cooperate. The ambulance service is already overloaded and its underpaid workers have held strikes.
Nonetheless, this example shows that the policy change is good provided the government carries out all the necessary parts.
(satire) *Elizabeth Holmes Immediately Defrauds Biggest Inmate To Gain Other Prisoners' Respect.*
Longer and longer trains in the US are blocking patients from reaching hospitals and blocking ambulances from reaching patients. It has been reported 1400 times this year. Sometimes the results are fatal.
In important areas of big cities you can usually find a bridge over the tracks, though apparently not always. In less important areas there are often only level crossings.
This is part of the general tendency of US railroads to trample their employees and the public to increase profits.
Saving fuel is a good thing, but railroads should be required to (1) make sure never to stop trains where they would block roads except in an emergency and (2) over the next five years, build bridges or tunnels or alternative routes so that access is not blocked anywhere.
A bill proposes to prevent one of the side problems of Google's and Facebook's surveillance-based advertising: that those companies get most of the income from ads and sites that run ads get almost none.
Arguably that would be an improvement, but it would do nothing about the main evil of surveillance capitalism: its massive surveillance. So it would not make the system any less unjust to the users themselves.
That is what we must change.
*Atlanta Police Arrest Organizers of Bail Fund for Cop City Protesters.*
It is unprecedented to charge people with a crime for raising money to pay legal aid to protesters. Regardless of the details, it is a form of fascist harassment. If it is allowed to stand, it will represent an escalation of fascism in the US.
*"Stop the dirty deal": activists decry Schumer and Manchin over pipeline plan.*
*West Virginia governor’s coal empire sued by government over unpaid fines.*
You can expect a Republican to try to cheat the country/
*Earth’s health failing in seven out of eight key measures, say scientists.*
*Going beyond climate disruption, the new report by the Earth Commission group of scientists presents disturbing evidence that our planet faces growing crises of water availability, nutrient loading, ecosystem maintenance and aerosol pollution. These pose threats to the stability of life-support systems and worsen social equality.*
When France offered the Comoro islands independence, in 1974, the inhabitants of one island (Mayotte) voted to remain part of France. They are now French citizens. But Mayotte has received many unauthorized immigrants from the other Comoro islands, and it now has the same sort of hostility to immigrants that many European countries' mainlands have.
What is interesting is that in this case the unwelcome immigrants come from islands about 50 miles away and are racially, culturally, and religiously very similar to the authorized residents of Mayotte. They speak related languages which have at least 80% of their vocabulary in common. The islands have had close links for centuries.
This suggests that the reasons that the cause of hatred of immigrants in other places, such as Europe and America, are consequences of politics.
Some insurance companies are limiting their sales of homeowner's insurance in California. If this spreads to more companies, it could impact the whole state.
It is crucial to stop selling insurance for homes that can't be kept safe, but instead of leaving their owners to wait to be wiped out by the next flood or fire, the government must buy them out so the can move to a safer place.
One golf course is demonstrating that it can also be a wildlife preserve.
Morocco was in charge of holding an event celebrating "African unity" in Australia. South Africa invited a representative of the people of Western Sahara, which is mostly occupied as a colony of Morocco. Morocco's agents refused to let him into the rented hall.
It shows that African unity is more a pious wish than a fact, and that the tendency towards colonial behavior is not limited to whites or Europeans.
South Australia has imposed harsh penalties on "disruptive" protests against events that are meant to plan deadly activities with fossil fuel.
We have seen governments including Britain and Germany surrender to planet roaster companies in this way and imposing repression on their behalf.
Labour in the UK has taken a firm stand against fossil fuel development. It might be worth voting for.
The one thing it clearly won't do is end the political power of the rich in the UK.
This Julian Assange rally is Monday, June 12, at 11am at the Boston Globe, One Exchange Place, Boston (State subway stop.) We are calling out the Boston Globe for their lack of coverage of the most important press freedom case of our time — the unjust persecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage act.
US citizens: call on the EPA to take action to get toxic PFAS out of our drinking water.
*Failed Republican candidate charged with shootings at [Democratic] lawmakers’ homes.*
*Industry donations flowed to key Dem senators just before a major pipeline approval [for the Mountain Valley Pipeline] was slipped into the debt ceiling bill.*
*Republicans love to make up fake crises [to distract from the harm they do]. Here are five of the biggest.*
*Pesticide firms withheld brain toxicity studies from EU regulators, study finds.*
A rogue employee of Amazon used Ring "doorbell" videocameras to watch customers.
What worries me more is that lots of thugs have been watching lots of people through them.
Amazon was snooping through Alexa too.
*Zimbabwe outlaws criticism of government before August elections.*
Mexico established a marine protected area. Fishing companies objected, saying it would reduce their catch — but in fact, there was no decrease.
Australia will spend AUD 350 million per year to maintain Nauru as a prison for boat people, inaccessible to the press and off limits to rule of law.
That prison is Australia's shame, just as Guantanamo is America's.
Greenland's glaciers grind the rock under them, producing a billion tons per year of powdered rock, which becomes mud. When spread on farms in warmer zones, it absorbs large amounts of CO2, while acting as fertilizer.
The UAE oil prince who is the head of this year's corrupt climate conference is having employees edit Wikipedia pages to greenwash his activities.
*Stateless Rohingya could soon be the "new Palestinians", top UN official warns.*
Journalists who covered the killing of protester Mahsa Jina are on trial in Iran and facing torture.
*If you defend free speech, you must defend it all and not silence those you disagree with.*
In particular, people like Kathleen Stock who advocate certain rights based on biological sex must not be censored, and people who oppose that must also not be censored.
Trans activists protested at her talk. Some of them tried to prevent it, but did not succeed. As a result, both sides got to present their views.
One trans activist compared Stock's expression of her opinions to the construction of fossil fuel projects. By thinking about that claim we can see the basic difference between them.
The feebleness of governments efforts to curb global heating is not a mere statement of opinion. It is an action, and a deadly one. The beginning of climate breakdown is already killing millions of people, and will kill hundreds of millions or perhaps billions in a few decades. It is legitimate for those likely to be killed by fossil fuel developments in a few decades to fight to stop them.
By contrast, Dr. Stock, and likewise the protesters who disagree with her, do not decide the legal questions they disagree on. They can only express their views and hope to influence others. All of them have the right to do that.
An Australian "hero" of the war in Afghanistan was found in court to have intentionally killed civilian prisoners.
He was not on trial; the trial was over his accusation of libel against newspapers which published accusations against him. The court found the newspapers not liable because they proved the accusations were true.
Will he now be accused of murder? That sounds like the next step.
Comparing two proposed laws to limit stock buybacks by corporations.
The Stock Buyback Accountability Act of 2023 would impose a tax on buybacks, as well as certain situations when this tax would not apply (i.e. if the buyback were part of an employer-sponsored retirement plan or employee stock options plan).
The Reward Work Act would prevent issuers from buying their own securities on a national exchange:
I think the two are complementary.
The Tories limited welfare benefits to supporting two children per family. This was supposed to pressure parents to get jobs. All it did was throw children into poverty.
Lab leaks of potentially dangerous pathogens happen every week. (This is because there are many such labs around the world.) Usually the labs cover them up. Usually no lasting harm is done.
Backup lines of defense, if any disease should start spreading, are not very strong.
US citizens: call on Biden to protect the Pacific Remote Islands.
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Kenya has adopted a law making companies responsible for the plastic waste that they generate.
Cory Doctorow recommended the same approach for dealing with the debt ceiling that I recommended.
*Far-right Oath Keepers founder sentenced to 18 years over January 6 attack.*
* [Hamburger Mary’s in Orlando, Florida] is suing [governor DeMentis] over a law that bans drag performances.*
*More than 5,000 new species discovered in Pacific deep-sea mining hotspot.*
Deep-sea mining, done the way companies intend, would devastate broad areas of bottom, and could wipe out that ecosystem.
US nuclear power plants, and their stored wastes, are vulnerable to physical attack and to cracking their computers. It would be stupid and dangerous to build any new ones — but rich jerks want to do it anyway.
*The Southern Ocean overturning circulation has ebbed 30% since the 90s,* and it is continuing to slow further. This could lead to big changes in climate and and sea level.
Right-wingers dominate Brazil's congress and are acting to handicap environmental protection by cutting funds to the environment ministry.
The Amazon rain forest is close to dying, that is, transforming into savanna, and that change could lead to global disaster, it would make sense for other countries to donate money to Brazil's environment ministry.
*Heat stress can kill up to 2,000 workers and cause an additional 170,000 injuries on job sites across the United States annually.* A proper heat stress standard for workplaces could prevent that.
Due to erosion, a river has come close to the Line 5 oil pipeline. Various sorts of accidents and bad weather could pollute the Great Lakes. Activists call for shutting down the pipeline as a precaution against a disaster that would be impossible to repair.
The Supreme Court's right-wing extremists have stripped protection from half the wetlands in the US.
Texas attorney general Paxton, a right-wing attack agent, is being investigated for accusations of corruption.
* World is on track for 2.7°C [of global heating] and "phenomenal" human suffering, scientists warn.*
The Putin forces have more or less captured the city of Bakhmut. They lost tens of thousands of soldiers doing so.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has 3/4 surrounded the city by capturing high ground around it. My partial knowledge of military history suggests that the safe thing for the Putin forces to do would be to pull out of the exposed salient which the city has become. I don't think they will, though. I think Putin's ego is bigger than his tactical understanding.
Maybe Ukraine should rename the city to Putingrad to make sure they don't pull out of it.
Governments threatened with the debt ceiling should not hesitate to use questionable maneuvers to keep the government operating — and they should not try to go to court to argue for them. Biden should do what is needed, then let the Republicans sue if they wish.
If government lawyers were to argue in the Supreme Court, in advance, that the maneuver id lawful, the current right-wing politicized court would have every motive to rule "it is unlawful", and thus strengthen the Republican hostage-takers.
However, if Republicans file that case after the maneuver is used, then a ruling of "it is unlawful" would mean instantaneous default. Even the right-wing justices would hesitate to do that. They would have to find a way to avoid that.
*Pregnant Texas woman [who was] threatened with arrest if she left hospital to seek abortion is suing over the endangerment of her life.* In all, eight women have joined this lawsuit.
People in the audience of CNN's presentation of the bullshitter were told in advance to "be respectful" by not booing.
This was one lie by CNN in addition to the bullshitter's own lies.
*Investigation finds [Chevron's] efforts to offset its huge emissions rely on schemes with little impact.*
*Recycling [of plastics] can release huge quantities of microplastics.* After installing an additional filter, the plant released 6% of the plastic input as microplastics. (Before that, it was more.) Even the air around the plant is full of microplastics.
Washing machines also release plenty of microplastics. The only way to arrange for most washing machines to have filters is for the government to do it to people's washing machines, and those in laundries. The amount of trouble involved in getting and installing a filter will dissuade most people who are busy.
One of the menaces of plastic waste is that it blocks drainage systems in countries too poor to clean them out.
Pressuring the wealthiest countries (in the OECD) to stop funding international fossil fuel development.
The previous (right-wing) Australian government paid a corrupt billionaire to arrange imprisonment of boat people in Nauru, and kept on paying him even after he was convicted of bribing Nauru officials.
What this says to me is that the previous government was so dishonest that they didn't bother to notice.
*The debt ceiling deal will fast-track the Mountain Valley pipeline, and limit the scope of environmental reviews for future developments.* That will kill people; the uncertainty is about the order of magnitude of how many people.
*A decade after the Tories demonized disabled people on benefits, it's happening again.*
If you are a non-rich working Briton, and your tax burden for supporting worthy causes such as helping the disabled is high, don't blame them! Blame the rich bastards who avoid contributing their proper share — by supporting Tories.
*A lawyer used ChatGPT for legal filing. The chatbot cited nonexistent cases it just made up.*
This goes to show how foolish it is to think of ChatGPT as "intelligence". It is not capable of having knowledge, understanding, desires, or plans. It has no idea of truth or falsehood.
Ohio will vote on a referendum to legalize abortion. Republicans have just passed a law to schedule a vote on making such referendums require a supermajority to pass. They plan to rush this vote so it will alter the rules for the abortion referendum.
Why August? I suspect that some voters will be on vacation in August and might have difficulty voting no for this change.
The right-wing government of Italy is squeezing antifascists out of Italy's public broadcasting.
*The so-called “Chevron deference” doctrine stipulates that the executive branch — not the federal courts — has the power to interpret laws passed by Congress in certain circumstances. Conservatives for years have fought to overturn the doctrine, a move that would empower legal challenges to federal agency regulations on everything from climate policy to workplace safety to overtime pay.*
Justice Thomas changed his position on this question after payments to him, and reportedly to his wife as well, from people with interests in the outcome.
Everyone: call on AmerisourceBergen to distribute medication abortion in all states where abortion is legal.
Everyone: call on CNN not to give the bullshitter any more "town halls".
*More than 1,500 arrested at Extinction Rebellion protest in The Hague.*
*Texas attorney general impeached by Republican-led House in historic vote.*
Uber ran for years at enormous losses to create the impression that it had to succeed and that it was a good investment. This general approach has been dubbed "Venture predation".
Under a good government, this sort of thing would land executives in prison.
Attempting to predict political collapse from big data.
That dooH niboR and the poverty it causes leads to political collapse is a truism. That idea of "overproduction of potential elites" as a major factor is less obvious, but over the years I've seen reference to large numbers of unemployed university graduates cited as a factor in civil unrest.
Since this theory is based on mathematical modeling, ultimately it will succeed or fail like any scientific theory.
Australian thugs engage in physical violence against blacks, then resist being held responsible, much like American thugs. The blacks in Australia are indigenous rather than of recent African origin, but they seem to get similar treatment.
On Wednesday, June 7th, RMS will give a talk, "Working for the public — universities, software and freedom" in Pisa at Aula multimediale.
The talk will include Richard Stallman as the speaker, and Marco Calamari (Progetto Winston Smith), Maria Chiara Pievatolo (Universitá di Pisa), and Francesco Potorti (CNR) as discussants.
Increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere makes it cool and contract. This enables dangerous space junk to remain longer in low Earth orbit, and undermines the slowly recovering ozone layer.
The London thug department has announced, all of a sudden, that it won't answer emergency calls about mental crises.
This implements, by surprise, half the goal of "Defund the Police": to stop sending armed thugs to deal with mental crises. However, it's only half of the goal of "Defund the Police".
The other half goal was to send other personnel to respond to those calls — personnel trained in de-escalation and calming people down, rather than in violence. This surprise announcement makes no provision for anyone to do this job. It can't be the ambulance service: they are underfunded, and often arrive so late that the patient is ready for burial.
About Britain's almshouses: a form of low-cost co-housing that has worked well for 1000 years or more.
The people who live in them live longer, on the average, than others their age.
US citizens: call on the U.S. Dept. of Education to protect students from DeMentis's censorship law.
US citizens: call on Biden to stop Big Oil's next disastrous fossil fuel project on the Colorado River.
Here for more information.
US citizens: call on the EPA to tighten the proposed standards for power plants' greenhouse gas emissions.
Erdoğan was reelected as president of Turkey.
This is bad for human rights in Turkey, and good for authoritarianism in general.
*We desperately need a government who will say it: Britain is still reeling from Covid.*
The US is, too — but not in one uniform, simple way. The policies for dealing with Covid-19 were different from state to state. At the start, some big cities were hit worst. Later, for many months, Republican states were hit worst, because Republicans seized on Covid-19 as an opportunity for disinformation and sabotage, especially after they realized that blacks were more likely to die from it.
One harm that most people don't recognize as one is that many activities and institutions in our society have imposed the use of nonfree computing technology. This includes most schools at all levels. Most talks at MIT still require using Zoom to listen. Whether you want to listen at the time of the event, or listen to recording later, the only way is through Zoom's nonfree surveillance system.
Some pro-Russian Ukrainians, in occupied territories, have taken their neighbors' children to Russia in order to get financial benefits, using lies to convince them. If they apply for adoption papers, the Russian system will not let their parents get them back.
The article calls this "deportation", but I don't think that term fits the example that it presents. Neither, I think, does "kidnaping." Those terms do properly apply to many Ukrainian children, who were forced to go to Russia by the Putin forces.
Researching the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, in which Chicago thugs murdered striking steel workers.
Disabled Britons now have to pay for aid in daily life, and it costs more than most can afford.
It sounds like the US.
England learns: wipe out the insects, and next you'll have wiped out the birds that eat them.
Ukraine has managed to put up 19 wind turbines since being invaded by the Putin forces. Meanwhile, England has built just two in the same period of time.
A few years ago, Tories changed laws to make it almost impossible to get permission to set up a wind turbine, but easy to get permission for fracking. I never understood why they wanted to discourage wind power. Does anyone know?
*Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (prisoner in Guantanamo) wants to bring a case examining alleged role of [British agencies] MI5, MI6 and GCHQ in his [torture] by the CIA.*
Racial censorship, first applied to censor white authors, has been stretched to censors all racial groups — the bizarre idea that "You can only write about people in your own group."
It's valid to complain about stories told by an author writing about people in a subculture perse does not know, works that are based mainly on stereotypes. You can make the claim that a work is of that sort; sometimes it is true. If people challenge it, you can defend it.
However, erecting a racial system of prohibitions is worse than the disease, and also won't cure it.
In a multiracial and multicultural society, that racial censorship rule would allow no fiction whatsoever. Unless the characters live in a ghetto together, no one author could write all of them.
PayPal is being rebuked for bias against Palestinians. It does business with Israelis in the occupied Palestinian territory, but refuses to do business with Palestinians there.
PayPal refuses to do business with any clients in a way that respects their freedom: to order, one must run nonfree software. No thanks, PayPal!
On the situation of Moldova, just to the west of Ukraine.
*[Republican] attempt to add work requirements to safety net programs such as Medicaid and Snap could harm families already struggling.*
In the US today, the minimum wage is so low that many people with jobs can't get by on their pay.
The Labour Party is proposing to reform the UK economy.
I still have to ask: would they tax the rich and use the money to lift people out of poverty? "Growth" as such is benefit if the growth goes mainly to the wealthy.
Former governors of Alabama point out that around 12% of the people sentenced to death in that state were subsequently exonerated.
One of them upheld the death sentence for a man he now believes was innocent.
On recent history in Pakistan: democracy and military rule.
German thugs raided the homes of climate campaigners belonging to a group called "Last Generation", comparable to Extinction Rebellion.
The group hopes to prevent mass murder. The thugs accused it of being a "criminal organization."
* As many as 14 million Syrians face a near insurmountable barrier to returning to their homes after [Assad's] government passed laws giving the state power to seize their land and property.*
*UK study of 1948 Israeli massacre of Palestinian village reveals mass grave sites.*
Wikipedia reports that denial of that massacre has gone as far as a libel lawsuit against an Israeli who wrote about it.
* California, Arizona and Nevada strike deal with US government to take about 13% less water from drought-stricken [Colorado] river.*
This will surely slow the drying of the Colorado river. Will it be enough to prevent that? We don't know. It depends on whether the atmospheric rivers that now plague California bring enough water to the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains to keep the Colorado flowing. If not, the trend of increased aridity in the region may continue.
Victoria (in Australia) wants to lead suckers to use phones and credit cards to pay for public transport. If they do this foolish thing, the system will track all their movements.
Will this system permit anonymous use, paying cash? Will it permit use by someone who has no snoop-phone, snoop-watch, or snoop-card? If so, how would that work? And what is possible with the existing system? If you know by experience, please email me.
*Minnesota Enacts Landmark Protections for Amazon Warehouse Workers.*
* Protesters from Greenpeace, Stay Grounded, Extinction Rebellion and others chain themselves to aircraft in [Europe's biggest private jet fair].*
Academics with connections to tobacco and alcohol companies do not always talk about potential conflicts of interest when they publish papers about the effects of tobacco and alcohol.
People for the American Way recommends ways to question and detect disinformation.
US citizens, call on Congress to reject the latest right-wing lunacy: to declare fentanyl a "chemical weapon" and use this as an excuse to threaten Mexico.
We need to end the "war on drugs", not extend it into a war with Mexico.
*Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings [carried out by US forces].*
Those are in addition to many attacks that were acknowledged.
George Monbiot refutes the absurd vision of returning to a preindustrial style of agriculture. It could not possibly feed the people who live our cities today, and didn't feed most people adequately when it was the norm.
He suggests that we produce food more efficiently using one-celled life. That might be adequate when we get really good of engineering it to resemble the diverse foods we eat today — at which point it will be another name for culturing meat without growing entire animals.
Having fewer babies is a crucial part of addressing the difficulty of feeding the human population of the 22nd century, supposing we prevent the gruesome gigadeaths that climate breakdown threatens in this century.
The ACLU is suing to stop Texas thugs for fabricating reasons to prosecute a city council member for pushing to remove another official.
India has put a pretty mask over the city of Srinagar to shepherd G20 delegates through the city and hide the repression of Kashmir from their eyes.
The article reports that Twitter is censoring some of the postings about these events.
Here is an example of someone who became terrified of "Artificial Intelligence" because he saw some output from ChatGPT.
It is clear he believes ChatGPT understands some sort of meaning in its output. In fact, we know it does not understand anything. It is incapable of having knowledge and incapable of having intentions.
I am not trying to claim that real artificial intelligence will be safe. I don't know what it might do. Perhaps we should take some precautions — such as limiting access to facilities for making DNA sequences to order. Those facilities might be used for mass murder even by plain old humans.
But we can't learn anything about hypothetical future artificial intelligences by looking at doubletalk-generating systems such as ChatGPT.
*The Press is Falling for Anti-Abortion "Fetal Heartbeat" Propaganda.*
The rapid increase in outdoor lighting is spreading light pollution.
The amount of light pollution is increasing so fast that in 20 years stars will no longer be seen in large regions.
This can have biological effects on species that need dark or are threatened by dark. This could drive some species to extinction.
Around 2006, in a taxi from Lake Titicaca to La Paz, I saw amazing vistas of stars. I wonder if those still exist.
Research into long Covid is active, but it won't be easy to figure out what is causing the symptoms.
The article estimates that 65 million people suffer from long Covid now.
Up to 70% of California's beaches may be washed away in this century by sea-level rise caused by global heating.
Other things people value, including their houses, are likely to be destroyed too.
The Belarus dictator Lukashenko forced down an airliner and took exiled opposition activist Raman Pratasevich off of it. It seems that brainwashing in prison broke Pratasevich completely. Now he walks around Belarus giving talks to praise Lukashenko.
He is not in prison, but I presume he is not free, rather an abject slave.
Boebert acknowledges that measures against antisemitism and other forms of bigotry are measures against right-wingers. Boebert, if the antisemitic shoe fits, wears it.
It is a mistake to refer to those right-wingers as "conservatives."
Some of UK's National Health Service web sites snoop on patients' browsing for Facebook.
Greg Palast reports that The (original) Keystone oil pipeline ruptured in 2022 (and caused a substantial oil spill) because of improper construction, which was not detected because the safety inspection tool's software had been modified so as to overlook "small" flaws in pipelines.
Palast says that such modification is a common practice. It seems that pipeline companies they have decided to ignore flaws that, although "small", can lead eventually to oil spills.
In the past, researchers could obtain large amounts of randomly chosen tweets for a small price. Now Twitter has raised the price to an amount they can't afford, and demands they delete the old data if they don't sign up for it.
US citizens: call on CNN to fire CEO Christ Licht.
The reasons for this include the "town hall" lying opportunity he gave to the bullshitter.
[Update June 10th: Campaign has been heeded.]
US citizens: call on Biden to take action to stop Israeli demolition of Palestinian schools.
US citizens: call on Secretary Becerra of the Dept of HHS to Investigate Maximus's labor practices immediately.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on your senators to support The Greater Chaco Protection Act. It would prohibit oil and gas drilling within 10 miles of Chaco Canyon.
To see the response to signing, disable CSS in that page.
I urge you to read about the ancient abandoned towns of Chaco Canyon.
[Update June 5th: Campaign has been heeded already.]
Everyone: call on Amazon to stop donating to book-banning Republicans.
US citizens: call on Senator Durbin to subpoena Justice Roberts to testify before the Senate.
US citizens: call on Biden to remove obsolete dams and protect Chinook salmon and the southern resident orcas that eat them.
To see the response to signing, delete all CSS in that page.
Everyone, call on Amazon to phase out plastic packaging.
You may need to wipe out the CSS in the site's reply to see it.
US citizens: state your support for the campaign for a Green New Deal.
US citizens: call on George Santos to resign immediately from Congress because of the criminal charges against him.
US citizens: call on states to adopt the National Popular Vote Compact.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the Comstock Act.
That law imposes censorship on writing and art that is mailed, and also prohibits mailing birth control and abortion drugs. It had become a dead letter because every part had been found unconstitutional, but the part about abortion drugs may have become dangerous again.
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: demand fair wages for nurses.
Giving nurses a raise is the right thing to do, but won't protect them from being overworked to the point that they can't cope with the overload. That requires a different solution: hiring more nurses.
*Leaked Government Document Shows Spain Wants to Ban End-to-End Encryption.*
Economic sanctions against Russia have basically failed to pressure Putin effectively. Many countries support Putin and help Russia evade the sanctions.
Alas, it will be necessary to defeat the Putin forces in battle.
Meanwhile, US sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela are having little effect except to cause suffering and convince thousands to try to get into the US.
Basically, economic sanctions rarely achieve foreign policy goals.
Will it be feasible to remove all PFAs from sewage sludge and make it safe to put on farms as fertilizer?
DeMentis's textbook censorship system is censoring discussion of the holocaust.
Under new Tory reforms, *richer graduates in England will pay less for degree than poorer students.*
That's to be expected, since the Tories are party that works for the rich.
Many well-known retail businesses are fighting against a California bill to require corporations to publish their annual harm to the climate.
Biden has a history of screwing up when negotiating with Republicans threatening to cause default. Negotiating with them would have been foolish for any president, but Biden is likely to screw up again.
China's loans are crushing poor countries. China refuses to cooperate with other lenders to reduce poor countries' debts when those become desperate. Instead it uses tricks to make them pay China ahead of the other lenders, and to conceal the amount of debt.
The IMF is famous for causing terrible damage to the education and medicine in countries that it "helps". But "help" from China is even worse.
There is an international upset about Netflix, because it effectively raised prices by disabling a feature that allowed many users to use friends' and relatives' accounts at no extra charge.
A higher price on something that is not a necessity of life is not a disaster. What's really bad about Netflix are the injustices of how it treats all users:
Everyone, flick off Netflix!
The flaw in the Morandi Bridge in Genoa was brought to the attention of the company responsible 8 years before it collapsed.
Autostrade began discussing what to do about the problem years before 2018. However, such a large maintenance job can't be done with cash on hand. The state needs to authorize the funds. According to Wikipedia, Autostrade asked for 20 million euros for repairs to this bridge in 2018. Perhaps that was the right action, but it was too slow.
Is it reasonable to entrust maintenance of bridges to a company owned by a fashion retail business? To me, that seems risky. The executives and board of the parent company would not have learned, in their line of business, the proper values for civil engineering.
Verra "certifies" supposed carbon offsets, but judges them so feebly that they are effectively a scheme for greenwashing.
500 university students and recent graduates in Britain sent a letter to many important insurance companies committed to refusing to work for insurance companies that insure fossil fuel projects.
(satire) *Florida Bans Men From Becoming Nurses.*
About the anti-Putin militias that have raided Russian territory.
The US immigration thug agency uses sites such as YouTube as well as Facebook and Twitter to find all users who seem to be interested in matters concerning immigration.
It is clear that some of these subpoenas investigate people who are not by any stretch of the imagination engaged in planning crimes. These are nothing like the Proud Boys.
The only way to deal with this problem is not to let those sites collect personal data on people for watching anything, unless there is a subpoena to collect data on those who visit a particular channel or page.
The myth of Capitalism is that investors take risks with their money, so they deserve a big profit when the risk succeeds. I can go along with this to a point: we can't let the investors keep most of the wealth that a business produces — most has to go to workers and to the state.
Nowadays, private equity fund managers and similar "investors" have obtained plutocratist laws which assure them of profits even from failure.
This problem stems from another foolish general practice: the US has more or less given up on penalizing companies that do harm. Instead, the proposal is always to subsidize businesses that say they won't do the harm.
And governments don't even bother to insist that the business do what it was subsidized for.
Thugs around the US violently attacked protesters and journalists at the rallies for George Floyd in 2020. Some of those shot with "nonlethal" weapons and left with irreparable injuries.
Have the thugs that refused to give Evans any help getting to the hospital been punished for that?
Have the thugs that encircled and besieged protesters been punished for that?
Americans, what DeMentis is doing to Florida shows what he would do to the whole US if he becomes president.
He has pioneered new sorts of bullying that go beyond the corrupter.
DeMentis aims do more than defeat opposition; he seeks to punish those that dared to oppose him.
I do not judge laws and government policies mainly based on whether they induce big companies such as Disney to move work to my state or my country. But I see, in DeMentis's efforts to punish Disney, a plan for the sort of fascism that makes opposition too dangerous.
(satire) *Target Removes All Towels From Stores After Soaking-Wet Lunatic Objects To Dryness.*
*Mississippi family demands officer be charged for shooting 11-year-old.*
*Supporters of jailed Iranian journalists call for trials to be held in public.*
Secret trials are an indication of tyranny. China's political trials are all secret.
Australia sometimes does it too.
Cutting down old-growth forests has wiped out spotted owls in Canada. Only one owl remains in the wild in Canada.
What do Republicans want most? To make sure rich people have a low tax rate.
Australia is now paying welfare benefits through a bank card that will track all spending of them.
A large fraction of those affected by this new system of surveillance are indigenous, and they are campaigning to put an end to this.
US citizens: if your congresscritter is a Republican, phone per at 1-833-964-2935 to call for raising taxes on the rich rather than cutting the benefits that non-rich Americans (even those with jobs) depend on. You could add, "Don't threaten to make the US default."
US citizens: call on Congress to expand the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Biden to use federal spending rules to direct more pay to workers and less to CEOs.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
South Australia has passed repressive laws against protests that might inconvenience others, and one of the politicians who voted for it says, "be grateful we won't cut your head off."
The protests that the state wanted to prevent were going to be against planet roaster companies that already kill people by the hundreds of thousands, and are working on raising that to hundreds of millions.
*It's a horribly effective [Tory] ploy: under invest in the health service, then encourage patients to blame staff for any failures.*
Buttigieg is going all-out to push for oil drilling in the Uinta basin of the Colorado Plateau, and to transport the oil long distances by train alongside the Colorado River.
He is also planning to approve tax breaks for building the line for these trains, so the owners can get a subsidy to prepare to poison the water of a large region of the US.
There is no room in the carbon budget for developing any new oil fields, no matter where the oil might be sent or how.
Starmer has proposed a real, significant change: to build millions of housing units under government direction, to avoid a massive give-away to the rich.
*You Should Not Trust Russia’s New "Trusted Root [certification authority for https]".*
*Elections in UK and US at risk from [neural-network-generated] disinformation, say experts.*
To refer to these systems as "artificial intelligence" spreads confusion, so I don't call them that. Please join me in that refusal.
Florida officials systematically entrap convicts into registering to vote and then voting. Then they get prosecuted for "voter fraud".
Some Russians claim to have started an anti-Putin armed guerrilla movement operating in Russian territory.
However, they seem to have entered Russia across the Ukrainian border, and to have picked up some US-made arms in Ukraine. So far they have attacked only government targets.
In moral terms, I think what they are doing is admirable. Their actions could help Ukraine win the war, but I think it will be difficult to increase them enough to have a significant effect.
Putin could theoretically cite this as an excuse for attacking Ukraine in some new ways. But I don't think that makes any difference. Putin never needs a real excuse for any atrocity — he invents all the bogus excuses he needs.
How Putin could be prosecuted for the crime of aggressive war.
Regime change in Russia would probably be a change for the better, but it would be foolish to insist on that if it interferes with reaching a just peace to end the war. We should allow Putin to remain in power in Russia if he agrees to release all of Ukraine's territory.
On Monday, June 5th, RMS will give a talk, "Digital Freedom and Digital Privacy", in Rende, Italy, in the Great Hall at the University of Calabria.
The talk will follow a roundtable, "Relating Language Models, Future Artificial Intelligence,
Massive Data Collection, Open Source, and Free (Libre) Software":
Moderator: Giovambattista Ianni, Professor of Computer Science
Participants:
Vincenzo Bruno, Founder of Coopyleft
Ines Crispini, Steering Board of the Italian Society for AI Ethics
Stefano De Carlo, Board of Hacklab
Gianluigi Greco, President of the Italian Assoc. for Artificial Intelligence
Antonello Mantuano, Senior director of Cerved S.p.A.
Giuseppe Rossi, Director of Unical's ICT Services
Domenico Talia, Professor of Information Processing Systems
Both are in English.
US citizens: call on Congress to Pass 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!
US citizens: call on Congress to stand up for Social Security and 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!
Ammar al-Baluchi is still in Guantanamo after 21 years. He is not allowed to tell us about how he was tortured, but what we know is horrific.
An "assistant commissioner" of the UK's somewhat-national thug department asserted that he felt no political pressure to arrest peaceful protesters at the king's coronation.
If that is true, why, then, did he disregard their rights? My guess is that there was pressure and he is covering it up.
New article:
Censorship and Oppression
Morality Substitutes or Moral Enhancement?
Alberta is suffering from a rash of wildfires.
Alberta has been doing its best to cause wildfires around the world by digging up the oil sands to sell tar sands oil. It brought these fires on itself.
US citizens: call on the Biden Administration to reject the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Everyone: Stand with the Banned in PEN America.
Everyone: call on Google to stop collecting location data and thus aiding abortion prosecutors.
US citizens: call on Biden to stop the cross-border arms trade (mainly with Mexico).
US citizens: call on members of Congress to co-sponsor the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.
This would make it harder for private equity combinations to destroy otherwise successful businesses and reduce competition.
US citizens: call on the EPA to adopt stricter limits on toxic coal plant wastewater.
To see the reply to signing, erase the CSS from that page.
Syrian dictator Assad has been forgiven by the other Arab rulers, who are more or less repressive themselves.
As a result, I fear the worst for Rojava.
Burma's government is blocking the UN from distributing aid to Rohingya refugee camps.
A Walgreens private "security" thug shot and killed a homeless man, Banko Brown, whom he accused of stealing snacks.
If we don't believe that people who can't afford to lawfully get food deserve to starve to death, we must conclude that they are morally entitled to take food from wherever there is plenty. We must also conclude that the store has no right to hire people to kill them for trying.
A good society provides a way for poor people to get enough food without having to steal.
Given what platform the district attorney ran on, we cannot trust her judgment, or her unsupported word, about whether the security guard had a justification for shooting. She must release the video. What use is a "security" camera if officials cover up what it recorded about a killing?
The Pakistani army and former prime minister Imran Khan have become enemies. Thousands of Khan's supporters went wild and attacked military buildings. Now the state is arresting thousands of Khan supporters, and claims it has identified each one arrested based on camera footage.
I have no way to reach any conclusion about moral culpability or justification in this.
Biden vs McCarthy: a weak-willed adult is negotiating with a toddler in a tantrum.
I fear that the adult will eventually give in so that the toddler ends the tantrum.
The rate of sea-level rise in New York City is augmented a little by the sinking of land under the weight of the skyscrapers.
The sinking is on the order of 1mm per year, while sea-level rise is likely to be around 1cm per year and accelerating.
Siva Vaidhyanathan finds it easy to catch students who cheated by using neural network text generators, and uses the opportunity to teach them about the issues those raise — and the fact that you can't trust anything they say.
I am disappointed that he refers to them as "AI".
*How is Australia trying to sell a major gas expansion? By badging it "sustainable".*
The plan is to start extracting gas from large reserves, and bet that carbon capture will be improved fast to cancel that out. If the bet succeeds, this expansion may be carbon-neutral, unless something else goes wrong.
If the bet fails, what will they do? Shut down the gas extraction? I don't think so. They will say, "Too bad, but you can't win 'em all. Enjoy your increased greenhouse emissions!"
The only sense in which this is "sustainable" is that they could hope to sustain the extraction from these new gas fields until civilization collapses from climate breakdown.
This is a plan to bet young people's lives. The owners of those companies should bet their own lives instead.
A new Thai party that aims to restore democracy got the most seats in parliament.
The next question is, can it form a coalition that will make some changes for the good.
Most Massachusetts hospitals are eagerly dropping mask requirements. The 6% of adults of age 18 to 64 who are immunocompromised are worried this will give them Covid-19 (or some other respiratory illness).
1500 people have died from Covid-19 in Massachusetts this year. I expect there is no way to count how many contracted long Covid and whose lives are now ruined.
Hospitals should act to protect patients' health. When they must choose, they should choose to protect the wise patients who take precautions for their health and other people's, rather than catering to the foolish ones who neglect the matter.
*"Debt Limit Chicken" is a direct result of anti-democratic US house [of representatives] elections.*
The reason so many house districts are not competitive is in large part due to Republican gerrymandering.
Some Muscovites are being pressured, even ordered, to register to vote through an internet voting system. Such systems tend to be greatly insecure, and not to be trusted.
Putin has made a practice of rigging elections for years, often blatantly. It is not clear that what a voter actually does has any effect on the "results" that Putin's state will report. But it might. Therefore, I think it is good not to actually vote.
*Turkish Elections: Erdoğan’s Government Arrested and Expelled International Election Observers.*
Louisiana is considering a bill to require just three cities — with mostly black residents — to publish criminal records of juveniles.
The purpose of not publishing the criminal records of juveniles is to help them to turn away from crime. So why adopt the opposite policy mainly for blacks? Perhaps it is to lead black teenagers into a life of crime, so as to put them in prison.
Arguing that fossil fuel companies owe a total of $200 billion per year in compensation for some of the kinds of damage their products have done.
I fear that arguing about the amount of "compensation" various companies and states ought to pay will act as a distraction from the crucial issue: how to build sustainable power facilities fast and wind up fossil fuel use soon.
The companies will resist reducing the amount of fossil fuels they sell, and they will resist paying reparations. I think the wise choice is to focus on avoiding more damage than on making them pay for it.
Meanwhile, we should certainly tax these companies (and other rich companies) a lot more. I suggest the method I described in https://stallman.org/articles/progressive-tax-on-business-gross-income.html .
Some universities and other large investors are pressuring fund managers to vote their shares to push large companies out of planet-roasting investments.
The NAACP has published a travel advisory calling on blacks to keep away from Florida: "Beware, your life is not valued."
There is indirect evidence that high-fat, high-sugar take-out food is addictive.
The World Health Organization continues to exclude Taiwan in obedience to China's pressure.
UK ministers are trying to find a twisted excuse to arrest a Briton who has been protesting lawfully for 6 years in front of Parliament.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the "HALT Fentanyl Act" which would prohibit a wide range of substances, most of which have never been tested on people at all. Of those few which have been tested, most were harmless.
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 Democrat leaders to stand firm against Republican ransom demands.
Israeli fascists marched in Jerusalem; some chanted "death to Arabs".
Uri Avnery warned years ago that the Israeli right-win sought to render the West Bank "Araberrein" (without any Arabs). Avnery meant this to compare them with the Nazis whom he had seen in Germany in the 1930s, before his family fled to what they hoped would become Israel.
Various parts of Italy have suffered unusual heavy rains, which generally arid Italy is not ready for.
This is global heating at work. It has caused record high temperatures, too.
*"When Democrats do something for the right reason, [Republicans] use the precedent to do something for the wrong reason."*
The emendation "[Republicans]" is in the words I quoted from the article. That statement is generally true.
I'm not planning to read the Durham report myself, but I won't trust any claims about it that are made by people whose life is lying.
France has decided to use cameras at the Olympic games with software that will scan the images looking for "suspicious activities".
We can't count on the software in the system to limit the effective level of surveillance, because more analytical capability could be added later. The only limiting factor that people can count on to prevent violation of their privacy is the capability of the hardware sensors (cameras, in this case). As people pointed out, that capability might be sufficient to enable the system to recognize and track people.
*Jeremy Corbyn tells local Labour party he wants to carry on as their MP.* The local party members stated support for him with only one abstention, and stated their opposition to Starmer's grip on who can run for MP for the Labour Party.
Bernie Sanders calls for a national medical system, and makes it clear that the name "Medicare for All" does not mean preserving the flaws of Medicare as it is today.
* [President Macron] had no mandate to dismantle France’s social model. His contempt for the people risks opening the door to extremism.*
*Dancers at Los Angeles club to become the US's only unionized strippers.*
Republicans didn't want to lose the vote of George Santos, so they were determined to defeat the resolution to expel him from Congress. But they didn't want to be criticized for voting to keep an accused criminal in the House to vote for them. So they voted to refer the expulsion resolution to a committee where they can quietly bury it.
Montana has banned app stores from offering to install the TikTok client program. This prevents users from installing the TikTok client program. since there is no other way to install it on a snoop phone.
This scenario has injustice on every side. TikTok collects data on every user. So do many other "app" client program — all of them are unjust. Secondarily, they are unjust because they are nonfree software.
The snoop-phones are unjust too, for snooping and for limiting what users can install. Their software also has the secondary injustice of being nonfree.
Darwin's planned large development on the "middle arm" turns out to be part of a plan for large new fossil fuel extraction projects.
The development has been criticized for putting some ancient rock art at risk in the long term. Strict laws might be able to keep the ancient rock art safe. But they can't save Earth from those fossil fuel developments, if those are allowed to proceed.
*Norway under pressure to scale back fossil fuel expansion plans.*
An episode of the Brian Lerner podcast has an interview with psychologist Peter Grey, who explains how Americans' obsession with keeping children "safe" has made them very likely to become helpless and develop many kinds of psychological problems.
*New York law aims to stop funding of illegal Israeli settlements in West Bank.*
All Israel's colonies in the occupied West Bank violate treaties about military occupation.
Many of them also violate Israeli laws, but the government looks other way for some years and eventually legalizes them.
Biden canceled a planned trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea to "negotiate" with Republican terrorists.
By treating the negotiations as important, Biden encourages Republicans to think he is desperate for an agreement, and that will encourage them to stand by their demands. They make think they can get Biden to help them harm non-rich Americans.
I fear that maybe they can.
US dumping of agricultural products has meant poverty for Mexican farmers.
The bullshitter's replacement of NAFTA, one of the few good things he ever did, did not change enough to end this.
A Washington DC thug has been charged with informing the Proud Boys leader that he was to be arrested for his part in the Jan 6 insurrection — and then lying about that.
A former leader of one group of Colombia's murderous paramilitaries says that officials protected the group and gave them lists of people to torture and/or kill.
Warning: canceling events because of extremists' threats is treated by the extremists as a victory.
The article refers to right-wing extremists, but I think it applies to leftist extremists too.
*Mother of girl who died in US border patrol custody says agents ignored her.* Avoidable death of prisoners happens repeatedly in any kind of prison, because the prison staff don't really care about prisoners' suffering.
*There's no shame in waging war on old age.*
But if we are mostly living on Earth, we will have to have children very rarely.
The G7 threw away concern for avoiding climate breakdown and adopted plans for development of gas extraction.
The British right-wing is drumming up opposition to low-traffic neighborhoods (designed to facilitate and encourage walking or biking rather than driving cars) using the same playbook as global heating denialism.
(satire) *Conservatives Claim Hitler's Nazi Allegiance Greatly Exaggerated.*
US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to use a discharge petition for a bill to raise the debt ceiling (and change nothing else).
US citizens: call on the U.S. Dept. of Education to sue DeMentis for making textbook companies censor textbooks in Florida.
Antibodies for Epstein-Barr virus can attack human tissues and cause multiple sclerosis.
A study found that YouTube tends to recommend videos about guns and shooting to boys of age 9, and boys of age 14.
Many of these videos were not supposed to be allowed on YouTube, but it seems not to enforce those policies.
*I took my kids to the playground without bringing my phone — and it was a revelation.*
*In the year since I quit [so-called] social media, my screen time has fallen, my mood is up — even my resting heart rate is lower.*
This is an additional reason to quit. The reason I refuse to use those systems is that they require nonfree software, which can be modified by others (though usually not by you), and much of it is malware.
Like Emma Brockes, I find children mostly boring. I avoided that problem for myself by not having any.
*Climate breakdown made southern Asia heatwave at least 2C hotter, study finds.*
*Former world leaders urge G7 to get nuclear arms control back on track.*
I fully support that urging.
* In occupied West Bank villages, Israeli-owned farms are flourishing, while Palestinians often do not have enough water to drink.*
Israel has been transferring water rights for years, using various legal excuses.
Oil companies generally set up a subsidiary to do oil drilling in each area or country, and make the subsidiary alone liable for the cost of oil spills, so that the main corporation's liability is limited by the total wealth of the subsidiary. This way, the victims of a spill won't be compensated for the damage the spill does to them.
However, Guiana, on the eastern part of South America's north coast, refuses to let them do this any more.
Will this make Exxon work harder to avoid a spill? I think people tend to be biased towards belief that disaster won't happen. If a regional disaster does happen, the countries and people affected could end up owning Exxon.
If so, would they handle drilling in a safer way, or would the vision of riches corrupt them as it corrupted the current owners of Exxon?
Arguing that the only chance of strengthening democracy in the UK is if neither the Tories nor Starmer gets a majority in the next election.
UK thugs plan to use face recognition in the center of Cardiff to find people wanted for various reasons.
The supposed occasion for this is that Beyonce is giving a concert in a stadium in Cardiff. But the facial recognition won't be limited to the stadium and its entrances.
Nor do we know that the tracking and data collection will not extend to everyone else who passes by. In fact, UK ministers are considering running facial recognition on everyone who shows up in a thug's body camera.
The UK is full of cameras, and I suspect many of them are surveillance cameras (images transmitted to some network which can recognize faces later). Those cameras could become, or perhaps already are, the introduction of Chinese-style surveillance in Britain.
That could be, or perhaps already is, part of the system of heightened repression in Britain. Do they use video tracking to figure out who to arrest for planning to walk slowly, or glue perself to the street?
There is no need for the software to gauge a person's ethnicity if it identifies each person against a database that record's per ethnicity.
*It's hard to get neo-Nazi cops fired. Too hard.*
We should not allow firing employees, even cops, for having a mere opinion we disapprove of. However, in the case of cops, who are given special forms of authority, we should be able to insist that they not have attitudes which are likely to result in unfairness to some demographic groups among the public.
A Chinese comedian made a joke that some extreme patriots interpreted as a slight on the Chinese army, though it apparently didn't say anything about the army. The government forced him to publish a confession of guilt, then silenced him on communication platforms.
The government also fined the company he works for around 1.5 million dollars.
I have a hunch he will be punished in other ways that were not officially announced. For instance, that he won't be allowed to work as a comedian any more.
President Lasso of Ecuador had been impeached, and was in the process of being tried for removal from office, when he dissolved the whole Congress.
It seems to me that the Ecuadorian constitution has a grave flaw if the president can always prevent impeachment so easily.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy has been convicted of corruption and sentenced to a year's house arrest.
*World likely to breach 1.5C climate threshold by 2027, scientists warn.*
*Billionaires Spent Over $1 Billion on 2022 Elections—More Than Any Year in US History.*
Don't assume their money was defeated. In addition to bringing about the election of more plutocratists (Democrats as well as Republicans), it also convinces many candidates who would have won anyway to adopt increasingly plutocratist positions.
A study estimates that the the US "war on terror" is responsible for at least 4.5 million deaths. 1 million seen to have been killed by fighting, but far more died from poverty and disruption of society caused by the fighting.
The boss of CNN (actually, of its parent company) rebuked CNN reporter Oliver Darcy intimidatingly for not upholding the company's spin about the bullshitter and his "town hall".
(satire) *Wealthy Parents Surprise Graduating Child With Judge Who Will Let Him Off Hook For Future Rape Accusations.*
*Medicare for All Legislation Introduced to Address Poor U.S. Health Outcomes, Inequities.*
I think that focusing on "inequity" in US medicine is a distraction from the real issue. What's wrong with the US medical system is that many Americans can't get the medical care they need.
We should set up a national medical system to give all Americans the medical care they need. Other countries prove every day that that is possible.
If we gave every American good medical care, as a byproduct there would be no more inequities in medicine. But we should not formulate the goal in terms of inequities. We could eliminate inequities by giving all Americans no medical care, but that is not what we should aim for.
A study of the corpses of English teenagers (and a few children) taken from poor parents in the 1800s, and sent to work in cotton mills far away, shows that they were basically systematically stunted and killed by malnutrition.
Speculation about what AI in reality might do to script-writing.
I can't believe this couldn't happen, if someday artificial intelligence can tell plausible stories. Speculation about this goes at least as far back as Asimov's story "Galley Slave". But be careful not to think of ChatGPT as artificial intelligence. It does not know anything, and does not understand anything.
It might be able to script a surrealist absurd movie, where lack of knowledge and understanding might be no problem. But I hesitate to assume even that. The great works of surrealism may well be less random than meets the eye; that may be what makes them great.
*Tunisian opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi sentenced to year in prison [for perhaps calling official thugs "tyrants"].
Ghannouchi used the word for "tyrant" but I don't think it was clear if he was referring to anyone in particular. The Tunisian dictator does not hesitate to act like a tyrant.
Important laws about reducing air pollution, both toxic and greenhouse, are among the laws the Tories plan to repeal. The Tories say these laws are "no longer applicable."
*Head of Ukraine's supreme court held in anti-corruption investigation.*
Ukraine has a reputation for being very corrupt, but the US also has corruption in its supreme court, and the US is behind in trying to do something about it.
*Bird flu could become the next human pandemic — and politicians aren't paying attention.*
*Plastic pollution could [feasibly be slashed by 80% by 2040, UN says.*
The EPA has become quite active in requiring cuts in various sorts of pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions.
However, Biden's foolish approval of drilling in large fossil fuel reserves is likely to counteract around half the reductions in greenhouse emissions.
*Cambodia’s only major opposition party is barred from running in July elections.* The thugs came one day, years ago, and seized their registration papers.
*Tories’ revised plans to scrap EU laws are still reckless, say lawyers.*
Two London thugs have been fired for punching and kicking a teenager while arresting per, and then lying about it.
Please don't refer to a teenager as "a child" — that is propaganda for constraining their lives.
In my view, it should be a crime for uniformed thugs to kick or punch anyone, of whatever age, absent clear and strong justification. Even an adult!
A UK thug paralyzed Jordan Walker-Brown with a taser, and justified that based on the "belief" that the latter had some sort of weapon. If he did have one, he had not pulled it out.
The thug was tried for causing gross bodily harm, but Walker-Brown said he knew the thug would not be convicted.
A student riding home in a school bus noticed that the driver had blacked out, because he did not have a snoop-phone. He ran to the driver and stopped the bus without an accident, while everyone else was too distracted.
If this were the worst danger caused by having a snoop-phone, I would not consider it much reason to refuse one. But they hurt nearly all their users in a number of ways.
At the border with Mexico, US border thugs arrest humanitarians under Arizona's trespassing laws, while right wing fanatics shoot holes in their water tanks. The fanatics are proud of their harassment even when they are convicted of it.
This is in addition to the nonfree app that is the only way to apply for an asylum appointment. Mark my words, if the US government gets away with doing this to asylum seekers, doing it to Americans will be next.
Democrats and Republicans are now competing for who can direct the most cruelty at convicts.
That is not very effective for reducing crime. What succeeded in the 1990s was partly the elimination from lead from gasoline in the late 70s, and partly an increase in income on the average for poor people in the 90s, which helped them get by without crime.
We can't get rid of any more lead from gasoline, because none remains in gasoline, but we might be able to make life easier for poor people by electing more progressive Democrats.
*[Governor DeMentis's] Attack on Voting Rights Won't Stay in Florida.*
The bullshitter is likely to face criminal charges about several matters. He is likely to be convicted. But will that happen before the election, and do Republicans have enough shreds of decency to defeat him for his crimes?
High-speed rail may finally be built in the US, starting with a line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
While the US has done almost nothing for decades, China has covered the whole country with high-speed train lines. Why has the US failed to do this? I conjecture that in the US, businesses are too powerful. So powerful that they can stop the US government from doing important things, such as building train lines.
By contrast, in China the government is more powerful than any combination of businesses. So if the Chinese government decides to build the railroad equivalent of the interstate highway system, and boost the country's industrial capacity, it can go ahead and do that.
China is using that boost in industrial capacity to build up its armed forces so it can conquer Taiwan and turn it into hellish tyranny. Meanwhile, the US can barely afford to defend Ukraine. And since business orders the US government to crush the poor, the poor turn towards fascism.
Confusion of large language models with general "artificial intelligence" is causing panic.
Artificial general intelligence may someday be developed, and if so it could pose many sorts of dangers, I recommend A Fire upon the Deep, for an example, and Accelerando. And many other stories, with a wide variety of outcomes.
I agree that these systems can be dangerous. But they are dangerous in the short term in ways that hardly resemble the disaster scenarios. Indeed, artificial general intelligence is unnecessary for digital systems to bring disaster. Imagine payment systems that track all purchases, and transportation systems that track people's travel. Those already exist, and if we don't want our countries to be like China, we need to abolish them.
ChatGPT is nothing like that. It can't make coherent plans, let alone carry them out. It can generate text that looks like a plan until you study it carefully. The problems it causes come from side effects.
In the US, children of age 10 are working long hours, as plutocratists work to legalize more kinds and longer hours of work by children and younger teenagers.
This is harmful because it harms those children permanently by denying them the opportunity for an education. Some kinds of work are dangerous for young people. The existence of the practice, enables businesses to lower wages generally.
I support education for everyone, and limiting labor by children and younger teenagers; I support Eisenhower taxation of the rich also. I must admit I don't see a close relation between them. Each is good for society but in its own way.
The number of people per month reported in the UK as possibly being trafficked as slaves keeps increasing. What does this imply?
Maybe more people are being trafficked as slaves.
Maybe the methods of detecting possible trafficking are being improved so that a greater fraction are being reported.
Maybe, as Braverman the Tory minister claims, the problem is caused by immigrants' making false claims. I don't know for certain that this is false, but if a right-wing politician makes such a claim, I check my pockets to make sure my freedom is still there.
*Ocasio-Cortez Slams Adams for Attack on "Very Services" That Could Have Helped Jordan Neely.*
*Thai Voters Back Opposition in Decisive Rejection of Military Rule.*
Will the next step be a military coup?
(satire) *World's Wealthy Call For Removal Of Stars Obstructing View Of Universe.*
*Twitter and Saudi officials face racketeering lawsuit over jailed satirist.*
*The grotesque rehabilitation of Bashar al-Assad's regime — Syria’s criminal president has been cordially invited to this week's Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia — makes sense to cynical Arab governments. They hope to reduce Damascus's dependence on Iran, encourage refugees to return, halt state-sponsored drug rackets and cash in on reconstruction.*
Would it be better to maintain hostilities so that Assad is not forgiven? I'm not sure.
On one hand, peace would do a lot to reduce Syrians' suffering. On the other hand, peace could result in Assad's getting the support to conquer Rojava.
Poland has declared a new name to use for the currently Russian city of Kaliningrad. Poland's choice of name, Królewiec, was the Polish name for that city during the short period, 1454 to 1457, that the city was under Polish control. Aside from those few years, the city's name was Königsberg for 7 centuries.
It seems to me that Russia and Poland are both being fools about this.
Russia is a place of horrible tyranny and repression. Poland is a place of diminished human rights and imposed Christian restrictions. Those issues are more important than the name of Kaliningrad.
Mike Africa Jr, one of the survivors of the Move collective, was not in the house when thugs firebombed it and killed everyone inside. He has bought the building that was built to replace that house, and plans to make it into a memorial to Move and the people who were killed in that fire.
How a right-wing billionaire compelled CNN to take a neutral stand about the bullshitter's gusher of lies.
In his long CNN "town hall", the bullshitter brushed aside inconvenient facts by opening the firehose of lies.
I have a hunch that CNN intended this program to increase its audience among US fascists, and that it succeeded.
There were a few topics on which the bullshitter seemed unwilling to dismiss reality entirely. For instance, he said he would quickly end the war in Ukraine, but refused to state any support for it. This gives us reason to believe he still supports Putin and would "end the war" by stabbing Ukraine in the back. This would end the deaths in combat, but would not end the killing. The Putin forces did plenty of killing in parts of Ukraine that were occupied in the first months of the war, as well as kidnapping and torture. If the war turns into a bigger occupation, they will surely continue.
The line that the bullshitter is following was worked out by many progressives, who now demand to "end the war" at any cost. After years of condemning the US for starting gratuitous wars based on lies, they can't adjust to a situation where for once the US is on the right side.
(satire) *Trump Condemned For Giving Platform To CNN.*
CNN gave the bullshitter a big situational advantage over the moderator.
It sank lower than that. Staff spoke to the audience shortly before the show, saying they were welcome to applaud but that booing was forbidden.
*CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016.*
Or are they mistakes? The CEO of CNN's owner seems to be quite content to have attracted more support from fascists.
CNN's live presentation for the bullshitter was a complete success for the bullshitter and for the plutocratists. They both got what they wanted: to tell the public, "You can choose fascism, or you can choose the cruel system that boosted fascism."
China has given itself the power to bar foreign lawyers from working in "national security" trials (political repression). It had already terminated the residence visa of the British lawyer that Jimmy Lai wanted to hire, and postponed the trial 'til after that lawyer was compelled to leave; but apparently China was so worried about the presence of a lawyer that might actually try to defend Lai that changed Hong Kong law to make sure this could never happen.
California residents, urge state legislators to oppose the CJPA bill.
That bill would not protect the real local journalism, only reward the fake.
*Senate Investigation Shows How [Republican tax cuts in 2017] Enabled Big Pharma's "Extreme" Tax Avoidance.*
Greg Palast warns that the bullshitter's campaign to make it hard for blacks to vote is working very effectively, and Republicans are still working hard at it.
George Monbiot: *The coronation arrests are just the start. [Thugs] can do what they want to us now.*
The thugs can now arrest people in Britain for almost any sort of protest that could attract attention, or even carrying harmless tools for one. In addition, experienced organizers can be ordered preemptively to stay away from all protests and other protesters, and jailed if they disobey.
Britain is at the tipping point of joining regimes such as China and Russia in repression of dissent.
Hindu fanatics in India are sabotaging traditional celebrations in which various religious groups joined harmoniously for hundreds of years.
Banning hijab in India is basically the same injustice as requiring hijab in Iran.
Many young Hong Kongers have asked for asylum in Britain. It's not clear they will receive asylum.
The saddest thing is that the UK is becoming repressive much like Hong Kong. However, the UK won't jail people for criticizing the government of China. so these Hong Kong refugees will probably be safe there if they get asylum, even though other Britons are not.
* Francesca Albanese says Israel is maintaining occupation to get as much land as possible for Jewish people.*
Daniel Perry, who killed Jordan Neely in the New York subway by using a chokehold, has been charged with manslaughter.
Neely apparently seemed upset, but what he said did not threaten violence.
Edinburgh University is trying to calm the dispute between the partisans of two different concepts of women's rights, in the hope of discussions between them.
An ironic proposal to rebrand mass shootings as "Second Amendment Celebrations".
A number of officials are calling for overturning the trial of Richard Glossip. He might get a new trial.
The crucial lesson from the bogus trial he received is that it is all too easy for US courts to reach a verdict of guilty based on evidence that is obviously insufficient to justify punishing anyone.
Self-driving cars now supposedly work without human backup drivers. In practice, they work poorly. In addition, they are full of cameras inside and out, and the company staff (remote) can look at the camera feed at any time.
It should be illegal to operate a car with such surveillance capability without a warrant to authorize the surveillance.
In order for a self-driving car to be tolerated in society, its sensors must not pick up enough data about the passengers, or the passers-by, to figure out who they were. However, that limited amount of data needs to suffice to figure out where they are and where they might be in n seconds.
The Hindu-nationalist party (BJP) lost the state elections in Karnataka, a state in the south of India.
Perhaps the new government will crack down on the BJP's efforts to stir up hatred against Muslims in places with long traditions of friendship between people of different religions.
Making parks safer for women through changes that don't treat anyone harshly.
As humans enter areas formerly wild, the danger of catching diseases from wild animals keeps on increasing. Several recent epidemics came from animals, Covid-19 being one of them.
Opposition has delayed the planned test of releasing sterile males of the mosquito Aedes aegypti in California. The method to be tested could perhaps wipe out that pest in California.
Aedes aegypti in California is an intrusive species, so its effects on ecosystems are essentially negative. Species which depend on eating mosquitoes must have eaten only the native species until recently, and can still do so. The benefit to be obtained by eradicating Aedes aegypti in California, in reduced disease and reduce pesticide use, is surely enormous.
The state should insist on researching what can be tested, and developing further precautions for aborting the experiment early. But don't let Aedes aegypti hang around for long.
Chinese dissident Ruan Xiaohuan was able to evade Chinese censorship and post messages opposing the regime. He kept it up for 12 years before they caught him.
Musk announced that Twitter would censor access to tweets in Turkey to placate Erdoğan.
This is the same excuse that Apple used for helping to carry out Chinese censorship in China. But is Turkey really better off having Twitter keep operation under Erdoğan's censorship, than having him very visibly shut it down? I don't think so.
*Musk, with business relationships in Turkey, comes under fire for Twitter censorship aiding [Erdoğan] whom he knows personally.*
Is Musk's excuse bogus as well as wrong? Others claim he is censoring Twitter more than the Turkish regime demands of other media. Maybe Musk simply desired to boost autocracy in Turkey, and only pretends he is doing so under threat.
*Disgust is an emotion that evolved to keep us out of danger, but people have long misused it to inflict cruelty and catastrophic harm.*
Right-wing fanatics apparently fail to feel disgust for lies.
I reproach the author for advocating flat-out censorship, such as "laws against hate speech". Under the First Amendment, unpopular opinions, whether fascist or progressive, are not prohibited.
"Sustainable" investment funds are accused of greenwashing fossil fuel businesses by investing almost $400 billion in them.
The article explains the system's perverse incentives.
The UK system of "student loans" is really a tax on graduates. But not a fair one: graduates who get higher incomes will end up paying less than graduates with lower incomes.
There is no need for the state to establish separate taxes to pay for various state activities. One unified set of taxes — income tax and inheritance tax — can pay for all state expenditures, provided it taxes people with high incomes at a high effective rate. Those who get more income due to their education will, indeed, pay more.
Proposing George Santos as the bullshitter's next running mate.
They are just made for each other.
*Most Credit Cards Still Deny Access to Justice with Forced Arbitration Clauses.*
This requirement makes it unlikely that the cardholder will get a fair outcome. It also keeps the public in the dark about the substance and outcomes of the disputes.
Scientists report that the main cause of the 25% decrease in wild bird populations in Europe is the heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers in intensive farming.
Erdoğan finished first in the first state of the Turkish presidential election.
It is not certain who will win the runoff, but each day gives Erdoğan more chances to cheat or to throw over the board.
Over 1000 scientists and academics carried out nonviolent protests calling for a rapid decrease in carbon emissions.
Some of them face criminal charges, basically "annoying protest" but stated in different words.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the Comstock Act.
That disused law prohibits mailing "lewd" or "obscene" materials through the post, and also prohibits mailing birth control and abortifacients. Republicans want to enforce it against mailing of mifepristone.
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 Stock Buybacks Act which would prohibit corporations from buying back their own stock so as to raise the stock price.
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 impeach Justice Thomas.
Thomas's corruption serves Republican interests, so I expect they won't vote to impeach him, or vote to remove him from office if he has been impeached. Nonetheless, it may help strengthen the will to do other things, such as expand the Supreme Court, after the next election.
US citizens: call on the DA in Atlanta to drop charges against Cop City protesters.
US citizens: call on the EPA to regulate and reduce mercury pollution from (fossil fuel) power plants.
(satire) *Picking up thousands of incapacitated Americans by their wrists and ankles and tossing them down to the sidewalks below, Covid-19 patients were reportedly flung out of hospital windows across the country Thursday as the public [Covid-19] emergency officially ended.*
Democracy is in trouble because most people are biased and most people are often mistaken. But democracy can be effective when it is structured to lead to discussions in which people present arguments for various sides.
The article refutes the claims of certain rich people who argue that markets, or the cleverest people, should rule. They call themselves "libertarians", but I don't think they deserve that term since they advocate subjugation of nearly everyone. Like most people who call themselves "libertarians", their real goal is for the elite to dominate most of society and to get rid of systems that help the non-rich. That is why I call them "antisocialists".
How unregulated lending business tends to suck people into unpayable debt.
The EPA's new pollution rules for fossil fuel power plants are predicated on the assumption that carbon capture will work and will be used.
So far, it doesn't work, and the only reason anyone assumes it will work is due to fossil fuel lobbying.
Human Rights Watch and Article 18 condemned Erdoğan's control of the internet in Turkey, saying he will use that to twist the election.
Sad to say, right-wing rich people own the principal news sources in most countries, including the US and the UK.
The UK plutocratists keep opposing nationalization of the railroads because their funders, the rich, make money from the privatized railroads. So they don't want to admit that the previous state-owned British Rail worked better than the subsequent state-owned railroads.
Sad to say, the Tory Party is not the only plutocratist party in Britain. The Labour Party's support for re-nationalization is half-hearted because Starmer is a plutocratist at heart. Now that he has blocked firm opponents of plutocratism from running as Labour candidates for Parliament, it will be hard for Labour to get any better in the future.
When people assert that private capital can more easily invest the large sums needed to improve railroads, the response is to ask why the state doesn't have enough funds to invest. Is it because of reducing taxes on the rich and on businesses? That's the real problem.
Australia's not so environmentalist government approved a new coal mine.
That is playing with fire. Every new fossil fuel investment acts to accelerate global heating and increase the chance that we cross a tipping point that tips the world into disaster.
The Tories have delayed the plan to repeal thousands of EU-derived laws en masse.
That doesn't mean the laws won't be all be repealed en masse.
Thoughtful and proper proceedings would be to allowing Parliament to examine each of these laws, one by one, and judge whether the UK would be better off keeping it, repealing it, or changing it. That would be the way to improve life in the UK. Evidently that is not the goal.
Fascists in France set fire to the cars and house of a town mayor who supported caring for immigrants.
The fascist strategy, in France as everywhere, is to demonstrate their "courage" to attack those who can't defend themselves, in order to make everyone afraid to disagree with them. It is not easy to thwart. But I think it requires capturing and punishing some fascist terrorists.
*Biden is selling weapons to the majority of the world's autocracies.*
Widespread use of disinfectant wipes spread exposure to certain chemicals, which could be harmful. Some researchers say the chemicals are linked to serious health problems, they contribute to antimicrobial resistance, they pollute the environment and they are not particularly effective.
*Big Oil Tries To Buy Its Own Courts: Texas oil and gas companies could soon have their business cases heard by judges handpicked by a close ally: Gov. Greg Abbott.*
Responding to Republican threats of sabotage: *Make them [the Republicans] own it. Make sure the public understands what is at stake and who will bear the responsibility if things go wrong. That’s not only smart politics. Absent successful application of the “constitutional option,” this is the only strategy, short of capitulation, that stands any realistic chance of preventing default.*
Australia has approved the construction of new facilities for handling natural gas near Darwin, which will surely push the Earth closer to busting the carbon budget and collapse of civilization.
The facilities are supposed to include producing "blue hydrogen", which means hydrogen gas generated by consuming fossil fuels and generating carbon emissions. They also include carbon capture and storage, will encourage using more fossil gas but is unlikely to actually eliminate its greenhouse emissions.
If that were not bad bad enough, the currently approved development area comes pretty close to an aboriginal rock art site. If development extends, it could reach that site and endanger it.
Australian rock art is amongst the oldest cultural relics of humanity and no one should have the power to authorize damaging it.
*Senate Judiciary Democrats No Longer Have an Excuse: It's Time to Subpoena Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow.*
US citizens: call for banning fracking in the Vaca Muerta region of Argentina.
Or else they should rename it to Billones Mertos, because that's where busting the carbon budget is likely to lead.
US citizens: tell Congress: No cuts to Social Security or raises on retirement age.
US citizens: oppose flooding schools with guns and uniformed thugs.
The special danger of thugs in schools is that they can direct students into the school-to-prison pipeline. They do this for minor matters of indiscipline that in the past would not have involved the state at all.
US citizens: call on state legislators to please support overdose prevention centers.
US citizens: if your congresscritter is a Republican phone per and call on per to sign a discharge petition for a bill to raise the debt ceiling and not do anything else.
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!
Some people love paradoxes and seek opportunities to claim that they are the whole of reality. For instance, it turns out that color perception is partially socially constructed. One writer leaps from that to the claim that color perceptions are arbitrary mental constructs which have nothing to do with reality.
Plenty of aspects of human perception, thought, and behavior are partially socially constructed, but that doesn't mean they are arbitrary or that they are not constrained by reality.
Legal advice received by the European Commission suggests that the "chat control" censorship plan is illegal.
The plan assumes that an encrypted communication service includes nonfree software to run on your machine to send and receive messages. That implies that the service can make that software snoop on your communications before it encrypts them.
That design, where the service imposes specific software on users, is fundamentally unjust and insecure, precisely because the service imposes nonfree software on users and users can never rationally trust such software.
In effect, the "chat control" plan demonstrates that we were right. A service that makes users run nonfree software to talk with it is inherently insecure and untrustworthy.
*Worried Your Child is Already a Screen Addict? There’s Hope!!!*
The "pervasive design" addictive features that the article naively attributes to "screens" are implemented by software: partly in the operating system and partly in some apps. They can be designed to do nasty things because they are non-free software: their code is controlled by some "owner", in this case a powerful company, rather than by the users. If they were free programs, the user community could reprogram them so as to be less addictive.
We must free ourselves from the idea that giant companies have the "right" to require users' connection to their "services" to go through software under their control. We should have the right to use our free software to do that.
Petrochemical industry in Louisiana have set up a "sustainability council" to help sustain their business model. They increase profits by skimping on the safety of people living in the region.
*FTC to address industry greenwashing complaints.*
(satire) *New Indeed Feature Lets Users Sort Jobs By Amount Of Exploitation.*
Anger management classes now part of the plutocratist neoliberal economic situation, used to teach the people being exploited and squashed to learn to remain placid and not fight to put an end to it.
The new Portuguese euthanasia law seems to have the same flaw as most such laws. It is limited to people whose illness is terminal, which means their suffering is sure to end in a matter of months anyway. If your suffering could continue for years, this law refuses to help you. What perversity!
It also excludes foreigners.
A member of the Danish parliament that represents Greenland gave a speech in Parliament in Greenlandic, which no one else there understood. Then she refused to tell the rest of parliament what the speech meant.
To speak to a body of people in a language almost none of them understand is disrespectful. When they ask you to repeat your point in their language, which you do speak, it indicates they do wish to pay attention to your point. To refuse them only vents contempt.
If you pretend that asking you what you said represents an attempt to gag you, that is perverse and unjust.
The other parliamentarians might respond, "While you speak to us in a language we can't understand, we may as well use the time to catch up on documents we are supposed to read."
Biden broke a commitment that the US would stop financing fossil fuel development in other countries.
It is silly to claim that Indonesia will refine fuel in the expanded Balikpapan refinery instead of refining fuel elsewhere and importing the results. The owners of the other refineries will try to sell their output somewhere else.
A long, serious list of bad things that Republican officials support.
Iran's repression now extends to prosecuting defense lawyers for "propaganda against the regime" on the internet.
Kansas City, Missouri, declared Itself a sanctuary city regarding state laws that criminalize being trans.
City officials are told to spend effectively no time on enforcing such laws.
Biden has replaced Title 42, the policy of sending asylum seekers directly back to Mexico, with a harsher policy.
The new policy makes them automatically ineligible for asylum for 5 years, simply for trying to reach US territory to apply for asylum.
Robert Reich: *The Democrats have a powerful campaign issue: price-gouging corporations.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to urge per to cosponsor the Medicare for All Act when it is reintroduced in Congress on May 17.
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 raise the debt ceiling without attacking the non-rich.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the FCC to require Sinclair's supposed "local news" TV stations to actually cover local news.
US citizens: call on Congress to Ban AI Use in Weapons Systems, Now and Forever.
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!
Christiania, the anarchist town in the middle of Copenhagen, has allowed sale of marijuana by known local people for 50 years. Now criminal gangs have moved in, taken control, and are fighting over the "territory". It looks like they have ruined everything.
I think the existence of these powerful gangs is a consequence of prohibition in the rest of the country and the world. Prohibition of marijuana (or any drug) does not get rid of it, but helps the gangs make lots of money.
The European Parliament concluded that the authoritarian governments of Hungary and Poland used spyware to monitor "enemies of the state" such as journalists, politicians and activists.
Many teachers in Hong Kong are quitting for fear they will say something politically unacceptable and be punished. And many school-age children are leaving for free countries.
Escape is available only to a fraction of Hong Kongers; most can't find a free country they can move to. I am sad for them.
"Battery passports" to track the raw materials used in making electric car batteries are proposed as a way of enforcing environmental regulations on mining world-wide. Critics question whether the system gives the mining companies too much influence in the system, which they could use to cheat.
I support the system for that purpose — but if businesses start offering to change out your car's battery as a quick recharge, it is crucial that those businesses not be able to examine the number of the battery that they get from you. That would become, in effect, another system for tracking where you drive.
The same reasoning applies to ordinary charging systems for cars. They must accept anonymous payment and they must be forbidden to get any identifying data digitally from the car.
Digital translations make errors that endanger refugees' asylum applications.
Missouri has imposed censorship on children and teenagers using nearly all libraries in the state. The rule would deny state funding to any library that allows a library user under age 18 to see books that are not "age appropriate", or to check out a book that per parents would not approve of.
A large fraction of people of age 17 and 16 have had sex, but Missouri doesn't want them to read about books that address issues of sex or sexual relationships. "Heaven forbid they might learn something pertinent to their lives."
Warning: increase in US export of liquid fossil methane threatens to wreck efforts to avoid global climate disaster.
If biometric tests are developed to detect sleepiness, and they are used to stop professional drivers from driving, the financial loss from being stopped occasionally must fall on the companies they work for, or on the state — not on the individual drivers.
This will lead us to a fight like the current one over sick days for train operator workers.
Here's an example of how concern about Putin's threats against the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant get spun into a demand to give Putin a victorious conquest.
Putin has frequently used his capture of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine for psychological warfare. There is a real danger that it will lose external power and melt down. Putin has chosen to magnify the danger by creating avoidable risk — by brinkmanship.
In response to this brinkmanship, the article calls on the US to impose a cease fire fast. The only way to get Putin to agree to that is to make Ukraine cede to him all the territory that the Putin forces now hold. (Maybe even that isn't enough to satisfy him.)
Is this what the author aims for? He does not admit it outright, but I can't believe that he is not aware of it. It has been pointed out many times. According to the author, the US should tell Ukraine, "Surrender fast, so you can have peace!"
Putin says he demands the whole territory of the provinces of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk, in exchange for peace. If the US were to take the desperate "Surrender, Ukraine" position that the article recommends, Putin would take advantage of that.
If we want to avoid a nuclear disaster in the Zaporizhzhia plant, it is easy to see how a local agreement could do this. If both sides are willing, they can easily do it. Since Putin has refused, it can only mean he does not want the plant to be made properly safe. But he doesn't want a nuclear disaster either. He wants a threat to make to set fools scurrying to demand giving him whatever he wants.
How Americans and American cities subsidize the private jets of the super-rich.
We effectively subsidize lots of other things for them too, mainly by charging them far too little tax. They pay a lower fraction of their income in tax than most Americans. It is fair for them to pay a much higher fraction, because they can cope with that share of the country's needs.
*US proposes rules requiring airlines to compensate passengers for flight delays.*
Flight delays and cancellations can't always be avoided. But the problems they cause will be spread a lot more fairly with these compensations.
In addition, in 2020 airlines often scheduled flights and cancelled them, leading to suspicions that they were expecting to cancel those flights when they announced them. With compensation requirements like this, they would not do that.
Hong Kong is punishing people who emigrate to Britain by denying access to their savings and pension funds in Hong Kong banks.
The changed regulation would require them to return to Hong Kong to get new ID cards, which would not be safe at all.
Arguing that youth today feel anxious because they are almost always under the control of adults, and never learning to cope with autonomy. The only way they can socialize and not have adults watching is on antisocial media.
This leads to the suggestion that the right way to protect youth from antisocial media is by allowing and enabling them to socialize together without the intermediary of online dis-services.
*George Santos Arrested on 13 Charges of Wire Fraud, Money Laundering, and More.*
While running for Congress, He lied about just about every aspect of his life. These charges say he also lied to his supporters when claiming to raise donations for his electoral campaign.
The US has seen seven different billion-dollar extreme weather disasters in the first four months of 2023. This is not a record, but the only two years that had eight such billion-dollar disasters were quite recent: 2017 and 2020.
*Big Food Raking in Huge Profits From Price Hikes as US Hunger Persists: Analysis.*
US citizens: call on the EPA to stop factory farms from polluting our rivers with liquid manure.
US citizens: call on the Secretary of the Interior to list monarch butterflies as endangered.
US citizens: call on Congress to make Bezos testify about Amazon's union-busting.
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 IRS to revoke the National Rifle Association's tax exemption.
The National Rifle Association used to work dedicate itself to teaching how to safely use and own guns. It was turned into a tool for spreading fear to promote gun sales a few decades ago.
US citizens: call on Congress to eliminate the subminimum wage, which applies to workers who are supposedly supported by tips.
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 progressive movement needs to reject the imposed myth that technological progress invariably makes people, or society, better off. We have the right to regulate technology for the public good.
When the users decide what features their technology will have, they can exclude the features they know they dislike. But when companies choose the features and impose them on the users, they will impose what benefits them, not what benefits the users. This includes DRM and snooping, as well as other nasty things. We must demand software be free.
However, we need to think carefully about what the public good consists of. Now that politicians want to "protect children (and especially teenagers)" by turning the internet into a platform for repression à la Chinoise, we must insist they do the job in a way that doesn't make us all politically helpless.
(satire) *Clarence Thomas Promises To Adopt Code Of Ethics For The Right Price.*
Robert Reich argues that the fact that the UK has a king, and a royal family, is a minor side-issue as regards everything important. He also criticizes the US tendency to idolize the president's family.
I'm with both points.
*Royal occasions aren’t really about the royals at all. What we love is our own reactions.* Most Britishers are content with the royal family because it is a sort of play-acting which makes no real difference.
The exception is when a royal occasion becomes an occasion for repression.
Proposed federal and California laws supposedly intended to "save local journalism" would instead help the Sinclair broadcast chain wipe it out.
Asserting that the Republican plan to hold the US hostage over the debt ceiling represents the the power of right-wing billionaires who put ideology over their own interests.
The "law and order" Tories have made big cuts in cops on the street. So landlords pay to replace them, in some local areas, with private security guards who enforce unpublished secret rules, and get away with violence just like official thugs.
E Jean Carroll won her lawsuit against the bullshitter, who was ordered to pay damages for grabbing her and trying to rape her, and later calling her a liar for saying he did that.
The result demonstrates that the bullshitter cannot always get away with "grabbing them by the pussy."
This defeat is not sufficient — he is still getting away with a far bigger and more egregious crime: leading a failed plot to overthrow the US government.
*The west must be ready for this moment of opportunity and risk in Ukraine.* The article includes a theory of how Ukraine hopes to achieve a military victory sufficient to end the war.
It may be true that Putin is obsessed even more with Crimea than with Ukraine; I wouldn't know. But I don't see a rational military reason for him to feel that way. Moreover, I don't see why Ukraine should be especially concerned with Crimea in Putin's hands as a military threat. Russia has plenty of air bases from which to attack various parts of Ukraine, and it has made some attacks from airbases near Moscow, which Ukraine has attacked with drones.
*MEPs to vote on proposed ban on ‘Big Brother’ [so-called] AI facial recognition on streets.*
I applaud the EU for even considering this, and I hope it passes.
Whether facial recognition should be considered "AI" is a tricky question, which I think makes no difference to anything important. Such systems should be prohibited, but the prohibition should not be limited to facial recognition. It should cover identification of persons by any kind of sensing of personal characteristic.
Indeed, it should include collection of records from which it would be straightforward to identify people later.
France has urged the EU to designate Wagner as a "terrorist group".
Wagner may be guilty of terrorism, but it is an injustice to label any person or group as guilty of a crime by mere fiat. That should always require a fair trial.
Wagner might be convicted in a fair trial. It wouldn't astound me. But it would be a foolish own-goal to try that now. Given the appearance of quarrel between Wagner's leader Prigozhin and Putin, the wise strategy is to encourage Wagner and its leaders to surrender to Ukraine, by promising them safety if they do.
Even if that appearance of quarrel is only play-acting, it is still desirable to exacerbate the tension, as long as this is done without sacrificing any military advantage.
In general, I think we should try to avoid applying this spirit of callous realpolitik to people. But it is forgivable to do that to vicious criminals such as Prigozhin and Putin.
Senator Feinstein is ready to resume duties in the Senate. This eliminates the reason to press her to resign now.
Harlan Crow, whose corrupt dealings with Justice Thomas have been publicized, has also donated heavily to the Republican senators who refuse to support imposing a code of ethics on the Supreme Court.
* Head of [UK's] Republic campaign group believes [his arrest] at coronation was premeditated attempt to kill protests.*
I have a feeling that someone on the spot improvised an aggressive response in violation of the agreement made by the "senior officers" who has said the protest plans were lawful.
Hindus in Manipur burned 1700 homes of people in the mostly-Christian Kuki tribe. The victims have lost everything and believe they can never return to their old lands or recover their stolen animals.
I have to suspect that Modi's ruling Hindu nationalist party had a hand in this, but I don't actually know.
Contrary to what many say, running into the US debt ceiling will not make the US default on its debts. Rather, it will stop the US from doing the normal daily borrowing that is necessary to make daily payments that the government has to make.
Social security payments, like purchases, are rather payments that the US will have an obligation to make, but they are not for debts because they are not repayment of loans.
Failing to pay them could be considered a default in some sense, but it would not be defaulting on debt.
What the 14th amendment says about this, I don't know.
The US hires mercenaries to fight in its wars, but it is hard to find out how many. The mercenaries are lumped together with the contractors that only cook and serve food, and the ones who work for the CIA or the State Department are not listed.
A large fraction are not Americans, but rather hired in the countries where military actions take place.
Australia is planning to punish drivers who did not get enough sleep. This is absurd — people cannot make themselves sleep more, and people can't wait a day because of being tired.
As the article explains, the demands on many people don't let them sleep enough. To punish them for the consequences of the demands placed on them is unjust.
On the other hand. to stop the employers from overworking drivers could be useful and just. This requires a fine, not on drivers, but on their employers.
It won't be trivial to stop the employers from turning this around into an excuse to impose more cruelty on drivers.
Israel bombed Gaza again, killing some leaders of Islamic Jihad.
The air raids bombed civilians too.
In general, killing leaders of a guerrilla movement has little effect on it. There are always new leaders ready to step in. If they are religious fanatics. the possibility of a martyr's death may not discourage them.
The only way to end the fighting is to change the factors that encourage people to join up.
RMS will be giving talks in Switzerland about free software and digital injustice.
The Tories want to ban communication systems that use end-to-end encryption. They've announced their decision that "safety", supposedly to be achieved by monitoring everyone's communications, outweighs privacy, so digital systems that maintain our privacy against state surveillance will be banned.
Paradoxically, what may defend us is WhatsApp.
The WhatsApp application is nonfree software — users can't tell what it really does, let alone fix anything malicious or merely broken that may be in it. So many nonfree programs are malware that we shouldn't suppose any of them is honest. The nonfree WhatsApp App could send all the user's private messages, in plain text form, to whoever Meta/Facebook wishes, whether that be the Chinese government, the UK government, the US government, or Meta itself.
We can't have free software packages that do communication with end-to-end encryption if communication systems with end-to-end encryption are prohibited. Paradoxically, a proprietary app which is not fit to trust may protect our right to have systems which can be worthy of our trust.
The presence of indigenous people in what is now the US was not a mere detail. The desire to take their lands was central to the history of the US.
*The coronation [in the UK] pulled a screen across a desperate, failing nation — just as intended. Those who opposed it must be portrayed as radical, or the whole rotten system it represents might come crashing down.*
If I imagine myself as British, I do not see myself as opposing either the coronation or the monarchy. I simply see them as side issues. Queen Elizabeth II was not responsible for the Tory policy of repression and impoverishment of the poor, nor for Starmer's ruination of the Labour party. Those are what's really bad about the UK government.
*There's Still Time to Avoid Climate Catastrophe.*
*Grocery Store Workers Stand to Lose Over $300 Million Annually if Kroger and Albertsons Merge*
The labor shortage that gave workers more clout has ended. Now employers are gleefully screwing workers again.
The author states the cause opaquely by saying that "the economy has slowed," choosing not to mention the cause of that: interest rate increases by central banks, made in the name of curbing the inflation whose real causes they refuse to recognize.
For some employees with special talents, this takes the form of loss of some special perks, described in the article, plus increased unjust surveillance. For the less influential employees who were mistreated all along, it takes the form of refusing to negotiate with their unions.
But don't stop there. Amazon mistreats customers as well as workers and everyone else. Do as I do, and refuse to ever give your name or your address to Amazon.
Labour has become so right-wing that it refuses to commit to repealing the Tories' new anti-protest laws.
A right-wing fanatic drove his car into a crowd of immigrants standing around a shelter where they were getting assistance, murdering 8 of them.
More about the fanatic's stated political views.
*The Real 'Right Wing Death Squad' Is the Cowardly Republican Party.*
Putin's growing authoritarianism started driving the leading artists of Russian culture out of Russia even before he started attacking Ukraine. Now the only major artists that remain in Russia are those who wish to flaunt their support for Putin's regime.
Recall how Putin used to mock the idea that other Russians could run against him in elections? It wasn't enough for him that he was popular and would win even a free election. It wasn't enough for him to make victory for his opponents impossible. He went out of his way to rig elections blatantly (for instance, against Kasparov) so as to disparage the very idea of democracy.
Everyone: call on Whole Foods to take single-use plastic packaging off its shelves.
*Central banks raising interest rates makes it harder to fight the climate crisis.*
Beyond the short term, high interest rates cannot produce stability, because instability is an inherent result of the developing climate crisis. To have less future instability, we need to decarbonize faster.
*To Solve the Climate Crisis, It's Time to Talk About Canceling Debt.*
*EPA has ordered chemical company Chemours to stop discharging high levels of [PFAS] into the Ohio River.*
Scientists Extract Human and Deer DNA from Paleolithic Pendant Found in Denisova Cave.
Research like this is possible because Russia has nothing like the NAGPRA law. If NAGPRA existed there, it would require "returning" ancient human bones and artifacts to someone or other, and we would not have had the chance to learn from them about the evolution of our species — for instance, we would not know that nearly all of us humans have Neanderthals among our ancestors.
As for the Denisovans, another strain of humans also known from things found in Denisova cave, we wouldn't know they existed at all.
The book _Frankenstein_ — not the movie — carries a warning about applying science without attention to what it means to be a human being.
To end global hunger, we need to stop treating food as a set of commodities for giant companies to corner the market on.
The coronation of Charles III was an occasion for repression such as one would have expected from an old-time monarch, if the monarch was lacking in regal magnanimity.
About 20 Just Stop Oil protesters were arrested for wearing t-shirts and carrying small flags, which they planned to respectively expose and wave. Another 20 antimonarchists were arrested for taking nonviolence training in another city.
In all, 52 protesters and would-be protesters were arrested. A minister said this was justified because the UK's show had to look good.
In my view, those arrests showed off what's bad and getting worse in the UK: uniformed thugs have been authorized to draw the boundaries of lawful and unlawful protest.
*US food pesticides contaminated with toxic [PFAS], testing finds.*
The pesticides may degrade and become harmless, but the PFAS accompanying them will not.
Vienna demonstrates that a city (or a country) can provide good quality social housing that working people and middle class people are content living on together.
Feral horses in Australia threaten the survival of six native species.
This will be a sensitive topic because many Australians love the feral horses. But the issue is very simple: feral horses in Australia are a dangerous intrusive species and it is important to keep their numbers down.
A Labour shadow minister gave representatives of two giant banks access to Parliament so they can lobby as they like.
It might help the party win the next election, but it does not help make that party honestly serve the country supposing it does win.
The editorial board of the journal Neuroimage resigned as a body in protest of how much Elsevier charges to publish a paper.
There should be a standard charge to the authors for publishing a paper, which research grants should cover; for authors that don't have such grants, the journal should waive the charge.
WHO declared an end to the "emergency" about Covid-19, but that really means only acknowledging that millions of people are not taking the well-known precautions.
We can prevent most Covid-19 infections by wearing masks, and prevent most cases of the flu as well.
(satire) *Federal Agents Intercept 500 Kilos Of Lifesaving Medication At U.S. Border.*
New York State has prohibited building new buildings to use fossil fuels.
The same law allocates funds to convert some old buildings to use electricity instead.
This will result in substantial reductions in fossil fuel use, provided the state builds enough renewable generating capacity to feed the resulting higher demand for electricity.
*EPA Confirms Bee-Killing Neonicotinoid Insecticides Threaten Extinction for More than 200 Endangered Species [aside from bees].*
The US Supreme Court canceled the execution of Richard Glossip, who seems to have had an exceedingly unfair trial.
Putin told Clinton in 2011 that he might attack Ukraine.
I wonder who Clinton told this to.
*Four "Proud Boys" Convicted of Seditious Conspiracy for Jan. 6 Attack.*
*Bernie Sanders unveils plan for $17-an-hour US minimum wage.*
*Billionaire Also Paid for Clarence Thomas' Grandnephew to Attend $74k/Year Private School.*
The mainstream media ignore nondisruptive protests, so protests against plans that amount to mass murder need to be disruptive enough to be heard.
The ACLU told the Senate about the danger of various bills that would "protect children" by snooping on the communications of all adults.
The ACLU opposes KOSA, too, because it would require even more data collection about every user to figure out who is a minor.
Pop music nowadays is sufficiently limited that almost any song could be seen as a take-off on many others. This led rapidly to charges of copyright infringement which could have turned the music industry into a mess of lawsuits.
Fortunately this threat was rejected for the moment.
Florida is about to prohibit teaching critical race theory for real, even in universities where it really might be taught.
It goes with other laws that censor education for many age levels.
Only a few instances of voters blocked in the UK by lack of the new voter ID were actually counted, but since the system was not designed to count them, there could be more than it seems.
Some were denied the right to vote because they are immunocompromised and did not dare remove their masks in the polling place.
Erdoğan is passing a law that would imprison people for spreading news that Erdoğan calls "fake".
RMS will be giving talks in Switzerland about free software and digital injustice.
US citizens: call on the USPS Board of Governors to stop DeJoy's privatization plan and reverse its decision to slash rural letter carrier capacity.
*Ginni Thomas Took Secret Payments Ahead of Landmark Voting Rights Case.*
Mexico has made an agreement with the US to accept many non-Mexicans who are deported from the US.
*Sanders and Klobuchar Reintroduce Legislation to Cut [Medicare] Drug Prices in Half.*
(satire) *Anthropological Research Reveals Ancient Cultures Used Psychedelics To Increase Productivity Within Startup Companies.*
Andrew Malkinson has been in prison for 17 years for rape, because thugs concealed the evidence that should have shown he didn't do it.
It's amazing how often officials illegally conceal exculpatory evidence and succeed in bringing about an abortion of justice. (The word "miscarriage" is a mistaken metaphor because they happen by accident.) We read over and over of people who were convicted in the US as a result of such deception. These prosecutors have to know they are lying someone into prison or (in the US) into the death row. Why don't we put them in prison for this?
British Columbia (on Canada's west coast) is having floods, while neighboring Alberta is having wildfires.
The tar sands oil that Alberta exports is partly responsible for both.
Noam Chomsky criticizes large language models as useless — fundamentally, by the way they are designed — for advancing understanding of cognition. This is because cognition plays no part in them. They don't try to understand anything.
Machine-learning systems can do many practical tasks well — those tasks that don't inherently involve conceptual understanding of anything. They can be useful, for good purposes and bad purposes. At the same time, they can treat their users justly (if released as free software) or unjustly (if released as nonfree software or only as a "service")
But we should distinguish this from intelligence, and reserve the term artificial intelligence for artificial systems that can understand.
What we think of as tales of individual resilience are the tales of those that survived danger by chance, and assume it made them stronger.
The chance sets you on a good path may result in your learning to be good at something. But chance doesn't turn out good for everyone.
Two years ago, Belarus forced down an airliner crossing its territory so as to seize dissident journalist Raman Pratasevich and his (then? former?) girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Now Lukashenko has tentatively decided to keep him in prison for 8 years for the crime of journalism.
There is no reason to suppose Lukashenko would actually release him, 8 years from now. It might do to him what Israel has done to Mordechai Vanunu — keeping him effectively incommunicado indefinitely, and pretending it is has a purpose other than making him suffer.
Sapega was sentenced to 6 years in prison.
Canada persecutes people who help anyone commit suicide — even with advice.
Limited to only incomplete and bad advice, some people may survive, physically damaged, and compelled to return to life even worse than it was before.
Starmer has dropped the policy commitments he made when he ran for leadership of the Labour Party, and it seems he was planning all along to do so. Apparently, all Labour stands for with him in charge is winning power.
Most horribly, he has made sure that all new Labour MPs will be like him.
It's like the British equivalent of the "centrist" US Democrats, but worse. Imagine if the Democratic Party machinery had the official power to forbid progressive candidates from running in a primary. That's what Labour is now.
*[DeMentis] accused of favoring insurance-industry donors at residents’ expense.*
*EU aims to harmonize criminal laws across bloc to fight corruption.*
*Brazilian thugs are investigating Bolsonaro, accusing him of counterfeiting a Covid-19 vaccination certificate.*
This is bizarre, because Bolsonaro says he proudly refused to be vaccinated and never claimed otherwise.
He visited the US on a special head-of-state visa. Maybe heads of state are not asked to prove vaccination.
It is idiotic not to be vaccinated, unless you have some specific medical problem which contraindicates vaccination. Please don't believe the disinformation which cherry-picks occasional problems with this vaccine and exaggerates their significance, while minimizing the continued danger of catching Covid-19.
A study of 50 counties in California and New York found that raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour had several good overall economic effects.
In places where the minimum wage had previously not been unusually high, right-wing economists would predict increased unemployment, but the study found that did not happen.
*If you care about press freedom, make some noise about Julian Assange.*
Accusing the right-wing Supreme Court of being ready to disregard both facts and the right-wing idea of how to interpret the Constitution, in order to hurt Americans with unpayable student loans.
* Republican states fighting Joe Biden’s plan falsely said they’d be financially impacted by the scheme, debt forgiveness group claims.*
*[Some specific] green investment funds pushing money into fossil fuel firms, research finds.*
Dozens of women who worked for the CIA have accused it of disregarding accusations of some sort of sexual pressure on them.
It is not clear to me what the bounds of the term "sexual assault" are. The term is so loose that it is inherently misleading. But whatever it includes, the CIA should have handled these accusations properly.
Senator Warren has called for the US Trade Representative to confirm he will oppose ISDS clauses in future trade treaties, as Biden promised.
This is the most salient requirement for making a trade treaty acceptable; but it by itself is not sufficient. There are other ways a treaty can give business an advantage over human beings and society, thus making it a business-supremacy treaty.
Michael Chong, a member of Canada's parliament who originally came from Hong Kong, accused Trudeau of doing nothing to stop a Chinese diplomat from acting to harass him, his family in Hong Kong, and other members of Canada's parliament.
Civil liberties activists called for governments to decide not to allow spy software such as Pegasus.
I wish getting rid of spy software were that easy, but I don't think it is. When programs have bugs, some people will exploit them as security holes, and just saying "That's prohibited" won't stop it.
Indeed, gangs do this and they are probably breaking a law by doing so, but that doesn't faze them — they break many other laws too.
The free press is under attack, by states and gangs, all around the world meanwhile, its old business model is gradually disappearing.
Repression is increasing globally and spreading to additional countries.
*Six Libyans face death penalty for converting to Christianity.*
Many countries that call themselves "Muslim" impose that religion on more or less everyone. This is an offense against the freedom of every citizen, including those who are currently Muslims and might want to change. They also punish people for criticizing the official religion ("blasphemy") — in some countries with execution.
Christian countries used to commit similar injustices, quite generally, until the 1500s when a few began to adopt limited freedom for a few Christian sects. The Dutch Republic permitted Judaism as well. The UK didn't officially permit Jews until the mid 1800s, although some lived there. It discriminated against Catholics until later.
Protests against Macron's arbitrary increase of the retirement age in France are continuing after months, and thugs have taken up arresting people for the traditional protest of banging on pots.
I'm sure it is true that the finances of retirement pensions in France have a problem that requires more funds. But why turn first to the poor to get them? Macron did that because he is a "centrist", which means "bowing to the rich and pretending that's what most people want."
The propaganda terms "centrist" and "moderate" can be compared with "Bolshevik", which was used by a minority to pretend to be the majority.
Georgia thugs outdid themselves in defying reality and stretching laws by arresting activists who were putting fliers on mailboxes. They gave the address of one of the thugs who was involved in killing protester Manuel Paez Terán in the forest which is to be cut down to build Cop City.
*The inquiry into [his] death has been marred by contradictory information released by officials.*
I hazard a guess that the thugs and judges involved in this are right-wing. Contempt for law, justice and truth is the hallmark of the right wing, and these look like examples of it.
Students in several European countries, plus Uganda, are holding occupations to demand an end to building fossil fuel facilities.
*Anti-monarchists [in the UK] receive "intimidatory" Home Office letter on new protest laws.*
Everyone: call on Costco to stop supersizing wasteful packaging.
Americans are suffering illness and death due to the level of disconnection from other people. The amount of direct contact with other people has been decreasing since the 1970s.
The essay "Bowling Alone" took note of this development in 1995, but it has continued since then.
By going to the store to buy things, you can have a little more social contact with a variety of people — and you can pay cash and resist surveillance capitalism.
Putin has cancelled national celebrations on the dishonest pretext that Ukraine would attack crowds of civilians. Perhaps he's really afraid that those crowds of civilians would show their opinion of him.
Various US states are regulating PFAs, since Republicans won't let the US government do it.
*Victorian duck hunters urge parliament not to bow to "political correctness."*
I suggest that governments in Australia do more to encourage hunting of intrusive and introduced alien species, including foxes and cats.
The company Bytedance that owns and controls TikTok has a surveillance and censorship tool that has word lists that would catch discussions about political issues relating to China's repression.
It is not easy to determine what use the company makes of these lists. I wouldn't trust what the company says about that. (If the tool belonged to Facebook, I would not trust what it might say about that.)
*Senate Democrat Slammed for Pushing 'Unprecedented Giveaway' to Mining Industry.*
Mastodon has announced a plan to make the service easier to join.
On the practical level, attention to these issues can make Mastodon easier to use, and that is good. In practical terms, this work is worth doing.
On the level of values, the reference to Mastodon as a "product" made me worry for Mastodon's future. The values associated with making a "product", and all the other words typically used by businesses, are corrupting. They infuse a set of goals that are incompatible with respecting people.
A digital pet service that imitated a sweetheart or lover won users' hearts — then the company that ran it cut these simulated beloved from expressing affection.
The free software movement has something to say about it, and the author of the article gets it: "You can never have a safe emotional interaction with a thing or a person that is controlled by someone else."
Whether the author learned this from us, or thought of it on per own, it is good to see.
At the same time, a simulated friend that is entirely under your own control is not satisfactory, because whatever it says and does is your own fantasy. It is like a puppet.
Airbnb is destroying communities which many people like to visit, as many houses in them are now used as hotel rooms and there is not much in the way of housing to rent for all year.
I would never use Airbnb anyway, since you are required to (1) run nonfree software and (2) identify yourself to the company. I don't mind if the owner of the apartment or room knows who I am, but not a company!
Big US railroads gave paid sick leave to some unions, mainly the ones whose workers don't do the day-to-day operation of the trains. This is not adequate.
If railroads want their workers to work even when sick, they are trying to exploit those workers.
Democrats in the House of Representatives are trying to pass a bill to extend the debt ceiling and do nothing else.
They plan to do this using a discharge petition. To succeed, they need 5 Republicans to sign. They believe they can get them.
Republicans in the Senate blocked a bill to impose a code of ethics on the Supreme Court.
I would expect that the Republicans figure the oligarchs who fund them want to continue corrupting the Supreme Court.
*Internet freedom activists warn Congress that the EARN IT act would eliminate internet freedom.*
The stated goals of the EARN IT act seem proper to me, but the cost to freedom would be terrible, as adults would have to prove their identities to get accounts on platforms,
Another bill to protect "children" on the internet is called KOSA. The description of that bill seems to imply determining which users are "children" but doesn't say how this would be done. I fear the worst.
*Revealed: most of EU delegation to crucial fishing talks made up of fishery lobbyists.*
* Fast-rising fungal attacks on the world’s most important crops threaten the planet’s future food supply.*
* The impact of fungal disease is expected to worsen, the researchers say, as the climate crisis results in temperatures rising and fungal infections moving steadily polewards. Since the 1990s, fungal pathogens have been moving to higher latitudes at a rate of about 7km a year. Wheat stem rust infections, normally found in the tropics, have already been reported in England and Ireland.*
*Hot air: five climate myths pushed by the US beef industry.*
Everyone: call on the Carlyle Group to protect the planet by divesting from fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on Secretary Austin not to leave [noncombatant] victims of drone strikes [uncompensated].
*The Democrats think [so-called] centrism will re-elect Biden. That’s a dangerous assumption.*
Currently they are planning to carefully manage the Democratic primary elections so as to prevent any progressive candidate from effectively challenging Biden.
When Democrats say "centrism", they mean siding with the rich and powerful against most Americans.
*Biden is still not doing nearly enough about the climate crisis.*
Evidence suggests that particles of plastic get into animals' brains (and that includes Homo sapiens), and that they can contribute to brain dysfunction.
Small private jets emit over 10 times as much pollution per passenger as commercial flights, yet they receive an indirect public subsidy.
This calls for a big increases in taxes on owning and using those jets. It would be just a start at ending the rich people's class war, but starting would be good.
Brazilian government forces describe fighting mining mafias.
The main difference between these mines and the mines and wells in the US is that the latter have bought the support of the government.
California still officially has a death penalty, but it is eliminating the soul-crushing "death row".
Clarence Thomas's vote in the Citizens United case boosted his billionaire benefactor's political power.
Labour is now competing with Tories to help middle-class people buy houses and disregarding the poor who can no longer afford to rent anywhere.
US citizens: call on Senator Feinstein to resign.
I have been disappointed with Feinstein for years because she is a so-called "centrist" (that is, plutocratist) Democrat. However. the reason there is a campaign for her to resign now is that her illness and consequent inability to vote in the senate is blocking Biden's judicial appointments. If she resigns, the governor of California will appoint another Democrat who will be physically well and able to vote.
Everyone: call on Google to stop collecting search and location data for abortion seekers.
Google's collection of such data about users is an injustice regardless of what they are searching for.
There is a proxy called LibreX which accesses Google search for you, but you can connect to it via Tor and not run the JS code it sends.
In the US: call on cable companies to stop paying extra to carry Faux News.
A previous petition called on cable companies to remove Faux from their standard list of channels. I signed that, but it doesn't affect me personally. Cable companies use DRM, and monitor what the user watches. For those reasons, I refuse to be a cable subscriber.
Australia's government is considering making the Nazi salute illegal.
Prohibiting expressions of hateful views will not stop people from communicating them, but it will undermine the defense of freedom of speech.
*Tucker Carlson has lost his job — but the far right has won the BATTLE for the mainstream.*
The Tories are not very good at carrying through a plan to the end. But they are already planning repression against anyone enraged about being arbitrarily disenfranchised through voter ID cards.
A survey of policy changes in European countries and which groups of people like or dislike them. In general, changes are more likely to be liked by the rich than by other people.
*Warren Says First Republic Collapse Shows Deregulation Boosted 'Too Big to Fail' Banks.*
US citizens: call on negotiators to prioritize working people & the planet in the "Indo-Pacific Trade Deal."
This deal would be a business-supremacy treaty, and almost certain would harm our freedom more or less. They give big companies additional power to do harm to the rest of society. Soon we will need to campaign to kill the treaty. Let's get ready now!
US citizens: call on U.S. pharmacies to provide abortion care to customers.
US citizens: call on Gov. Ron DeSantis to stop censoring teachers, students, and journalists.
Everyone: call on Trader Joe's to stop union-busting.
A Just Stop Oil protester has been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for climbing a bridge and dropping a banner. Prison officials have threatened to make his prison term extra painful if he talks with reporters.
The Tories are passing additional repressive laws to crush the "selfish" protesters whose protests cause momentary annoyances. Just imagine how annoying agricultural failure will be for everyone!
47 Republicans blocked the Senate from approving the Equal Rights Amendment.
*Pandemic and Climate Crisis Usher In a New Age of Inequality.*
Demands from music copyright holders are pressing to stretch the scope of copyright, making the writing of lawful pop songs very difficult.
Overeager thugs arrested people for the most minor and peaceful of protests on the occasion of the proclamation of Charles III as king of the UK.
Paul Powlesland was threatened with arrest for holding up a blank piece of paper, inviting comparisons with China.
Meanwhile, the UK is rapidly passing laws to repress any sort of protest that inconveniences anyone.
*Climate Campaigners Stage Blockade at White House Correspondents Dinner.*
Being only 2/3 planet roaster is not good enough.
Asserting that the fighting in Sudan is a fight between proxies of rich Middle-Eastern powers over control of Sudan's resources.
I have a hunch that some of those powers are gangs rather than states.
Reportedly Libyan General Haftar is allied with one side in Sudan, the militia that is fighting against the Sudanese army, and they are backed by the United Arab Emirates and by Russia.
But I see no info about which powers back the Sudanese army.
Activists occupied the entrance to BlackRock headquarters to protest its pouring money into fossil fuels. Then New York City thugs vented right-wing hatred on the protesters, with beatings.
Republicans took control of the North Carolina Supreme Court and voted to permit arbitrary partisan gerrymandering in that state. That will establish nondemocratic government in that state.
More guns and more irrational fear make everyone less safe.
Wikipedia warns that the UK's proposed web censorship and age verification requirements would cut off access to Wikipedia in the UK.
Bravo to Wikipedia for refusing to compromise with censorship and tracking. However Ms Crompton-Reid made a grave conceptual error by including Wikipedia in the category of businesses — "players" in a "market".
Wikipedia's virtue, what makes it morally important despite its imperfections, is precisely that it is not a business. It does not operate in a "market", and it has a commitment to a goal beyond its own success.
The cynicism of "players" may resonate with a general vague condemnation of business, which to some extent business in general deserves; but it also tends to silence moral discussion about any business's acts or practices. Even to raise the question of whether a certain business, or a certain line of business, treats people unjustly is more difficult with the "players" metaphor sneering at it.
In 1954, the CIA used a fake news campaign to destabilize and overthrow the elected government of Guatemala.
The careful design of that campaign has served as the model for many other fake news campaigns, including the ones being used by Putin and by the US right wing extremists today.
*How Finland Virtually Ended Homelessness — and We Can Too.*
"We" here refers to Canadians, but it should work for the US and other countries. The crucial thing is to burn the idol of the Invisible Hand.
There is no such thing as "negotiating in good faith" for the hostage-takers and terrorists of the Republican Party.
*The UN working group on arbitrary detention has condemned the US for imprisonment without trial (not to mention torture) in Guantanamo prison.* It called for release of prisoner Abu Zubaydah.
Republicans are trying to distract attention from their real insurrection on Jan 6, 2021 by pretending that a few peaceful protests were "insurrections" and punishing its supporters as if that were true.
*A decade on from Rana Plaza, fast fashion still reigns — has anything changed…?*
China seems to be serious about trying to bring about a peace between Putin and Ukraine.
If China works on this patiently, it may eventually bring about a deal, provided that the two sides can eventually agree on one. It would require Putin to accept concessions which, at present, he is unwilling to accept. But maybe with time he will change his mind somewhat.
Taking stock of the enormous atrocity that the Putin forces committed in Mariupol.
Naturalists are breeding and releasing 11 species of Polynesian snails that were extinct in the wild, killed by an intrusive predator snail that humans had brought, hoping it would wipe out another invasive snail.
The technique of releasing an intrusive predator to control a pest species has often backfired in this way. Cane toads in Australia are a prominent example.
I wonder if robots could be programmed to efficiently find and kill the two intrusive species of snails. It might be easy to distinguish them from all the other species actually present in a given island, making the robots reliable there even if they might not be reliable elsewhere.
Unlike intrusive life forms, robots are easy to prevent from becoming a pest. They don't reproduce, and they need the help of humans to recharge.
In Australia, the rapid construction of renewable energy generation is substituting for fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse emissions.
*Why We Must Beat Back Private Equity's Deadly Hold on Nursing Homes.*
We need a law to prohibit tying many companies together. Not solely via visible mergers, but also by having common owners.
Perhaps certain companies should be forbidden to have their stock owned by anyone but individuals.
(satire) *Promising Report Finds Great Pacific Garbage Patch Could Support Full-Scale Ground War By 2040.*
Florida Republicans have another idea for attacking voting rights: attacking the organizations that help people in disprivileged groups register to vote.
Congress has proposed a law to prohibit setting up AI systems to decide whether to launch nuclear weapons. This is not an imaginary issue: there have been proposals to do just that.
The legal technique of "no federal funds may be used" has a well-known loophole: just find a private source of funds to do the specific job. Thugs have used "police foundations" to negate laws design with that method.
Disney is suing DeMentis, accusing him of using law for motives of personal retaliation.
The pleas of Oklahoma's attorney general that Richard Glossip is innocent were not enough to convince the state's pardon board not to execute him.
The US Chamber of Commerce pretends to represent small businesses, but half its income comes from donations of over a million dollars.
Jaci Statton had an nonviable fetus which was turning into cancer, but doctors in Oklahoma could not treat her because the treatment is an abortion. They told her to wait in the parking lot until she was on the verge of death, so they would be allowed to perform it.
*[So-called] conservatives love judicial activism — as long as the law is moved in their favor.*
Robert Reich: why Republicans make a big fuss about gender bigotry: it is a well-established path for recruiting for right-wing extremism.
*The Murdochs Want to Erase the Dominion Exposé [of Faux News]. We Won't Let Them.*
(satire) *Sarah Huckabee Sanders Drops Kids Off At Summer Work Camp.*
The "Starship" rocket faces an environmental investigation because of the damage it when lifting off. It not only destroyed the launch pad, it threw parts pieces of it into the air, and they crumbled and rained down on a nearby town.
California has put toxic pollution limits on train engines. Many will have to be replaced with more efficient engines.
The new rule will greatly reduce toxic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
An important new class of antibiotics is derived from "antimicrobial peptides". However, feeding them to farm animals is breeding bacteria to be resistant to them.
Florida's surgeon general, an anti-vaxxer, altered the text of a study the state was publishing, to exaggerate a rare problem with Covid-19 vaccines.
New Zealand thinks it can plant enough trees to outweigh all its greenhouse gas emissions.
That is very risky. What if the trees die? That has happened before in big tree-planting projects. It is also no example for the rest of the world to follow.
This Julian Assange rally will be at the May Day rally, Monday, May 1, at 5 pm at the bandstand on the Boston Common.
US citizens: suggest to Congress to allow the president to raise the debt ceiling, unless 2/3 of Congress says no
US citizens: call on Congress to reject Republican "permitting reform" but do untangle permitting for electric transmission lines.
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 EPA to go further to protect us from toxic air pollution.
Right-wingers and thugs in Germany demand to imprison people for a month if they are suspected of planning annoying protests, such as blocking roads.
The protesters demand cutting greenhouse emissions faster, on the grounds that climate collapse is likely to kill them before they get old.
The thugs want to "get the situation under control" to assure an orderly march towards mass death. Orderly, that is, until it is too late to prevent collapse and the early death of most of these potential protesters is assured.
Climate disaster is likely to kill billions of people. It will not be an accident, though; big businesses of various kinds are lobbying to keep it going while they extract all possible money. (Those who profit suppose that they will be somehow safe from the disaster, though I don't see how that could be true.)
As a consequence, we can describe future climate disaster as the biggest act of mass murder of all human history, past and future. It is unlikely that there will ever again be billions of people to kill.
Australia plans to block the use of credit cards to pay for online gambling. This is a wise plan since it can prevent some gambling addicts from betting money they do not have.
I conjecture that any system that requires gamblers to declare their intention to gamble and then wait a while will help people avoid compulsive gambling. Perhaps other ideas can be found from that.
More reason to suspect that Tories have introduced voter IDs as a means to prevent legitimate voters from voting is that they plan not to report how many people show up to vote and are turned away.
That number would be an underestimate of the number actually blocked from voting. Some of them, knowing they didn't get the required ID card, will not come to the polls at all.
The people most likely to fail to get the ID card are those who can barely keep up with their work and family duties, and have little time to spare to get the ID card.
Life in the ocean depths feeds on organic detritus that falls from nearer the surface. With global heating, more of the detritus gets eaten by microbes and never reaches the depths. Almost half of the deep ocean life could disappear in this century.
(satire) *Man Buys Wife Gun In Case She Ever Needs To Protect Herself From Him.*
(satire) *Survey Finds Nearly 6 In 10 Wealthy Americans Living Fraud To Fraud.*
A sheriff in Oklahoma (and other officials) were secretly recorded talking about their wish to murder various inconvenient people. They are trying to distract attention from this by claiming that making the recording was a crime.
Arguably it was lawful to make the recording, but even if it wasn't, that is no reason to tolerate officials whose idea of upholding laws is to discuss ideas for murder.
Clarence Thomas's corruption: his rich benefactor Crow repeatedly was involved with questions that the Supreme Court would decide.
*Ocean Warming Study So Distressing, Some Scientists Didn't Even Want to Talk About It.*
*Gorsuch Failed to Disclose He Sold Home to CEO of Major Law Firm.* That was just before Gorsuch got onto the Supreme Court. That law firm has had 22 cases before the Supreme Court since then.
I don't know whether Gorsuch made any decisions specifically in return for (or gratitude for) that sale of property. It could be that Gorsuch's plutocratist ideology is firm and he would usually have decided for the benefit of the wealthy. Perhaps that law firm generally represents the wealthy. If so, that law firm perhaps had no need to pay to assure his support most of the time. Maybe he was glad to get paid off for harm he would have done anyway.
*Clarence Thomas and Democratic Fecklessness.*
Just as Republicans (in Congress and on the Supreme Court) have a tradition of disrespect for democracy and the rights and interests of the non-rich, Democrats have a habit of timidity and weakness in defending them.
I have a suspicion that a lot of this timidity and weakness has been purchased by rich donors that will only support "centrists".
Progressive young voters tell Biden that the way to win their votes is to energize them with progressive policies.
I mostly agree with them, but not on all issues. I give very high priority to defeating plutocracy, and taxing the wealthy to help the rest of us. Those issues are up at the top along with climate defense. Immigration is secondary by comparison.
The antiabortion federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, who ordered a ban on mifepristone, did make supreme court’s conservative majority look reasonable by comparison. Don't be fooled.
US citizens: call on Congress to defeat Boebert's bill to eliminate endangered species protection for wolves.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
To see the confirmation statement in your browser, erase the CSS from it. IceCat has a command to do that in the right-click menu.
*A team of United Nations experts has arrived in the US on a tour that will focus on racial justice, law enforcement and policing.*
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are switching in large numbers to speaking mainly Ukrainian, as a gesture of resistance.
*Abuses "still rife": 10 years on from the Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza disaster.*
Robert Reich: the corrupter should be barred from running for office because of his involvement in attempted insurrection.
The article uses the word "treason" to describe this. In everyday informal terms, that word fits; but it is better to be precise in this context, because the Constitution gives a definition of "treason" which is much narrower: fighting against the US on behalf of an enemy country. For clarity, we should say "insurrection".
A protist species known as "philaster" was responsible for nearly eliminating a species of sea urchins on the US east coast and in the Caribbean.
Is there any chance this organism could be used safely to save California's kelp forests from the sea urchins that are wiping it out? That does not automatically follow — the sea urchins there might be immune to them, or they might destroy other species too. Research would be needed.
We shouldn't assume different kinds of prejudice are equivalent, or to try to set up a fixed order of how bad they are.
How harmful any given kind of prejudice is can vary from place to place, and over time.
For example, antisemitism in the US was much worse before World War II than it has been since the 1950s. My mother told me a story about her childhood in Brooklyn, about children from Catholic schools screaming "Christ killer" while running after Jewish children — every year after Easter. The rest of the year they might be friendly.
Canadian thugs used to grab indigenous men in the city at random, take them by car to the woods, then leave them to freeze to death. One victim, Darrell Night, was able to survive and blew the whistle on this practice of murder for fun.
It's not too late to prosecute some of the murderers, if the government has the spine for it.
Manchin is responsible for increasing the income taxes on poor Americans with children by around 10%.
The reason Social Security won't have enough income after 2034 is that rich people have taken a much bigger fraction of all the income in the US. And rich people pay the social security tax on only a limited amount of their income.
The first step in fighting the billionaires who have seized power over our democracy is to use deprecatory terms to refer to them. For instance, "billionaire".
A billionaire may have acquired a substantial part of per billions, but billionaires don't usually "earn" the wealth they acquire. The reason they acquire so much of it is that they collectively rig the rules so that they acquire, then keep, a much bigger share.
US citizens: call on the Senate to investigate Sinema's apparent corruption; billionaires should not be able to buy senators or the Supreme Court.
I am unhappy that the petition uses an …OTUS abbreviation, but it's not a moral issue so I signed anyway.
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!
*More than 100 Israeli and international civil society groups warn [that adopting] IHRA definition [of "antisemitism"] could curb work of UN bodies.*
Overextension of the crime of "terrorism" in Georgia has been used to terrorize environmentalist protesters. A similar law in Oregon may be used to do likewise.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
After the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Billionaire Polluters hired thousands of workers to clean away the oil. Now they are suing because they have a tendency toward a specific pattern of illnesses, which is likely to have been caused by contact with the oil.
BP cut corners on safety to save money at its workers' expense. Some of the workers on the drilling platform were killed in the explosion that BP didn't prevent. The cleanup workers' illnesses are an extension of that same practice.
The alcohol industry used its donations to medical research to help engineer a conclusion that a low level of drinking alcohol was a little more healthful than abstaining.
This conclusion was subtly mistaken: in fact, a certain fraction of the abstainers had decided to abstain because of some illness, and those illnesses were what made them less well than the typical light drinker.
The controversy over possible future technologies for removing CO2 from the air.
I think that we should try to develop CO2 removal technology, because it will be very helpful if it does work efficiently; but it would be a terrible mistake to bet on that. Our investment now should go mainly into replacing fossil fuels.
Mississippi Republicans deny the city of Jackson the right to elect and control its own thug department and prosecutors.
This is an attempt to thwart criminal justice reform, which would reduce the racism that "justice" systems have meted out in the past.
It is helpful for adolescents to see a wide range of humans nude, so that they don't think everyone is supposed to look like a porn star.
*The government rescued Silicon Valley Bank's wealthy depositors, but neighborhoods counting on the collapsed bank are out of luck.*
The Condamine river in Australia seems to be condaminated naturally with methane that steadily leaks out of the ground and contributes to global heating.
Is it possible to capture the leaking methane, and replace some of the artificially fracked methane that Australia now produces?
*Rightwing extremists defeated by Democrats in US school board elections.*
*China ramps up coal power despite carbon neutral pledges.*
Xi, visit Shanghai now, because in a few decades it will be under water.
India too is building more coal-burning electric generation. Bye-bye, Mumbai. By the time those fools see the danger manifest itself, it will be too late to save that city. or Chennai, Kolkata, Goa, Kozhikode, and many more.
The Recovering America's Wildlife Act would invest in conserving America's wild species and ecosystems, without which our civilization could hardly survive.
Some 20 million Americans would be at risk of losing Medicaid funding for their medical care, if House Speaker McCarthy gets his way.
Precisely how many millions would actually lose coverage we cannot tell, since it would depend on many decisions yet to be made.
If it comes out to around 10 million, my rough guess is that a few percent of them would die as a result within a few years. That will be hundreds of thousands killed.
Shall we call him Massacre McCarthy?
Thousands of people protest in France to block the construction of a new main road between two cities, saying that building more roads for cars is a bad investment for society.
US citizens: call on the Senate to investigate Clarence Thomas.
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 raise taxes on the rich & corporations; and not cut benefits for working families (and non-rich Americans in general).
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 Biden to close the Guantanamo prison.
My recommendation for how to get around the US laws that make it hard to find a way to move the current prisoners out of that prison is to convert it into a town.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Arguing that only sabotage and direct resistance are strong enough to prevent the mass murder that greenhouse emissions drive us into.
The idea is to stop deadly projects, not merely symbolically denounce them and hope that governments will stop them.
A Republican who pushed to override the 2020 election results now proposes a strategy to rig the 2024 election: make it harder for college students to vote.
Republicans are already trying hard to do this, and facing a lot of resistance. What the presentation shows is that Republican activists feel no shame whatsoever about systematic cheating.
To be a good parent requires fighting now to prevent climate disaster from destroying them later in their lives.
The article reiterates a basic assumption — that you should love, care about, your own children more than anyone else. Carried too far, that narrow focus is a mistake. A saying that struck me as very wise is, "Helping only your own family is a just a form of selfishness." This can be see in the way billionaires are practicing precisely that form of selfishness when they try to take all the world's wealth for their own heirs.
Notwithstanding that, the article's overall point is valid. But I would take it one step further. Nowadays the best thing you can do for your potential children is not to have them.
On the struggle to convert gold mining in Peru — mostly illegal and controlled by gangs — to a method that avoids spreading mercury.
Costa Rica sets an example of successfully reversing deforestation. Since around 1990, most of the lost forests have grown back.
The basic idea was to pay the owner of a formerly forested area just a little more than the pittance that could be made from inefficient raising of cattle, for letting forest grow there.
I wonder if this method can be adapted to the Brazilian Amazon. The situation is not the same.
When UK "anti-terrorist" thugs questioned French publisher Ernest Moret, supposedly about "terrorism", they asked him questions about his positions in French politics, such as whether he supported President Macron and whether he had protested against Macron's pension delay law.
This catches them red-handed in dishonest use of these special powers, which violate human rights.
It is not enough to drop charges against Moret. The UK must restore its respect for human rights.
"Americans, unite to support the anonymous billionaires!"
In the US, the "Centrists" are the plutocratists — the ones who avoid most political issues and mainly insist on keeping life profitable for the rich. What's new is that billionaires plan to pool their money secretly to get their politicians elected without bothering with supporting either major political party.
The numbers of tourists now going to the main destinations are not only making them unpleasant places to be, but also converting them into theme parks.
The Supreme Court decision to tentatively allow sales of mifepristone to continue seems to have split the most extreme right wing from the rest.
It is a very sad thing for the US that the Supreme Court has been politicized so far, but there is no use denying it.
The fanatical Christians that is the Texas Republican Party plan to require display of a religious statement in every classroom.
This would directly defy the First Amendment, which bans establishment of religion.
In normal times, we would confidently expect federal courts to quash this — but no one can be sure nowadays.
Global climate negotiations systematically refuse to consider dangers that are plausible but not yet certain. This leads to underestimating what we should rationally do. They also overestimate the effectiveness of economic systems in acting to reduce danger. That gives plutocrats an excuse to argue against taking firm measures to ensure survival.
The author suggests government launch a lot more studies about "What is the worst that can happen?"
The overall point of the report covered in this article is a proposal for a way to reduce emissions quickly: by taxing the old technologies that produce lots of emissions enough to ensure they are replaced in a few years.
*Fox News and its audience became hooked on lies — now they can’t break the habit.*
At least two art-generating online dis-services have banned the word "abortion". One of them directly threatens users who try to generate drawings on that topic. This form of censorship seems to reject many other words, including words for reproductive anatomy and for birth control products.
This form of censorship demonstrates the injustice of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute). The user simply wants to run a particular program, but that program has never been released, so the only way to run it is to connect to someone else's server which will run it for the user. This is basically similar in injustice to a nonfree program, but worse: the server operator can control who is allowed to use the program (by requiring each user to make an account), snoop on all the data the user provides to the server, and can even demand data from the user for purposes of profiling or subsequent manipulation.
If the same program were released as nonfree software, that would not respect the user's freedom either. For instance, it could contain arbitrary censorship rules. However, unless it has a back door (which is not unheard of), the developer could not remotely add more censorship to a copy that a user has already installed.
Nonfree software and SaaSS are two unjust ways of making a program available for use. The only just way is to release it as free software.
As for the other characteristics of some drawings that disappointed some users for representing stereotypes, or the male gaze, different users might have different preferences about those things. One user might have different preferences on different occasions.
These programs can't think about those preferences, because they are not a form of intelligence and have no understanding of anything, last of all what an image might mean to a human looking at it.
To make such distinctions requires a human artist.
One of the founders of Earth Day warns that it has become an occasion for massive greenwashing by heavily polluting businesses.
Journalist Doni Chamberlain covers the fascists of Shasta County, defying their threats and their intimidation, but keeping an eye open for the possibility of violence.
Allowing business to optimize everything with profit as its only goal has produced disaster over and over.
Railroads, masks, medicine, arms — every area of work that has been put under the dominion of the profit-maximizer works badly for everyone except the owners. A profit-maximizing AI will be little different from a paperclip-maximizing AI.
Iran is using facial recognition in public places to identify the dangerous criminals that don't wear required Islamic clothing.
They have been specifically banned from the Tehram Metro.
Proposing April 9 as a national holiday for the military defeat of the forces of slavery.
I am in favor of having such a holiday, but April 9 is not the only candidate. Juneteenth, June 19, is already a federal holiday — let's stick with that.
On the Zapotec form of transgenderism, called "muxe".
Texas is planning to pass a bill to invalidate local regulations in a sweeping way. This would include regulations to *protect workers, consumers, and the environment.*
Naturally, ALEC is involved, showing that the main benefit will be for the rich.
I expect that fascists will use this to prevent cities and counties from resisting voter-suppression.
Verisign has asked ICANN to give every government total power to seize or shut .net domains. If some government, such as Tuvalu or China or Beijing, seized your domain, you'd have to sue in the courts of Tuvalu or China, not your own country.
This is a very dangerous concentration of power. The fact that Verisign arranged for this shows it is far too powerful. The network's arrangements with it should be canceled and replaced with something quite different.
The fact that ICANN agreed to this suggests that there is corruption in ICANN that needs to be rooted out.
The American Clean Power Association, which officially represents various renewable energy companies, seems to have been corrupted by fossil fuel influence.
An autopsy found that Manuel Paez Terán did not fire a gun in the confrontation in which thugs killed him.
The thugs claimed that he had, but it was evidently bullshit.
An IPCC publication comparing the effectiveness of various ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions finds that the five most effective methods are:
*By reviving scrounger myths and rubbishing free social care, Starmer’s begun a race to the bottom — one the Tories will win.*
Prime Minister Wilson said, "Labour is a moral crusade or it is nothing." What does that say about Starmer?
Frequent killings of people for going to the wrong door are *the effects of a "national experiment in freely giving deadly weapons to anyone who wants one."*
Chile's president Boric plans to gradually nationalize the lithium mining industry.
Some countries are permitting export of lithium only if the refining is done there before export.
(satire) *Police Read Wealthy Suspect Special Miranda Warning Outlining Right To Impunity.*
Australia has decided to give full employment equal weight with reducing inflation, in decisions about monetary policy.
Republicans have described a specific plan to impose disaster specifically on non-rich Americans.
If I were the Democrats, I would tell the Republicans, "If you are determined to cause a disaster for Americans, you'll have to do it by yourselves. We will not participate. Especially, don't expect we will help you save the rich while abandoning the poor."
If the UK transitions to renewable energy by 2050, it could save money and achieve lower total greenhouse emissions if it avoids building any nuclear energy.
A concert to benefit poor musicians in the UK accidentally used a copyrighted work. The collecting society PRS charged it a fee that amounts to half the money it had raised, and thus revealed it has the attitude of a parasite.
Copyright is an extremely bad way of supporting musicians and composers. We should allow noncommercial use of music with no fee, and for supporting musicians and composers, we should set up other systems for that.
The Australian Capitol Territory will offer abortion gratis to anyone.
This is what every country should do. No one should be compelled to have and raise a baby.
*They cleaned up BP’s massive oil spill. Now they’re sick — and want justice.*
Justice Thomas's rich patron funded a right-wing group that had a case before the Supreme Court, during the time he knew and gave gifts to Thomas.
Survivors describe the massacres committed by Eritrean soldiers in Tigray.
*Shocking messages about beating suspects and making up evidence were found when Antioch, [California], [thugs] were investigated.* Nearly half the thugs in the department either sent them or read them without objecting.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
The point of the article is that we have a responsibility to object to bigotry when we see it. Symbolic bigotry is nowhere near as bad as beating people up, but we should still call it out, as I am doing here.
US citizens: call on the Senate to confirm Julie Su as Secretary of Labor.
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!
India's population is increasing substantially — and so is its rate of coal, and its rate of deforestation.
Poverty is a major cause of death in the US.
*Why are Americans being shot for knocking on the wrong door?*
Senator Feinstein is ill and unable to go to the Senate to vote. This is blocking many judicial appointments. She agreed to let another Democrat replace her on the judiciary committee, so as to unblock these votes, but Republicans' assent was required and some refused.
It is absurd for Senator Durbin to defend a questionable bipartisan tradition of the past that the Republicans refused to observe when the saboteur in chief was president. To defend it unilaterally is being a sucker.
Making plastic often spreads toxins, and disposing of it likewise. We need to reduce total production.
Texas is considering many new laws to punish fraud in voting, which almost never happens in the US.
I am sure this is blowing smoke so they can claim a fire exists, but I suspect it is worse than that.
I think these bills are in fact intended to create opportunities to intimidate voters — voters who belong to disprivileged groups and probably vote Democratic — by making false accusations and threats. For instance, the "marshals" could make false accusations on election day to drive voters away.
A guide to the typical terms used for greenwashing in the clothing industry.
The best way to reduce the waste made from making your clothing is to stop the frequent purchase of clothing. If you wear each thing you buy on at least 50 days, you will buy far less than most people do in the wealthier countries. You'll also save a lot of money.
Almost 500 species of animals, mostly coastal species, have colonized the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the "EARN-IT" bill that would prohibit end-to-end encryption and require most online services to scan, for the government, all material they get from users.
That's what Congress is considering once again, after it was shelved for public opposition in 2020. Now they are trying to rush it.
I think this would require services to require users to run nonfree software in order to use them.
The bill is so extreme that if people communicate through an encrypted service, and then commit a crime, that would be grounds to prosecute the service. Why go off the deep end? I speculate that they figure to drop them (as a "compromise") while keeping the basic outrages.
I found a campaign to contact senators to oppose this bill, but I can't use it or recommend it, because it requires running nonfree Javascript code. Web sites and services should be usable with Javascript disabled.
Why not make an exception and run the nonfree software "for a good cause"? Because once you make that kind of exception, once you allow a pervasive injustice to become part of how you fight other injustices, you've effectively legitimized that one.
Those web sites could have been designed to function even with Javascript disabled, and they should be.
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!
Children in Britain are becoming obese because many parents can't afford vegetables.
Some of the leaked Pentagon files seem to show the US was listening to UN secretary general Guterres's conversations.
*Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From [Faux] News.* Squeezing money out of it was all it wanted.
*"Don’t fool yourself": Billions more needed to protect tropical forests.*
"Stand your ground" laws bring with them a roughly 10% increase in homicides.
They also enable racism. Any shooter can cite this law, but courts are more likely to approve it for white shooters, especially when they shoot blacks.
Big Tech asks Australia to change copyright law to permit machine learning systems to scan copyrighted web sites to construct language models.
Copyright should allow people to study copyrighted works to learn from them, as a matter of basic principle. That includes adducing patterns in how language is used.
If people want a law to prohibit studying works of text or art to make programs that generate text or art, this should be a separate law so that it doesn't mess up other uses of studying works, or other ways of reusing aspects of works. We must not let Big Tech add copyright restrictions, since they will design it to give them more power over us.
(satire) *Missouri Now Requiring All Residents To Have License, Permit To Operate Doorbell.*
UK "anti-terrorist" thugs arrested a French publisher visiting the London Book Fair. They accused him of having some sort of involvement in the mass protests against President Macron.
This inculpates both the UK government and the French government in repression against protesters. In addition, it demonstrates the UK's disrespect for the rights of the accused.
It is not the first time that the UK has used this repressive law against journalism.
In 2014, David Miranda. whose spouse is Glen Greenwald, flew through London with a disk containing copy of Greenwald's data from reporting, including on Snowden. UK thugs arrested Miranda and threatened to imprison him for years if he did not immediately hand over the keys to that data.
Flying through the UK is comparable to flying over Belarus. The UK government should ashamed of itself.
People who want to rent an apartment, in Australia, are almost forced to use invasive data-collection sites. The users of the sites are unhappy with the data they collect, and some of them are manipulative too.
I expect similar abusive practices exist in the US. They may have started in the US. So many other Internet abuses did.
There is a danger concern that the site will implement housing bias. If their developers get the idea to use trained neural nets to evaluate would-be renters, they are likely to learn whatever sorts of biases landlords have.
I confidently predict that the site insists on running nonfree software on the user's site. The users are not complaining about this, but they would if they were wise.
US citizens: call on Biden not to put immigrant families in immigration prison.
US citizens: call on the Senate to abolish "blue slips" for blocking judicial nominations.
This is the system whereby judges from a state can veto appointment of judges in that state.
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 medically-necessary emergency abortion provides an example of the dishonesty and price gouging of the US medical system.
This is why I advocate a national medical system, not merely "Medicare for all." Under Medicare, medical treatment can be quite expensive. Even the part the patient has to pay can be quite expensive.
Governor Sanders of Arkansas directs applicants for state offices to demonstrate their lack of probity by praising her in the job applications.
Governor DeMentis is hell-bent on punishing Disney. His latest plan is to build a prison next to Disney World.
I expect it will take years to start construction. By then, DeMentis probably won't be governor any more; his successor will not have the same grudge against Disney, so perse will make a deal with Disney.
DeMentis's mania for punishing anyone that won't bend the knee to him is alarming.
However, Disney's being in a dispute with DeMentis, who is clearly our enemy, does not make Disney deserve our admiration. Disney is not our friend. Disney is one of the companies responsible for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Tunisia's dictator has now jailed 20 opposition leaders.
I too strongly condemn political Islam, but repression is not going to make that go away or result in a free country.
Discovery of a thriving coral reef that is too deep for ordinary diving leads some to hope these species will not be wiped out by heat.
However, heat is not the only threat to marine life. Too much CO2 in the sea will kill all coral, and many other kinds of animals, by making the ocean too acidic for them.
We need to cut the CO2 emissions even if it isn't too hot.
Unofficial reports describe masses killed in China by the sudden anti-Covid quarantines, followed by perhaps millions killed by rampaging Covid with their deaths falsely attributed to other causes.
The Ukraine-Russia border, between Kharkiv and Belgorod, was just an arbitrary line, with similar people speaking the same form of Ukrainian on both sides (often related to each other). The war forced each person to choose a side.
The two states, becoming increasingly different over time, created a superstructure that made the two sides of the line terribly different. Now one side of the line is under a repressive tyranny while the other is under (imperfect) freedom.
The author recognizes implicitly that Stalin's 1930s famine affected a large part of the Soviet Union — it was not specifically aimed at Ukraine.
Idiotic UK bureaucracy incorrectly denied the citizenship of many UK citizens who came there long ago as children from colonies in the Caribbean. The Tory government was pressured to acknowledge these wrongs and set up a scheme to right them. But the Tory inclination never to give a non-rich citizen a break eventually won out over righting wrongs.
As long as the watchword is, "When in doubt, kick them out," it won't do the job.
Global heating is wiping out ancient settlements in the high Andes because there is no more water.
US citizens: call on US courts to protect medicated abortion.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax rich people's income at the same rate regardless of which financial arrangements are used to pay it to them.
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 Republicans to leave Americans' benefits (already inadequate) alone.
US citizens: call on Congress to fund Public Media.
Corporate "sponsors" have too much influence over US public media. As usual, they use that influence to slant coverage and adjust the Overton window. With more public funds, public media could resist their influence more.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The US may supply Taiwan with a huge stock of weapons for asymmetric warfare against the threatened Chinese conquest.
A teenager in Kansas City was shot while trying to pick up two of his brothers when he was shot. Why was he shot? He had gone to the wrong address, and he was black.
The victim made an innocent mistake, and perhaps so did the shooter. But the victim's mistake was harmless and nonviolent. The shooter's mistake, if it was one, was to jump to a hostile conclusion without checking it.
We must not accept the excuse of "innocent mistake" for violent actions.
Sanders: *We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.*
The necessities of life should not depend on employment. If society provided those to everyone, the minimum wage would not have to include that.
Some PFAS are used in packaging, and are supposedly safe when used that way, but in fact they can escape from the packaging and get into the food or beverage.
*Assisted-living homes are rejecting Medicaid [as an excuse for] evicting seniors.*
*LNG Is a Bridge Fuel to a Hotter, More Dangerous World.*
*Israeli [thugs] Assault Palestinian Christian Worshipers in Jerusalem.*
US citizens: call on members of Congress to sign the Bowman/Sanders letter for the US to push back on Israel's increasing violence (and repression) in occupied Palestine.
Tracing the suffering caused by deregulating various businesses to Republican politics and Koch money.
A spy company hired by the companies behind the Dakota Access Pipeline used lawful and unlawful methods to snoop on the campaigners opposing to the pipeline.
For me, the most important thing about the pipeline is that it would lead to more fossil fuel use for a long time, and therefore contribute to global disaster. It is interesting that, for the author of the article, the fact that indigenous people lived nearby and played a major role in that campaign is more important than helping to save the world.
Amazon is wearing down its workers' union by continuing noncooperation and harassment.
There are so many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon.
US citizens: call on Secretary Buttigieg to stop the Uinta Basin railway.
*What is it about many modern day Republican candidates?
If they win an election, everything is on the up and up. If they lose, something was amiss and certainly unfair.*
My explanation is, they accuse Democrats of doing what they would plan to do.
Clarence Thomas sold real estate to Republican funder Harlan Crow and did not report it.
* The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Mexico violated the rights of two people who were held in pretrial detention for more than 17 years.*
Ralph Nader: what Congress would legislate if it were for democracy instead of plutocracy.
The giant accounting company EY offered to split up into an accounting company and a consulting company. That split would limit opportunities and temptation for corruption. The US objected to a detail of the plan.
I wonder what the objection was. Was the US protecting corruption? Or was EY's plan designed to play a fast one?
The federal appeal court placed onerous restrictions on mifepristone. It will be available in principle, but obstructed by senseless restrictions.
They include a reimposed requirement for an in-person visit to a doctor. In addition, the court arbitrarily cut it its use at 7 weeks of pregnancy. Many women don't learn they are pregnant that early, so this will compel millions to have surgical abortions.
People stocked up on mifepristone in case they will need it later.
It is urgent to ramp up the underground networks that obtain mifepristone and convey it to women who need it.
The Supreme Court surprisingly intervened and blocked the appeals court's temporary ruling that would have greatly limited access to mifepristone.
The result is that sales of the drug, even by remote orders, are still lawful.
This is like a game of reversi.
Thom Hartmann: *The Commodification of the Commons Is Killing Us All*
I use the term "plutocracy" to refer to the political philosophy he rebukes.
*Hungary and Poland provide model for Israel’s assault on judiciary.*
Protesters stopped a coal train in the UK and started shoveling out the coal.
This should be justified by the necessity defense by citing the deaths and diseases that coal will cause.
(satire) *Embattled Dalai Lama Quietly Reincarnated To Remote Tibetan Village.*
Salafi Arabia and the Houthis are negotiating for peace in Yemen.
The difference between Teixeira, who leaked secret military memos this year, and whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, is a matter of motive. The whistleblowers wanted to serve the public; Teixeira was motivated by bad wishes.
We must revise the Espionage Act to include a public interest justification. For Manning and Snowden, it would have exonerated them and probably discouraged prosecuting them at all. For Teixeira, it would have changed nothing.
US citizens: say no to anti-voter laws.
DeMentis threatens to imprison anyone in Florida who gives transportation, shelter or work to an unauthorized immigrant.
Punishing people for not participating in some sort of repression is a standard fascist tactic, and you can gauge how fascist a party is by whether it has recourse to that. The Republican Party has turned thoroughly fascist, but Democrats have supported fascist policies in the area of immigration.
There has been a law since the 1990s under which employers could not avoid demanding employees show government ID to prove they are authorized to work in the US. This imposition of government control and surveillance over life makes me boil.
* Because [the UK doesn't] pay doctors enough, there are too few of us. It's all we can do to stop people dying in NHS waiting rooms*
Biden aims to extend Medicaid to cover the DACA people, who were brought to the US as children.
*World's 60 Largest Banks Have Dumped $5.5 Trillion Into Fossil Fuels Since Paris Accord.*
*Sky Not Falling: U.S. Government Again Exaggerates Damage From Leaks.*
US citizens: call on the FDA to use emergency powers to protect access to Mifepristone.
Daniel Ellsberg is dying, but he won't let that hold him back from campaigning for peace and disarmament.
*Manhattan DA who indicted Trump sues Republican Jim Jordan over interference in case.*
The interference consists of demanding to subpoena one of the DA's investigators, trying to find something to accuse him of.
I don't understand the legal issues enough to know whether there was any actual wrongdoing, but in general no one is more likely to lie than a Republican official.
Coffee shops in Ukraine have "security cameras" that should better be called "insecurity cameras", because Russian crackers broke their security in order to snoop on Ukrainian convoys.
Any store that takes pictures of its customers and puts them on a network in real time is making its customers vulnerable.
Rutgers faculty are on strike to call for a raise for all the kinds of teachers at the school.
A billionaire Republican hedge-fund founder tries to buy elections, and perhaps has succeeded. He did succeed in buying the naming rights of Harvard's general graduate school.
I expect the students and faculty will have their say now, and I hope their condemnation of that Republican will live longer than he does.
When the MIT AI Lab moved to the Stata Center, and I discovered that one of the two towers was named Bill Gates, I urged people to refuse to call it by that name. I suggested Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul, but people settled on the innocuous "D Tower" and "G Tower".
I also made a practice of formally saluting the sign that says "Bill Gates", near the outside door of the G tower, with my middle finger.
Methods like this can certainly be used against another billionaire donor who has harmed people's freedom.
*Climate emergency is the biggest health crisis of our time — bigger than Covid.*
Benjamin Ferencz was one of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, after investigating Nazi concentration camps in the US Army. His obituaries do not mention that he called for prosecution of Dubya and some of his ministers.
Governor DeMentis worked at Guantanamo prison, and was given the task of interviewing prisoners who were going to be force-fed.
DeMentis still claims that the prisoners they tortured were "terrorists", though hardly any of them can be connected to terrorism.
*Report Shows Social Security Expansion is Affordable.*
Some members of the US Congress called on Attorney General Garland to drop charges against Julian Assange.
They were led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
The Group of 7 wealthiest countries are converging on a policy of increasing extraction of methane for fuel. This will speed up climate disaster.
Activists are calling on Biden to stop this. Biden is not the most steadfast and reliable of champions for climate defense. The sad thing is that there is no one else to appeal to.
Biden's new rules for fossil fuel consumption of future cars and trucks are inadequate to prevent them from causing climate disaster.
The Australian government has eliminated use of private debt collectors to prevent repetitious of cruel abuses set up by the previous right-wing government by means of them.
Governor DeMentis went to enormous lengths to eliminate the state's one black congressional representative, by gerrymandering and intimidation of voters at many levels.
Los Angeles released information to journalist Ben Camacho for a public records request. Now the city is suing him for publishing it.
US citizens: call on Biden to respect the legal right to ask for asylum inside the US.
Requiring asylum-seekers to run a nonfree program on top of that not only fails to excuse the policy, it is an additional separate injustice. Governments must never require people to run a nonfree program.
US citizens: call on the World Bank's new president, Ajay Banga, to redirect its investments to promote decarbonization and economic equality.
Sea-level rise in the southern US has accelerated. Since 2010 it is rising more than a centimeter per year.
*A home purchased today in Pensacola will be underwater before the mortgage is paid off. This is so scary.*
This augments the damage done by hurricanes, but I think the sea-level rise itself will do more damage, because it is cumulative. Your locality may go 50 years without a hurricane, but it won't go 50 years magically skipped by sea-level rise.
Imagine how horrible it would be if we treated fire-fighting like ambulances, making people pay for fire-fighting service.
Then turn this around to see the arguments for handling ambulances like firefighting — a public service provided at little or no charge.
In ancient Rome, fire-fighting was a private activity, and this played a role in destroying the Republic. The rich man who ran the fire brigades, Marcus Licinus Crassus, enriched himself so much that there were only three men left who had any political power. When he died, that left only Caesar and Pompey, who then fought a civil war.
If we allow large fortunes to keep growing, we risk arriving at the same end.
Suing the EPA for approving a plastic-recycling plant that would cause a 1-in-4 risk of cancer for people who live nearby.
The risk of cancer will inevitably extend, though with decreasing probability, to people who live somewhat farther away. I wonder at what distance that risk will decrease to an acceptable amount. 100 miles? 1000 miles east?
The report is vague, and represents estimates. I can't be sure from this report how much danger there would really be. Perhaps Chevron can demonstrate that the actual danger is far less. But we should insist that it do so by publishing measurements and analyses.
In an arid land city, a rich person can use almost ten times as much water as a poor person. Cities head towards a water shortage should strictly limit water consumption by the rich years before what they would call a "crisis".
Private wells also deplete the same ground water that makes up the last resort for the region. They should be strictly regulated.
By contrast, building private desalinization plants run by renewable energy should be encouraged, because they increase the total water resources available to the region and don't take it away from anyone else.
The Putin forces are making advances in their capability to jam communication with Ukraine's most common kind of drone. In a few months they may be entirely useless.
What it's like to grow up poor and white in rural America.
I'd be interested in seeing how this compares to growing up poor and black in those places. Racism surely continues its dirty work.
Supermajorities enable parties to crush democracy, as Republican parties are doing now in several states.
But these supermajorities did not happen naturally. They result from Republican measures to rig elections — voter suppression and gerrymandering.
AOC argues that the US government can disregard the court decision that purports to remove the FDA authorization of mifepristone.
Recommending how the FDA should respond to the two conflicting federal court decisions about abortion medicines.
Republicans want to cut SNAP benefits for disabled Americans who can't find jobs. They cite Clinton's 1996 "welfare reform" law as an example to follow, which shows the cruelty of their intentions.
*[Clarence] Thomas Pushed To Kill Disclosure Laws While Getting Secret Billionaire Gifts.*
Why the British government bureaucracy behaves bizarrely and ineffectively: it is in the grip of an ideology that makes mistaken assumptions about how to do any job.
England has an infestation of grey squirrels, and they do lots of damage. It is important to kill them.
(satire) *Couple Struggling To Conceive Considers Trying Sexual Intercourse.*
I appreciate reporting broken links in stallman.org. To make the reports useful, please send each broken link in a separate email. The email should contain
Please don't send more than 4 per day! I can easily get overloaded and have a backlog.
Thanks.
Some of the prison thugs in US federal prisons make a practice of pressuring prisoners for sex, especially prisoners who are not US citizens and might be deported. Those who testify about this are often punished with deportation.
Officials have invented bureaucratic excuses to block the factual investigation of accusations against prison thugs. Anyone who does this should be charged with obstruction of justice.
The practical details of the legal proceedings against the corrupter are unimportant. When journalists dwell on those, they are playing into the hands of his attack on US democracy.
One thing you can help do about this, if you watch TV, is to change the channel (or turn it off) as soon as it focuses on the antics of the bullshitter. The details they focus on are not important. The importance is in the bullshit campaign overall, and you already know the important thing about that.
Biden decided to allow Medicare Advantage insurers to keep overcharging the US government more or less for three more years.
*Markey, Merkley, Jayapal Lead Colleagues on Legislation to Ban Government Use of Facial Recognition and Other Biometric Technology.*
I support passing this law, but it does not go far enough. Nongovernmental operation of systems for facial recognition (and other 1984 surveillance systems) is equally dangerous and we need to put an end to that too.
In 2020, shortly after the election, the CEO of Faux News ordered that fact-checking "has to stop now" because it is "bad for business".
While a right-wing judge in Texas ruled that the FDA's approval of mifepristone must be cancelled, another judge in Washington State ruled that it must continue.
It is possible the drug may be authorized in 18 states and not in the other 32.
Israelis are coming to regard Prime Minister Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition as a security threat.
A white Texan has been convicted of murdering a black protester. Governor Abbott wants to pardon him.
Abbott is, in effect, advocating lynching.
The Taliban told the UN that it would not allow Afghan women to do work for the UN in Afghanistan. The UN told its male Afghan workers to stay home.
The Tories promised to change some of the policies that have forced into penury people who moved from Jamaica to Britain as children with their parents and didn't have the documents to prove they had done so. Now they are planning to take back the promise.
* It doesn’t matter if you think abortion will be legal where you live –- the anti-abortion movement wants a national ban.*
Arguing that the corrupter's arrest hurt his chances of being elected president again.
It depends mainly on how much Republicans get away with cheating.
*Why Republican lawmakers are obsessed about sex [and oppression based on anything about sex]*
*[Progressive] governors stockpile abortion drugs as access is threatened.*
*Outcry over lengthy jail terms handed to China human rights lawyers.*
48 Australian federal elected officials called on the US to drop charges against Julian Assange.
In Australia from 2009 to 2019, the wealthiest 10% received 93% of the economic growth. That's plutocracy for you.
Of the two progressive Tennessee state representatives expelled by Republicans, one has already been reinstated by his district, and the other is on the way to being reinstated.
Israeli attacks on Muslim worshipers in al-Aqsa provoked battle in Gaza.
I'm sure the right-wing government could predict this — such things have happened many times — which implies it sought this. I conjecture that this is a plan to to manipulate Israelis to drop their resistance to what the government really wants: to attack democracy in Israel, permanently.
G20 countries are spending big on constructing more liquefied gas exports. The owners of these facilities will pay politicians to let them continue to profit from them.
Tesla cars record videos of activity inside the car, and company staff can watch those recordings and copy them. Or at least they were able to do so until last year.
They may have changed some security functions so that this is harder to do. But if Tesla can get those recordings, that is because it is planning for some people to use them in some situation, and that is unjust already.
It should be illegal to make a car that takes photos or videos of the people in the car. Or of people outside the car.
Mark Dunlea: *Avoiding climate collapse requires ending capitalism.*
I hope he is mistaken, because ending capitalism entirely would imply communism, which in practice has implied repression and terrible economic problems.
We have good societies with a great deal of socialism, but capitalism persists as well.
Biden has explicitly rejected neoliberalism and the cult of the invisible hand.
This is an important victory, though we need to advance further in order to change all dooH niboR policies that squeeze wealth up to the rich.
Nothing like this has occurred in the UK. *One in three young teachers in England skipping meals to make ends meet.*
The cheater held a campaign rally in Waco, but Waco officials made him sign a contract so strict that he won't be able to avoid paying the costs.
For instance, it required him to pay in advance.
The two Democratic Tennessee legislators that Republicans expelled for joining a protest in the legislature are planning to be appointed as their own "replacements" — and then run to replace themselves permanently.
*Green groups sue to stop Ohio from leasing state parks for oil and gas drilling.*
A new Ohio law defines fossil fuel as "green". We can call it a "liar law", and it shows the dishonesty of Republicans.
The basis for the lawsuit is that the legislators disregarded Ohio's constitutional rules for passing a law.
Biden has taken some steps to reform Medicare Advantage, but didn't have the gumption to do enough to make the insurance companies deal fairly with the public or the government.
There is evidence that some of the plastics used in food containers makes people tend to get fat.
The US Surface Transportation Board approved the merger of two of the very large railroads. This will hurt customers and workers while benefiting (as usual) the owners.
Large companies, or companies that have more then 5% of a market they operate in, should never be allowed to merge.
High-tech "lie detectors" are unreliable for the reason older ones are: because they are based on a simplistic model of how people behave.
Australia's right-wing government is keeping people in prison based on untrustworthy algorithmic predictions.
* "Please": Critics Scoff at Clarence Thomas' Defense of Secret Luxury Trips.*
The White House blames decisions that the corrupter made, that were effectively impossible to reverse, for the chaos of the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
*World’s ocean surface temperature hits record high.*
The biased Republican judge who was asked to ban Mifepristone went ahead and did it. The appeals court and the Supreme Court, both Republican, are likely try uphold the ban.
*Jayapal Laments Biden's Cave to Insurance Industry on Medicare Advantage.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and call on them to reject the RESTRICT act, which would allow the US government to ban arbitrarily the accessing of non-US web sites.
I see nothing about TikTok that would excuse its existence, but we should ban sites for disrespecting privacy, not for being under the control of China.
Please do not use the EFF's recommendations for how to contact your Congressional officials. That method depends on running nonfree software, The only ways of doing that which don't treat you unjustly are (1) phoning and (2) sending snail mail.
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: phone your congresscritter and say to increase the estate tax, and stop the use of trusts to bypass that tax. Millionaires' families should not be allowed to accumulate growing fortunes across generations.
Then phone your senators and make the same point.
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 series of disasters in Puerto Rico — Hurricanes interspersed with Covid-19 — have ruined education, leaving most students years behind their grade.
These disasters have combined with the crushing debt burden exacerbated by the nondemocratic fiscal controls imposed by Congress which are designed to pay the debts at no matter what cost to Puerto Ricans. This is driving people to migrate to various US states where they have somewhat more rights (whatever Republicans do not take away). Education is another motive to migrate. Even in a state with lousy public schools, they are better than Puerto Rico's schools.
The more people migrate, the greater the debt burden per person remaining. Eventually, I expect, this will force everyone to leave, and the land will be sold to corporations.
Right-wing politics under the auspices of the Catholic Church is driving young Poles away from Catholicism.
*Global banks pledged to cut emissions — but still invest billions on US gas exports.*
Israeli religious fanatics have imposed by law a prohibition on bringing leavened bread into hospitals during Passover.
Religious fanatics seek above all to impose their religion's obsessions on everyone. The amount of trouble those obsessions cause varies greatly. Banning bread for a week is rather mild as these things go. Shutting down public transport on Saturday, which the same group achieved some decades ago, is worse, but still minor compared to the ban on abortion that some Christian and Muslim fanatics impose.
However, giving religious believers the power to impose their obsessions on everyone is harmful in itself, independent of the specific obsessions they choose.
*Politicians are right about the ‘decline of the west’ — but so wrong about the causes. The problem is not moral decay. It’s the withering away of our living standards, security and wellbeing.*
*Democrats bid to use [DeMentis'] censorship law against [him] and ban his book.*
Atlantic mackerel was considered a "sustainable fishery", but it seems that was not actually so — fish stocks are declining, which implies it fishing for them isn't really sustainable.
*New oilfield in the North Sea would blow the UK’s carbon budget.*
Like the "Willow project" in the US, it shows a government that is letting Big Oil pull the world to disaster. But this one shows how the presupposition that "carbon capture and storage" will cancel out the carbon emissions is being used to excuse going further out on the limb.
New York State banned facial recognition in schools, but schools install systems that can do facial recognition and other things, and use that as an excuse to bypass the law.
Republicans have cited "parental rights" since the 1950s to oppose social changes such as racial integration.
*Idaho’s Abortion Travel Ban Shows Dangers of GOP’s “Parental Rights” Agenda.*
Justice Thomas received many expensive gifts from a billionaire over a period of decades, without reporting them.
*Demand Justice renews calls for Senate investigation into Supreme Court justices' ties to far-right donors.*
*AOC Says Clarence Thomas 'Must Be Impeached' Over 'Almost Cartoonish' Corruption.*
I agree he deserves to be removed from office, but it's useless to try to achieve that by impeaching him, because the Supreme Court is now thoroughly politicized — Republican senators won't remove someone who is on their side.
The UK fines poor people who receive welfare benefits if they break rules. The aggregate effect is to make it harder for them to find work and push them into jobs with lower pay.
How could a functioning democracy choose the bullshitter as president? It didn't. Ever since corporations were given the right to spend millions on elections, they became dangerously powerful.
*Women who with higher levels of PFAS in their blood had 40% lower chance of conceiving within a year of trying.*
This Julian Assange rally will be April 17, 11:30-1:00 at the Government Center in front of the JFK Building, where our senators have their offices.
US citizens: call on the DOJ to file federal charges against the corrupter.
The EPA will tighten limits for toxic pollution from power plants.
Similar measures for particulate emissions are needed to avoid provoking dementia.
Pollution activists call on the EPA to enforce air quality standards on factory farms.
*Two Colorado child care workers will go on trial this June for presiding over a day care center where a 5-year-old pulled down a 3-year-old's pants. Twice.*
Israeli thugs attacked Muslims in al-Aqsa mosque again. This time the only violence came from the thugs. They hit dozens with sticks, then arrested hundreds, with no visible excuse.
Humans can develop erroneous memories in a few seconds.
*Ice sheets can collapse at 600 metres a day.* This occurred in Antarctica at the end of the last ice age.
This means that sea level could rise catastrophically in mere decades.
*[Right-wingers] see the law as a weapon, to be held by the in-group, pointed at the out-group, which is to say they are tribalists passionately committed to inequality. They find the idea of the out-group pointing the law at the in-group outrageous and upsetting. Thus their meltdown over an alleged criminal being charged with and arrested for his alleged crimes.*
A defector says that Putin meets hardly anyone in person, does not use the internet, and doesn't even have an assistant who uses it, so his information about reality is quite limited and filtered.
US citizens: call on the US Dept of Health to demand additional financial disclosure about nursing homes owned by private equity.
Here is an idea: make all fines for failure to follow standards of care proportional to the total gross sales of the company responsible? These private equity giants would split themselves up on the double to avoid such big fines.
TikTok's algorithm recognizes a user's points of vulnerability as opportunities to get per hooked.
The article focuses on people of age 13, on the border between childhood and adolescence. But I doubt that that algorithm treats older users any better. Why would it?
The OECD, an organization mostly of developed countries which administers economic aid, has agreed on criteria for "climate-friendly" projects which are vulnerable to distortion.
For instance, hydrogen for intermediate storage of energy avoids greenhouse gas emissions if the hydrogen is made by electrolysis of water using 100% renewable electricity. If "clean hydrogen or ammonia" is strictly defined that way, it would be a reasonable policy. But planet roasters' playbook is to try to stretch that policy to include hydrogen made from fossil fuels.
Unless the policy is made firm and robust enough to prevent that, they will twist it so that it speeds destruction.
Public pressure convinced Governor Hochul to drop her plan to change New York law to permit greater amounts of methane emissions.
*Phaseout of coal power far too slow to avoid "climate chaos", report finds.*
New pun:
Q: Why did the poet start writing elegies?
A: Because he was given advice to die-versify.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and your senators to urge them to sign Rashida Tlaib's letter calling for dropping charges against Julian Assange.
This page includes the text of the letter.
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!
Companies get graded on greenhouse emissions, and deforestation, based on figures that they supply. JBS, the giant meat processing company, amazed environmentalists by getting a grade of A&minus. They say it must be altering the figures.
A court ruling could eliminate preventive medical care for millions of Americans.
The lawsuit was filed by religious fanatics who object to paying for drugs to prevent transmission of HIV. Those drugs, over time, can wipe out HIV, but extremist Christians think that the deity they worship intended HIV to make homosexuals suffer and we humans should not interfere.
The decision was based on the perverse idea that they have a constitutional right not to pay for insurance coverage of treatments that violate their religion.
I don't think that they object to cancer screening as such. I think those are the collateral damage caused by a desire to punish people for having sex.
The leader of a thug union in California has been charged with smuggling fentanyl.
The "war on drugs" promotes corruption of every sort of official who participates in it . That is just one of the many reasons to get the war off drugs.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus recommends a long list of executive actions that Biden could take to help poor and disprivileged Americans, and restrain the powerful rich from doing some kinds of harm.
Australia's government got a secret report explaining how global heating is a bigger threat to Australia's national security than any possible foreign enemy.
It should publish this report.
I've read about two people convicted and sentenced anonymously in Australia for crimes that the government refuses to describe.
It seems almost Stalinist.
Norway is raising the tax rate on salmon farming so that the companies will have to share the profits with people that live in coastal regions.
Those quoted as objecting to the tax increase base their arguments implicitly on the trickle-down theory of economics. The owners would like us to believe that if we let them get richer, they will share it with us. But when the time comes to do that, they always argue for postponing it.
US citizens: call on Biden to protect old-growth and mature trees on federal lands. They absorb more carbon than the smaller young trees.
To see the confirmation of your signature, you need to strip all the CSS from it. Icecat has a command in the right-click menus to do that.
Global heating is expanding the territory where tornadoes usually strike. The expansion is into the US southeast.
"Smart" devices are designed to enable companies to abuse people, but it turns out domestic abusers take advantage of them too.
Even if your present and former lovers don't mistreat you through the Internet of Stings, those companies will eagerly do so.
*New York Governor Hochul (D) is pushing to gut the state's signature climate law after raking in nearly half a million dollars from the corporations and lobbyists pushing the move.*
*UAE plans huge oil and gas expansion as it hosts UN climate summit.*
The stress and danger of being in a demographic that is a target for prejudice tends to make people get old fast.
I presume that those demographics tend to have trouble getting a good night's sleep. It now appears that they predisposes people to asthma.
CEOs of big businesses are tired of pushing for gun control, especially since Republicans don't heed them. Reportedly they don't know what else they can do at the moment.
How about this: stop supporting the campaigns of right-wing candidates? That won't take much time, and it will save them money.
Of course, we know why they don't do this.
US citizens: call on Biden to use executive power to make federal agencies fully account for climate the effects of their decisions.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax billionaires.
US citizens: call on Biden to take climate defense action with dispatch.
US citizens: call on Congress to do everything in its power to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to sign the discharge petition for the bill to prohibit assault rifles.
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: Insist that the corrupter is not above the law.
Netanyahu gained extra protection from his corruption charges with a law making it harder to remove a prime minister from office.
A US court ruled that Texas school censorship is unconstitutional. The books removed from school libraries must be brought back to them.
A few years ago I would have taken this result for granted, and so would the advocates of censorship — they would not have tried it. Now they hope that the right-wing extremists on the court will make up an excuse to permit this — and they may be right.
Right-wing fanatics, supporters of parties in Israel's government, held a rally in Jerusalem and launched mob attacks on a TV journalist, and on a Palestinian taxi driver.
They beat up the journalist, who was hospitalized. The taxi driver was rescued by Israeli cops, who often don't try to protect a Palestinian, but the fanatics destroyed his car.
UK thug departments spruce up their reputations by deleting from their web sites the reports of wrongdoing by thugs. This includes reports of grave crimes such as rape.
*Starbucks fires Buffalo worker who founded union campaign.*
The laws that enforce workers' rights are weak. If the individuals who participate in violating them were sent to prison, corporations would not find to get anyone to do this.
Confirmation that the UK's new voter ID card serves no purpose except making it hard for poor people to vote.
Bernie Sanders calls for breaking up the giant agriculture quasi-monopolies.
I agree, but I think something like my proposed progressive income tax for corporations would be easier and more efficient than suing them one by one.
Joining the TPP would ruin the UK's plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Other business-supremacy treaties are already making it hard to reduce emissions.
For a good time, watch https://invidio.us/watch?v=ues8ycOxXKM
Israeli annexationists have been finding excuses for years to expel Palestinians from old Jerusalem, neighborhood by neighborhood. The next target is the Mount of Olives.
It is foolish and stingy for societies to refuse to spend money to help each child grow up well.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose cutting SNAP, which provides food benefits to poor 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!
Everyone: call on Red Lobster to buy only lobsters caught with ropeless methods.
This is to avoid injuring whales.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Pay the Teachers Act, which would increase the salary of public school teachers.
The page you get after signing may appear blank. If so, stripping or disabling the CSS in the page could make the text visible.
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 reject the TAP American Energy Act, which would mandate more drilling in the seas, and more coal mining on land.
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 vote against authorizing war with Mexico.
Although the "war on drugs" is only a metaphor, the actual policies it stands for cause many deaths. Extending it into a real war would make it even worse.
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 disqualify the wrecker from running for federal office, on the grounds of his call for violence if he is arrested.
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 legalize using US foreign aid funds for abortions": pass the Abortion is Healthcare Everywhere Act.
I object to using the marketing term "health care" to refer to medical treatment, but that's a secondary issue, but not important enough to outweigh my support for this.
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!
Formerly interhostile Palestinian factions in the West Bank are joining to fight Israelis; the two sides regularly kill each other.
The article describes repeated Israeli attacks as "in response to" repeated Palestinian attacks. That asymmetry seems arbitrary: this looks like a cycle in which each attack inspires an attack by the other side. Each side is constantly retaliating for what the other side is constantly doing, and vice versa.
If Israel had protected Palestinians who were not violent, and respected their rights at least somewhat, the Palestinian Authority could have validly said it was providing benefits to the Palestinians. But Israel did not do enough to restrain its fanatics, so the Palestinian Authority could not gain anything by recognizing Israel's authority.
I suspect that the fanatical Israeli annexationists aim to whip up all-out war, figuring that they can make that an opportunity for ethnic cleansing, as Uri Avnery said was their goal.
Italy's right-wing government is attacking same-sex couples by persecuting their children — refusing to register them as citizens. That is likely to cause them many problems throughout their lives.
IVF should not be allowed for anyone. There is nothing immoral about it, but we still need to curb the human population. If you want to raise a child but cannot biologically make one, what you should do, to help civilization survive, is to adopt an already-living child — not arrange for an additional child to be born for you.
That may change some day. If we get down to only one billion human beings, and there is no danger of further global heating, perhaps then we should encourage people to have somewhat more children so as to stabilize the population.
Renowned Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin condemns Putin for staining the Russian language with the blood of Ukrainians.
Shishkin talks about the situation of Russia.
The planned Idaho law prohibiting helping a minor travel to get an abortion is designed cunningly to interfere with the activities of people outside Idaho.
In addition, it is designed to harass people even for activities which it says are still lawful.
The Tories are pushing laws to set up an exaggerated version of "broken windows policing." When the US tried that, it did no significant good but lots of harm. Sad to say, the US has not entirely dropped that approach; thugs love it, since it gives them an opportunity to go to town on rather helpless "criminals."
The Tory version will be exaggerated to penalize minor nuisances.
The main crime the bullshitter is now charged with is paying hush money on behalf of a political campaign.
The secondary crime is misrepresenting the purpose of that payment, on a tax return.
Ralph Nader: *One measure of corporate power’s dominance is its 24/7 relentless, profit-driven capacity to strike back and prevail over reforms or other efforts designed to give the people voice and fairness.*
Some of his examples support one simple lesson:
Never try "help" businesses do something we would want them to do
by giving them more money to do it with.
There are more good lessons to be learned.
The Vatican has denounced its "doctrine of discovery" which it used to give a religious justification to colonization.
In the 1400s and 1500s, European monarchs were seriously afraid they would go to Hell if they started unjust wars. For instance, the king of Spain really really wanted to attack England, but waited years for a religiously valid excuse for dispatching the armada.
It is foolish to demand that the Vatican make substantive changes in the situation of indigenous people today, because it doesn't have any power nowadays. All it can do is give advice — which can be good or bad.
It is a good thing that a Vatican decision "doesn't change the law in any country." If the Vatican could do that, the first change it would make is to prohibit abortion.
The Tories are entering Britain in the TPP (Trance Pacific Partnership), under a slightly changed name but with the same subjection to business.
The Tories said they wanted the UK to leave the EU so as to decide its own laws, but what they really wanted was to augment plutocracy — to give international business more power than the EU permits it to have.
*15 Million People [in the US] Could Lose [medical] Coverage as Nightmarish Medicaid 'Purge' Begins.*
It starts with five states suffering under Republican rule.
US citizens: call on Biden to declare a climate emergency now. This would give him powers he could use effectively without Congress.
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 not to extend the corrupter's tax cuts for the wealthy.
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 EPA to protect the rusty patched bumblebee (and many other species) from the pesticide cyantraniliprole.
*UN nuclear watchdog says fighting near Ukraine power plant is "intensifying."*
Comparing this with Putin's other behavior suggests this is intended to as something fools can cite in arguments calling for giving Putin a successful conquest in the name of peace.
It won't bring peace for long, though.
The fossil gas industry is trying to use Putin's economic warfare to get permission to build lots of extraction facilities, which they will parlay into an excuse to keep running them for decades.
*European Human Rights Court Hears Historic Climate Case Brought by Elderly Swiss Women.*
Such lawsuits are increasing. The global heating that has occurred already is killing people today. But if one of these cases reaches a verdict of "guilty", or if in a civil suit the plaintiffs win, I don't see what adequate punishment or remedy a court would be able to impose. Money damages to be paid by the state would do little to make things right. That would require reducing future emissions, but a court can't decide how to do that.
A US Senate investigation reports that Crédit Suisse has participated in a "massive, ongoing conspiracy" to help wealthy US citizens dodge taxes.
The US citizens in question are quite wealthy; each has deposited more than $20 million each in Crédit Suisse.
*Protect the Israeli Judiciary — but Don’t Let It Launder War Crimes Against Palestinians.*
Idaho Republicans plan to make it a felony to "procure an abortion"for a minor.
This would clearly be wrong and harmful. Just how much harm it will do, I am not sure; it depends on precisely what it means to "procure an abortion", which is not clear here.
*[New] Quality standards [proposed] to hold carbon offsetting industry to account.*
Both the sellers of offsets and the buyers have a monetary interest in undermining the goal, and they have found plenty of ways to do so. This initiative is meant to prevent that, but they will keep trying, and I think they will find new ways to undermine it.
That is why I advocate greenhouse emission taxes rather than a market for trading quotas.
Tories have converted the UK's planned "green day" at last minute into a fossil fuel bonanza. *Dirty money powers the [Tory] government.*
US citizens: call on Biden to appoint Kyrsten Sinema ambassador to Italy.
The proposal is ironic but I think it is seriously proposed.
US citizens: call on Attorney General Garland to automate marijuana pardon applications.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Republican plan to replace income tax with a big sales tax.
The result of that change would be to tax wealthy people much less and tax poor people a lot more. This is what sales taxes always do; we should get rid of them.
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!
*Angry Fox News chief said [in 2020 that] fact-checks of Trump’s election lies "bad for business."*
Rep. Gaetz hired a convicted murderer as an aide. But not just any murder — that one murdered a prisoner of war in Afghanistan.
I expect that this was no coincidence — that Gaetz did this to demonstrate his support for political murder.
The Tories' planned law to punish refugees will especially punish those who have been enslaved and trafficked.
The bullshitter has been indicted for secret payments to Stormy Daniels.
I think that paying her, as such, was not a crime. I think the crime was using campaign funds for this personal purpose, but I wish that were made clear.
Robert Reich rebuts the ways the wrecker will claim that it was unfair to indict him.
Comparing the US and other democracies in regard to how they treat criminal accusations against former presidents.
*Trump appointees interfered to weaken EPA assessment of [a type of PFAS].*
Biden reversed the damage they had done, but they remain in positions of authority in the EPA.
Calling for radical replacement of the London thug department.
US citizens: call on Biden to declare a climate emergency now. This would give him powers he could use effectively without Congress.
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 Bayer to stop manufacturing neonicotinoids.
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to hold Silicon Valley Bank executives accountable — to claw back some of their profits from its failure.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Finland's schools systematically teach how to identify misinformation and ungrounded accusations of conspiracy.
I think this would be wise to adopt everywhere.
TikTok's intense collection of data about each user is a threat to Americans and to US national security. As EPIC points out, TikTok is far from the only such.
The same is true for many other "social media" platforms, and school education programs, and other proprietary programs. If you can't modify the program to send whatever made-up data you want to send, instead of true facts about you, it is not safe to use.
The ADPPA bill that EPIC recommends would reduce the existing massive internet surveillance, but it starts with the usual mistake: systems can collect data that is "reasonably necessary and proportionate to provide or maintain a product or service". That is too lax and will fail to protect privacy.
My article, linked above, states the basic principle of sufficient protection of privacy: does the rule prohibit systems that identify each person who uses them, when other systems to do basically the same job have existed which served people anonymously? Any law that fails to prohibit that is too weak.
The ADPPA's stricter rule for children and teenagers should apply to everyone, but even that could be interpreted in a way that is too weak. We can be sure companies will press for the weak interpretation. This defense of privacy must be bulletproof.
Will we open our eyes to the past and its implications, or drown them out by shouting?
*The campaign to "protect our [British] history," in other words, is about protecting the past from historians — and protecting the present from dangerous new ideas about how we got here. Because when an organisation like the Guardian researches its own historical links to transatlantic slavery — and then apologises and embarks on a substantial project of restorative justice — the newspaper is not primarily presenting a different past, but its ambition for a different present.*
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important, such as the one linked to above.
Right-wing fanatics in Wisconsin ordered a first-grade class not to sing the song Rainbow land.
The song's words advocate tolerance instead of hate in a very general way, but the word "rainbow" was more than the censors could stand for.
The Pentagon should include, in its planning for where to put military bases, the predictable extra cost of putting the base in a state which prohibits abortion.
I'd go further. I'd suggest a policy of actively re-stationing units and activities from abortion-restricting states to abortion-tolerant states, with a goal of moving moving nearly all to the latter in 10 years.
The CHIPS act is intended to discourage US semiconductor companies from outsourcing of chip manufacturing to hostile countries such as China. A look at the details of how it is supposed to achieve this shows the weakness and timidity of the US government in dealing with any sort of big business.
The US government hasn't got the gumption to prohibit US companies from doing things that put the nation in danger, or even to penalize them to discourage doing so. The best it can manage is to offer subsidies if they avoid those actions.
For this reason and many others, making America great again starts with slapping down the businesses that think they own it.
Here's the White House statement lauding the law.
Exxon scientists in the 1970s and 1980s presented executives with a fairly accurate projection of what global heating caused by fossil fuels might do to the world in a few decades. But they presented it as a possibility;
with all the gaps in the scientific knowledge of that time, they could not determine whether those things would really happen.
By around 2000, the science had resolved the uncertainty and fossil-fuel executives could not honestly deny the damage they were going to cause.
(satire) *Prisoner Given 10 Extra Years For Good Behavior To Serve As Role Model For Fellow Inmates.*
Former Texas governor Connally talked with Middle Eastern leaders in 1980 trying to convince Iran to hold on to the US embassy hostages, so that Reagan would win the 1980 election.
This is according to Ben Barnes, who worked for him and accompanied him on the trip.
Officials of various countries have affirmed, over the years, that Reagan made a deal with Khomeini to refuse to free the US embassy hostages before the 1980 presidential election. Here is Greg Palast's report on Ben Barnes.
It accuses him of a lot of nastiness, but doesn't answer the questions it raises: why did Barnes not say this before, and why does he say it now? But, it doesn't cast much doubt on his recent statement.
As for calling "Dubya" a "draft-dodger". that term should not be used. I rebuke Dubya for many wrongs, including the crime of starting a war of aggression against Iraq. But there is nothing wrong in trying to escape from being conscripted into an unjust war.
That includes the Vietnam War, which the US ramped up based on fabricating the fictitious "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin.
And it includes Putin's invasion of Ukraine. We should support Russians who are doing whatever it takes to avoid fighting in the Putin forces.
*Business Interests Dominate U.S. Trade Advisory System, Gain Access to Trade-Pact Texts Kept Secret from Public.*
This is perhaps the mechanism that ensures so-called "free trade treaties" are actually business-supremacy treaties.
Fresh water from rapidly melting Antarctic glaciers goes deep into the ocean. There it tends to slow down deep-level currents. This could cause catastrophic sudden changes in climate.
Evgeny Morozov: *The problem with artificial intelligence? It’s not artificial or intelligent.*
That is true, about today's neural-network systems. However, generalizing that into a prediction of impossibility for all kinds of technology is likely to be mistaken. If something isn't impossible for known reasons, the prediction that it can't be done is likely to be falsified some day.
In news coverage of homicides in the Boston Globe, from 1976 to 1984, stories where the victim was black were less likely to use language that would encourage seeing the victim as a human being than stories about white victims.
This must reflect racism in some way or other. I'd be very interested in whether it is the result of racism of the writers, or some sort of systemic racism.
I am puzzled that the article says that this used "artificial intelligence", but it doesn't say what that is meant to refer to. I am dubious that something as complex as reasoning software or machine learning was needed to categorize the stories.
US gun fanatics have won the battle of competing pressures on US business,
They have even passed state laws to boycott banks that reject gun companies as clients.
Australia's new climate defense bill requires Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions to decrease steadily over time. There are provisions too to limit fossil fuel exports.
The Green Party pushed hard and improved the deal, thought it did not get all it pushed for.
Alexei Moskalyov's daughter drew anti-war drawings in school. He was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for her drawings, but he tried to run away. Alas, he has been caught.
*Israel hasn’t been a democracy for a long time. Now, Israelis need to face this fact.*
Democracy in Israel includes only the Jewish part of the population, and a split in that part, mostly about how to treat the rest, is making this partial democracy unstable.
*Russia arrests Wall Street Journal reporter on espionage charges.*
There is very little the US can do to stop Russia from using those laws to arrest reporters who are not spies, but it can at least drop the charges against Julian Assange to stop setting a bad example for other counties.
Each country should stop prosecuting journalists for doing journalism.
The UK's "net zero" plan looks like it was designed to go in the wrong direction.
Supposedly the US government refused to bail out the investors owner of Silicon Valley Bank — but it seems to have done precisely that. The owner was a holding company that had deposited money in Silicon Valley Bank. By deciding to bail out all depositors, the US decided to bail out the investors.
Tory members of the UK parliament, who were former ministers, agreed to represent a foreign company's interests for large sums of money — as much as 10,000 UKP per day. The company was a hoax and their assent was recorded.
For legislators to take pay to serve private interests is corruption and it ought to be a crime. The most shocking thing to me is that in the UK this is lawful. The UK has rules for it, and those elected representatives followed the rules.
*Biden Chooses Fossil Fuels Over Us.*
The EPA has failed for years to upgrade an old standard for safe concentration of dioxins. Because of this, Norfolk Southern may be allowed to leave dangerous levels of dioxins at the site of the derailment in Ohio.
Lots of web sites snoop on their visitors for TikTok by containing its "tracking pixels", just as sites do for Google or Facebook.
The browser IceCat blocks these tracking pixels, but it ought to be a crime for a web site to try to use them.
(satire) *Investors Worried AI Could Leave Shred Of Humanity Intact.*
What they are talking about is neural network systems, not artificial intelligence properly speaking.
The antibiotic-resistant bacteria bred by feeding antibiotics to farm animals are consumed by humans when meat is not cooked sufficiently. Then they can get into the bladder and cause urinary tract infections.
(satire) *Catholic High School Newsletter Has Updates On Which Alumni Are In Hell Now.*
The urbanized world is facing a gradually developing crisis of shortage of fresh water.
*Urban water demand is expected to increase by 80% by 2050.*
A plutocratist party in the German government demanded a change in the nearly-agreed EU directive to ban sale of new cars made to use fossil fuels after 2035.
Supposedly this is to encourage the future sale of new cars intended to run on hypothetical future "synthetic fuels" made from CO2 extracted from the air. However, the proposed directive was already written to permit that the continued sale of such those cars after 2035, provided they could not run on fossil fuels. It is clear that the plutocratist demand aims to create an excuse in 2035 to continue selling new cars that can run on fossil fuels. The excuse will be to claim that these new cars are intended to run on synthetic fuels.
Why is that important to them? Based on the planet roasters' record of repeated dishonesty, I speculate their plan is to claim that cars are "intended" to run on the synthetic fuels, knowing that owners will actually buy the fossil fuels instead, and that this will create increased demand for fossil fuels, such that it is impossible to discontinue them as planned.
It looks like the planet roasters won: the EU made the demanded seemingly-small change in the directive.
Assorted ideas for redesigning cities to cope with the increasing intensity of rain that global heating is now causing.
The Federal Reserve protects banks from interest rate increases, while workers get crushed.
When minors in the UK are searched by thugs, black minors are far more likely to be strip-searched than white minors.
The thugs violate the official rules meant to protect minor from psychological trauma about half the time.
The article says "children", but I expect that means "minors" and that most of the people searched are teenagers.
A new method of modeling predicts that the world human population will peak at 8.8 billion before 2050, and then decline to 7.8 billion by the end of the century.
This will help avoid disaster, but doesn't assure avoiding it. If more people avoid reproducing in this decade, it will make the next decade easier to get through without disaster and facilitate lower use of fossil fuels.
Some city departments to send unarmed people with intervention training to respond to psychological crises are effective, while others are not.
US citizens: call on the Biden Administration to investigate racial inequity at Maximus, a federal call center contractor.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
*How Big Oil money influences US universities.*
Universities even sometimes let Big Oil employees teach the university's classes.
It is misguided to rush to relabel art from the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union as "Ukrainian".
Given the information in the article, it would be more accurate to describe that Degas painting as showing a dancer in Ukrainian dress; but if Degas gave it a title, or (as it seems) said somewhere what he thought he had depicted, we should respect that. Being French, he may not have been aware of the difference, and it is anachronistic to make it seem that he did.
Medicare Advantage insurance companies are using secret algorithms to choose a time to refuse to keep paying for a treatment. Patients and their lawyers are not given the supposed reasons for the decision so they have no easy way to challenge it.
The article calls these algorithms "AI". What that means is not clear — I expect it is mere machine learning, but it might perhaps be a system that draws confusions for reasons. Either way, the details of how the algorithm operates are not important. The crucial point is that they are secret.
Some countries have considered laws to forbid the use of secret algorithms to make decisions about how a person will be treated — and not only in medicine. I think the US should adopt such a law.
The UK plans to evict tenants who use recreational drugs. Nominally the law will require all rental agreements to permit the landlord to do so — but this would not make sense on its own. I suspect there will be a system to punish landlords who don't evict. This way, the state can punish people and hide behind the landlord.
An Australian who worked for the tax authority informed the public about how that agency was using harsh measures to collect unpaid taxes. Now he faces trial for this, despite Australia's law meant to protect whistleblowers.
The problem is that the existing whistleblower protection law fails to cover the copying and recording necessary to collect the evidence to be released.
Extra aid during the late stages of pregnancy improves the baby's health at birth, and that leads to a better life.
Starmer has finalized the rejection of Corbyn as a Labour candidate for Parliament.
*Greenland Ice Sheet Very Close to Melting Point of No Return, Scientists Say.*
*Twitter Widens Its Censorship of Modi's Critics.*
Netanyahu says he has backed down on ending the independence of the judiciary.
He is slippery, though, so he might bring it back in another form.
This is not the only odious right-wing policy change he has agreed to. Others include big expansions of the colonization of Palestinian territory.
Putin's propaganda, together with cutting off Russians from outside news and thought, is successfully convincing them to identify with the war.
I read elsewhere that the families whose youths were conscripted and then died in the war have mostly convinced themselves that this had to be somehow laudable, because they can't bear to think the thought that it was pointless destruction.
This is good news for fascist rulers around the world, and bad news for human freedom.
The US government sued Starbucks for union busting. Starbucks is using that lawsuit to subpoena communications between employees, so it can find out which ones support the union — and punish them.
French students have joined the protests against Macron's increase in the retirement age, and especially about his bypassing the National Assembly to do it.
The Supreme Court refused to hear Stephen Donziger's appeal of the highly irregular procedure by which Chevron procured his conviction.
Surprisingly, the only two justices who wanted to hear the case were Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. All the others were willing to let Chevron get away with railroading Donziger.
The vagueness of DeMentis's censorship of course discussions of racism is causing disputes about showing students anything about the subject.
Given any presentation about racism, people can contrive a way to conceive of it as teaching something bad. For instance, Ruby Bridges is about a black child who needed guards to protect her from racists in her school, back in the 1960s. That is meant to teach students the same age today what racism was like; but how can you prove it isn't teaching that all whites are evil?
In Connecticut: support the campaign to legalize leaving a child alone even for minutes in public places such as the public library.
Workers at 100 Starbucks stores walked out during the company's annual meeting.
Rep. Tlaib has proposed a law to remove debts incurred for medically necessary treatments from people's credit reports.
It would be a change for the better, but a very small one. What Americans need is a national medical system funded by the government, rather than a little less hassle when they are forced to borrow the money.
Rep. Tlaib supports that too. So why propose this bill? She must be hoping that some Republicans will support it, and allow it to pass. But is there really any chance they will do so?
Bernie Sanders proposes to ban some bank executives from serving on regional federal reserve boards, since those regulate the banks those people are executives of.
I support this.
Starmer's policy of vetoing candidates applies to local councils as well as the UK parliament. This has caused a major rebellion in a city where almost half of the current Labour councilors were vetoed. Several of them are going to run again outside the Labour Party.
I surmise that the vetoed candidates were more leftist.
Which approaches for limiting Covid-19 did work, at the beginning, and which did not?
Toilet paper contains PFAs, and since sewage treatment does not break it down, it gets into waterways and sewage sludge.
*Why We (Still) Need a Federal Reserve for the People — Not [for] Wall Street.*
The Society for Personality and Social Psychology states in its home page that it is an academic scientific society that aims to advance a field of science.
However, that has changed. The organization has taken up anti-racism
so intensely that campaigning against racism is its primary purpose and research is secondary.
It is proper for any organization to try to avoid racism in its activities. It is proper for any organization for research about human beings to try to study a variety of groups of humans, because not all humans are alike. In particular, not all societies are alike, and in any one society people with different roles may be systematically different.
However, the SPSP seems to have decided that every research project is supposed to campaign against racism, and research which doesn't do that is not worth publishing.
That is going too far, because it means that the ostensible purpose of the organization is now of minor importance.
I could support an organization whose sole purpose is to campaign against racism — depending on what methods it uses to do so. But we should not convert a scientific organization into a political campaign.
*I live near the East Palestine chemical spill. Officials who say we’re safe are lying.*
The Australian Labor and Green parties have made a disappointing compromise which will allow some new fossil fuel developments but could cap total fossil fuel extraction and total gross greenhouse emissions.
An elite Putin forces unit, made up of Russian veterans of the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, suffered great losses and tried to retreat. Other units of the Putin forces were ordered to threaten to kill them.
They made a video to denounce this treatment.
Netanyahu is desperate to subject the Israeli judiciary to his power so that it cannot convict him of corruption. The army won't stand for that change, and the defense minister (a former general) called on Netanyahu to compromise. Instead he fired the minister. Meanwhile, 100,000 protesters came out and pole-wielding thugs attacked them on horseback.
A general strike has been announced.
I've predicted this confrontation for many years. Ultra-orthodox Jews have special privileges which they use to increase their numbers, and they have joined with the extreme right-wing. That increase, across the decades, has brought the right-wing to a position where control of the state is in the balance. Even if the supporters of democracy win this time, the demographic trend will sooner or later deliver victory to the right-wing.
The only path I see for its survival is for the democratic Jews and the Palestinians to unite to support liberal democracy. But I don't see how there could be enough trust between them for that to happen. Maybe Uri Avnery could have united them if he lived, but it would have been a tall order even for him.
If Israel's democracy falls, many Israeli Jews will have to search for countries to move to where they can be safe from repression.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to Merrick Garland calling for dropping charges against Julian Assange.
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!
Republicans in Congress passed a bill to help right-wing parents pressure schools to remove books from the library and subjects from the curriculum.
It is designed to attack sex education and education about treatment of minorities.
The wrecker is trying to intimidate US prosecutors out of arresting him by threatening that his followers will start violence in response.
So far, it has worked. But if we allow such a plan to go unpunished, it will keep escalating.
*Drugs and alcohol do not make [people] more creative, research finds. Travel, meditation, training and exposure to culture have a greater effect on artistic output.*
*People who took psilocybin felt they were more creative while on the drug, but were actually underperforming relative to their sober state.*
Those results are statistical. There can be occasional exceptions, such as *if you have a vision on hallucinogenics and paint a beautiful picture inspired by it.*
Inland reaches of Australia's longest river, the Murray, are suffering a continuing ecological crisis.
From what I have read before, it has to do with taking too much water out of the river for irrigation.
A plane which the Argentine military used for throwing protesters into the sea is being returned to Argentina. It will be kept in a museum to help make the dictators' murders real to today's Argentines.
The US Congress supports trying Putin for war crimes. That is what he deserves — but so do some American politicians.
This is an instance of hypocrisy: the US supports doing justice in one case and opposes it in another similar case. In the Putin case, the US stance is correct — in the Dubya case, the US stance is wrong.
There are people who would argue that this hypocrisy is a reason not to punish Putin. That is misguided reasoning. The proper response to hypocrisy is to change the conduct in the case where it is wrong (US war criminals), not to change it in the case where it is right (Putin).
I support trying and punishing Putin, all else being equal. But I think we may end up in a situation where a just peace (Putin relinquishes the territory and Ukrainians that the Putin forces have seized, and ends the fighting) is possible but only in exchange for not trying to capture and try Putin. If this happens, I say we should take that deal.
*Only months before its troubles, First Republic pressured bank overseers to preserve the status quo.*
Over 100 UK lawyers have signed a pledge not to prosecute peaceful climate protesters.
An analysis of the events unleashed by Dubya's conquest of Iraq, which have caused misery and trouble just about everywhere.
Robert Reich connects billionaires including Peter Thiel with the bank bailout and with right-wing extremist politicians.
The car tracking company Flock made a deal with a homeowner's association to install surveillance cameras in Lakeway, Texas, without even consulting or informing the city government. (The city's thug department did participate in the deal.)
The fact that the government was kept out of the matter is a additional secondary outrage, but the system itself would be no less unjust if the city government had approved such tracking.
Tracking people's movements is an injustice, and the foundation of repression. No person or entity, whether governmental or private, should be allowed to track a car except under a warrant ordering tracking in a specific place for a bounded time.
Privatized water companies in the UK put profit over the environment. Somehow I am not surprised. The government agency in charge of them did not insist that they spend enough to maintain the sewers. That does not surprise me either. Between lobbying and the revolving door, it doesn't take much to persuade a plutocratist politician to do what perse is naturally inclined to do: shaft the non-rich.
The corrupter expects to be arrested soon, and seeks to turn the arrest into a campaign appearance.
Commit crimes against those who are weaker, get arrested, and call yourself the victim — typical Republican. Compare with George Santos.
Biden had a chance to make a drug company reduce the price of prostate cancer drug Astellas down to what it costs in other advanced countries. He didn't do it.
The article points out that the US government funded the drug's development. That was what gave Biden a legal opportunity to force the price down, but morally I don't think it makes a crucial difference. We should not allow gouging on saving people's lives.
We should eliminate the patent system, especially in medicine, agriculture and software.
Ralph Nader: Powell should have known in advance the danger of his interest rate increases.
A Florida principal fired was after a Renaissance art class showed students a photo of a famous nude statue.
A school board official said that a complaint from any number of parents — even just one — justifies firing the principal.
French thugs used violence on peaceful protesters.
*When he led the Chicago school system, mayoral candidate Paul Vallas took actions that resulted in more than $1.5 billion being transferred out of the city’s budget-strapped public schools and to some of the wealthiest individuals and banks on the planet, a new report shows.*
Rahul Gandhi, leader of India's principal opposition party, was expelled from Parliament after being convicted of "defamation" for insulting Prime Minister Modi.
It was, indeed, rather insulting to all other Indians named Modi. Gandhi should not have said that. But it is not grounds to put anyone in prison.
In the US, I am pretty sure that saying that "all thieves have Trump as their common surname" would not not be slander against Trump. So I am pretty sure that India's standards for convicting someone of defamation of a politician are too weak.
Armies are developing weapons to attack countries by manipulating how people think. TikTok can be seen as one, and Facebook too.
The author is right to generalize this beyond TikTok, since many other antisocial media platforms can do similar things.
Systems to attack or control the human brain are being worked on. Even if technology never reaches the point of planting specific thoughts in a brain, it could be capable of conditioning people. All that takes is the ability to make someone feel good or bad.
Eventually this will be one of the reasons to reject nonfree software.
*Officers in ‘Cop City’ raid shot pepperball gun into [Manuel Paez Terán]'s tent first.*
This means that the thugs started the shooting. They said he did that.
The article presents reasons to distrust their testimony, in addition to the likelihood that (being thugs) they are probably habituated to perjury.
The Tories propose to pass a law that prohibits many groups of workers from completely striking. Some unions now propose to strike anyway and go to jail.
*Hotel Rwanda's Paul Rusesabagina to be released from prison* in response to US pressure. The US considers his trial for "terrorism" to be unfair.
US citizens: call on the Florida legislature to reject the bill to censor bloggers.
US citizens: call on Biden to ban government contracts for pharmacies that refuse to carry Mifepristone.
US citizens: call on Congress to admit Washington DC as a state.
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 House Ethics Committee to investigate Speaker McCarthy for giving Tucker Carlson the complete security video of the Jan 6 attack.
US citizens: call on state legislatures to continue participation in ERIC, an organization of states which help each other reconcile their voter lists.
The Tories say they will end their inhumane policy of having bureaucrats arbitrarily disbelieve doctors' assessments that some specific person is disabled and needs specific kinds of state aid.
Such policy decisions can transform a capable and independent person, perhaps employed despite a disability, into a helpless cripple. That change often entails no alteration in the person in question: a change in how society treats per is enough.
Is this really the cruelest social policy of modern times? I don't know. Australia's off-shore immigration prison, which the UK is planning to imitate, could give it strong competition.
Don't believe this promise until it really happens. Tories often say they will make a change for the less cruel and then don't actually do it.
Analyzing how the US social, economic and legal systems keep poor people poor.
J Street recommends ways for the US to pressure Israel against annexation of Palestine.
Does Australia's proposed indigenous voice to parliament carry "authority"?
This article describes the proposed agency in sufficient detail to show that it would communicate indigenous concerns directly to parliament (that is, give advice) but would not have authority over parliament's decisions. The description seems clear to me. If I were Australian, I would vote yes to that.
However, the article says that changes demanded by right-wingers would have "reduced the authority of the voice’s advice." The use of the word "authority" in regard to it makes me wonder if there is a crucial misunderstanding at work here — if the words "advice to parliament" would be interpreted as implicitly giving the voice some sort of authority over some aspect of parliament's decisions.
That would make non-aboriginals second-class citizens in Australian democracy.
If I were Australian I would want an explanation of what "authority" means in this context. Is it a real issue or just a poor choice of words?
A company that undertook to decommission the Palisades nuclear power plant now seeks large sums of money to restart it instead.
The campaign to oppose this asserts, based on the plant's history of problems, that the plant is decrepit and particularly unsafe.
*Secretary general urges countries to tackle "vampiric overconsumption" [of water], water guzzling industries and climate crisis.*
*British Head of Deep Sea Authority Accused of Pushing for "Reckless" Mining.*
The Tories still want to send all unauthorized immigrants to prison in Rwanda. The US judges Rwanda's prisons as cruel and life-threatening, and the general censorship (including imprisoning journalists) in Rwanda makes it hard for people to push to change those conditions.
Look at how hard it is to change cruel prison conditions in the US, where the press is mostly free; in Rwanda it must be impossible.
China has released additional data collected in the Wuhan live animal market in the investigation of Covid-19 in December 2019.
In 2020 the FBI infiltrated agents into Black Lives Matter protest groups and tried entrapping activists into buying guns illegally.
The Tories are about to hold a vote on giving rich people permission to put any quantity of money into a tax-free retirement and inheritance account. This would be a big tax cut for the rich.
*It Is Time for a National Reckoning About the Iraq War.*
Arguing that Dubya attacked Iraq because it would make a good example of US belligerence.
The US is building many export terminals for natural gas.
The excuse for them is the war in Ukraine and the short-term shortage of available fossil methane, but they won't be finished until 2025. After that, their owners will use them to lobby for permission to extract more gas.
No one is safe from the right-wing "culture war"'s scapegoating and repression.
Alas, something similar is true of the progressive youth's censorship campaign.
US bankers don't want the sort of regulations that would prevent banks from failing.
Calling for criminal prosecution of the big planet-roaster corporations.
*A radical climate strategy emerges: charge big oil firms with homicide.*
Everyone: call on Amazon to start negotiating with the Amazon Labor Union.
US citizens: Support the Insulin for All Act.
The name of that proposed law is badly formulated, since we don't want everyone to take insulin! Most people don't need to.
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!
*Vast releases of [methane] gas, along with future "methane bombs," represent huge threat — but curbing emissions would rapidly reduce global heating.*
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for the US to send forces to fight in Iraq.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Everyone: call on Big Tech to implement end-to-end encrypted messaging now.
Messaging applications that involve through nonfree client software are unjust, and endanger your privacy, regardless of whether they do end-to-end encryption, because the encryption could be ineffective or snoop on users.
*Jamie Dimon [along with other big stockholders in "too big to fail" banks] Is Poised to Benefit Most From This Banking Crisis.*
*Bailing Out the Undeserving Rich — Again.*
That article falls into the confusion spread by the term "intellectual property". It is an incoherent generalization about laws that have very little in common. To group those laws (or even some of those laws) together and talk about them together is a mistake.
*Leader of White supremacist group [in California] arrested for threatening to kill journalist trying to report on [that group].*
US citizens: call on Biden to protect communities from the effects of railroad companies' greed.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *Walgreens Clarifies Stores Still Selling Plenty Of Household Products That'll Abort A Fetus.*
(satire) *Neighbors Shocked To Hear Quiet, Unassuming AR-15 Went On Killing Rampage.*
*The Fed Accused of "Playing With Fire" After Latest Rate Hike.*
Progressive Democrats have proposed to define housing as a human right and spend 300 billion dollars to fulfill that right.
I am in favor.
Public Citizen: *Private equity's ownership of U.S. healthcare providers is incompatible with the needs and best interests of patients and should be checked with federal legislation.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and your senators reject right-wing budget cuts and pass Biden's budget.
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!
*Fears of Monarch Butterfly Extinction as Numbers Plummet 22% in Annual Count.*
The Michigan Republican Party published a meme comparing a proposed law to reduce gun violence with the Nazis' collection of murdered Jews' wedding rings.
The Republican Party is now full of Nazis. Won't they take offense at comparing a Nazi activity that they admire with something such as gun control that they despise?
*Water's Moment: Advancing the Human Right to Water in the United States.*
*Why We Can't Just Do It: The Truth About Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions.*
I don't know whether the factual claims in the article are true. I am surprised by the claim that building the renewable energy facilities we need would require a significant increase in the amount of industrial activity.
*Low-income Americans face a "hunger cliff" as Snap benefits are cut.*
Before Maus, there was … Bambi.
The UK government has claimed for years that it was totally successful in fighting PISSI in Mosul. Now there is proof that some of its bombing killed civilians. The British government did wrong to deny the civilian casualties. It should have admitted those consequences.
That does not necessarily imply that those attacks were wrong. This was a necessary and justified war; fighting PISSI was necessary and called for. Military action always has a risk of going awry, which could kill bystanders. That doesn't imply that fighting is always wrong.
Whether the UK forces acted with proper care to reduce that risk, I don't know. It may have made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes are very common in the fog of war.
No army is perfect. Knowing that, we should think carefully before fighting a war.
Proposing a specific change in the law to enable the US government to confiscate the money that executives of failed banks (such as Silicon Valley Bank) personally extracted by putting the banks at risk of failure.
*UK fishing industry underreporting whale, dolphin and porpoise bycatch.*
The Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates, though perhaps not as quickly. It may not succeed in curbing inflation,
but even if it doesn't cause more bank failures, it will put millions of Americans out of work.
*Putin says Russia "will respond" if UK supplies depleted uranium shells to Ukraine.*
I can't imagine what sort of "response" Russia could actually make? Try to destroy the tanks that would fire these shells? The Putin forces will try their best to do that anyway.
Ukraine should say "no thanks" to these shells, since using them would pollute Ukrainian territory with Dirty Uranium fallout for a long time.
It causes various sorts of diseases for anyone who breathes it in.
*A Swedish court … ruled that … youth climate activists including Greta Thunberg can collectively sue Sweden for the government's "insufficient climate policy."*
(satire) *Congress Rules Food Stamps Can Only Be Used On Rutabagas.*
(satire) *Politicians Explain Why They Oppose [Gratis] School Lunch Programs.*
A government-commission report found that the "Metropolitan Police", which is the thug department for London and does other things nationally, is pervaded by racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry.
This includes harsh bullying by thugs against thugs, as well as against everyone else. In London, polls find that most people do not trust it.
Here's a description of the bad things it does.
*Economic growth is not a magic wand for ending poverty.
our focus should be on reducing inequality not increasing GDP.*
*US maternal mortality is more than ten times higher than in Australia.*
It is not easy to measure the causes of this, but we know that they include consequences of the pandemic of Covid-19, a general attitude of disregard for women's medical needs and health, and racism (black American mothers are even more likely to die).
Secretary General Guterres has set up a climate summit for September, with a new demand for earnestness: for a country to be invited, it will have to plan to end licensing and funding of new oil and gas reserves and expansion of old ones. Bravo, Guterres! It is heart-warming to see someone in a position of importance who recognizes what priorities are needed for survival.
With his influence, he has a chance of overcoming the power of fossil fools. It won't be easy to beat them, but civilization depends on it, and every young person's life is at risk.
Astronomers call for people to support banning projects that involve putting large number of satellites into low Earth orbit, to preserve the darkness of night.
A hospital in Idaho will no longer deliver babies, as Idaho's repressive laws make it risky for doctors to work there.
It is the only hospital in Sandpoint, which is at the northern tip of Idaho. I wonder what is happening elsewhere in that state.
The EFF has published a complete list of the locations of the highly visible US surveillance towers on the border with Mexico. The US government has a list but has refused to publish it.
These towers surveil everyone in the border region constantly, but they are not the only method. Citizens that live in or visit the border are frequently stopped or harassed while they drive.
Modi regime censors and punishes foreign critics of its violations of human rights.
The US is suing to stop JetBlue and Spirit Airlines from merging.
I'm glad to see the government doing this duty to some extent. However, to do it fully would require strengthening antitrust law. If we put progressives in control of Congress, they will do this.
UN secretary general Guterres has endorsed the IPCC's plan for rapid reduction of fossil fuel use.
The hard part is convincing governments to carry it out, over the opposition of fossil fuel companies that are determined to make us burn every last drop before civilization collapses.
Several important governments that we might expect to resist it have endorsed it already,
including China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the European Union.
Being hit by ships is a major cause of deaths for endangered whales. The US should adopt measures to protect whales from ships.
*Florida considers ban on discussion of menstruation before sixth grade.*
Some of the students will start menstruation before they reach sixth grade.
Plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must not rely on risky and untested technologies, such as carbon dioxide removal.
Biden vetoed a bill passed by Republican legislators (including a couple of quasi-Democrats) that would have allowed pension funds to invest people's pensions disregarding how the investments are likely to lose value due to global heating effects.
Ralph Nader looks at fallacies right-wingers use to justify impoverishing the non-rich.
*Tens of Thousands of LA Teachers to Strike in Solidarity With Support Workers.*
Contrails contribute to global heating, but airlines lobby against measures to reduce contrails.
*Crowds in Milan protest against curbs on rights of same-sex parents.*
* Leading respiratory doctor fears generation could end up with long-term addictions and lung damage [from vaping].*
*The former saboteur in chief deregulated railways and banks. He blames Biden for the fallout.
In true hypocritical manner, the ex-president has quickly forgotten why the two sectors are in shambles.*
*The [right wing accuses its critics] of the conspiracy they themselves engage in.*
Exxon claimed it would grow algae to make biofuel without generating greenhouse gases. It has now given up on that research.
Wyoming, an extreme right-wing state, has made it a crime to "prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell or use any drug for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion."
Redistribution of abortion pills will continue, underground, but people must make sure not to have a snoop-phone in room when they talk about plans.
*The [Republican Party] Is a Party of Death, Not Life.* I'd say it more strongly: the Republican Party is the party of excuses to kill people.
The US has recently deported Russians who fled to avoid being drafted into the Putin forces, despite a previous statement suspending deportation to Russia.
This is not only cruel and treacherous, but stupid and self-defeating as well. It harms Ukraine's chances and helps Putin.
The precise rules for asylum are complex, and full of pitfalls that make it easy to fall into a trap where they say "You didn't follow some procedural detail so you're screwed, tough luck."
*Journalists go on trial in Egypt for "offending MPs."*
Prosecuting people for charges like that is by itself proof of tyranny, regardless of whether they are "true."
Frackers in the US stored methane in an old well. The seal broke and a billion cubic feet of powerful greenhouse gas leaked into the air.
Accidents leaks will happen — both enormous incidents like this one, and numerous long-term permanent leaks that add up over time. This makes fracking a much bigger contributor to global heating than the calculations predicted.
We should ban fracking entirely. This could lead the gas market to decrease fossil fuel use, as is needed to push industries to decarbonize.
*Industry Knew — and Hid — Dangers of Gas Stoves Over 50 Years Ago.*
*Elizabeth Warren says Fed chair "failed" and calls for inquiry into bank collapse.*
He failed because he insisted on interest rate increase after interest rate increase, fixating attention on a misguided plan to cut inflation based on misunderstanding its cause, which drove banks into failure.
The Nazi salute is disgusting, cowardly, and bullying, and naturally provokes "sadness, outrage and disbelief" — but its prohibition by the Australian government is a violation of freedom of speech.
Many Americans were angry at the ACLU when it successfully sued to establish that Nazis had the right to organize a public rally in the US. I may have agreed with that anger for a little while, but after more thought I concluded that the ACLU was right. Freedom of speech is not reliable for anyone if it excludes certain views that most people strongly disagree with.
The US is ramping up the war on people in pain.
* US tech innovators have a culture of regarding government as an innovation-blocking nuisance. But when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, investors screamed for state protection.* Socialism for the rich, laissez faire/laissez mourir for the rest.
* The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals — from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers — is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet.*
*Minnesota Becomes 4th State to Provide [gratis] School Meals to All Kids.*
To reduce the confusion of the two meanings of "free", I carefully avoid using it to mean "gratis".
A Christian university in Florida fired a professor because a student denounced what he taught about racial justice.
The student called it "indoctrination", but other students said it wasn't. For right-wingers, exaggeration even to the point of dishonesty is normal and legitimate.
That article was written before the actual firing. I chose to link to it because it explains more of the situation.
Greg Palast conjectures that Putin grabbed Ukrainian children and gave them to Russians to raise in order to boost the fraction of Russians that will be white orthodox Christians.
Newly studied evidence suggests that raccoon dogs (a species related to foxes) in Wuhan's live animal market were infected by SARS-CoV-2.
The US and Mexico are cooperating to send Mexicans who worked legally in the US the wages that employers stole from them.
(satire) *Locksmith Called After Man Loses Incantation Used To Open Ancient Stone Chamber.*
P&O Ferries aroused condemnation by firing its well-paid workers and hiring low-paid foreigners.
But nothing has been done to reverse that or punish the company or prevent repetition.
This does not surprise me. Tories would consider this desirable as it enriches the wealthy.
US citizens: call on Congress to make Warren Buffett answer for his push to deregulate the railroads.
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 Biden not to imprison unauthorized immigrant families.
(satire) *Conservative Historian Claims Diversity Ultimately Doomed Third Reich.*
Virginia thugs have been charged with second-degree murder for smothering a prisoner to death. The prisoner's hands and feet were chained, so he was no threat to them at the time.
A federal appeals court rejected DeMentis's education censorship law.
*Global fresh water demand will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030, say experts.*
The increase will not be due to the need for humans' domestic use.
*Aside From the Military Bloat, Biden Budget Is Worth Celebrating.*
I am less enthusiastic because I am sure FDR would have done a lot more.
*Russian soldier who confessed to killing Ukrainian civilian [has been] jailed [for supposedly posting] "fake news."*
Putin deploys bogus criminal charges to punish any disobedience.
Many city, county and state agencies have refused to give Manuel Paez Terán's family answers or evidence about how thugs killed him.
There is no reason to doubt that this is what it looks like: a murder followed by playing dumb. The thugs' denials count for nothing since they are biased and untrustworthy witnesses.
The campaign of repeated lies by which Dubya won support for attacking Iraq misled Americans about fundamental background facts, such as the fact that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 2001 terrorist attacks and treated al Qa'ida as an enemy.
A similar preparatory campaign against Iran seems to have been running for years.
Since young Americans reject the Republican politics, the plutocrats are trying to wipe or distort our public education.
A loophole in log requirements has undermined European fishing quotas. Governments corrupted by fishing interests are now pushing to make the loophole bigger.
Biden is considering nominating for the Federal Reserve Board someone who previously supported the banks against innocent US homeowners while an official in a related agency, the US Treasury.
(satire) *Financial Experts Recommend Investing In Businesses Government Will Bail Out Anytime They Fuck Up.*
*Biden Says Top Executives of Failed Banks Should Face Harsher Penalties.*
*The bullshitter’s own research showed that voter fraud did not cost him election.*
*The lessons of the Iraq invasion [for the UK]? Beware spies and allies who would drag you to war.*
*Silicon Valley Bank said it was too small to need regulation. Now it's "too big to fail."*
Surely every bankster wants per bank to be both at once.
Soil near the Ohio train wreck contains extremely high levels of dioxin.
Yanis Varoufakis: today's banking crisis is the latest repercussion the 2008 financial crisis.
* Global Commission on the Economics of Water released a landmark report Friday to warn the international community that the world is "heading for massive collective failure" in the management of the planet's water supply and demand that governments treat water as a "global common good."*
The International Criminal Court has indicted Putin and some other Russians for forcibly taking hundreds, probably thousands, of Ukrainian children to Russia and concealing who they are from their Ukrainian relatives.
The article describes what he has done.
I have no doubt that Putin merits punishment for this. However, putting him on trial for it risks prolonging the war. If Ukraine is militarily successful, Putin might be willing to retreat from Ukraine in exchange for being allowed to continue in power in Russia. Insisting on trying him might convince him to continue holding parts of Ukraine until the Putin forces are pushed out.
Here's a clear statement, written by prominent educators and champions of the campaign against racism, of how the pressure to censor the Advanced Placement African-American Studies course is an attack on freedom of thought and education, and part of a much broader campaign against education and to cover up important areas of Americans history.
It says nothing to suggest that today's young Americans should feel guilty about crimes that American whites in the past committed against Americans blacks (though some people do that). Rather, it says that we should teach young Americans these aspects of their country's history, so they can carefully draw moral lessons from those past events and apply the conclusions today and in the future.
That goal applies to other issues besides racism. If democracy and schools exist 50 years from now, they will teach what has been learned from investigations based on critical environment theory and critical computation theory, showing how powerful interests distorted laws and institutions to poison the Earth and make computing subjugate its users.
US citizens: call on the USPS Board of Governors to stop DeJoy's USPS privatization plan.
US citizens: call on your senators to defend the Clean Water Act.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
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!
Jews in New York City held a protest calling on Senator Schumer to stop cozying up to Israel's fascist-leaning government.
Texas officials are using a pretext to take over control of the Houston Independent School District. The pretext consists of one problem school that the city was improving. State officials have not presented any plan to do better. We can anticipate that they will make some aspects of the schools worse, and I conjecture that that is their real goal. We must expect deceit from Republicans.
The imposed state board will have the power to impose censorship, and I expect it will use that to prompt racism and sexism and interfere with sex education, as DeMentis is doing in Florida.
I expect Republicans will also ramp up the school-to-prison pipeline. With so many black students in that district, this will be a great opportunity to put many of them in state prisons and thus disenfranchise them.
The UK government offered many NHS workers in England a bigger raise,
The practice of fully protecting all depositors from bank failures while letting the bank speculate with the deposits is an invitation for banks to take foolish risks.
Readopting Glass-Steagal would prevent some of the mismanagement that can make large banks fail. However, the author calls for nationalizing the largest banks.
A Georgia sheriff has been sentenced to prison for torturing prisoners. He put them into bondage chairs and left them there long enough to cause serious bodily harm.
(satire) *Mark Zuckerberg Worried Facebook Listening To Him After Being Pushed Shirt That Says, "I Just Laid Off 10,000 Employees."*
(satire) *Ron DeSantis Bans Births In Florida Due To Exposure Of Impressionable Infants To Vagina.*
A Republican legislator in Iowa claims that the law he helped to pass prohibits teachers from telling students that "slavery is wrong."
The actual text of the law does not go that far. It prohibits saying that the US, or Iowa, is "fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist." There is no serious doubt that systemic racism and sexism exist in Iowa, and in the US generally, so that law tries to censor an important truth. But it does not seem to prohibit saying "slavery is wrong." Nonetheless, officials fear it implies that.
People fear that these laws will be stretched and twisted to attack them because Republicans say they want to try, and Republican judges are are ready to be dishonest in interpreting laws.
*After industry cash flooded their war chests, Florida Republicans stopped requiring utilities from disclosing who they are punishing
*Mexico to investigate alleged human rights abuses by military after spying claims.*
(satire) *Fetus Panics After Ballooning Up To 500 Times Her Original Weight.*
*The [Federal Reserve] needs to stop raising rates now, former FDIC chair says after Silicon Valley Bank failure.*
Americans for Tax Fairness: arguments for raising the tax rate on corporations to 28%.
I think we also need to eliminate the ways that corporations arrange to claim that income was nominally received in some other country with a lower tax rate.
The BBC claims to be politically independent, but in practice its rules for presenters, writers and commentators are applied with enormous right-wing bias. This has been the case for decades at least.
*Republican lawmakers funded by the credit card industry are fighting to protect the excessive fees companies charge consumers.*
The junk fees are not among the biggest ways that businesses exploit bad laws to exploit the non-rich, but they are an example of the electoral corruption that upholds plutocracy in the US.
*The Iraq War started the post-truth era. And America is to blame.*
I don't think that is entirely true, because the right-wingers were using lies before that. The campaign to capture US policy decisions for the rich, and pretend that non-rich receiving government help were the exploiters, started in the 1970s; it was based on lies from top to bottom.
It has been argued that al-Libi was not merely giving his torturers what they demanded, but intentionally encouraging a war between the US and Saddam Hussein, both being enemies of al-Qa'ida.
Feral hippopotamuses in Colombia are reproducing and causing problems for humans and for wildlife.
Since these intrusive animals are damaging native wildlife, the right thing to do is to eliminate them from the wild in Colombia.
Biden has given reasons for approving the Willow oil drilling project, but they are fallacious.
Allegedly the attempt to reject the project entirely is likely to be overturned by courts. What if that is true? What would be the right thing to do?
We are dealing with a threat to kill most human beings and wipe out most living species -- in effect, the biggest war in all history. So let's look at it like a battle against the planet-roasters.
When your army holds a position that it cannot continue to hold indefinitely, should you pull those troops back promptly, or hold the position as long as possible? It depends on what you can gain by holding it and what you might lose.
In this case, there is nothing to lose by fighting in court except the cost of paying some lawyers. Therefore, Biden's duty is to hold that position for as long as possible. Delaying the drilling is good in itself, and the fight to delay it will inspire climate defenders and help win the next election.
The delay also creates an opportunity for the situation to change. In 2025 it may be possible to pass a law — perhaps a carbon tax — that would make Chevron abandon the project.
Thugs committed violence against the property of protesters at Cop City while trying to find evidence for "terrorist plots" in protest supplies.
The actions of the thugs are calculated to spread terror among civilians who are only exercising their legal rights. That's terrorism, pure and simple.
How Biden plans to bail out the depositors of failed banks, including large deposits not officially covered by FDIC, using funds accumulated by FDIC.
If this sort of thing becomes frequent, it may call for increasing the fee rates of FDIC.
Senator Sinema voted for the Republicans' bank deregulation law in 2018, after accepting campaign funds from Silicon Valley Bank's lobbyists.
21 Republican legislators in South Carolina supported a bill to impose the death penalty for "homicide" against a fertilized egg. That much strong support shows that that religious fanaticism has become mainstream in the Republican Party. Women, Republicans want to kill you.
This bill would punish not only abortion, but also some methods of birth control that prevent a zygote from implanting and generating a placenta.
The EPA has taken a small step to limit PFAS in drinking water.
US citizens: call on Secretary Haaland to reduce single-use plastic in national parks by 90% by 2025.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the merger of Albertsons and Kroger supermarkets.
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 Biden to propose a new FCC commissioner who follows Free Press Action's recommendations.
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 the deportation thugs to close abusive deportation prisons and not open new ones.
*Ohio sues Norfolk Southern over toxic train derailment.*
That selfish and greedy organization is happy to profit by putting the public at risk. But if it loses this lawsuit, that could compel it to adopt better safety standards.
*Conservation groups sue to stop the Willow Oil Project in Alaska’s Western Arctic.*
Presenting demographic statistics clearly by imagining a world of 100 people.
In the name of "energy security", UK prime minister Sunak wants to focus on slow, inefficient and iffy approaches.
It looks like the real goal is to continue the extraction and combustion of carbon as long as possible. Is this an example of "carbon capture"?
Most of the major companies in the UK have imposed big price increases simply because the system has nothing to hold them in check.
Raising interest rates, supposedly to reduce inflation, does nothing to stop them. But it is very useful for the rich, and inflation makes a great excuse.
Robert Reich explains the history of US bank regulations since the great depression: a conflict between the public and the rich, with politicians choosing which side to take. He concludes with calling for a return to the New Deal regulations including the Glass-Steagall Act, to "make banking boring again."
Bernie Sanders has called for this too.
In my view, the 2000s bail-out of the rich might have been ok if combined with a bailout of homeowners plus increasing taxes on the wealthy and on businesses so as to pay for it.
*Warren Calls for Clawing Back Pay, Bonuses for Silicon Valley Bank Executives.*
Biden approved the "Willow" fossil fuel development in Alaska, which will have deadly consequences around the world.
He thought that protecting other areas of Alaska would somehow compensate for the damage of these additional emissions. But environmental activists are not going to forgive damaging our air and nature in one place on account of choosing not to damage it somewhere else.
*Meat, dairy and rice production will bust 1.5C climate target,* those being the high methane emission foods.
US citizens: phone your senators and representative and call on them to undo the changes made in the Dodd-Frank bank regulation law to the strength it had in 2015.
This law, if not for being weakened by the corrupter, would have prevented Silicon Valley Bank from doing the risky things that caused it to fail.
The Dodd-Frank law was a weaker replacement for the previous Glass-Steagall Act, which was abolished in 1999 by Republicans in Congress. It is described in this history of US bank regulations.
I think we should bring back Glass-Steagall with its full force, rather than an inferior substitute.
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!
*Silicon Valley Bank's CEO pressed Congress to weaken risk regulations [designed to keep banks from failing].* He said that his bank's operations were risk-free. We now know empirically that that was false.
Basically, our officials (elected and appointed) believe too much of what business executives and their mouthpieces say. I speculate that that is due to lobbying, campaign funds, and the revolving door — in one word, corruption.
Western Europe, from Spain to Germany, is being hit by a shortage of rain (and snow) which is already causing major problems, and likely to get worse as weeks go by with little rain.
Modern agriculture depends on phosphorus fertilizer obtained from mines, but the mines are heading towards exhaustion, leading towards food shortages. Meanwhile, the runoff of fertilizer into waters creates toxic algal blooms, which then convert into planet-roasting methane in the air.
Before modern agriculture farmers gave plants phosphorus as part of urine. Some countries, even some modern ones, still use this method.
30 Christians held a protest march on a street where there are clubs frequented by queer people. The march was condemned as "disgraceful" and "unauthorized protest activity".
I oppose those protesters' views, and I reject their religion; but we must respect their right to protest. Queers especially must defend that right — it was not that long ago that queers met with violent repression holding rallies, and even when not holding rallies. Didn't right-wingers call them "disgraceful" when they did not disguise their orientations and identities?
Faux News edited the security camera footage of insurrectionist Jacob Chansley on Jan 6 to omit his criminal acts, then claimed that the absence of those scenes exonerates him.
What liars say doesn't prove anything, except, occasionally, that they lie.
The autopsy results show that protester Manuel Paez Terán had his hands up when the thugs shot him and killed him, in Cop City.
The proposed Railway Safety Act is a change for the better, but it has flaws that need to be fixed.
*The Far-Right's Culture Wars Are Just a Distraction So Oligarchs Can Keep Looting the Working Class.*
I agree that that is a large part of the purpose of these "culture wars," but they do have a secondary purpose: to radicalize supporters so that they give way completely to hatred.
Robert Reich: *The Guardrails Against Greed Capitalism Must Have.*
The British government's stated commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions was unable to stand up to airline lobbying to cut taxes on flying.
This also shows that the supposed need to limit the deficit is limited to the people who don't count (for Tories), and doesn't apply when interests that are really important want a boost.
The FBI director acknowledged that the FBI had bought location tracking data. Data about Americans, no less. But this scandal is being understood only at the superficial level.
The most superficial scandal here is that the FBI bought location data about Americans in order to track them.
A deeper scandal is that the company which collected the data was able to sell the data without asking permission of the users the data is about.
The deepest scandal here is that the company was able to collect location data about Americans. For real privacy, we need to require systems to be designed so as not to track people's life activities.
No systems should be able to keep track of where people go, what they do there, or who they communicate with.
UK ministers are disrespecting permanent staff of government agencies to the point where those become sycophants, giving the advice that ministers want to hear.
Perhaps this is why the UK government carries out almost any policy incompetently.
Thru April 16.
A documentary about Julian Assange is touring US cinemas. The tour continues till mid-April.
Each showing is followed by a Q&A discussion with Julian's father and/or his brother.
In calculating various people's effective tax rate, there are decisions to make. Deciding wrong leads to giant confusion.
The history of the end of dependence on whale oil may have lessons for the end of dependence on fossil fuels.
A heavy snowfall in California is crushing trees and buildings.
The heavy storms in California result from global heating. This won't be the last one that drops snow instead of rain. I have a feeling that in isolated mountain areas most of the inhabitants will have to move away.
Heavy rains may reduce the fire danger, if they are frequent enough.
The US continues to hold on to art done by prisoners in Guantanamo even when prisoners are allowed to leave.
Online services that allow advertising tend to pass through a transformation known as "enshittification".
First, the service shows users what they want to see. Then it shows users with high priority whatever businesses pay it to show them. Finally, it shows users with even higher priority whatever will keep them spending more time on the site — at which point the users and the advertisers hate it but feel they don't have an option to refuse.
I do refuse. It just happens that these disservices tend to require users to run nonfree client software, and I refuse to do it. Thus, by defending my control over my computing, I avoid the shit too.
I think that the key to ending enshittification is to pass laws to change the funding model.
Right-wing religious fanatics in several states propose bills to prosecute women for having abortions. In the past, anti-abortionists said they did not want to do this. But success encourages fanatics to compete to see who can be the most extreme.
Suggesting that the UK and the US help Afghan civil society organize with a view towards possible future opportunities for democracy there.
The US system of "guest workers" funnels hundreds of thousands of foreign workers into a system of low-wage temporary work that in that verges on slavery. In some cases it is effectively slavery.
*The US central bank is poised to cause untold hardship to millions of Americans.*
This was predictable when Biden reappointed the saboteur-in-chief's appointee to continue as its chief.
*Progressives Back Bipartisan Push to End US Military Presence in Syria.*
I am not sure exactly what US troops are doing nowadays in Syria, and perhaps there is no reason for part of their mission. But the US should help protect the Kurds of Rojava, including with troops so that Turkey and Syria won't attack them.
*Campaign calls for "gender apartheid" to be crime under international law.*
I agree with the substance of this proposal, but "apartheid" is the wrong word for extreme patriarchal. Calling it that distorts the meaning of the word "apartheid." That word's fundamental idea is separation, and extreme patriarchy does not try to divide up men from women as if they were two separate peoples that should never mix.
Planet-roaster businesses are lobbying the EU to weaken its campaign to reduce fossil fuels for heating so that it would allow biofuels, and hydrogen made from fossil fuels.
Biofuels as they currently exist either cause deforestation (wood chips) or compete with farming food (corn products). They should be eliminated too.
If we can ever make fuel from the waste products of farming, they might be better.
*How to break the Xi-Putin axis? Biden must engage with Beijing.*
That is good advice for the first step, but it isn't a map to the desired destination.
(satire) *SpaceX Crew Member Realizes He [had been] Fired After Being Locked Out Of Capsule.*
(satire) *Mitch McConnell Bankrupted By 3-Day Stay In Hospital.*
Silicon Valley Bank's collapse would have been prevented by the former bank regulations that Republicans eliminated in 2018.
Three women allegedly helped another woman obtain abortion pills which she used in Texas. Her ex-husband is suing the three for a million dollars for "killing" the fetus.
I wonder how he got ahold of their text messages.
Unless those women have quite high incomes, his winning this case would leave them in poverty for the rest of their lives.
Tories appointed a former minister of deforestation to work for "Natural England", whose mission is to protect nature in England.
You can't get more blatant contempt for the nation and the people than this.
*Iran and Saudi Arabia agree to restore ties after China-brokered talks.*
A priori, this decrease in hostility could reduce conflict in the middle east. It might lead the way to more reconciliations, such as perhaps peace in Yemen.
However, both of those governments are fanatical Islamists. If they join forces for religious repression, that will not be good for the world.
The BBC has surrendered to right-wing pressure by refusing to broadcast a David Attenborough program that would make right-wingers angry.
Verra, which organizes many suspect "carbon offsets" whose validity is now recognized as questionable, says it will redesign the offset system.
Hotter fires are not just burning the existing conifers in parts of the US west, they are also killing seedlings so that no new conifers can grow.
Artificial turf is suspected of causing cancer.
Right-wingers plan to ask the Supreme Court to enforce the long-disused Comstock Act to prohibit mailing abortion pills and abortion information.
*Fossil fuels received £20bn more UK support than renewables since 2015.*
*One-fifth of money given directly to fossil fuel industry was to support new extraction and mining.*
(satire) *[Governor] Ron DeSantis Oversees Program Offering Florida Students Free Force-Fed Meals.*
*House Freedom Caucus Economic Hostage-Takers Issue Latest Ransom Demands.*
Comparing various stories about which opponents of Putin bombed the Nord Stream pipelines and what relationship they had with the US government.
Canadian "mounted" thugs are being investigated for cruel violence towards environmental protesters.
Gigi Sohn withdrew from candidacy as FCC commissioner.
Shortly before her announcement, Manchin said he would refuse to vote for her. He has been toying with the issue sadistically for two years.
Free Press Action describes the qualities that the new nominee for the FCC should have.
The US is moving to restrict "technologies" that threaten US national security. Precisely what "technologies," "restrict" and "threaten" mean is not clear.
The threat is real, but it does not come only from companies based in certain more-or-less hostile countries. Israel is a US ally, but Israeli companies make products that threaten the freedom of Americans (along with everyone else).
What's more, US companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon threaten the national security (in a broader sense) of the US. And even when they are not being used in a way that threatens the security of the US, they collect personal data about many Americans in a way that can is often used to oppress them.
I believe the solution is to prohibit the collection of personal data. Not just "without consent," since they can always make most people "consent."
*EPA Proposes Improved Wastewater Treatment Standards for Coal-fired Power Plants.*
On a global scale, pollution of water by burning coal is a secondary problem. It could kill millions of people over decades, whereas greenhouse gas emissions can destroy technological civilization and kill billions. However, as long as coal-burning power plants exist, we should make sure they don't pollute our water. And this requirement will convince many owners that it isn't worth continuing to operate the plants.
South Africa has decided to "downgrade" its embassy in Israel as a rebuke for the occupation policies that amount to apartheid.
The Tory plan for total repression of boat people is a rejection of fundamental human rights as well as an example of the performative cruelty used for right-wing radicalization nowadays.
It would violate many important treaties with the rest of European countries.
The latest Faux News lie campaign has the support of House Speaker McCarthy and helps the bullshitter.
Scientists have successfully "revived" frozen viruses found in permafrost and they were able to infect cultures of amoebas. The scientists chose those virus because they had determined from studying the virus DNA that amoebas were their target.
It is possible that other frozen permafrost viruses could infect various other kinds of life. It is not impossible that they could cause pandemics.
However, the world is full of viruses that might do this, infecting various kinds of animals. It seems to me that the additional danger of permafrost viruses is a small fraction of the danger we already face.
It is difficult to do empirical studies of the effectiveness of mask requirements, partly because there is no objective way to determine how often any person wears a mask (or which kind, properly or not, etc.) A group of scientists did a meta-study and found some evidence in favor of concluding masks reduced Covid, but not enough for real confidence.
Then one of them, who had antimask leanings, made the bizarre claim that the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. But that seems to be misleading words.
When US food prices in bulk went up last year, retail businesses raised their prices more than the commodity prices. Now bulk prices are decreasing, but those businesses are not reducing retail prices.
The cause of this is — not enough competition, after too many mergers.
Biden's proposed 2024 budget would improve many kinds of help for non-rich Americans, though not as much as is needed.
It also reduces future deficits, by increasing taxes on the rich.
It will not be easy to get any of this through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, nor through the Senate where Manchin can block it. Robert Reich says that Biden knows it is impossible and the point of it is to present his goals and to influence negotiations.
Those are useful things to do to influence the outcome.
The amount of microplastics in the ocean is growing exponentially. As long as so much microplastic is being dumped, attempts to clean up the ocean are futile.
US railroad workers call for nationalization of the railroads on the grounds that billionaire stockholding executives will always skimp on public safety for the stockholders.
Every time external power to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is cut off, it risks leading to a meltdown that would pollute a large region.
It is easy to say that we "can't allow this to continue," but we have no obvious way to stop it except for Ukraine to surrender to Putin. the challenge is to find a way to reduce the danger that Ukraine and Putin will both accept.
Michigan has repealed the Republican law that allows businesses to hire workers that don't pay dues to support the union. That law gave businesses another way to attack unions.
*Rising temperatures in tropics to lead to lower coffee yields and higher prices, study suggests.*
*[Rep. Ilhan] Omar Unveils Bill to Block US [military] Aid to Human Rights Abusers.*
With the world dividing into blocs, and repressive regimes on every side, I don't know if the US is in a strong enough position to refuse alliance with all of those regimes. I think that in the 1990s it could have done so, but it did not give priority to that goal.
*Norfolk Southern's "Safety Plan" Includes Automation That Could Further Endanger Workers.*
It also replaces workers with machines that can't check for all the problems human workers can spot.
*Smoke from Australian bushfires depleted ozone layer by [3%] to 5% in 2020, study finds.*
Global heating will cause more and bigger fires, until most of the trees are gone.
Some British lawyers say that trials of protesters which forbid them to state the reasons for their actions violate their human rights.
At the very least, they are being denied the right to present a defense of necessity or a defense of the public interest. That in itself is an injustice.
*Demand Your Cable Service Provider Make FOX News Channel Optional!*
Refugees from China are trying to get to the US by land from Colombia. This just as Biden searches for policies not to ever let them in.
One person interviewed told the reporter that he would eagerly go to Taiwan to fight a Chinese invasion. It occurs to me that if he wants to be able to make a real contribution to that fight, he needs to go there now and start training. Does anyone know whether Taiwan would welcome volunteers who come to join its army? Perhaps it is too hard to be sure they are not spies or saboteurs.
A rumor coming out of the US government says that it is considering a deal to promote exports of US methane to Europe by falsely labeling it as "green."
Everyone: denounce Exxon for keeping its research about global heating secret.
People often mispronounce the name "Exxon".
Comments on Europe's strategic situation.
*Artwork referring to abortion [ordered] removed from Idaho public college exhibition [in the name of Idaho's censorship law.]
Robert Reich: raising interest rates is not effective for reducing spending nowadays because most of the spending is done by rich people who are profiting from the interest rate increases.
Republicans have changed the rules of the House of Representatives to make it easy to defund any specific government program, in the name of "saving money".
A 2020 article about the need to defend freedom of speech even for those we oppose is just as pertinent today. Do keep in mind that "the president" criticized in this article was the bullshitter, not Biden.
Repression in Atlanta: protesters held a rally with music, about a mile away from the site where Cop City is supposed to be built. Thugs accused them of "domestic terrorism" for acts of vandalism which there is no evidence those people had anything to do with.
This reminds me of the Haymarket martyrs.
This calls to mind the absurd charges that fascists such as Putin and Modi use to crush dissent.
These thugs are sending a message: "We are fascists with the power. We spit on truth, justice, and law."
The US military is allegedly refusing to give the International Criminal Court evidence of Putin forces war crimes.
That action is discreditable in itself, but the motive is even more discreditable: to protect US soldiers accused of war crimes from someday being prosecuted by the ICC.
The right way for a country to prevent its soldiers from being prosecuted by the ICC is for the national government to prosecute those war crimes. The ICC exists as a backup method for cases where countries fail to prosecute their own war criminals.
The US supports the right side of this conflict, but it supports the wrong side in others, including the war in Yemen.
An investigation found that the Louisville thug department has systematic tendencies toward thuggish behavior, especially towards blacks.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
Biden proposes to increase the Medicare tax on the rich so as to provide sufficient funds for Medicare until 2050.
Big Pharma has convinced the US government to strive to the utmost to prevent Americans from buying prescription medicines abroad to save money. Medicines are more expensive in the US because the US government has a decades-long tradition of helping Big Pharma gouge. Their pretext is that people would import opioids that way, but few people try that.
Thousands of Twitter accounts, which appear not to represent real people, are supporting the bullshitter and criticizing the other Republican candidates.
Overuse of fertilizer on three continents is stimulating the growth of floating sargassum seaweed. Tons float onto coasts, producing toxins and harming land animals including humans.
The typical single-use water bottle uses up a lot more water than it can contain.
I try hard to avoid single-use water bottles, using them only as a last resort. As a result, the number I use per year in the US is just a handful. Even in Europe I don't use them often.
Florida Republicans will criminalize the taking of abortion pills.
There is an exception for rape an incest but you have to prove somehow that it was rape or incest — very difficult to do.
"Exceptions to abortion bans are often useless and are only included to make extreme restrictions seem more reasonable."
*The United States of America has to choose between imposing a sacrifice on the rich, by increasing their taxes, or imposing a sacrifice on the poor, by decreasing their health care. The vast majority of the people, including many rich people, want to tax the rich.*
US citizens: call on U.S. pharmacies to provide abortion pills to customers; don't let Republican bullies convince you to cut them off.
US citizens: call on the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to block mining near the Okefenokee swamp, which is a wildlife reservation.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
Calling for improvements when the Medicare-for-all bill is reintroduced in this Congress.
Republican fascists are infiltrating the institutions of power in the US, aiming for a position where they can win some sort of coup.
A group of indigenous Australians in New South Wales want to build housing on an area of forest that needs protection. The state government blocked the plan, so they played the "indigenous card."
The government of New South Wales is right-wing, and in general fails to defend the environment. That means it often deserves criticism. This seems to be an unusual case where it did defend the environment.
*Israeli military reservists refuse to train in protest at far-right government.*
Teenage girls are developing social structures and institutions to a plague of harassment by the many misogynist teenage boys.
Jamaica has got good results from treating the vast majority of the mentally ill without hospitalization.
With mental illness increasing in other countries, maybe that approach would be good to adopt.
The exiled leader of Belarusian opposition suggests that putting more pressure on Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus and Putin's flunky, will help defeat Putin's attack on Ukraine.
How stock buybacks harm the public and the nation.
What the newly agreed global ocean treaty needs in order to be effective.
*Defusing "Methane Bombs" Key to Averting Climate Catastrophe.*
Monitoring of people's mental states by measuring their brainwaves is close to the point of threatening cognitive liberty. We need to defend it.
The threat to cognitive liberty is not new. Brainwashing systems, such as applied in China (and especially to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang) attack cognitive liberty. The US, Canada and some other countries set up brainwashing systems to apply to indigenous children. Disinformation campaigns existed before computers.
However, supporting brainwashing with monitoring of subjugated people's individual mental states makes the threat harder to resist.
These systems depend inherently on making them use nonfree malware or else devices that are imposed on them.
The ballot initiative to legalize abortion in Ohio has been approved for a vote.
Calling on people to choose carefully which words to use or avoid.
I was glad to see another that criticizes the use of "appropriate" as an accusation as a "bludgeon." The term is subjective and vague, so it lends itself to bullying and harassment by people who try to impose their views demands on everyone else.
In regard to the expression "you guys", that used to imply adult men only. However, since a few decades ago I've often heard it used for groups of adult women as well. Maybe it is no longer incorrect for the author's classes.
But we don't have a good base word for names of groups of adults of various genders. "Person" tends to make the compound words too long and cumbersome.
How about "mensch", copied from German? How would you feel about being called a "firemensch"?
Most Britons have recognized that leaving the EU was an economic disaster. Yet neither major party advocates undoing the disaster, which would be easy enough with a simple agreement. The Tories have accepted making such an agreement limited to Northern Ireland; since all of the UK would benefit from that, there is no reason except fantasies to refuse.
Britons should have listened to Corbyn, who stated that a customs union would be his goal.
An agreement limited to trade won't correct all the problems caused by leaving the EU. For instance, the Tories are about to make a human rights disaster too.
The Mormon church was fined $5 million for concealing investments amounting to around $30 billion. The concealment lasted over 20 years.
Is this fine large enough to deter such crimes? I doubt it.
Perhaps long-term concealment of data that are supposed to be reported annually should result in an annual fine. That way, the total fine would be around $100 million. But that would only 0.3% of the amount concealed — still too small, I think.
Doctors in Texas are terrified of the repression around abortions; they don't dare say the word to a patient, even when the patient needs an abortion for medical reasons.
Florida Republicans have proposed a law saying that bloggers who are paid to write about elected officials must register as lobbyists.
I have a suspicion that registration will require running nonfree Javascript, and paying likewise. That is definitely an injustice. However, is it an injustice to require them to register?
I don't think that people who are paid to write articles for or against an elected official are considered lobbyists if it is not for their own blogs. If I am right about that, it is unjust to impose that requirement specifically on individual bloggers.
Jimmy Carter is an evangelical Christian with progressive political views. Back when he was young, most evangelicals championed progressive politics.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine will never abandon Bakhmut.
The policy of "no retreats," or "defend territory at all costs," is likely to be disastrous in war. Such inflexibility makes an army vulnerable. Bakhmut is worth nothing to Ukraine for the war unless defending it gives Ukraine a tactical advantage.
Same-sex couples do as well in raising children as different-sex couples.
*Groups Sue to Stop Biden From Offering 73 Million Acres to Oil Drillers in Gulf of Mexico.*
*Israel is at a crucial crossroads: it can save itself or slide into despotism.*
Alas, one can say the same thing about the UK, and the US, as well as some other countries with a history of democracy.
*Iran pledges to restore monitoring equipment at nuclear sites, says IAEA.*
So there may indeed be hope of avoiding Iran as a nuclear power, if Biden wants to make the effort.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the PRO Act, which will facilitate unionization.
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 affirm the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to stop the practice of allowing the senators from a state to veto any appointment of a federal judge in that state.
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!
*Stop Rewarding Destroyers of Our World and Punishing Those Defending It.*
One proposed repression has been removed from the Tories' bill for repression of protests: it won't allow arrest of journalists for covering protests.
That protecting journalists from arrest had to be done with a special exclusion — roughly "journalists covering a protest have an exemption" — demonstrates that this law threatens the rights of people in the vicinity of a protest even if they are not joining in the protest.
Jailing protesters is bad enough; jailing people for being near a protest is an additional step towards repression.
Some companies, when making a car loan, require drivers to use a machine that tracks all the car's movements.
This demonstrates the uselessness of a "consent" requirement as protection for your privacy. If companies say, "If you don't consent to total tracking, you don't get a car," your "choice" is a fiction.
*Oil CEOs Should Be Barred From Global Climate Summits, Not Running Them.*
Efforts to solve critical world problems, including coming climate disaster, are hamstrung by their fundamental structural organization: "multistakeholderism", which means the corporations doing the worst harm have the power to thwart all progress.
*Second train derails in Ohio but carried no hazardous materials, company says.*
This second derailment demonstrates that train disaster is not a rare, freak accident, and thus supports the insistence on safety improvements: better brakes, larger crews, sick pay, etc.
There was a last-minute breakthrough in negotiations for a global ocean conservation treaty. With organizations such as Greenpeace praising it, I expect I would be pretty happy with it.
One issue where I might have expected bad decisions was that of control over "genetic resources" — scientific discoveries that could be made by studying the genes of ocean life. There have been demands for harmful policies that would declare countries to be the "owners" of genomes found in species found in those countries. That would be unjust.
I can't be sure from this article, but I think this treaty chooses a better approach, that would distribute some of the income from some sorts of activities to some poor countries. I see nothing wrong with that.
Ukraine is reinforcing the defenders of Bakhmut with "elite units" as the Putin forces get closer to encircling that town. I have to wonder, is it tactically wise to send the best units into a town that may soon be cut off? That risks losing them for no gain.
There is nothing important about Bakhmut except that the Putin forces keep trying to capture it. I think it may be more efficient to pull out of Bakhmut now and defend the next town. If it takes the Putin forces 6 months to capture each town, it will take them decades to conquer all of the Donetsk region. The war won't last that long.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, so Afghan refugees can become citizens instead of being expelled.
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 reject the Republicans' Maximally Unfair Tax 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!
*"Fair and Balanced"? Murdoch’s private messages show Faux News was instructed to help Republicans.*
Lukashenko has imprisoned the most prominent human rights activist of Belarus, Ales Bialiatski, supposedly for smuggling.
(satire) *High Cost Of Child Care Forcing More Toddlers To Work Their Way Through Preschool.*
New York City now has a law requiring fast food employers to give cause to justify firing anyone. It has already hit Starbucks' union busting.
Blackstone's strategy is to profit based on events that make Americans suffer. The current instance of that strategy is buying millions of family homes at the height of Covid-19, and now raise the rents and evict the families.
Various proposed laws would increase the taxes Blackstone pays and reduce the pain it can cause. One is to eliminate the carried interest deduction.
Another is the Billionaire's Income Tax.
I advocate prohibiting any one business or alliance of businesses from owning more than one residential building. That would make a lot more competition for rentals.
MIT named its "College of Computing" after Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone. If you are at MIT, that is an appropriate place to protest him.
Some Republicans admire Putin and say so. Now the shock jocks among them are arguing against support for Ukraine as a way to appear audacious.
Modern day indigenous Australians say that Captain Cook's men "stole" spears from the aboriginals they met at Kamay.
Wikipedia (I don't have access to a better reference) transmits a report from the other side: that the aboriginals at Kamay fought with the British sailors each time those landed. The term "steal" does not fit that sort of situation.
Either or both accounts may be distorted, but I see no reason in the article to endorse the indigenous interpretation of "stealing", and no obligation to "return" the spears.
Increasing wildfires in northern hemisphere forests could start a chain reaction of increasing release of CO2.
Ford envisions making cars harass the driver if the company wants to repossess the car. It expressed this by filing a patent application for the malicious idea.
Whether this idea is patented or not, or by which company, is just a detail. What is significant is that "connected" cars make this possible and easy for any company to use on people. The car could even refuse to start at all — or start spontaneously and drive itself. And the manufacturer will always know where the car is located at any time.
A railroad manager was recorded telling workers not to report broken railroad cars for repair — lest it cause delays. This seems to reflect general industry practice.
Such outright disrespect for safety doesn't surprise me. Is it punished as a crime? It ought to be.
*New York Gov. Kathy Hochul calls for new rail safety regulations — after rejecting [New York State] safety legislation requiring trains to be staffed with at least two crew members.*
More confirmation that her actual political alignment is "plutocratist."
An oil tanker sank in the Philippines and now threatens to pollute protected marine areas — meaning it causes danger of extinction.
The world's approach to this sort of disaster is not systematic. A systematic approach would design ships and sailing rules to provide redundant protection so that there will be no such leaks.
* Mobile billboards on how to get access to [abortion] pills by mail are being driven through college campuses in 14 states.*
This is a brilliant move — both helping the enemy's victims and building up the movement against them.
US citizens: call on Biden to kick Faux News out of the White House press pool, for knowingly spreading misinformation.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Everyone: support a worldwide end to unsustainable logging.
To see the acknowledgment page, you will need to eliminate all the CSS in the page. Icecat has a menu command to do that: click right on the page.
Some bird species are injured in the stomach by the small pieces of plastic they eat.
*Call to "Boycott Walgreens" Erupts After Company Caves to Right-Wing on Abortion Pills.*
Various US cities are taking a stand in favor of a universal gratis medical system.
A school in England replaced a temporarily removed mirror with posters suggesting that makeup is an addiction and you're better off not learning to feel dependent on it.
This led to various misunderstandings which I think are not very interesting, since they were responses to incorrect surmises about intentions. However, that provocative statement is interesting to think about.
(satire) *[Chicago] Finally Safe After Every Single Resident Hired As Police.*
US citizens: call on Biden to protect communities from the effects of of railroad companies' greed.
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: phone your congresscritter and senators to urge them to protect the added funding given to the IRS — which it uses to audit rich people instead of poor 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: phone your senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Stock Buyback Accountability Act of 2023.
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: organize to support the constitutional amendment to deny human rights to corporations.
This is complementary to the Democracy for All amendment, now reintroduced in Congress. That would reestablish the power to regulate campaign contributions by rich human beings as well as by corporations. But the idea that corporations are entitled to human rights does harm in many areas. We need to erase that too.
US citizens: call on Congress not to continue the tax cuts for the wealthy that were adopted under the corrupter.
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!
Lab accidents that can cause leaks are more common than politicians suppose. Whatever may have happened with SARS-CoV-2, we need to take care to avoid some future leak that could start a pandemic.
We also need to take care to avoid future contact with wild animals that could start a pandemic. I disagree therefore with the article's final sentence. Given that both dangers are real, which one actually happened in 2019 makes little difference.
OSHA is investigating the high accident rate at Amazon warehouses.
You can reduce it by boycotting Amazon as I do.
Starmer's systematic ban on leftist candidates rejected the only plausible candidate. In response, the whole of the local Labour Party organization has resigned in protest.
People living near the River Ouse in England want to protect it from pollution. That's a good thing to do, but their method is based on a philosophical absurdity: to assert that the river itself is a person and has rights.
Giving corporations the same rights as people has worked out badly. Attempts to give fetuses the same rights as people causes grave injustice.
I forecast that the attempt to treat rivers as if they were people will cause no end of bad consequences as people (and as well as corporations, fetuses and rivers) deduce other absurdities from that absurd premise.
Furthermore, the more entities that are not people are treated by our legal system as if they were people, the harder it will be to stop treating corporations as if they were people.
A neurologist has found patients suffering from some unidentified malady and suspects it is due to exposure to glyphosate.
There is also evidence that glyphosate in farm runoff water is causing toxic algae blooms in the ocean and even in reservoirs.
*On How Tech Lobbyists Lobotomized NY’s Right To Repair Law With Governor Kathy Hochul’s Help.*
Hochul seems to be quite a plutocratist; she tried to put a right-wing judge on the state supreme court, and Democrats rejected the nominee.
How US supermarkets collect lots of valuable data about customers.
They can track you if
I expect that the store can also track you if you pay with something other than cash, and if you ask for a delivery.
(satire) *Los Angeles Warns Residents Not To Touch Poisoned Food Left Out To Deal With Homeless Infestation.*
British Columbia will provide gratis prescriptions of various contraceptive products to female residents. I fully support this policy.
It is amusing how the article struggles to describe which residents the offer applies to. It faced a struggle because it has accepted a limited version of English in which there are no words for an individual's physiological sex, only words for gender. Contraception knows nothing of gender roles; it is concerned only with physiological sex.
The article does not entirely succeed in specifying who the offer is meant for. Does the offer include all transpeople (even trans-women)? Does it include all people who identify as non-binary? My guess is no, because that would be absurd in practice, but I can't be entirely sure. Maybe trans-women will be offered female contraception that they don't have a natural way to use.
The US government says there is no Russian "energy weapon" that could make embassy staff sick.
There are energy weapons — for instance, the laser that a Chinese warship pointed at a Philippine supply ship — but when those are used there is little doubt.
Iran is basically ready to refine uranium sufficiently to make atomic bombs.
We can thank the bullshitter for canceling the non-nuclear deal with Iran, followed by Biden who gave low priority to restoring the deal.
A federal judge found Starbucks guilty of systematic illegal union busting, and ordered Starbucks too undo numerous actions.
I expect that Starbucks will appeal, refuse, appeal, refuse, and so on. It can afford to pay lawyers to do this forever. We need to give the NLRB enough power to give big companies big punishments for spitting on workers' rights.
* Evidence collected from Kherson … shows Russian torture centers were not "random" but instead planned and directly financed by the Russian state, according to a team of Ukrainian and international lawyers headed by a UK barrister.*
Biden is expected to veto a pernicious bill that would prohibit retirement investment plans from taking account of probable future investment losses likely to be caused by environmental damage, and whether the company respects the well being of workers and customers.
Plutocratist politicians apparently want to steer us into investing in dishonest companies, even those that are on course to kill us in a few decades.
Quantifying the growth of autocracy around the world: 72% of humans now live under autocratic regimes. Only 13% live in liberal democracies which respect, more or less, human rights.
Progressives called on Biden not to make the proposed Indo-Pacific "trade deal" a business-supremacy treaty.
It is good news that negotiations have rejected having an ISDS clause like the ones that do so much injustice on other business-supremacy treaties.
Jewish peace groups called on the Biden administration to bar Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich from entering the U.S.
Smotrich calls for wiping out the Arab town where the recent pogrom took place.
The statement describes that as "genocide", but that is an exaggeration. When he did was to advocate an atrocity. I think that is a sufficient reason to refuse to admit him to the US — we don't need to exaggerate it, no need to weaken the term "genocide".
Starmer says it is futile to aim to make the UK treat poor people once again as well as it did before the Tories got into power.
Calling on the EPA to test soil for dioxins in and around the town of East Palestine, where the vinyl chloride derailment occurred.
The US government spent $31.9 billion on mRNA vaccines, including research, and buying millions of doses. Despite this, Moderna gouges the US government on vaccines and Biden lets it.
However, the reason that other companies should be allowed to make these vaccines is deeper than that. Live-saving medicines should never be monopolies.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to sign the letter by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09), and Rep. Jim McGovern (MA-02), which calls on Biden to tell Israel the US will oppose annexation of the West Bank, and to respect its liberal and democratic traditions.
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!
Due to the bullshitter, right-wing Americans are torn between various kinds of bullshit about Covid-19. Should they claim it leaked from a US-funded lab in China ? Or that it is a Chinese bioweapon? Should they support quack treatments, or claim that it was never a real danger at all? Or that it has become harmless?
What they have in common is that they (1) smear the medical establishment fools, (2) attack the government, and (3) create hostility within society. They come from right-wing disinformationists.
Whatever the facts turn out to be, on whatever question, we can't get them from those people.
Breakfast cereal manufacturers are threatening to sue if new US regulations limit how much added sugar a "healthy" cereal can contain, Due to the lunatic Supreme Court decision that said corporations are entitled to human rights, they might even win.
Thus they use their political power to prevent the US government from reducing childhood obesity.
Relating mass layoffs to stock buybacks.
*Scientists prove clear link between deforestation and local drop in rainfall*. The *study adds to fears Amazon is approaching tipping point after which it will not be able to generate its own rainfall*.
*NYC to Pay Millions to Police Brutality Protesters Violently Arrested by NYPD.* The article describes the damage done to some of the protesters by this cruelty.
Compensating the victims is only a start. We need to make sure that uniformed thugs don't do this again. What plan does the current night-mayor offer to achieve that? None, I would expect.
Planet roasters have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to prestigious universities in fields that relate to global heating, apparently with the aim of shaping research results.
In some cases, the projects funded by the planet roasters directly promoted global heating denialism.
Nokia has advanced the Right to Repair campaign by making an Android phone in which it is easier than usual to repair the hardware.
If they make the software easier to repair, by replacing the nonfree parts with free software, that would be a step forward in freedom as well.
The AFL-CIO praises Biden's nomination of Julie Su as Secretary of Labor. Her past career included championing enforcement of labor law against businesses that cheat workers (which many businesses try to do).
It sounds like she is just the person for the job. However, I am disappointed with the journalist who thought that the most newsworthy thing about her is her racial background.
*US justice department sues two companies over pollution in Louisiana's "Cancer Alley."*
At long last, an attempt to enforce the law against toxic pollution!
Sydney thugs admitted in court that their onerous bail conditions on Cherish Kuehlmann, accused of trespassing in a protest, were intended to prevent her from protesting again.
The magistrate rebuked them for the wrong of that idea.
*90% of ice around Antarctica has disappeared in less than a decade.*
UK thugs want the power to place criminal charges directly. With that power, they could do as US thugs to — charge witnesses with "obstruction" for making a video, and charge people being questioned with "resistance" for any delay or strange gesture.
Russia is refusing to cooperate with protection of the beaked redfish, which is being driven to extinction.
China built 100 new coal-fired electric plants in 2022.
(satire) *Supreme Court Questions Whether President Legally Allowed To Improve Americans’ Lives.*
A new PAC says it supports right-wing Democrats, and policies like what mainstream Republicans used to stand for in the 1980s.
It is funded by Jeffrey Yass, who also funded the right-wing takeover in Israel.
US fascists, where they get power, are moving to teach fascism in schools following a path that fascists have used in other countries. The persecution covers books, teachers, and curricula.
A half-baked policy proposal would fail to help US parents support their children, due various problems it does not address.
To be fair, Biden is looking for things he can do with an executive order, since Republicans block any bill that would give money to non-rich Americans.
Bolsonaro encouraged illegal mining in the Yanomami reserve. The miners destroy patches of the forest where they work, and poison the rivers and thus indirectly the Yanomami. Now the Brazilian government has gone back to work driving them out.
Lula says that Bolsonaro's plan was for mining to wipe out the Yanomami — that is, genocide.
Since the US cannot stop the importation of illegal drugs, we have to wonder whether Brazil can stop the extraction of various metals. It may not be quite as difficult, since there are other sources for those metals, which puts a limit on what anyone will pay for them. But indeed miners will keep coming back.
I suppose they are driven by poverty. Poverty results from (1) continuing population growth and (2) the dooH niboR economy. Lula is trying to change both of those; I hope he succeeds, but that sort of thing takes time.
US citizens: call on Sysco to stop using single-use plastic packaging.
If you don't run the Javascript code, the response in your browser may be invisible unless you disable the CSS in the page.
US citizens: call on Buttigieg to put people over rail and airline corporations.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Justice In Policing 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: phone your senators and urge them to oppose the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.
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 Biden to protect voting rights by executive order.
*China spends billions on pro-Russia disinformation, US special envoy says.*
Deportation thugs raided a factory in Tennessee and violently arrested any non-citizens who were working there. Those arrested sued and won, because the thugs had no order to arrest anyone.
It seems they exceeded their orders from sheer sadism.
The "Derail Act" would require the US to classify trains carrying vinyl chloride, or any other flammable gas or liquid, as "high-hazard flammable trains". They would be required to have to have modern brakes, and other precautions to avoid dangerous spills.
Republicans continue to work on a law to eliminate the requirement for environmental review of potentially dangerous products.
*Research reveals climate crisis is driving a rise in human-wildlife conflicts.*
Information about past changes in climate is now revolutionizing the study of history.
Rebecca Solnit: *Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like [the wrecker] and Putin.*
The article shows that the violence and lies of political authoritarians follow the same tactics as the violence and lies of abusive husbands.
Australia arrested a former US marine pilot whom the US has accused of training Chinese pilots, who faces an extradition hearing. While awaiting that hearing, he is being held in cruel conditions of isolation that call to mind the imprisonment of Julian Assange.
I don't understand how training Chinese pilots, if he did that, can be considered "arms trafficking" or "money laundering". Either that information is garbled, or it is some sort of newspeak. I also don't see how training them constitutes a crime. It behooves the US to explain.
It would be legitimate for the US, Australia and other countries to prohibit their ex-pilots from training Chinese pilots, but it is unconstitutional in the US to make that an ex-post-facto law.
A Colorado sheriff's deputy was given a medal for shooting and killing Richard Ward, who had done nothing harmful or threatening to anyone.
Perhaps it was a medal for creativity in imagining an excuse for killing.
*India enjoyed a free and vibrant media. Narendra Modi's brazen attacks are a catastrophe.*
The article lists a long series of persecutions of journalists on absurd charges.
US society and government policies undermine public schools; then people put all the blame for the bad results on the teachers.
Forgiveness of loans enabled Germany to recover economically after World War II. Now other countries need the same help.
Rebecca Solnit: *Fossil fuels kill more people than Covid. Why are we so blind to the harms of oil and gas?*
WHO's estimate of the number of deaths from Covid is surely far too low, since many countries such as India did not try to count them all. Nonetheless, I expect her statement is still true.
Texas prisoners started a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement lasting years, sometimes even decades.
The pretext for this is anything the authorities take to be a sign of association with a gang, as in California.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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!
*"Crafting an illusion": US rail firms' multimillion-dollar PR push.* The goal of the PR is to convince officials that it's good for railroads to shift to smaller crews and that safety improvements are not needed.
The UK's cancellation of citizenship as a punishment for crimes is an injustice. Doing it without even a trial to determine guilt for those crimes is flat-out contempt for justice.
In some cases, this has the added consequence of making the condemned-in-advance person stateless as well. This extra affliction and extra injustice must not distract us from the broader injustice of cancellation of citizenship. That is the heart of the matter; that is what the UK must change.
Mexico is considering a change in its policy towards asylum seekers so that they will get hit by Biden's proposed new restrictions.
Norfolk Southern's system to detect bearings in the process of failing was set to too high a threshold, so it didn't warn the crew of the train until it was about to derail.
One could suggest that the government require railroads to generate these warnings at a lower threshold, but the company has a response for that: the other major US railroads are even worse.
The article talks about a possible improved detector that would detect such problems at an earlier stage. Perhaps that should be adopted, once it is ready for use. But we should require safe practices now, and we should not accept the possibility of a technical advance as an excuse not to do so.
Libraries in Texas cannot allow children and teenagers under 15 years old to enter without someone older. And they threaten to call the thugs.
The US is making visas for touring UK musicians much harder to get. Most of the musicians can't afford it.
DeMentis's law that sets up a special state-controlled "local government" over Disney World has taken effect.
At its most basic level, that law does the right thing. A company should not have the powers of a local government. Disney used its economic clout to squeeze that concession from the state, and now that has been undone. However, normally a local government is democratic. The officials of this "local government" seem to be chosen by the state.
I don't believe that DeMentis seriously believes the state must not "treat all the other theme parks differently." On the contrary, what he wants is arbitrary power to treat them differently, power that he can use to bully each one for his own political purposes.
New South Wales (a state in Australia) is planning carbon bombs that would emit 1.5bn metric tons of CO2.
Infrared lights attached to a hoodie can reportedly defeat infrared cameras used for tracking people on the street at night, so that they can't follow the person that wears the hoodie.
Tracking people's movements threatens human rights, so it is good to thwart tracking and surveillance cameras; it would be even better to prohibit them. By contrast, security cameras, which record their images locally in case a crime occurs there but do not allow remote examination, are acceptable because they do not make it feasible to track all the non-criminals.
We should require all cameras that watch public places to be the record-locally security camera type.
US agencies disagree about whether they believe that SARS-CoV-2 spread from animals or leaked from a lab.
I don't think it makes much difference.
It is agreed that deadly viruses can spread from animals; we should take stricter precautions to ensure that does not happen.
Since it is agreed that deadly viruses can leak from labs doing research on them, then we should take stricter precautions to ensure that does not happen.
Which of the two happened this time changes nothing.
Republicans continue feverishly proposing bills to hamper voting or rig elections.
DeMentis's latest bill to impose right-wing ideology on Florida's public universities not only prohibits teaching certain subjects, it also eliminates tenure and will allow fascist state-controlled boards to fire any professor for political reasons at any time.
The owner of Faux News admitted in court that he told presenters to endorse the bullshitter's lies claiming the Democrats stole the election.
This is likely to enable Dominion, a company that makes voting machines, to win its libel suit and collect enormous damages. Whether Faux News could continue to operate after that, I can't determine. Maybe Dominion will end up owning Faux News.
Jewish organizations in the US condemned the pogrom carried out by the fanatical Israeli racists that now control Israel's government.
In Israel, B'tselem said that the state and the army supported the pogrom, as they have done before. "The [fanatics] carry out the attack, the military secures it, the politicians back it," the group said. "It's a synergy."
*[Senator] Scott seeks to impose highly divisive and unpopular social, economic, and fiscal policies that would attack the basic human and constitutional rights along with the well-being of millions of U.S. residents.* The Republican Party agrees with him.
Our next rally for Julian Assange is Saturday, March 4 at 11:30 to 12:30pm. We will gather at Park St. Station on the Boston Common to speak out for Assange and gather signatures on our petition to our senators.
US citizens: call on Biden to invite Ukrainian civil society to the next steering committee meeting.
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 Biden not to pull out of the New START arms limitation treaty, even though Putin has "suspended" it.
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 Standard Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation not to finance the East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
US citizens: call on your U.S. senators to save the bees from neonicotinoids.
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!
National Public Radio runs mostly on funds from corporations rather than public funds. Lately corporations have preferred to put their money into stock buybacks, so they are donating less and buying less advertising, which is causing big cutbacks at NPR.
The New York Times published an "opinion" article that attacks masks by misrepresenting the conclusions of a medical study. Apparently the Times skipped the fact-checking on that article.
Putin put children and teenagers from Mariupol on TV so they could thank a Putin forces soldier for "rescuing them" … from the devastating shelling by the Putin forces.
They didn't put 2 and 2 together in the TV presentation, and didn't mention the relatives that were killed by the Putin forces in Mariupol.
It is possible that they were speaking honesty when on TV — that they had been taught to forget how their "saviors" intentionally caused the danger they were "saved" from.
Putin's disinformationists persistently misrepresent the situation. I expect that some will refer to the "gratitude" of Ukrainians "saved" from Mariupol, citing this TV program as "proof".
(satire) *[The US] Installs 2,000-Mile-Long Privacy Curtain After Mexico Sees It Naked.*
A pro football player saved money by living in his workplace. I'm not the only one.
A proposed constitutional amendment would reverse the Corporations United decision that allowed corporations to donate ad lib to political campaigns.
I hope to see a fuller description so I can see how this compares to the amendments previously proposed.
Several Democratic states have sued the FDA demanding an end to the restrictions on buying mifepristone.
I basically agree, but all depends on the bizarre Republican lawsuit that they filed before a judge who is a trumpet, in a state in the 5th circuit which is full of biased right-wing judges too. The suit offers that judge a chance to try to ban mifepristone nationwide, To fix this could require massive civil disobedience.
Bernie Sanders condemns the US economic system of extreme capitalism as little better than indentured servitude, saying that many US workers can hardly considered to have any freedom except to choose a different master.
*Covid disinformation prompts Royal Society to consider ways of countering forgeries and falsehoods [in science].*
Roald Dahl threatened those who would "correct" his writing after his death with attack by the "Enormous Crocodile".
Jimmy Carter wrote about the injustice of Israeli apartheid in 2006, when Americans were hardly used to the idea.
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