Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
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Urgent note to US citizens
It is vitally important that we elect Harris and Walz. And that we elect Democrats to the House and Senate. Please vote, and vote for them.
Since Bernie Sanders and Franklin D Roosevelt are not running for president this year, we can't get the sort of president we really need. But we can elect a president who is good on many issues and won't make things worse on the others.
Winning Congress is crucial because we must not allow right-wing extremist Mike Johnson to remain Speaker of the House. In that position he could sabotage the election, and has made it clear he wants to. If we elect just a few more Democrats, he won't be speaker any more.
The US and other powers said that the killing of Yahya Sinwar would be an opportunity to end the fighting in Gaza.
However, Netanyahu is not ready to stop killing Palestinians.
I suppose that is because he will be out of the governing coalition and on trial for corruption if he ever stops.
Iran's religious terror agency has arrested the mother of a teenage protester who in 2022 was disappeared during a protest and later found dead.
Americans, if you don't want such state terrorism in the US, help defeat the Christian fanatics that are trying now to impose it.
If you are not an expert on how to so that, here is a way to try. Tell people you know, and strangers too: "Trump has no heart, but he does need a de-fib-relator." You can tell them verbally and textually.
If you say it verbally, I suggest learning to say "de-fib-relator" with emphasis on the first three syllables and small pauses between them.
*[Corrupter's] "roundtable" in Miami packed with pre-screened ultra-loyalist Latinos.*
Lies Within Lies — that is his motto.
*Meta's Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts.* That manager was formerly a government official in Israel.
(satire) *Report Finds Americans Need To Cut Emissions By 3% In Order To Tell Themselves They Did Their Best.*
(satire) *[The wrecker] Vows To Outlaw Electricity To Secure Powerful Amish Vote.*
(satire) *Both Campaigns Release Ads Showcasing Trump’s Most Racist Comments.*
The FAA is starting a general review of Boeing's safety culture.
If the wrecker were president, his government would have let the big corporation's executives judge for themselves what constitutes "safe enough".
As it is, they have to do what the FAA demands. But I expect they will contribute to industry groups that lobby to "cut red tape".
(satire) *Bret Baier Admits He Made Mistake Letting Kamala Harris Speak.*
(That refers to her interview on Faux News.)
*Halloween [in the UK] isn’t some frightful US import — its origins are Celtic.*
However, in most other countries it is indeed a frightful US import, part of the "spend all your money on celebrating now!" industry.
Swarthmore College is accusing students of "assaulting" people in campus by using megaphones to shout protest slogans, and threatens to expel them as a punishment.
The college administrators who allow such attacks to be made against freedom of speech have demonstrated their unfitness for the job, and ought to resign. Or, either than resigning, cancel the proceedings and join the side of freedom of speech.
Bayer did not remove glyphosate from its weedkillers as promised, but it did release new ones that are very toxic.
Global heating threatens to kill billions of people in this century. But the short-term-thinking people of Aberdeen look with terror measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels and see that 200,000 jobs in that field might disappear.
Then they exaggerate and say, "They are killing us", but it is only certain world-destroying jobs that would disappear. This wouldn't actually kill anyone.
If Britain makes its welfare system adequate, the disappearance of some jobs won't be a disaster for anyone. And it will help avoid a much bigger disaster for everyone.
If the wrecker takes the presidency and appoints Musk to a federal office, Musk would get an enormous tax break.
But that would be tiny compared to the profit he could get by bullying people into giving him almost anything he wants. He would not be president, but he would be emperor, having more power than any president ever had.
Lebanese fear Israel will now bomb their hospitals.
A Venezuelan opposition figure who was seized by state suppression forces on Wednesday turned up dead on Friday.
Sign in support of Harris's plan to have Medicare cover the cost of at-home help for people who medically need such help.
Claiming that the civil war in Sudan continues because each side is propped up by rich or powerful Arab countries.
Many Republicans have been downplaying the abortion issue while some states prepare a court case that could restrict distribution of mifepristone in the whole US.
It seems that the Putin forces recruit 20,000 soldiers per month, while suffering casualties at about the same rate.
They mostly recruit convicts and people from poor regions who join for the money. As a result, Russians in general don't feel upset about the high casualties. Russian generals don't care either.
Helen O’Sullivan was with Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi in an olive grove away from everyone else, when the latter was killed by a sniper's bullet.
Some of the people who know the bully best are calling him "fascist".
More "lifelong Republican" former aides [of the bully] denounce ex-president in letter.
*"Fascist", "conman", "predator", "cheat": what 11 former staffers of [the corrupter] say about him now.*
One of the "staffers" was not exactly a staffer. He was an elected official: Vice President Pence, who refused to betray the Constitution when the corrupter demanded it.
Ralph Nader advises the US Chamber of Commerce that the wrecker will be bad for its members. "Be careful what you wish for!"
Netflix abruptly disappeared nearly all the films in its "Palestinian Stories" collection.
This demonstrates a political aspect of the basic injustice of streaming as a way of distributing works of art and opinion: nobody is allowed to have a copy that is copyable, so the company can make the work nonexistent.
The streaming dis-services take DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) to the next level of injustice. Please join me in refusing to use them (I have never done so, not even once).
When the only copies that respect people's rights are unauthorized copies, insist on unauthorized copies!
*Israel's plan to ban Unrwa from accessing Gaza marks new low in its relations with UN
US only nation likely to be able to persuade Netanyahu to drop plan condemned by 123 member states.*
Republicans are *doing a really wonderful job of faking relationships* with individual supporters.
It always bothers me when an organization pretends that my support for it is a personal relationship rather than a political position. I don't make a fuss about it because that doesn't affect my support for the cause (whichever cause that might be). But since it feels manipulative, I would rather the organization didn't do that.
Musk is trying to destroy the Center for Countering Digital Hate for sharply criticizing the slant of ex-Twitter towards right-wing hate. His methods so far include (1) exaggeration and (2) trying to stretch the law (but failing so far).
Overall I think his aim is to intimidate people into surrendering to his encroachment on election law, as they would if he were emperor.
I am of two minds about on-line hate. On the one hand, that hate can whip up right-wing hate campaigns that undermine human rights generally. On the other hand, laws against expressing hatred as such are a form of censorship, and the laws can easily be redirected to suppress protests that the state does not like.
*Nobel prize winners endorse Harris and warn [the corrupter] would endanger future of science. … letter by 82 laureates … calls [the corrupter] a potential threat to progress on climate crisis.*
US citizens: Tell lawmakers, "I oppose all bills that weaken end-to-end encryption, infringe upon teenagers’ constitutional right to free speech on the internet, and enable censorship of valuable online resources for abortion seekers and LGBTQ+ communities."
The editor of the LA Times has resigned after the paper's owner forbade endorsing Harris for president.
Calling for US sanctions against the political sponsors of the Israelis who organize pogroms against Palestinians.
British "centrists" find excuse after excuse to weaken the measures that are supposed to move the UK away from fossil fuels.
Look in the article for where they leap from "We may need to move away from the gas tax someday" to "Let's ditch it now!"
A carbon tax ought to be programmed in advance to increase gradually year by year. That will encourage people to plan to reduce their consumption, even with plans that take years.
We don't know how much more global heating the system of circulation can stand before it changes drastically. By the time we know, it will be too late.
*Cop29 host Azerbaijan set for major fossil gas expansion (around 30%), report says.*
A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them.
Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place.
Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously.
World progress on reducing poverty until 2019 was concentrated in China. Since that year, we have made little progress anywhere, and little more progress is expected with the current system,
The corruptor has repeatedly expressed his contempt for workers.
I expected this. The corrupter and Putin are working together somehow, and this is a natural part of their mutual assistance.
*This Is Exactly How an Elon Musk-Funded PAC Is Microtargeting Muslims and Jews With Opposing Messages* — trying to stir up hatred between them.
That is typical right-wing tactics, to stir up spurious hostility so as to weaken people's resistance.
The president of the Philippines (a Marcos) and the vice president (a Duterete) were elected as a slate, but are now enemies, venting wild rage at each other.
"Health" department officials in Florida ordered TV stations not to show an advertisement to vote yes for the abortion access ballot question. A judge rebuked them, saying "It's the first amendment, stupid."
It ought to be shocking that people have elected as officials the sort of fanatics that would disregard the basis of our system of freedom and democracy.
Americans, it is up to us to stop them as they try to destroy it.
*[Palestinian] West Bank olive harvest met with rising Israeli violence, says UN.*
Haitians in Springfield have called for charges against the bullshitter for fomenting violence against them by telling lies.
Ralph Nader's statement about Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
US citizens: call on Google to remove the facial recognition feature from its doorbell cameras.
While at it, the company should eliminate unlimited network access to the images in the camera. Access to them should be limited to images from the past minute.
In Finland, global heating effects are damaging forests so much that they are no longer carbon sinks.
The wrecker threatened to "send the military" after "some very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics."
He won't be able to do that this year, but if he captures the presidency he or Vance will do it in 2028.
This is a wise idea, but why limit this protection to "young" teens? These "algorithms", more precisely described as recommendation engines, draw millions of people into disinformation which aids right-wing demagogues, plutocratist servants of big business and business associations, and enemies of your country (whichever country that is). We should protect everyone from these.
Another bomb, another atrocity: Israel's air force bombed a residential building in Gaza and killed at least 73 people in it.
South Korean intelligence reports that North Korean soldiers are training for combat in Russia, and that Russian ships transported them from North Korea to Russia.
The US should help Ukraine operated forces there to sink future transports. That will be far more efficient than fighting them on a front on land.
I'm looking for some basic information about Sam's Club. If you have ever bought anything there, you probably know the answers. If you'd like to have a brief email conversation, please send me email, at the gnu web site with address rms.
Bail funds are charities that raise bail for people accused of crimes who are offered bail but can't afford it. Bail bond companies and the insurance companies that serve them are trying to outlaw those funds, not overtly but sneakily by imposing regulations that would be nearly impossible to satisfy.
The regulation of toxic chemicals in the US is hamstrung by laws that enable companies to keep their use and their presence in any place secret.
The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health.
Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds.
But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public.
Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption.
Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret.
Labour is pandering to business owners and to China by canceling the plan to push for formal condemnation of China's repression of Uighurs.
The Israeli army has killed HAMAS leader Yahya Sinwar.
I forecast that his death will not change the military situation in Gaza. Normally the killing of leaders of underground military campaigns does not eliminate the campaigns, not if they have the popular support needed to recruit new fighters. They will appoint someone else as leader.
Killing Sinwar, personally, was completely justified given that he was at large and fighting. He launched the terrorist attacks of 7 Oct 2023. However, his personal deserts are a secondary issue, given what else was at stake.
The 42,000 (and perhaps tens of thousands more) killed in Gaza were mostly civilians and Israel's little-discriminate killing of them could not be excused by fighting HAMAS.
US cabinet ministers sent Netanyahu a letter demanding Israel reach specific targets in allowing more aid into Gaza, with a deadline, and suggesting that the US will enforce the Leahy law.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to insist that the US cannot help Israel attack Iran unless Congress votes to authorize it. And then to argue and vote against authorizing it.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
New York State prosecutors propose to charge big oil companies with reckless endangerment for knowingly taking a big risk of fueling devastating hurricanes, rains and fires.
I wonder what the penalty would be if they are convicted. What sort of penalty could be imposed that would help end global heating?
*US judge bars Alabama from purging thousands of voters before election.*
*More than half the world's food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review.*
Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates more than 100,000 have died already in Gaza as a consequence of Israel's bombardment and siege.
The bully plans to stretch use the old Alien Enemies Act to deport non-citizens immediately based on fabricated vague accusations.
Starmer Labour has pledged a "green revolution" based on spending 22 billion UKP on carbon capture plants, which have never worked effectively. This was the response to fossil fuel industry lobbying. Carbon capture may not be effective, but fossil fuel lobbying is quite effective with Labour.
It is certainly possible to spend that much money on building them, if you don't mind that they many not do much to reduce emissions.
Tesla's new driverless taxi
has the essential injustices of Uber
and Lyft,
because it surely will be tracked everywhere,Like all Tesla cars, and won't allow people to pay cash anonymously.
It will have one other drawback for society: little or none of the passenger's fare will go to provide support for workers without technical skills.
We should prohibit driverless taxis, and prohibit cars from reporting or recording where they have been. In addition, we should require all taxis to accept payment in cash with no penalty.
Starmer Labour is buying in fully to trickle-down.
* [Palestinian lawyer] Raji Sourani says west is "jeopardising something precious" by shielding Israel from legal consequences.*
That is a valid point. International humanitarian law reduces the world's barbarism, to the extent that it is followed. When countries such as the US enable their best friends to violate these laws, they debase the future conduct of countries in general.
A British court found that condemning Zionism is not antisemitic, and that it was culpable to fire a professor for such condemnation.
Ralph Nader suggests how the Democrats can win the election by miles — by defying the orders from business and doing things the non-rich want.
I voted for Nader for president. I wish he were running now.
*Retired US army general [Mark Milley] fears unusual action of being recalled to uniform for retribution, [Bob Woodward] writes*
General Milley tried to restrain the fascist from repressive actions.
Other retired generals who were loyal to their country instead of the fascist are likewise in danger.
I wonder where they can go to be safe. Most countries that are strongly hostile to the US are repressive themselves. A person who supports the freedom that the US stands for would not be comfortable in them.
If the US becomes as repressive as its main adversaries, there will be little safety for dissidents anywhere.
The corrupter often changes his stance dramatically from one day to the next. But he is consistent about his support for Putin.
Either Putin is giving him crucial support for his efforts to take over the US, or have such dirt on him that he wouldn't risk disappointing Putin.
But if the corrupter gets to suppress dissent in the US as he is aiming to, perhaps Putin's kompromat won't be effectively usable any more. Totally loyal trumpets just won't believe it.
*Biden administration proposes rules to ban Chinese-made cars over spying fears. *
They surely do spy, and we should not tolerate that. But this threat is not limited to cars made by Chinese companies. What about all the non-Chinese-made cars that are known to snoop on their users? Shouldn't they be banned, too?
Instead of banning those cars, we could require them to give users some control. We could enable users to get rid of the snooping by requiring cars to ask for the driver's permission before recording and/or transmitting any information about their drivers and passengers, including their identifies and their actions.
Or we could require all software delivered in cars to be free software so that users could change it. If you're allowed to work on your car's brakes, why not its software too?
Michael Kovrig, held hostage by China for the release of accused criminal Meng Wanzhou, was kept in solitary confinement for 6 months in a cell where the light was always on. And interrogated for up to 9 hours a day, every day. This is a form of torture.
I have no opinion about whether the accusations against Meng Wanzhou were true, nor whether they were morally legitimate in principle. I don't know enough about that issue to have an opinion. But I am confident that the Chinese government did not care about those questions. It wanted hostages that Canada would feel a need to bring home.
I makes me sad to know that the United States holds some prisoners in similar conditions of torture. Julian Assange could expect to be held that way, if he had been sent to the US for trial. Indeed, his imprisonment in Britain was in conditions almost as bad as that, It is wrong no matter which country does it.
Violent crime in the US decreased substantially in 2023, including an 11% decrease in murders. Republicans pretend the rate is increasing. The real flaws of Democrats are due to being too right-wing, but the Republicans have trouble repeating those criticisms. So they have to make some up.
The muskrat is promoting global right-wing extremism and has appointed Italy's right-wing leader Meloni as the muskette.
I wonder how long before Putin is invited to join.
California is suing Exx-on for fraudulently telling the public that plastic was in general recyclable.
(Former administration officials say [the saboteur-in-chief] deliberately denied funds to states he deemed politically hostile.*
I recall reading about this at the time.
*Columbia Law School Told Professors to Call Campus Police on Student Protesters.*
The article identifies
The article suggests fertilizing plankton by dropping lots of dust in the ocean as a way to remove CO2. Would this really work? Would it be safe? I don't know.
Turkey is acting bizarrely to block an aid convoy that wants to sail for Gaza.
*US meteorologists face death threats as hurricane [conspiracy ideation] surges. Storms Helene and Milton have triggered rise of misinformation stoked by Trump and fellow Republicans.*
Israeli soldiers killed some of the journalists covering the forced migration of Palestinians from northern Gaza. Other journalists who witnessed this say the soldiers specifically targeted those they killed.
Israel has killed so many Palestinian journalists that it is hard to imagine that this was not systematically intentional.
The world hardly pays attention to the civil war in Sudan. I know why I say little about it.
In my political notes, I do not set out to report news, but rather to comment on the issues (political and moral) raised by the news. If there is a problem, what might be solutions.
The coverage of the civil war in Sudan, that I see, describes only the tactical developments. I can't draw any significant conclusions from that. Are these two sides merely factions fighting for power? Does either side stand for something — anything at all? Why is the fighting continuing? I don't know anything about that, so I have nothing to say, and I have no idea what might be a good outcome to help attain it.
The wrecker started one ebusiness after another, and drove most of them to failure. He damaged the US when he was president, but this time he has prepared to damage it a lot more.
A play about Ukrainian children seized and imprisoned by the Putin forces was written by a journalist based on interviews with some of them.
Putin's excuse for imprisoning Ukrainian children is to protect them from the danger of the war that Putin started by choice. This is a standard right-wing behavior pattern: creating a problem and insisting on prolonging it, and citing that as an excuse for repression.
China is punishing people for reading books about China that they had acquired outside China.
Xi does not want people to be exposed to other points of view at all.
Politicians that don't want to actually address society's big problems can make excuses by saying they are "complex", and negotiating with business about how to do it, and the businesses will ensure no progress in reducing greenhouse emissions is made.
How the Georgia rule of hand-counting ballots can introduce delays and possible confusion.
Delays in the counting from any county are likely to spark imaginary right-wing conspiracy theories. In fact, there is a conspiracy — the right-wing conspiracy that led to adopting this rule.
Pakistan's government arrested the leaders (and many other members) of the main political party, which was protesting the imprisonment of the former president, Imran Khan.
*The bully's supporters have threatened Deloitte with the loss of lucrative government contracts … because one of its employees leaked critical comments about his presidential performance made by his running mate JD Vance.
I don't care at all what happens to Deloitte, but the use of this sort of bullying to spread repression throughout society is repression.
*World Energy Outlook Exposes Governments’ Climate Action Shortfall.*
Every new oil or gas well, every new or enlarged coal mine, and every new fossil gas export terminal, increases the danger.
Israel is attacking the town of Jabalia in northern Gaza, full of civilians with nowhere else to go.
Israel claims to have killed 50 HAMAS fighters or more, while counting corpses found it had killed at least 350 people, of whom most are surely civilians. Israel claims that killing these civilians is excused by (1) intending that HAMAS fighters be the ones to die and (2) telling the civilians to evacuate and never mind whether they can.
Explaining the context and significance of Israeli army attacks on UN peacekeeping forces in the south of Lebanon.
*Canadian police accuse India of working with criminal network to kill dissidents.* Indian dissidents living in exile, that means.
The damage from disasters such as modern hurricanes cause financial repercussions through many areas of the economy. They can ruin insurance companies, banks, cities governments and states, as well as individuals and families.
If we don't organize managed retreat from places that it isn't sustainable to live in, we are likely to have an unmanaged retreat which will be even more painful.
Can the presidents of Brazil and Colombia, cooperating, succeed in saving the Amazon rain forest?
Rebecca Solnit: *Tech barons are forever predicting some amazing new technology to fix the climate crisis. Yet fixes already exist.*
The difficulties with the known solutions are mainly that some businesses and billionaires are lobbying tooth and nail to stop us from using them. *Proposing we go for some false or nonexistent solution has become an excuse constantly deployed as an excuse for not supporting the solutions we have.*
Exploring a sunken slave ship in which the slaves tried to revolt. They were defeated, locked in the hold, and later all died when the ship sank in a storm.
I don't think those slaves regretted their revolt just because it failed. Better to fight than go meekly to subjugation.
The International Energy tells us that sufficient progress in moving to renewable energy could make fossil fuels cheaper.
That is true, but the IEA does not seen to realize that that would be a deadly trap for society. The lower price would threaten to entice people to move back to, or continue using, fossil fuels and continue driving the world into climate mayhem.
The disadvantage of fossil fuels is not expense or scarcity. It is the harm they do by producing CO2. A suitable carbon tax could make sure these fuels continue becoming more expensive, so that humanity would continue to reduce its use of them.
Some Australian schools try to counter the influence of right-wing misogyny and male supremacist campaigns.
Right-wing politics is all about winning some groups' support by teaching them to scapegoat other groups. It looks like right wingers have concluded that women will oppose them regardless, so they will use women as scapegoats.
They don't really care about anyone who isn't rich. Whether you're a scapegoat, or being manipulated by teaching you to despise someone, either way you're being used.
Richard Stallman's talks in Peru, in Spanish, in October 2024.
Conferencias de Richard Stallman en el Perú, en español,
en el mes de octubre 2024.
Musk made ex-Twitter censor and then ban a journalist who published embarrassing leaked material that made Vance look bad.
Now we see what the muskrat means by "freedom of speech".
*Four Days in Gaza: Five Journalists Killed or Wounded.*
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which will prevent some abuses by private equity corporations.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*U.S. Journalist Jeremy Loffredo Released After Four Days in Israeli [Jail].*
He had been accused of "aiding the enemy" by republishing (or was it merely downloading) photos of sensitive places that had been published by news outlets already.
*If Israel’s theory is that reporters illegally share information with the enemy whenever the enemy reads the news, that could criminalize a whole lot of journalism. If Israel has proof that Loffredo did something more nefarious than that, it should say so, and be specific.*
Rich UK citizens threaten to fully move away from the UK if the UK requires them to pay taxes. Experience shows that few actually follow through on such threats.
I have an idea for how make it even less likely they will resist taxation: require them to renounce their UK citizenship in order to avoid being liable for UK taxes. Then make it a crime for a non-citizen to fund or support political campaigns in any fashion. With this policy, the UK won't necessarily get those millionaire jerks' taxes, but it will at least block them from buying elections.
Israeli military officers report that their commanders and elected officials had a negligently complacent attitude regarding the possibility of an attack by HAMAS in the year before HAMAS did attack.
US citizens: call on Federal Agencies: the fight against global heating should include strong consumer protections and access to fair and affordable green loans.
The petition fails to mention that online resource hubs must not require people to run JS code.
US citizens: call on Biden to secure a ceasefire and de-escalate the threat of regional war.
If you buy at Sam's Club, push back against plans to require all customers to be tracked trough snoop-phones.
I suggest several ways to push back:
That program deleted all your files.
How can people continue to live in fire-prone areas?
In China, there seems to be only one way to criticize the government which is not forbidden: by stock trading.
The US government responds to right-wing irrational attacks by taking special care to give no cash aid to victims who don't have papers to prove citizenship.
What does it actually take to evacuate during a weather crisis? For many Americans, it is far beyond their means.
Everyone: call on airlines to desist from surge pricing.
As average [wildlife] population falls reach 95% in some regions, experts call for urgent action but insist "nature can recover."*
A right-wing conspiracy theory claims that Hurricane Helene was brought about by a business plot, intended to eliminate obstacles for a lithium mine.
The inventors of that myth are, it seems, trying to demonize building batteries to facilitate decarbonization.
It is surprising how close the myth is to the truth. There was no conspiracy to cause Hurricane Helene -- nobody would know how to do that intentionally. But there is a conspiracy of fossil fuel interests to maximize global heating, and that did cause this hurricane to be so powerful and damaging. The existence of this conspiracy is well documented.
The difference between the truth and the myth is just enough for the latter to put the blame on the wrong side.
*Study confirms Hurricane Helene fueled by Big Oil’s emissions: Greenpeace calls for climate polluters to pay.*
A British official wants to abolish privacy in the UK just to make each motorist pay tax exactly in proportion to per driving.
The short-term solution for the shortfall in tax funds is simple: increase the tax rate on gasoline and diesel fuel. until the total revenue reaches the former level. That will speed the elimination of all fossil fuel vehicles.
In a few years, when those are mostly gone, that method will no longer solve the problem. At that point Britain could tax all electricity usage to get the money to pay for road maintenance. Or tax the rich in one way or another.
Armitt seems to treat as sacred the goal of measuring everyone's use of roads so as to compute precisely how much value each person gets from them. Such exactitude is an improvement in theory, but it is not crucial. We should not accept Orwellian surveillance just to make the tax perfectly fit the usage.
*MI5 chief: UK facing growing threat from Islamic State, Russia and Iran.*
The threat includes assassinations and terror attacks.
*Two of the [Philippines'] most powerful political families, the Dutertes and the Marcoses, are set for an epic struggle for power.*
I expect that one of them will seek support from China. It is the obvious thing to do, for anyone that would sacrifice his country to gain power over it.
* Foreign aid for fossil fuel projects quadrupled in a single year, … rising from $1.2bn in 2021 to $5.4bn in 2022.*
There should never be foreign aid to spend on increased planet roasting. No matter what pain is caused by a local scarcity of fossil fuel, it is not as bad as death for nearly everyone.
The UK will have a new agency whose staff will actively enforce penalties for violating workers' rights.
I've called for the US to do this. Stealing N dollars from your employee should be as serious a crime as stealing N dollars from a business, and enforced similarly.
*Croatian police accused of burning asylum seekers' phones and passports.*
Non-rich Americans who want to stop the elite from impoverishing them see little to support in "centrist" Democrats. Meanwhile, the wrecker falsely claims to oppose the elites even as he appears on stage with them.
Republicans want to make Social Security payments decrease in real value every year. They would do this by eliminating the cost of living adjustment Thus they would drive old people into penury.
Israel ordered the only children's hospital in North Gaza to evacuate, but there is no way to evacuate the children in intensive care, and no place to bring them to.
To attack that hospital would be an atrocity, but such atrocities have become normal for Israel.
To attack a hospital is generally a war crime. Th attack the one and only hospital is even worse.
*On Thursday, UN investigators accused Israel of deliberately targeting health facilities and killing and torturing medical personnel in Gaza.*
The mainstream media double standard: criticizing Harris any time she does not reply to a point, while letting the bullshitter duck all real issues all the time.
The US says that North Korean military engineers are deployed in Putin's war against Ukraine.
The ex-CEO of a company that sells carbon offsets has been charged with fraud for systematically exaggeration how much greenhouse emissions a project would avoid.
The idea of emissions offsets is full of loopholes. Most of the exaggeration is a matter of making high estimates; since there are no facts to compare with, it can't quite be called "fraud". But it does undermine the intended result.
*Fema chief warns ‘dangerous’ Trump falsehoods hampering Helene response.*
*Trump is falsely blaming Harris for high prices. His plans will cause huge inflation.*
I wonder if that is why Republicans are pushing to remove the cost-of-living adjustment from Social Security.
With that, and high inflation, US retirees will be squeezed between the two.
Walz stated support for eliminating the electoral college.
I am in favor of that, but what Harris and Walz most importantly need to call for is directing more of the nation's wealth generation to the non-rich, as it did in the 1950s.
Republicans seek to bully US colleges with threats unless they repress students' freedom of speech.
Whatever your position on the war in Gaza, if you love civil liberties you should fight those dangerous religious fanatics here in the US. Nov 5th is your opportunity.
*Record emissions, temperatures and population mean more scientists are looking into possibility of societal collapse, report says.*
I used to say that the best picture we have now of future climate disaster is the Hunger Games, but I am having doubts about that. In the Hunger Games, there is an organized society with a state. It can still make some high-tech products. It surely has a population in the hundreds of thousands.
A high tech society needs global resources, and that requires communications and shipping that will no longer exist. No one will be able to make an IC, let alone a computer.
Coal mines and gas wells in Australia seem to be underestimating their rate of methane leaks by as much as a factor of two.
The US government is considering breaking Google up into separate companies.
Would that do anything about the injustices of Google? Let's look at them:
I don't see how splitting up Google would correct these. Perhaps Google itself would not use the collected data as a base for advertising. Perhaps instead Google would sell the use of that data to various advertising companies. I don't think that would make that use of personal data acceptable and it would not help with the others.
*Endorsements from Republicans and CEOs won’t help Kamala Harris win.*
People who were Republicans in 2015, before the corrupter became that party's nominee, and who have not been sucked into his fantasy land, can be persuaded by these endorsements. It may cost the corrupter some votes. But they are not so numerous as as the Democrats who gave up on the party because Obama protected the rich from the 2009 financial crisis that was generated by those Republicans, rather than saving the poor and middle-class.
Some Indian states have passed laws to make it easy to boycott restaurants that employ any Muslims.
Clearly this is the work of Hinduismist party.
A museum in Britain that is supposed to be about science will present "stories" about the "afterlife" of dead animals on display.
The "stories" are constructed by bullshit generators,
and they teach religion and superstition under the rubric of science.
Starmer has surrendered to big business, and promises to "slash the red tape" that is meant to protect the public from a wide range of dangers.
A previous period of "slashing red tape" weakened the building code enforcement and permitted use of flammable materials in building tall buildings. It was not actually lawful, but builders knew they could get away with it, because the red tape as no longer there to stop them. Some of the buildings had fatal fires.
This shows what happens when a government says it will get the funds to solve pressing problems by encouraging "economic growth".
The bullshitter condemns trade with China, but he had his special bibles printed there.
(Those are the very expensive bibles he is going to sell to the state of Oklahoma.)
This in its own right is a minor issue, but it epitomizes his dishonesty.
Relatives call on the Dutch government to rehabilitate the conscientious objectors who refused to fight against the independence of Indonesia.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban carrying guns at polling places.
US universities are confused and conflicted about how to deal with strongly opinionated students and their disagreeing views.
Since Iran's missiles have shown they can hit Israel and do damage, further escalation by Israel could result in a long war of attrition
Oklahoma Republicans have found a clever way to corrupt the election: by buying bibles from the corrupter's campaign. The price will be over 3 million dollars.
They don't openly admit that the purchase has to be from his campaign, but they make that inevitable by specifying details that other printed bibles don't fit.
Government purchases coming directly or indirectly from electoral campaigns ought to be illegal.
Accusing the wrecker of restraining the FBI from thoroughly investigating the rape accusation against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court.
The head of the UK "energy industry" has been chosen as the new head of the "Climate Change Committee.
I know nothing more about her besides that point about her previous experience, but that one point is enough to make me suspect that the fox is now in charge of keeping us chickens safe.
*Project 2025 would "unequivocally" lead to more hurricane deaths, experts warn.*
An Australian official is moving to revoke the visa of a visiting Palestinian who said, speaking in an event this Oct 7, that it was the occasion for “considerable celebration” as the anniversary of HAMAS's hostage taking and killings. Now the Australian is considering revoking his visa on grounds that he advocated terrorism.
The official said, "But he did prove the point that many of us are making in the lead up to the rallies on Monday, which is that the only reason you would organize a pro-Palestinian protest on Monday, is if you thought it was worthy of celebration." This seems to be valid.
Both HAMAS and subsequently Israel were responding to terror attacks. Both had grounds for belligerence if it were in accord with international humanitarian law. Both entities' retaliations instead violated that law, committing atrocities.
I defend freedom of speech in a very firm way. I don't think anyone, whether citizen or visitor, should be prohibited to express those views, even though I strongly disagree with those views.
A Republican official, extreme right-wing by the standards of 2022, is now organizing the fight to defend some basic idea of truth and justice against the wave of trumpery.
The corrupter ordered the US to adopt a nearly no-op rule about poisonous lead and copper pipes. Now it has been replaced with a plan to eliminate nearly all lead in American's faucet water.
*Harris announces plan for Medicare to cover long-term care at home.*
This would be a big help for partially or completely disabled Americans, and not just those 65 years old or older.
*Utilities Only Planning Enough Clean Energy to Replace Half of Fossil Fuel Generation by 2035, New Sierra Club Report Finds.*
They still plan to build lots of gas-fired power plants. Using fossil gas causes more global heating than coal.
This demonstrates that existing laws, plus existing pressure from well-informed public opinion, are not sufficient to decarbonize rapidly.
A government can be far better than blatant plutocracy and still be weak in resisting plutocracy's destruction of the eco-sphere. Australia's Labor Party seems to be an example.
*NSW [(a state in Australia)] premier says police should be able to ban pro-Palestine protests because they are too expensive.*
This has been met with opposition.
Bravo for resisting this.
I agree that we should avoid the terms "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine" because those terms tend to push society into a dichotomous choice.
My wish is well-being, peace and freedom for both peoples.
Decades ago, large demonstrations were run by organizations, and the organizations appointed and trained Marshalls to keep the protest on the track of nonviolence. I am sure that practice greatly reduced the cost of policing, as well as the probability that the official thugs would go on a rampage against protesters.
That isn't 100% effective at preventing rampages,
but it surely helps.
*Demand for beef, soy, palm oil and nickel hindering efforts to halt demolition by 2030, global report finds.*
Robert Reich described how Bridgestone defeated the US government legal effort to compel Bridgestone keep its factory workers safe. Bridgestone responded by saying it would shut the factory rather than install the safety measures.
It announced that threat by making a false assertion: that it would be "uneconomical" to run the plant if it had safety measures. With the usual meaning of those words, that was not true: Bridgestone would have made a profit even with the safety measures installed. But it might have made less from that plant than from a hypothetical replacement plant somewhere else, without the safety measure.
To put an end to this sort of practice, we need laws that will prevent businesses from winning disputes in that way. Reich explains other changes that would have strengthened his hand.
Australia and East Timor were formerly very hostile, but now they are making joint plans to collaborate in planet roasting by extracting undersea fossil gas.
The world must hope that they can't come to agreement on the details.
Narges Mohammadi has been imprisoned in Iran since 3 years ago. A year ago she received Nobel peace prize, and the screws made her imprisonment harsher.
*An Oil Giant Railroads Its SCOTUS Connection To Gut Environmental Law.*
Engineers are proposing a system for every car to communicate constantly with every other nearby car, as well as with nearby pedestrians (does that mean, their snoop-phones?) and local non-mobile surveillance systems.
The result would be total surveillance of everyone.
It may be possible to design such a system such that it doesn't identify any car or any person. That could be safe as well as beneficial. But we cannot expect the manufacturers of today's "connected cars" to value their customers' privacy.
If I were going to buy a "connected" car such as are made today, I would choose a model that people know how to disconnect. I expect that each antenna needs to be either removed or covered with a Faraday cage such that it cannot receive or transmit.
The contract for holding the COP29 conference in Azerbaijan does not protect the human rights of the participants from Azerbaijan's repressive state.
It also does not protect the conference's goal from Azerbaijan's planet-roasting state. Planet-roasters, including fossil fuel companies, dominate this series of conferences so completely that they are not fit for the purpose any more.
*UN peacekeepers in Lebanon say Israel has fired on their bases deliberately.*
It did this in two different places at around the same time. In one, a drone reconnaissance seems to have been preparation for the attack. Meanwhile, a number of Israeli tanks drove up to a UN peacekeepers' position, apparently to threaten the peacekeepers into pulling out.
President Macron of France is seriously trying to press the US to cut off arms for Israel to use in Gaza.
I disagree with Macron on many issues, but it is good to see the president of a significant country taking this stand.
Fake testimonials on TikTok, purporting to be from unauthorized immigrants and made in their own languages, are designed to fool people back home to think they would be welcomed if they were smuggled into the US.
So it's not just minors that TikTok is likely to harm, and it isn't mainly a matter of being owned by a Chinese company.
Google is using artificial stupidity to generate false and misleading "images" for recognizing particular species of mushrooms.
I once had a friend who was learning to collect mushrooms, and I looked at his very long study book. For distinguishing species of mushrooms, including distinguishing edible ones from deadly ones, one needed to recognize subtle traits, and sometimes perform physical tests.
*US sues Visa for monopoly on debit-card use affecting "price of nearly everything".*
It may be true that this affects the price that most purchasers pay for most products. More generally, monopolistic behavior does great harm to society by giving big business too much power. Prosecuting is crucial and we need to make these laws stricter. But it may not affect the price of things I buy for cash — which is almost every product I buy.
The exceptions are when I ask a friend to order something for me, and later reimburse person. Person will normally use a payment card to order it, and the card's fee will be part of the amount I reimburse. But that does not happen often.
The reason I avoid paying with a card is not about that small fee. It is a negligible part of my spending, and not worth worrying about. The reason is privacy. I don't want the store to collect any personal data for their data bases.
If the employee who receives my money gets interested in free software or surveillance resistance, I don't mind telling person my name. I will even give her my pleasure card if that is useful. It is unlikely the employee would enter that data in the company's data base.
The demographic triumph in Israel of extreme right-wing Jews and religious fanatic Jews has made secularist and peace-minded Jews seek to move to other countries.
for years, some have been moving away, but now it has become a stream.
I suggested that secularist, non fanatical Jews should make common cause with Palestinians so as to outvote the fanatics.
I knew, of course, that that would be be difficult and unlikely, but it seemed at least thinkable. I am not sure it is even thinkable now.
Some of the cities devastated by Hurricane Helene will take years to rebuild. Some are too wrecked to even try.
Those who can try may face devastating storms every year, so they will never finish the job.
Perhaps it is necessary to adopt new construction methods, such as concrete supported on pillars talk enough to keep the building dry.
Saied, dictator of Tunisia, seems likely to "win" an unfair election with his critics and main opposing candidate in prison.
He was elected when the voters were unhappy with the Islamist ruling party and found in Saied the opposition that seemed to have a chance of winning. Some Americans voted for the corrupter in 2016 following similar reasoning. In both cases that was a disastrous mistake.
The lesson: never help elect an anti-democracy candidate or party, no matter what the flaws of the incumbent government.
Iran's big missile attack did little harm to civilians because it was carefully aimed at Israel's military facilities — and it did damage to them.
This might turn into a war of attrition.
* Tests show adding just 10% of waste to a wood burner indoors can double its particle pollution.*
Burning wood inside a house is quite dangerous even without this increment.
*More than £494bn subsidies a year are harmful to the climate, says report.*
I think that is the total of subsidies paid by many different countries.
Proposing a tax on visits by private jets and super yachts.
It could be a good idea, but there's no reason to limit it to private jets. Some years ago the EU decided to tax commercial flights as a kind of carbon tax. It was a good idea, but other countries did not join in and instead applied diplomatic pressure to make the EU cancel it.
Taxing solely the private jets could be a first step towards taxing them all.
California has apologized for its role in the system of slavery, and has adopted a new system to give black students better education.
I was surprised to learn, from the article above, that California before the Civil War had a law that supported slavery. That was a concrete reason for the apology.
Where laws discriminated against blacks, the governments that once enacted and enforced them ought to pay reparations to the descendants of those who were the victims of them. But we should reject the line of thought which imposes a sort of original sin on all whites.
A leader of a Yemeni faction that opposes the Houthis says that the US/UK attacks on the Houthis are totally ineffective at stopping the Houthis from attacking shipping — and instead give the Houthis an opportunity to boast that the US can't stop them from attacking shipping.
I wonder why the US can't stop them from attacking shipping. What kinds of targets has the US been attacking in Yemen? Is it trying to deny the Houthis the means to attack shipping, or is it only trying to cause "damage" that it supposed might make the Houthis stop attacking? If the latter, of course that was ineffective. If you think you're on a mission from "god", damage won't make you abandon a fight.
And how is it that ships can come and go in Houthi ports without being stopped and inspected for missiles and drones?
Has the US considered seizing the Houthi ports?
Elected sheriffs in the US tend to be right-wing white men, and tend to impose right-wing political views using the power of their office.
*Activists say they have proof [Tory] ministers tried to influence police over [protests against] Israeli arms firm [Elbit].*
Leaked documents show that Blinken lied when he stated, in an official report, that "we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
Veterans for Peace calls for him to be prosecuted. I'd be satisfied if the US government officially reversed that false statement and began applying the law to arms shipments to Israel.
Island countries in the Pacific are denouncing Australia for authorizing expansion of some existing coal mines. One leader accuses Australia of proceeding to drown them.
This is true in the deepest sense, but superficially an exaggeration.
Humanity is indeed carrying out the inundation of the atolls. Of their habitable land, nothing atoll will remain. Later, after global heating and ocean acidification have caused the extinction of coral (along with most mollusks and crustaceans), there will never be atolls again.
The exaggeration is that this is not specifically the fault of coal, nor specifically the fault of Australia. All fossil fuels contribute. and so does deforestation. Australia participates in bringing global disaster, but so do the US, China, Brazil, and many other countries.
It's inaccurate to put the blame on Australia alone. Every country that opens new mines or wells for fossil fuel is more or less to blame for this crime-in-progress. However, since Australia is one of the major perpetrators, and located in the Pacific, it is entirely legitimate for those victims-to-be to focus their ire there.
* Labour used “economically illiterate” analysis paid for by water companies in order to argue against the nationalisation [of the water companies] in England.*
I am not surprised by this — it is the sort of thing that Tory Lite would do.
*[The corrupters' former] advisers help to grow pro-Russia website that spreads misinformation.*
Julian Assange spoke to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
about how the US actions against him and others related to Wikileaks put freedom of the press globally in danger.
The Council of Europe
predates the European Union and has more countries as members.
Kenan Malik: *Too white? Too black? Too woke? Politics by labeling is a disease of our times.*
*There is, in fact, a long history of hate speech laws being used to criminalize minorities.*
The Madeira river basin, in the Amazon, is beset by wildfires — promoted by global heating and lit for the sake of deforestation.
The Israeli air raid that killed Nasrallah killed 90 other members of Hezbollah — probably many of them leaders.
It will not be easy to replace them with experienced new commanders.
There must still be hundreds of commanders who can order their units to keep firing missiles. That doesn't require cleverness, great authority, or special cleverness. For Hezbollah to change its course of action will be far more difficult. Especially difficult would be any reduction in the level of conflict. In effect, Hezbollah may now be too weak to be flexible.
*Scientists criticize UN agency’s failure to withdraw livestock emissions report,* which they criticized for understating the importance of reducing these emissions for avoiding climate disaster.
Robert Reich: *[The bullshitter] is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why.*
Basically, he theorizes that the bullshitter is attracting the major media from the issues of substance where Harris would have an advantage.
It would be true.
Arthur Schubarth of Montana was convicted of using tissue from large Asian Marco Polo sheep to make a clone and then a "giant" hybrid.
The judge seems to have said that the real crime was modifying breeds of animals, but that is done all the time. The article does not say that the project involved any genetic engineering (as distinct from ordinary breeding), but that is not a crime either.
Was this operation alleged to be harmful? If so, how? Are these sheep dangerous to people? Could they become feral and overgraze areas? I expect it would be easy to control their numbers by hunting, or wipe them out if necessary.
Maybe all that is irrelevant to the accusation — it could be simply that he did not have the required permits.
*Overcharged for substandard housing: untold story of Haitians in Springfield [Ohio].*
Putin's men poisoned the Seym river, which flows into Ukraine and merges into the Desna river. This has killed all the animals in the Desna as far as it has reached. Humans cannot drink the water or even swim in it. This is chemical warfare, banned by a treaty that Putin has visibly violated.
This may resolve an ancient philosophical quandary. It must be possible to step into the Seym river twice, but it may not be safe.
The UK may be planning to use massive surveillance on people who receive government support, then use artificial intelligence to heuristically raise suspicion of fraud or errors.
If this task is done "correctly" it will identify many cases that might involve fraud or error. To separate the real fraud or error from the misidentified cases would require further investigation by human beings. Then the whole system might work correctly.
But there will be a tendency to skip the expensive second step and presume that the computer's results are correct. When they are not, you may face a horrible runaround that could leave you homeless.
*US farms are forcing workers to buy inedible, expensive meals.*
Note that the workers described in the article are US-government-authorized migrants. Farms need workers, so US law arranges for Mexicans to come and work. The same law tries to protect them from exploitation, but the greedy bastards that own the farms never stop looking for loopholes in that protection.
Data analysis shows that a hurricane hitting the US generally causes 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths in the damaged regions over the following 15 years. This makes it an important cause of death in those regions.
The study looked at statistics for the US, but I see no reason this would not happen similarly in the rest of the world.
This method of analysis does not give information about the chains of events that lead to these subsequent deaths. The researchers speculate that the causes might include "fallout from resulting economic and job losses after storms, suddenly overstretched local government budgets that under fund [medical] providers, the release of environmental toxins as storms hit industrialized areas and the unhealthy impact of stress upon those who have to endure hurricanes."
These effects happen even where there is no hurricane, but a hurricane makes them happen to more people. If we organize better social responses to these problems after a hurricane, and they prevent some of the delayed deaths, the same responses could help the people who suffer these problems due to non-hurricane causes.
It looks like poverty plays a role in causing these deaths; it makes people more vulnerable to whatever goes wrong. Indeed, poverty generally correlates with lower life expectancy.
If the US economic system were not based on dooH niboR, hurricane-caused delayed deaths would be fewer. However, even as global heating has been making hurricanes more powerful, and thus likely to kill more, plutocratist economic policies and laws have been increasing poverty, which likewise tends to kill more.
Why lawsuits for defamation are not adequate to protect society from harmful disinformation.
Biden adopted the bully's policy to block people from asking the US for asylum at the border with Mexico. In practice, almost no one can do that any more, but Biden wants to look even "tougher", so he has announced a stricter theoretical criterion for maybe someday allowing asylum requests to be taken again.
People who have been oppressed at home are entitled to political asylum. The US is unable to respond promptly to all the requests because its capacity to judge them is insufficient. The remedy for this is to train and hire more judges so it can respond reasonably fast with "yes" or "no". Then it could allow applicants to stay in the US for the short time it will take to judge their requests.
Asheville, North Carolina, is far away from the coast, and people called it a refuge from the danger of climate disaster.
Alas, Hurricane Helene was so powerful that it reached Asheville and its rain flooded parts of the city. I suppose that the flooding had to do with the major rivers that meet there.
Fast, heavy rain can cause flooding in all sorts of places, and it takes an engineering study to determine where that will happen. The engineering works to prevent flooding generally are adequate up to some postulated level of rain a heavier rain than that would still cause floods.
Geography can make refuges for some global heating effects, but some are not so limited. For instance, global heating effects are messing up agriculture. If (or when) there is a national or global shortage of food because of ruined harvests, you won't be able to escape that just by choosing the right neighborhood to live in.
*U.S. Media's Doublespeak: Israelis Live in "Densely Populated Areas," Palestinians Are "Human Shields".*
Microsoft and a utility company want to make a deal to restart an old nuclear power plant, to power LLMs (bullshit generators, which it likes to call "artificial intelligence") which it will use to enshittify its search engine and other "services".
That plan includes a contingent gift from the US government. Worse, a nuclear power plant's cost tends to increase enormously. If that happens, they would ask the US government for more money and use the "sunk costs" fallacy to manipulate the government into granting that request,
The government should respond, "Ask Microsoft to guarantee this loan".
But since enshittification harms the public, the ideal course of action is to prevent it from happening.
Netanyahu is talking about how to "retaliate" for Iran's attack with many ballistic missiles that caused almost no damage.
It makes no sense to "retaliate" for an attack that did almost no damage. If you want peace, the useful strategy is to refrain from responding and hope that opens a path to de-escalation.
I therefore suspect that Netanyahu is seeking an excuse for more escalation.
A proposal to entirely disconnect assisted suicide from the medical system and medical practitioners.
I think it is a reasonable idea. The criterion of a terminal illness has always seemed arbitrary to me. Intractable pain clearly should be considered a valid reason.
However, that is not the only situation which is a good reason for suicide. If I were sliding into dementia, and the most I could hope ever to achieve by living was to have occasional moments when I could be aware of what was happening, I would want to give an order to dispense with my body's life when I myself (my mind) was fully dead.
*JD Vance's debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense.*
This is the most deeply dangerous thing about the wrecker/Rants team: they have developed s way of forming their public discourse out of pure bullshit, treating real issues with contempts.
This is what makes them enemies of democracy in the US.
The most significant real point Rants made was the one he made by refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election. They and their followers talk like gangsters (at least fictional ones), making statements to threaten us, veiled with a pretense that we're supposed to see through but gives them deniability.
Global heating is speeding plants in Antarctica.
Californians will vote on whether to abolish the practice of forcing prisoners to work.
That practice is bad for people outside prison, as the state collects a low wage for the prisoners' labor. If not for that, people would do those jobs by choice and get a fair wage.
The European Union's highest court ruled that any Afghan woman is entitled to asylum.
This seems valid to me — and I expect the same arguments apply for various other countries.
When societies become more distrustful in general, that can be exploited by politicians by promoting belligerence, and arms companies will fund them to do so.
*William Barber [co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign] Says Presidential Debates "Failing" the Poor.*
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important — and I label them like this.
This article is important because the Poor People's Campaign deserves people's attention.
US citizens: call on CNN to apologize to Rep. Rashida Tlaib for falsely claiming she had attacked the Michigan Attorney General for bring Jewish.
In fact, Rep. Tlaib reproached her for arresting peaceful protesters.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass Sanders's resolution to block weapons sales to Israel.
When Sanders was young, he went to Israel and lived in a kibbutz. That he now advocates refusing to arm Israel is proof of how clear the case is for that policy.
US citizens: call on NYC Mayor Adams to stop trying to force retirees onto Medicare "Advantage" plans.
These insurance plans are convenient for people who are basically well, but can get incredibly expensive for people who are sicker. When that happens they are far more expensive than basic Medicare.
US citizens: call on Michigan Attorney General Nessel: Drop charges against campus protesters.
US citizens: call on Congress to tax Elon Musk before he becomes a trillionaire.
If the wrecker grabs the presidency, he will twist laws to help Musk become a multi-trillionaire by the end of the wrecker's fourth term in office.
US citizens: call on Georgia officials to sue to stop MAGA election interference.
US citizens: call for abolition of the death penalty.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to abolish the filibuster to restore reproductive rights.
US citizens: call on DoorDash, Google, Walmart, CVS, and other major corporations to stop funding Mark Robinson's Nazi-excusing and queer-hating campaign for governor of North Carolina.
US citizens: Support the USDA's proposed regulations to limit the amounts of added sugar in foods included in school meals.
US citizens: call on Comcast to stop funding anti-abortion campaigns.
US citizens: call on Networks, Media, and Press to stop "sane-washing" the corrupter.
In the US: call on CNN and Josh Kraushaar to issue a retraction to correct their false reporting on Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
US citizens: call on the Pentagon to stop funding Elon Musk's anti-democracy power grab.
US citizens: call on the DOJ to investigate Texas Republicans' voter purge.
*US public sector workers' retirement savings invested in [fossil fuel] projects that pump out a billion tonnes of emissions a year.*
Climate scientists called for cancellation of British plans for large-scale generation of hydrogen gas from fossil fuel, with hypothetical carbon capture to catch some of the CO2 that would produce. Even if the carbon capture works (it has never been made to work enough to be advantageous), this would still emit lots of greenhouse gas.
"Blue hydrogen" is supposed to sound similar to "green hydrogen", but in terms of carbon footprint the two are very different. "Green hydrogen" is hydrogen made by electrolysis of water, using electricity generated renew-ably. That would be a low-carbon fuel. But "blue hydrogen" is hydrogen made by burning fossil fuel, and its production emits CO2.
Alas, Labour just reaffirmed its decision "invest" around 30 billion dollars in carbon capture and continuing greenhouse gas emissions.
*[Louisiana] officials class mifepristone and misoprostol as "controlled substances" — which medics say could imperil women's lives if they have hemorrhage.
I think the aim is to confiscate supplies of these pills and perhaps arrest people for carrying them into Louisiana. People do this to help women have abortions, in states where that is prohibited.
The right-wing Swedish government is trying to make begging a crime.
i understand that it is unpleasant to be asked for money by a beggar. But that is no justification for taking out your displeasure on people who are in a much worse situation. That bespeaks a cruel and callous attitude.
I do dislike beggars who try to pressure me. For the first, I learned the firmness to say no. It is very important to have that firmness. I think it helped me develop the capacity to say no to worse things, such as pressure to use nonfree software.
As for beggars that lie about their situations. I found a way to offer help to those who are honest but not to those who are lying.
How Vienna's flood defenses effectively limited damage from a storm that caused disasters in other cities.
Animations show what floods predicted for the year 2100 would look like on towns of today.
(satire) *Vatican Dispatches Micro-Missionaries On First-Ever Trip To Convert Native Bacteria.*
Denouncing the concept of "resilience" as a public performance that people in misery owe to everyone else as inspiration.
This reminds me of what it felt like in my worst years of rejection, in the 1980s. I would go for months or years without any romantic possibility, without enough of a beginning that I could learn from it. Often I would cry, berating myself as unlovable. Then I would get out of bed and walk over to the terminal. If love was out of reach, I would at least get something useful done.
If you can get yourself out of bed and into doing some good, and it takes your mind off the pain, that's resilience, I guess.
The musk-rat has spent tens of millions of dollars on right-wing ads, including hate ads, and started by 2022.
*New Study Confirms LNG is Worse for Climate Than Coal.*
Coal is worse an another way: it produces a lot of local toxic pollution, as well as radioactive fallout (uranium).
So it is important to stop burning coal — but not by replacing it with other fossil fuels.
A number of "Libertarian" local government candidates have been elected in Australia. They have campaigned on opposition to two very different ideas: "smart cities" and 15-minute neighborhoods.
The idea that governments want to block people from traveling more than 15 minutes away from home is absurd. There is no possible rational motive for such a goal, and no one who wants it. In Britain the idea of "15-minute neighborhoods" is that the services and businesses people usually need should be available within 15 minutes travel from every home.
That is a convenience, not a restriction, and I am in favor of it. Some countries have implemented that policy and people like it.
That goal has nothing to do with "smart cities", but those really can be dangerous. They tend to involve systems that (if we don't compel states to design them for privacy) will track people's movements, communications, and activities. That is what China uses for its pervasive repression scheme, "social credit".
I don't think any western country would use snoop cities to stop people from traveling to places 20 minutes away from home. Why would they want that? But many western countries might use these snoop-city systems to punish dissidents — such as those who protest against fossil fuel plans that would eventually destroy civilization and kill most people.
Alas, such tracking systems are not just hypothetical. They are called "mobile phones" and "payment cards". That is why I refuse to have a mobile phone, and don't use payment cards except for emergencies. You can join me in resisting them.
Looking at a real painting activates the brain far more than looking at a poster of the same image.
One of the problems that tend to result from the policy that help for the non-rich can be funded only from "economic growth" is that it gives plutocrats an all-purpose argument against any measures that impede their exploitation of workers: "That will mean less growth!"
We should reject the trickle-down economy, by saying we believe in transfer some of the rich people's ever-increasing riches to the rest of society. They have been increasing their share for decades
It is high time to re-balance that.
Wildfires, a consequence of global heating. Are also accelerating global heating.
This is one example of the potential positive feedbacks that, it was clear long ago, might prevent us from escaping from disaster even if we started to really try.
The UK will hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This will allow the exiled Chagosians (many of whom live in Mauritius) to return to the Chagos Islands.
US citizens: call on Biden to de-escalate the Israel-Hezbollah war.
A study comparing psilocybin with a prescription antidepressant found that the psilocybin was equally or more effective. It even tended to lead to other improvements.
A study compared ten wealthy countries' medical systems. The US system provided the worst medical care and charged twice as much for it.
The other nine countries do better because they have national medical systems. The US needs one of those. The US private-centered system is likely to eventually kill you by pushing you into bankruptcy.
For the billionaires, the function of the lunatic right wing (the bullshitter/corrupter and his supporters) is to make it difficult to challenge plutocratist Democrats from the left. Biden has moved partly in the progressive directions, and Harris is likely to continue that path, but what we really need is a Sanders.
*Gaza publishes identities of 34,344 Palestinians killed in war with Israel.*
The usual count of deaths includes 7,613 more -- corpses which have not been identified.
Democratic senators and Bernie Sanders shamed big US corporations that pay their CEOs more than they pay in federal taxes.
They are AIG, Agilent Tech, Alliant Energy, Ameren, American Electrical Power, AmerisourceBergen, Atmos Energy, CMS Energy, DISH, DTE Energy, Darden, Dominion, Duke Energy, Entergy, Evergy, First Energy, Kinder Morgan, Match Group, MetLife, NRG Energy, NextEra, Oneok, PPL, Principal Financial, Salesforce, Sempra Energy, T-Mobile, Tesla, U.S. Steel, UGI, Voya Financial, Williams, and Xcel Energy.
Australia's government approved expansion of three existing coal mines.
It is not as much of a planet roaster as the right-wing government it replaced, but (like most countries) it fails to recognize the desperate urgency of decarbonization.
California is considering *the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, which would require producers of apparel, towels, bedding and upholstery to implement and fund a statewide reuse, repair and recycling program for their products.*
It may be difficult to design clothing to be recyclable -- and clothing that people have actually worn out (as I often do) are difficult to reuse or repair. But if this law is done right, it could pressure the companies that "produce" clothing to head in that direction.
I wonder how the bill deals with outsourcing of clothing production. To try to enforce this law on the companies in poor countries which really make the clothing would be ineffective.
One effect of global heating is that rapidly increasing costs of no-longer-natural disasters are undermining the foundations of the system of insurance for buildings and property. A single mega disaster can collapse all levels.
This will tend to expose everyone to unpredictable risk of being wiped out financially as well as physically.
Is it possible to develop building methods that are proof against the strongest hurricanes? The first step would be to cease building in coastal areas that could be inundated, but that won't be enough; even buildings at a sufficient altitude can be wrecked by floods, fire, wind and flying trees or bricks.
Building storm shutters over all windows might help with the unforeseen flying objects. Building on stilts could help with the floors. Could suitable choices of building materials and keeping large plants away help with the fires?
A report argues that *policymakers could tip the world into a series of "positive tipping points", accelerating the switch from fossil fuels to clean energy sources, by simply introducing mandates requiring key sectors to make the change.*
The report claims that taxing emissions is not a strong enough pressures, and directly requiring certain specific activities to decarbonize would be more effective.
*Harris calls for end to Senate filibuster to restore US abortion rights.*
When the wrecker was president, Republicans abolished the filibuster rule for appointing judges.
That enabled them to pack the courts with right-wing extremists, including the extreme court.
So it is no use for Democrats to keep the filibuster rule in place in the hope that Republicans will consider it too sacred to touch.
If the Democrats control Congress next year, any measure to fix the Supreme Court or undo damage they have done will surely be blocked by a Republican filibuster unless Democrats abolish it.
Global heating is causing fast heavy rainfall all around the world. The most recent instance was in eastern Europe.
The speed of the rainfall tends to cause local mini-disasters by flooding places that had never been flooded before.
*Experts Unsurprised at Intensity of Extreme Weather But Say Damage Wreaked Shows How Unprepared World Is.*
This flooding is one of several kinds of local disasters that global heating is increasing. Together they imperil the system of home insurance.
The problem shows up in the fact that many people can't get insurance again disasters that destroy Their homes, but insurance is not the fundamental cause of this problem. Rather, it is the seam at which the overstuffed bag splits open. If rebuilding our houses as fast as they are now being destroyed is unsustainable for society, insurance as such can't alter that. Either we make the rebuilding sustainable for society or we will end up without houses.
In the long term, curbing global heating needs to be part of making rebuilding sustainable in the future. <,p>
Marieha Hussain was charged with a crime for calling some Tory ministers "coconuts".
Ms Hussain is right that the thug department should make up for the harm it did to her with this evidently unjust charge. Criticizing politicians by calling them "coconuts" must not be a crime.
That criticism is, however, an example of a morally misguided assumption: that people of a certain demographic group have an obligation to hold certain political views, and are somehow betraying that group if they do not.
People are members of demographic groups, but thoughts are not. No one has an obligation to hold the views of the group perse was descended from.
The Tories Richi Sunak and Suella Braverman are very wrong to stand for plutocratist and repressive policies, and they are responsible for personally (as ministers of state) helping to impose those views on Britain. But that has nothing to do with their ethnicity. Those views are wrong no matter who holds them.
An additional reason to reject the "coconuts" approach of criticing people's views as "betrayal of their demographic group" is that it tends to legitimize those views for people of other groups.
NYC's night-mayor Adams has been indicted for taking bribes and foreign campaign contributions.
Here is more of suspicions about him.
This reminds me of what Pseudolus said about being insensitive to physical pain. "I am going to crack down on crime … Not my own!"
*Mexico’s ‘anti-monuments’ force country to remember its [tens of thousands of people who are] missing.*
The world's countries pledged to reduce the death rate due to antibiotic resistance by 10% by 2030.
There is a way to slow the increase in antibiotic resistance: end the mass use of antibiotics in livestock.
What makes this difficult to do in practice is that massive use of antibiotics in livestock is what makes factory farms profitable, so their owners lobby hard against it. Will this pledge help overcome the lobbying?
Most people in wealthy countries endanger their health by eating too much meat. Discouraging that practice could help slow the increase in antibiotic resistance, but that too faces a powerful lobby.
To achieve more than that will require advances in medicine. But in order for them to do the good we would hope for, we must keep them safe from patents. If the US government subsidizes the research, it could keep them un-patented in the US.
Could it prevent US companies from patenting them in other countries? Maybe that requires in world patent treaties — which ought to be made anyway.
That research is a very important project to subsidize. Secondary to curbing global heating, because if climate disaster destroys civilization I expect humanity will completely lose 20th century technology including antibiotics.
7 to 15% of mothers regret that they had children.
*Pakistan says police orchestrated killing of doctor [Shah Nawaz] accused of blasphemy.*
This practice, which repeats frequently, shows how Pakistan is dominated by brutal, drooling religious fanaticism. This is of of the reasons to refuse to visit Pakistan, and why I have never gone there.
Typhoid fever is becoming a dangerous disease again as is bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics. People who catch it once again often die.
The same is in various stages of happening with other diseases.
*[Egyptian dissident] Alaa Abd el-Fattah is due to complete five-year sentence over social media post but family fear further charges.*
His relatives ask the British government to press Egypt to release him.
Harris has stated economic policies that focus on helping Americans become and remain middle class.
I am in favor of these plans, but I would put more emphasis on helping the poor, the people who have to survive on the lowest paid jobs or who are unable to work. To pay for this, we should tax the rich — not only to reverse the grab by rich they got so rich at the expense of everyone else, but to reduce the power that they get from their wealth.
Al Jazeeera: *By storming our Al Jazeera offices in Ramallah, Israel has stepped up its assault on press freedom.*
Delegates at Britain's Labour Party congress voted to call on the party to reverse what did in Parliament — cutting poor people's winter home heating subsidy.
Subsidizing fossil fuel use is, in general, a bad policy. But when it's a subsidy for poor people and is needed for them to stay alive and well, cutting it is dangerous and heartless. The safe way to reduce this subsidy is through helping the poor in other ways, not through harming them.
One way is to invest in insulating their homes so that they don't need as much artificial heating. Starmer keeps talking about "investment", so invest here.
The other way I know of is to increase welfare payments for the poor as a substitute for subsidizing their heating costs.
*Washington state to keep abortion pill stockpile in case [the wrecker grabs the presidency].*
A surveillance resister in India describes the gratuitous and purposeless ways in which Indians are pressured to submit to the national ID system Aadhar, and clever ways people are resisting.
His persistence in refusing to use Aadhar is inspiring, and he does win some victories.
Several countries are suing Afghanistan in the International Court of Justice for discrimination against women.
The case would seem to be so strong that the court must surely find against Afghanistan. But the Taliban will surely not obey any judgment, so why hold hearings to prove the obvious? It seems that the aim is to discourage other countries from recognizing the Taliban government.
The bully said that Ukraine should have surrendered immediately and let Putin seize part of Ukraine.
This is more evidence that the bully is a supporter of Putin.
If he seizes the US presidency, he may make the US an ally of Putin, or a vassal of Putin.
The wrecking crew want to deregulate medical insurance so that most Americans who are sick won't be able to afford it.
It is a mistake to think of medical care as "insurance" since that implies that each subscriber pays the amount perse is predicted probably to need spent on per. What we need is a national medical system that will be funded by taxing those with lots of money.
The company that publishes The Economist (magazine) has been secretly taking tobacco money to support events about medicine. When this became known, many organizations decided to refuse to participate.
This pressure has made the company commit to taking no further money from tobacco.
Side issue: the phrase "editorial content" causes me revulsion, like any use of "content" in that sense.
Some of the wrecker's campaign events are being wrecked by effects of global heating, and some of the attendees are becoming ill from them.
If Israel attacks Hezbollah on the ground, it is likely to have trouble seizing all the territory it seeks to occupy. Hezbollah succeeded in resisting Israel's invasion in 2006, and is likely to have even better fortifications now.
In Gaza, Israeli units can occupy any piece of ground but can't wipe out HAMAS in its tunnels. Hezbollah's tunnels are designed for fighting from, not only for hiding in, so Israel can't expect to have control of the surface as it does in Gaza.
I think this threat represents Netanyahu's scheme to stay in power by unceasing escalation.
It is impossible to negotiate with Netanyahu, because he does not negotiate in good faith. When he agrees to a deal in private, he then rejects it in public.
The US should punish him for this by cutting off important kinds of military support to Israel until it negotiates a cease fire for Lebanon and Gaza, and accepts it, and carries it out. Or until Netanyahu is no longer in charge there.
*More than 3,600 chemicals approved for food contact in packaging, kitchenware or food processing equipment have been found in humans.*
Some of them are already suspected of being damaging.
KIA cars were built with a back door so that the company's server can locate them and take control of them.
The car's owner had access to these controls through the KIA server. That in itself is not objectionable. However, that KIA itself has such control is Orwellian, and ought to be illegal.
The icing on the Orwellian cake is that the server had a security fault which allowed absolutely anyone to activate those controls for any KIA car.
Many people will be outraged at that security bug, but that was presumably an accident. The fact that KIA had such control over cars after selling them to customers is what outrages me, and that must have been intentional on KIA's part.
*Green roofs and solar chimneys are here — experts say it’s time to use them.*
Governments in the US and elsewhere must take the lead here, to change building codes so as to press for new buildings to use various technologies that have been found to work. We also need funds to retrofit millions of old buildings.
The Putin regime is prosecuting reporters for "illegal immigration" for going with Ukrainian forces into the Kursk region to cover the war.
Ironically, this is the only way reporters can cover news in Russia without submitting to Putinite censorship.
Awareness of the approaching danger of climate mayhem is causing anxiety and despair among young adults in the UK, who see that the planet roasters have barricaded every door through which to prevent disaster they profit from increasing.
*Gifts to politicians are all about buying influence,* but Starmer persists in denying that.
*Declaring potential conflicts of interest does not eradicate them as conflicts of interest. For example, studies done on the efficacy of psychiatric medications and many influential medical papers list the benefits the authors received; it is not unusual to see whole pages devoted to their financial connections to pharmaceutical firms. That must cast some doubt on the validity of the studies.*
Israel is accused of depriving Palestinian workers of pay they are owed for work they have already done in Israel.
US Department of Justice sues Alabama for purging people from voter rolls.*
*Officials say purge violates "quiet period provision" prohibiting name removals 90 days before federal election.*
*Force companies to report their food waste, say leading UK retailers.*
I am surprised that retailers are in favor of this, but it seems like a wise policy to me.
Microsoft's bullshit generator read many articles associating Martin Bernklau with criminal accusations, and output that he was a wanted criminal who had escaped from a mental hospital.
Bernklau's actual association was that he was a crime journalist and had written those articles. But you can't expect bullshit generators to understand that distinction — to do so requires intelligence, which is what they totally lack.
Several factors are simultaneously acting to wipe out monarch butterflies.
Federal prosecutors report on Putin's interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
They did not find grounds to charge the corrupter with a crime. I expect that some exist, but that is not proof.
*"Global Oligarchy" Reigns as Top 1% Controls More Wealth Than [least wealthy] 95% of Humanity.*
*Elon Musk has gained a concerning level of power over US national security.*
Muhlenberg College fired Professor Finkelstein, a tenured professor, for condemning Israeli atrocities in Gaza, by making the usual false equivalence between "Zionists" and "Jews".
The American Association of University Professors may sue on her behalf.
Fossil fuel lobbyists work with supportive legislators to criminalize nonviolent (but inconvenient) protest around the US.
I suspect that they collaborate with AIPAC to achieve their common goal, so that protesters calling for an end to Israel's bombing and siege can be imprisoned too. The measures seem similar in practical effect to those recently used by the UK to convict climate defense protesters.
The real antisemitic threat in the US is the corrupter.
Iwao Hakamata was convicted of murder in 1968 in Japan. Now a retrial judge has ruled that investigators falsified evidence about him and bullied him into a false confession into a false confession. (His name was misreported as "Hakamada".)
Hakamata is 88 years old, and is mentally unwell as a result of spending years on death row. He was unable to attend the retrial because of that.
Six of England's privatized water companies appear to have fraudulently increased their charges to customers by misrepresenting the level of sewage pollution that they were releasing into waterways.
*Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global livability.
This means Earth may have breached seven of nine boundaries.*
*Anura Kumara Dissanayake: who is Sri Lanka's new leftist president?*
California has banned distribution of plastic shopping bags at grocery stores. Only paper bags will be available.
I prefer thicker plastic bags to paper, but to avoid causing waste, I reuse each bag until it wears out. I set out the bags to reuse on he belt along with what I will purchase, and say to use these bags and not give me a new one. I get a new bag perhaps once a year.
But the things we buy include lots of plastic packaging. To reduce plastic waste we need to do something about that, too.
Labour says it will legally require all rental housing with poor air insulation to be repaired so as to need less heating.
If a private landlord says, "I can't afford to do the repairs that the law now requires," there is an easy response: "So sell that house." Most of them will then discover some money that they had temporarily forgotten possessing. As for the rest, it's no disaster if they do have to sell.
For housing owned by local governments, it is another matter. They are cutting all sorts of important public services because the Tories cut their budgets to the bone, and Labour refuses to raise them. Some are already going bankrupt. If Labour really wants those buildings repaired, it will have to provide money.
Some US states will report parents to the Parent Gestapo ("Child Welfare Services") for "neglect" if they don't pay the bill for their child's school lunch.
That isn't neglect of the children, it is neglect of the state. But I think it is the state's fault anyway, not the parent's that that parent is too poor to pay for the child's lunch. It ought to do that.
In reality, what is the usual cause of parents' neglecting children? I expect it is poverty — what a child needs costs a lot of money and many parents can't get that much money. Growing up in poverty may result in real neglect, but punishing the parent(s) won't help them get more money.
Taking the child away from the parent(s) and giving per to a foster parent might help per, by making more money available; but if the state is willing to provide that extra money, it can just as well give that to the child's parent(s).
Thus, the only case in which to consider taking a child away from per parent(s) is when the cause is something other than poverty.
Musk refuses to pay Brazil's fines on ex-Twitter and challenges the state to stop Brazilians from accessing that site. So the court imposed a bigger fine, around 1.5 billion dollars per year, for ex-Twitter's circumvention of the ban.
The court also ordered that Starlink, likewise owned by Musk, be required to pay the fines if ex-Twitter does not; Starlink is very widely used in Amazonia where there is not much communications infrastructure, and I think it makes a lot of profit in Brazil.
The muskrat has the support of Bolosonaro, the fascist-leaning ex president who, after losing the last election, launched an attack on the main government buildings in Brasilia.
As I recall, he faces trial for this. Can anyone tell me where that trial stands? Why isn't Bolsonaro in prison?
The Federal Election Commission decided to take no action to against fraudulent political deepfakes.
If there is any effective method to deter, prevent or delete them, the FEC should have done so. I don't know what methods might be effective.
Kamala Harris formerly campaigned for limiting hidden campaign donations from the rich, but she isn't advocating that this year.
Actor Reece Richards, performing in a play in London, says that four thugs pepper-sprayed him and held him down on the ground, They were chasing someone else who was in a vehicle.
Everyone makes mistakes, so I can't condemn those thugs for mistakenly thinking that Richards had something to do with the fleeing vehicle. But since that was just a suspicion, they should have realized that Richards might have been a bystander. And even if he were guilty, they had no grounds to be so violent to a person who was not fighting them. That is the typical dangerous excess of thugs.
*Britain’s limited Gaza action will do little to curb Israel’s wider territorial ambitions.*
*Chief justice Roberts pushed for quick immunity ruling in Trump’s favor.*
Two New York City transit thugs cornered an alleged fare evader who allegedly pulled a knife. At that point, they proceeded to make the subway substantially more dangerous by hitting two other innocent passengers and one other thug, as well as the alleged fare evader.
It is quite possible that the many really did try to evade the fare. That is no grounds for shooting him. It is possible that he pulled out a knife, which would be a much more serious crime. However, I won't take thugs' word that he did so. They might be "testilying", to use the term that thugs coined for this.
Adams, NYC's night-mayor, is a former thug himself, and no matter what harm thugs do in the city, he always claims it's not their fault.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria *"could kill 39m people by 2050" amid rising drug resistance.*
This problem is mostly avoidable. It is caused by various sorts of carelessness in the use of antibiotics.
Few new antibiotics are developed, because drug companies are no longer interested in them.
They are no longer led by people whose background was in medicine and thought that curing disease was a goal in itself. Now they want to develop "the next Viagra", something that millions of people will take when they are not sick.
For-profit drug development is corrupting in many ways.
One consequence is that our systems of medicine and drug development no longer encourage people to make curing disease their goal.
We should replace the system driven by lust for monopoly megaprofits with a system of government funding for finding new drugs that will not be covered by monopolies.
*Meta bans Russian state media outlets over "foreign interference activity".*
I am sure that they do that.
Iran's president calls for peace, and says Iran could negotiate a non-nuclear deal like the one that the wrecker canceled. He also accused Israel of trying to provoke a regional war, which I think is spot on.
I hope Biden is flexible enough to reach such an agreement. Iran's government oppresses women horribly, but that is no reason we can't work with Iran towards regional and nuclear disarmament.
Israel attacked Hezbollah with ordinary weapons — missiles, and perhaps bombs and shells too. Reportedly these hit 1300 targets and killed around 500 people. Since 90 of them were women or minors, we can roughly estimate that counting also the adult men, around 140 to 200 of those killed were civilians. That sort of outcome is comparable to what happens when Israel attacks in Gaza with the same weapons: lots of civilian casualties.
The Israeli attacks in Gaza are a series of atrocities, and these attacks in Lebanon were atrocities too. They were atrocities, and war crimes, because Israel violates the requirement that civilian casualties be "proportionate" — not excessive.
It's clear that Israel does not try very much to avoid excessive civilian casualties. Indeed, when army snipers shoot protesters and journalists, who are specially protected civilians, Israel hardly tries to punish them.
Ironically, one exception which contrasts with that habit of disregarding this principle is the pager attack of last weekend. Whether or not Israel actively sought on that occasion to follow the requirement of proportionality, in practice it did so. Some 3000 pagers were in use, and were likely to explode, and in the process only two children were killed.
It is bad when children are killed, or adult civilians are killed. It is bad when anyone is killed, even enemy soldiers, because nobody ever deserves to be killed. War normally requires trying to kill some enemy soldiers, but even those don't personally deserve death.
Thus we should try to avoid war, fighting only a last resort. And even when fighting is necessary, we should strive to keep civilian casualties down to a proportionate level.
This is why, rather than being especially outraged at the pager attack and denouncing it as egregious, I take the opposite view: the pager attack is the proportionate exception which highlights Israel's usual disregard for the lives of civilians.
HAMAS and Hezbollah also often disregard proportionality when they attack, but —another irony— their missile attacks typically do so little harm to anyone that the question of proportionality may be merely theoretical.
Netanyahu is threatening to escalate the war with Hezbollah. Supposedly this is to achieve demands which include peace. But that is not what escalation is likely to achieve.
SCROTUS gave up on the wrecker's demand for a new nationwide voter suppression requirement, and dropped the threat to shut down the US government otherwise. Indeed, they could not even pass that bill in the House of Representatives, despite having a small majority there.
The decision not to shut it down was embodied in a law that will keep the government operating for around three months. The article doesn't state the precise date of the next shutdown threat, but the words suggest it will be negotiated in December, before the newly elected Congress takes office.
Americans, we need to remove those hostage takers from our government, so that they can't take our government and our country hostage any more. For every level of government, vote to defeat Republicans!
The modern American way to lobby for an anti competitive merger is to hire lobbyists who are tied into networks of support for major politicians.
Each time these lobbyists go to work, their goal is harmful to the public interest. We should change our laws so that there are no such lobbyists — but how to do that? I tend to think that blocking large anonymous campaign donations, and blocking all campaign contributions from corporations, would tend to correct this problem as a side effect of correcting the problem of legalized bribery.
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to hold an independent investigation of the killing of protester Ayşenur Eygi.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
Support the proposed FDIC regulation that would limit how "asset manager" companies such as Blackrock use their deposits for political influence.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above function without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code.
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for some of them.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Enter the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort compared with the benefit of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: call on Israel to comply with the UN General Assembly vote calling for Israel to withdraw its army from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
Everyone: call on Coca-Cola to stop sponsoring neo-segregationist Chris Rufo.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to block voter intimidation in Florida.
US citizens: We have a right to safety, privacy, and protest. Say no to mask bans.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Bernie Sanders's resolution to end weapons sales to Israel.
Explain I might have proposed to adjust some details, of this, but I have confidence in Sanders and I trust him to know such matters better than I do.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on US agencies to shut down for-profit immigration prisons.
The petition calls them "detention centers", but I think that term is desensitizing.
* A new survey of eight vital swing states reveals that at least 239 election deniers who have signed up to Trump’s “election integrity” conspiracy theories are actively engaged in electoral battles this year.*
The saboteur's hate messages about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, inspired a bomb threat.
If the time bomb threat is accompanied by a real bomb, I expect he will leap for joy.
(satire) *Vatican City Police Unveil New Unit Of Sin-Sniffing Dogs.*
* Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio want to scare off voters [of disprivileged racial groups] and naturalized citizens, activists say.*
Various religions in the US are ganging up to fight against sex education and equal rights for queer people.
At the debate. the bullshitter refused to say whether he wants Ukraine to defeat Putin. Why did someone who cares so little about truth hesitate to make up whatever would go over best?
The author does not know, but I have a conjecture: because Putin is watching, and Putin demands obedience. The bullshitter expects to get away with bullshitting Americans, but this is a matter of promoting Putin and he knows Putin won't stand for shenanigans.
"Just stop the fighting" has been the standard line of Putinite influencers ever since Putin launched the invasion. The reason is simple: that would leave Putin in possession of conquered territory, probably permanently. That would be victory for him, even if not total victory.
It is surely no coincidence that the Republicans in Congress have been willing to obstruct and threaten to interfere with US support for Ukraine. They are happy to increase the military budget unless it supports Ukraine. This has happened in parallel with their shift to endorse the bullshitter's claim that he really won the election.
This is not proof, but it's plenty of grounds to treat the corrupter as a suspect.
(satire) *Ohioan Disturbed by Reports of Haitians Eating Vegetables.*
Some of the cars that aren't driven by anyone in the car are operated by remote drivers.
These cars are neither "autonomous" nor "self-driving".
Are they safe for the passengers and others in the vicinity? The reply must be, "Safe from what?" If the question is about safety from collisions, I don't know but with time we will find out.
If the question is about safety from surveillance and snooping, the answer is clearly not.
* Suspected Russian propaganda operation prompts calls to force UK-registered news sites to reveal ownership.*
I can support that sort of rule without hesitation, because it is clearly not censorship.
Netanyahu seems to have succeeded in provoking Hezbollah into all-out war.
Greenpeace proposes to offer unlimited rail passes for Britain at a low flat fee per month (though trains passing anywhere near London will cost extra).
This scheme will cost money, but it could be money well spent on reducing CO2 emissions and boosting the economy of places away from London.
Crucial for civil liberties, this is also an opportunity to reduce surveillance — or to increase it. With a fee paid per month, the pass could serve as a ticket for anonymous travel. It would be easy to allow the holder to ride a train without collecting per identity.
But if the system does record who rode each train, as I fear the surveillance-mad UK will do, it would further discourage anonymous travel, because to do that you would have to pay cash for a ticket on a train that would otherwise have been gratis.
Britons, don't wait this out. Organize now to demand that train passes not track their users.
The UK already uses its massive surveillance of everyone for repression of dissent.
But the state can always increase the surveillance, or decrease it. We must fight to decrease surveillance, limit it, and defend anonymity. If this train pass idea is adopted, seize this opportunity.
Billionaire Larry Ellison called for a society of total surveillance in which everyone is constantly monitored by hypothetical future AI.
We could expect the AI to share the political bias and racial/religious/ethnic prejudices of the organizations that run them.
Thugs in Pakistan killed someone accused of "blasphemy" — rejecting and criticizing religion.
In Pakistan, being arrested and charged with "blasphemy" tends to lead to being killed, often before trial, except for those who are saved by international pressure to let them go into exile. The accused man must have realized that he was doomed if he allowed himself to be captured.
Side issue: I've seen several other articles about shooting dead people. I am surprised at how many dead bodies are being shot.
In the UK, people get fined for leaving usable items outside the door for passers-by to take away. Some are fined so much that it can ruin them.
Often the people responsible for this are the employees and the owners of companies which have won contracts to hand out these fines. Their business is cruelty. The owners deserve the term "vampires", but the employees may only be desperate.
Chicago sold off the income from street parking fees to a company along with the authority to decide the policies and prices.
Motorists have already been screwed, but the contract will run for many years so the city is screwed too.
It should be illegal to involve anyone in fining the public in such a way as to profit more from fining more.
Side issue: I wonder what they mean by "fly tipping". Is it anything like cow tipping? A cow that is lying down can get back on its feet, but can a fly do that?
UK tax cuts for corporations in 2023 resulted in a loss of 30 billion UKP in tax revenue but will *spur only up to £10.5bn investment.*
The rich will generally invest their money in the way they expect will be most profitable. When governments want to influence what ways they choose, instead of taxing certain ways less, how about taxing the other ways more?
Musk has yielded to the Brazilian government and has made ex-Twitter obey the court orders.
* Keir Starmer has suffered a precipitous fall in his personal ratings since winning the election, according to a new poll for the Observer that comes before his first Labour conference as prime minister.*
It seems lots of voters don't like his Toryish loyalty to rich people's wealth.
The wrecker and Vance eagerly acknowledge lying as a tactic to win support from people who they have taught to accept lying. They aim to create a post-truth America in which truth ceases to matter.
That is the ultimate form of sabotage. We must reject anything that comes from them, without taking it seriously, because they are liars.
No one can achieve 100% falsehood. Inevitably, some of the things they say will turn out to be true. But we should ignore the claim when it comes from them. If someone credible and honest makes the claim. then we should pay it the attention it merits — but we should not confuse matters by associating the issue with the Lie Party candidates.
* The court of justice of the EU ruled on Thursday that member states could keep vital details of their implementation of fishing rules under wraps, in a blow to environmental campaigners hoping to use the information to show whether the regulations are working.*
* The press is still pursuing the appearance of fairness [in covering the US election] by treating the true and the false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid.*
*Amazon is trying to trick me into signing up for Prime services.* And bully her, too.
A documentary is being criticized for presenting the Russian soldiers in the Putin forces as victims.
Those soldiers are victims … of Putin's tyranny, alongside the Ukrainians. And some of them used to know this — which is why some Russians fled and joined the Ukrainian army rather than fight for Putin.
But Putin's tight censorship is brainwashing many Russians, especially young ones that get drafted.
*Water bosses could be jailed if they cover up sewage dumping under new law.*
The government looked into the causes of a deadly fire in an apartment building and found that several companies were jointly dishonest and many government bodies failed to do their job of insisting on safe construction.
All sorts of regulations to protect the environment and people's health and safety, should carry criminal penalties for intentional conduct that significantly endangers people. The punishment for a serious violation should include prison, for individuals, and for corporations seizure and liquidation.
Anyone can make a mistake — even a CEO who has acted wrongly may have done it unknowingly — so everyone accused must have a fair trial to judge culpability. But intentional disregard for those regulations, when it occurs to a significant extent, should be grounds for severe punishment.
This should not be limited to cases where serious injury to specific actually persons occurred as a result. When that was avoided by sheer luck, the crime should be the same.
Merely banning a company from operating in a country may have no effect. Even shutting down the corporation directly involved may be insufficient. Many construction businesses do (or at least used to) start a new corporation each year as a scheme to shrug off subsequent fines or judgments. The law should refuse to be thwarted by such schemes.
If this helps drive the UK's formerly public but nowadays private water companies into bankruptcy, so much the better, since it will avoid the need to "compensate" their stockholders when renationalizing them.
We need capitalism so it can drive people's desire for profit into competing to do a good job for society. However, they will face constant temptation to cheat their customers, their workers and the general public. We must make sure they recognize those methods are too dangerous to try.
Florida is coming to recognize it must help people whose houses are going to be flooded by paying the cost of their moving to higher ground.
In the long run, that is cheaper than paying to build a new house in the same doomed place, where it in turn will be flooded.
That study covers the UK experience, but I expect the situation is similar in other countries. The planet roasters are callous but not stupid.
We need to do much more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but Republicans want to repeal these policies and turn the spigot wide open.
A great drop in the seabird populations in Norway is a sign of some big problem under the water, but we don't know what it is,
In American politics, and British politics, signaling an attitude or membership in a tribe tends to take precedence over choosing a policy that will have good results.
That is unfortunate because signaling is not a cogent reason for any policy. Thus, policies chosen based on signaling will tend to be bad ones.
* Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be [almost 8 times the] official tally.*
For the survival of civilization we must prevent the expansion of these data centers. A sufficiently large tax could do it.
* Landmark research finds 244m tons of organic carbon is stored in top 10cm of marine sediment in British waters.* And it will steadily capture more carbon if we prevent it from being disturbed.
* The vice-presidential candidate [Vance] seems to feel no remorse about spreading dangerous misinformation that has put lives at risk.*
*Amber Thurman was killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. There will be others.*
Banning abortion tends to cause various sorts of bad consequences. Being compelled to have a baby can ruin your life in many ways, and some of them (combined with poverty) could later cause your death.
*Faculty from seven University of California campuses took a stand against the repression of protest over Israel’s war on Gaza on Thursday, taking the historic step of filing a joint unfair labor practice charge against their employer.*
Climate defense protesters in the UK climbed the former prime minister's house as part of a protest, but did no harm. Charges against them were dropped by the judge.
The Commodity Futures and Exchange Commission proposed guidelines for trading of carbon offsets. Public Citizen says it should instead eliminate such trading entirely.
Ohio’s Republican governor condemns Trump and Vance for [bogus claims about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.]
The bullshitter claimed that the audience at the debate demonstrated great support for him. He imagined it all — there no audience was present.
A plague of fungus killed many bats across the US. Without the bats to eat the insect pests, farmers increased use of pesticides. The pesticides are estimated to have killed 1300 children since then.
*South Carolina to execute man despite bombshell admission from key witness* that his crucial testimony for the prosecution was a lie.
*Holocaust survivor marks 80th birthday with protest outside Israeli prison* about maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners in that prison. What Palestinians need to do, to get the Israeli army to insist they should be treated with some respect, is die.
My view is different. I think the living are the people who we should treat with some basic respect so as not to cause them gratuitous, avoidable suffering. For the dead, that issue does not arise.
Nassau County (just east of New York City) has arrested a protester for wearing a keffiyeh, and allegedly concealing his face with it.
To harass nonviolent protesters who are not menacing anyone for concealing their identity is an attack on human rights.
Shooting protesters who are not threatening anyone is a repeating pastime of Israeli snipers near the village of Beita. A report lists 15 other instances.
Typically the victims are not near any Israelis, and walking away from them.
The limit on tourists visiting Soain's Atlantic Islands National Park
Requires every visitor to give name and national ID number (or passport number). And the only way to apply is on a web form.
This is one more little brick in a wall of Orwellian surveillance, imposed gratuitously.
It would be very little work to sell permits at some physical stores and avoid the surveillance. But once a country gives everyone a national ID number, every activity's managers find it convenient to add another brick to the wall of Orwellian surveillance. It comes to seem "normal", so no one hesitates to impose this on everyone else.
Contrast Spain's park with the Boston Aquarium, which I visited recently. It sells entry tickets for specific times, and encourages people to buy them by internet — but you can go there and buy a ticket for whatever future slots are available. I did that anonymously, paying cash.
This shows the need to organize to demand the right to be anonymous.
*Labeling [the bullshitter]'s lies as "disputed" on [ex-Twitter] makes supporters believe them more, study finds.*
* The Republicans desperately need to distract voters away from abortion. They've now found the perfect new scapegoat.*
Specifically, authorized Haitian immigrants that they can lie about.
*[The bully's] escalating legal threats against [Democratic] lawyers, donors and others raise concern as Project 2025 seeks to curtail DoJ.*
Kenneth Roht: *The US and all nations must respect the UN resolution against Israeli occupation.*
* The general assembly confirmed the ICJ ruling that Israel’s prolonged occupation constitutes a de facto annexation and hence a violation of the “principle of the non-acquisition of territory by force”. In other words, although the term was not explicitly used, the endless occupation is an act of aggression — no different from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.*
Right-wing demagogues have long used hatred against scapegoat groups as a way to distract and madden the people. Today they are using antimuslimism for this purpose.
I reject the term "Islamophobia" because a phobia is an anxiety disorder, and we can't blame people for suffering from one. We can and should blame people for bigotry and hatred. So the word I use for that is "antimuslimism".
*Israeli military shuts down Al Jazeera bureau in West Bank raid.*
Al Jazeera reports are sometimes slander in favor of Palestinians, but no more slanted than is usual in journalism, That should no be a reason to shut it down. At least this time Israel did not do so using explosives, as it did in Gaza.
Vance insists on calling Haitians working in the US "illegal aliens"
Although he knows that their presence and employment in the US has been officially authorized with temporary protected status. Vance is claiming to be more powerful than reality.
Vance and the wrecker could honestly criticize the decision to give Haitians temporary protected status, if they wanted to. I would disagree with their position, but they would not be lying if they said that. They could also claim that Biden's decision to do that was somehow illegal. They might be mistaken, but it would not be a factual lie.
However, the ambiguity of calling them "illegal aliens" turns it into a dishonest claim.
Vladimir Kara-Murza studied and wrote about dissidents in the Soviet Union and the workings of the system of repression. When he became a dissident and Putin imprisoned him, he observed directly what he had learned in his studies.
An Australian city has ordered giving the thug department full access to watch all the town's surveillance cameras.
This is far too much surveillance to keep people safe from repression. However, protecting against repression calls for more than just maintaining the status quo.
Butterfly populations in Britain dropped by 50% this year — *probably the consequence of habitat loss and the use of pesticides, making the insects less resilient to extreme weather fluctuations: the scorching heat and wetter weather driven by global heating.*
*Back to School at Columbia: Two Students Arrested, New Guidelines on Protest.*
Columbia's administration is violating its own discipline procedures, in its rush to show 120% compliance to the demands of the right-wing fanatics that control the House of Representatives.
We can all help put a stop to this persecution by helping to defeat Republicans in Congress on Nov 5.
US citizens: call on Biden to investigate West Bank violence including the killing of Aysenur Eygi.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: support Biden's proposal for a "No One Is Above the Law" amendment.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say to pass a bill to prevent a government shutdown with no sabotage riders to attack voting rights or any other rights of human beings.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to end utility shutoffs and treat these life-sustaining services as human rights.
I support this campaign against artificial cruelty, but success of this is not a substitute for curbing global heating and reducing human consumption to a sustainable level.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The exploding pagers used to attack Hezbollah leaders were bought as a special order. It was subcontracted to a Hungarian company whose owner supports Putin (and surely supports also the repressive ruler of Hungary, Orbán, who supports Putin.)
But that company subcontracted the order to someone else. We don't know known who actually built these pagers.
This demonstrates how subcontracting causes a potential risk to the national security of any country, and even organizations of other kinds, when combined with the opacity of their construction. It is one more reason why the world needs free hardware designs.
The rigged pagers have been compared to booby traps. With careful comparison, we see a crucial difference: the pagers were targeted specifically at important Hezbollah participants.
A booby trap is triggered by some ordinary, non-warlike action, such as opening a door, standing in a certain spot, or picking up an object. Soldiers do these things, and so do civilians. Such a trap can easily strike anyone.
The rigged pagers were carried by chosen members of Hezbollah — not solely the highest leaders, but surely important enough for special protection from tracking. They were sure to keep the pagers near them and under their personal control. Just playing with one would not set off the bomb; the plan arranged that almost always the owner would be holding it when it exploded.
Wikipedia estimates that Hezbollah in Lebanon has around 100,000 members. Clearly the 5,000 pagers were distributed to selected people with command or sensitive roles, not footsoldiers or fellow travelers.
Thus, the pager attack was not an atrocity or a crime — it was simply war.
That does not imply it was morally justifiable.
Netanyahu is aiming to escalate the war between Israel and Hezbollah. and exploding the pagers was one among many attacks in the campaign of escalation. That aim is what he deserves condemnation for.
How stock buybacks undermine the incentive that is supposed to motivate CEOs to add economic value to the companies they run.
Indoor firing ranges, including those run by the US military, are dangerous: they have residues generated by firing lots of bullets, that contain toxic lead and pose a hazard to anyone breathing inside.
The US is suing the owner of the ship that destroyed a bridge over Baltimore harbor.
This suit demands $100 million, solely for the cost of cleaning up the wreckage so the harbor could get back to full operation. It does not include the damages for the six workers killed by the damage, or the damages of the loss of use of the harbor, let alone what it will cost to build building a new bridge.
I have a hunch that the company will be bankrupted by this, and will not be able to pay the whole damages.
Can it pay even this part of the damages? I wonder how many other ships that corporation owns. Did the real owners make a separate corporation for each ship? If so, it may not be able to pay anything more than its legal fees.
Part of the cause of the collapse was the lack of buffer islands around the bridge's piers. The bridge was built not long before the US adopted a policy of requiring such buffers, and plans were being drawn up to add them — but it wasn't considered desperately urgent, and that sort of project normally takes many years.
Scientists are making some progress on breeding corals to tolerate greater heat.
But this seems futile to me, since (based on Wikipedia's article on Ocean Acidification) in a few more decades the increased CO2 in sea water will start to interfere with the making of coral shells.
Six prestigious US universities have, since 2003, accepted 100 million dollars in donations from fossil fuel companies.
These donations are officially gifts, but in practice there is a quid-pro-quo of not championing climate defense.
Queensland (a state in Australia) is holding an inquiry and investigation into how British colonists seized that territory from the previous inhabitants.
I read a book, The Other Side of the Frontier, which describes the damage that the process imposed.
Companies often use subcontracting as a way to get the good side of a business and dump the bad side on others.
Gold Apollo, the front company that sold exploding pagers but did not actually make them, is an extreme example, but everyday non-extreme examples are all around us.
Perhaps there should be a law saying that if you sell a product or service with signs implying it was your product, you become co-liable for any harm it may do, along with the company that made it "for" you.
That would encourage some transparency.
Even in the 1940s, the state of Queensland (Australia) systematically stole 2/3 of the wages owed to aboriginals.
US citizens: Oppose laws that require religious displays in public schools. Protect the separation of church and state.
US citizens: Support the Harris Opportunity Economy -- several tax increases on the rich.
US citizens: call on Democratic candidates to reconnect with the Democratic base, including by pushing for an arms embargo on Israel until it ends atrocities.
In the US: tell AT&T Southeast that you support striking workers.
* Extremist groups [including Nazis] are latching on to [the corrupter]'s xenophobic messages to recruit people and spread ideology.*
Calvijn College banned students from carrying of portable phones in school four years ago, and has observed an amazing positive change among the students.
The students and teachers in Calvijn College probably don't know about the injustice of the nonfree software running in their phones, or the surveillance and manipulation those are programmed to do to them, but they do benefit because that mistreatment is blocked for many hours every day. However, so-called "ed-tech" companies are busy developing replacements for the surveillance, and the school authorities probably do not imagine that this is wrong.
*State abortion bans are forcing doctors to provide substandard [medical treatment].*
*Almost 200 people killed last year trying to defend the environment, report finds.*
Those were mostly in Latin America. In Britain, they won't kill you for this but they will sentence you to years in prison.
*Rich countries silencing climate protest while preaching about rights elsewhere, says study.*
*The report's authors highlighted several examples of developed countries lauding the importance of the right to protest on the international stage at the same time as undertaking harsh and punitive crackdowns at home.*
Side issue: the term "global south" means "poor countries". but refers to them using a geographical metaphor which is not literally true, adds no actual understanding, and can mislead you if you're not careful. The poor countries are scattered around the Earth, have no common history, and what they have in common is the consequences of bring poor and frequently exploited.
This article takes a step into being misled by the metaphor: it refers to countries "in the global south", as if it were a region. That metaphor could stir up a sort of nationalism that takes the side of one imaginary region or the other.
That way of thinking obscures the real issue: rich people are exploiting most of humanity, but in the wealthy democracies a substantial fraction of people get a decent life out of this. (Just how big a fraction varies from country to country, and varies over time in any given country.)
The article's actual point is valid despite use of that metaphor. And they are planting to ramp up the repression.
*"We'll arrest people quicker at protests from now on -- London cops' deputy chief.*
The Guardian has published *The 10 best electric cars to buy if you want to avoid Tesla.*
Alas, the ratings fail to include how easy it is to painlessly turn off all radio transmission, and GPS reception, by the car's proprietary computer systems. That information is crucial for any car, whether electric or not.
The Department of Homeland Security warns that Republicans are likely to attack polling places to disrupt the election.
If they do, the chief truth-hater and his followers will claim that Democrats did it and use this as an excuse to sabotage the election in other ways. That is standard operating procedure for right-wing truth-haters.
Israel has killed 220 UNRWA staff in Gaza, but it is not satisfied; it wants to eliminate UNRWA itself.
Israel is working on laws that would stop UNRWA from operating, but this would not establish any replacement system. Israel would, I expect, simply never agree to one. Then it would have more "excuse" to stop humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza.
Israel condemns UNRWA because its work is done by local Palestinians, and some of them work for HAMAS.
I don't think that in practice there is any way to avoid this. It would not be feasible to get so many workers in Gaza in any other way.
If no substitute can get Israel's approval, that will cement the hunger in Gaza but enable Israel to pretend that it was due to a failing of the UN, rather than to Israel's obstruction.
Israel is already blocking the flow of US humanitarian aid, and would do so even more if it stops UNRWA from functioning. Under US law, the US is supposed to block military aid to Israel for this.
*Gaza children begin second school year without education.*
Vance explicitly defended lying for political advantage.
*Jeremy Corbyn addresses meeting on formation of new leftwing party.*
Turkey has accused writer Yavuz Ekinci of promoting terrorism for publishing a work of fiction.
Such repression is not unusual under Erdoğan's repressive rule.
*Florida officials investigate voters who signed abortion ballot initiative.*
This is standard harassment procedure for right-wing governments.
The two appear similar in spirit to my eyes. Can Biden direct the FBI to investigate Florida officials for this apparent political harassment of citizens for lawful political activity?
The US government is right to investigate Nvidia for alleged unfair practices. Too bad that its unjust practices are not the target.
My understanding is that Nvidia's processors have secret specifications, so no one but Nvidia can make tools to generate code that can actually be installed in them. This is an injustice to every user, because it blocks the use of them without nonfree software. Every nonfree program is unjust, so a processor that forces use of nonfree programs is unjust.
That's what we need governments to investigate.
Students protested military recruiting at the University of Michigan. The local sheriff labeled it a "hate crime against law enforcement" and the FBI labeled it as terrorism.
Although IANAL, I think the law about hate crimes is limited to certain demographic groups as targets, and "law enforcement" does not qualify. In addition, a "hate crime" in the US is defined to be more than just expression of views (thank the First Amendment!). It means a crime of violence, motivated by hatred for one of those groups. Expressing condemnation for all uniformed thugs cannot actually be a hate crime.
Nor does spraying ketchup as fake blood constitute terrorism.
Biden, will you make the FBI stick to reality-based action?
Republicans are running fake ads in areas in Michigan where there are many Muslims, emphasizing the fact that Harris's spouse is Jewish.
It is true that Harris insists on support for Israel — and Republicans do so even more strongly. But the ads don't show that about both major parties.
I hope American Muslims recognize the one-sidedness of these ads and refuse to be fooled into helping the more hateful party to win.
Afghan women went to Albania so they could have a public event, which they wanted to hold in a majority-Muslim country (though I don't see why that was crucial). Most of those supported the Taliban by refusing.
Most of the women who participated are living in exile,
but some came from Afghanistan and are facing a challenge to go home again.
They called on influential countries to insist that the Taliban include some women in diplomatic discussions. The Taliban, out of misogyny, refuse to do this. The discussions are about international aid to give people in Afghanistan a better life. If you call on the Taliban to include women in that better life, and in the discussion, they refuse. What is right to do in this situation?
The Taliban are hardened religious fanatics, and the world would be a better place if they were all gone. But the war with which we tried to defeat them failed.
Maybe an Afghan woman needs to be ready to kill the Taliban in her own family, while he sleeps at home.
Thugs attacked an anti-war protest outside a weapon sales exposition in Australia. They injured dozens of protesters and some required hospital treatment.
A legal support person says that thugs "were documented using force against people who were trying to run away, shielding themselves or were already on the ground."
Some protesters' actions may have called for a forcible response, but police offers are supposed to determine judiciously when and where that is necessary, not go wild and rampage against all.
Ex-Twitter's chatbot spread incorrect statements about the election: specifically, whether another candidate could replace Biden on ballots.
It took the intervention of several states' secretaries of state to get this corrected.
The Burmese military government is sending raids that kill journalists in their own homes.
*More than 80% of EU marine protected areas are ineffective, study shows.
Activities such as mining, dredging and bottom trawling in most MPAs mean conservation targets will be missed.*
*Global spending on subsidies that harm environment rises to $2.6tn.*
*Fossil fuel companies sponsor $5.6bn in global "sportswashing" deals.*
I think plane roasters should not be allowed to advertise or visibly sponsor anything. As for the sports that they sponsor, they are not important anyway.
*Losing the Whales: How the Anti-Whaling Narrative Has Failed.*
The article accuses the International Fund for Animal Welfare of secretly working against the cause of whale conservation while publicly stating it advocates that cause.
I don't have a way to judge the accusation against that organization, but the larger point seems to be valid.
Starmer-Labour seems leaning towards allowing airport expansion and thus more commercial flights in Britain.
This would be a step towards climate disaster, and one that would be easy to prevent. I think it reflects the basic Starmer error of choosing to get funds from trickle down from the rich, rather than by taxing the rich.
*[Unbridled consumption by the rich] and the climate crisis threaten equitable future for humanity, report says.*
A Republican sheriff in Ohio has launched political repression against Democrats.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) denounces a Russian disinformation fake "BBC" documentary that reported a fictitious RSF investigation.
*Israeli Soldiers Killed 15 Protesters in the Same Place They Shot Aysenur Eygi.*
Arizona's policy of requiring people to prove citizenship to vote in state and local elections led to a big confusion in the voting in Maricopa County (Phoenix).
There would have been no problem at all if not for that measure, which is a variation on a typical Republican voter suppression scheme.
According to an investigation by Microsoft, Russia's disinformation army made a video that pretends to be a news report about a fictitious 2011 car accident that supposedly involved Kamala Harris.
What was the motive for this? It makes sense if wrecker is Putin's man
or if they made a deal.
I don't have implicit trust in Microsoft, so I don't have full confidence in this report. But I trust Microsoft more than I trust Putin.
The "Leahy Law" requires denying US military aid to units that stand accused of violating human rights. The US makes this system function for donations to nearly all countries; but when it comes to arms for Israel, the US has a special system that fails to operate.
For more information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass anti-corruption policies and campaign finance reform to limit the influence of Big Money in politics.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject Republicans' last-minute voter suppression scheme.
It is called the "Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act", which is typical right-wing blackwhiting, since actually it makes US citizens ineligible to vote if they can't show up-to-date papers to prove they are citizens. An expired driver's license isn't good enough, even if you look just the same.
This bill was defeated in the House.
US citizens: call on Congress and Biden to reject Netanyahu, and end U.S. support for the war on Gaza.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: call on Biden to investigate West Bank violence including the killing of Aysenur Eygi.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: call on Congress to establish a minimum wage people can live on.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to investigate Texas Republicans' voter purge.
Fossil fuel companies convince governments to spend money on far-fetched "greenhouse gas reduction" programs that are unlikely to result in any real reduction.
They seem to be intended as distractions to relieve pressure for serious actions that could substantially reduce global heating.
Put that together with long sentences for the heroes that try to focus attention on the need to curb global heating for real, and the planet roasters have a clear shot to keep on roasting Earth until there's little left to burn.
In the US: Pledge to stand in solidarity with hotel workers.
US citizens: call on state legislators to protect the US constitution by rejecting any calls for an Article V constitutional convention.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Senator Warren's Price Gouging Prevention Act.
DeMentis's new law to eliminate homelessness allows any fanatical hater to sue a city if a homeless encampment exists. But it gives cities no help in giving housing to the homeless people who are looking for a place to sleep.
Republicans used to condemn "unfunded mandates". This seems to be an unfunded mandate for cities to make homeless people disappear.
UK thugs bullied Oliver Campbell into a false confession by interrogating him over and over until they wore down his insistence on telling the truth. Now, 30 years later, his conviction has been overturned.
The surprisingly high frequency of false confessions is well established. Correcting these injustices one by one, years later, is better than letting them stand, but it is not good enough. The thugs' systematic methods of extracting false confessions from weak and vulnerable people should be prohibited.
Special preschools in China allow groups of children to organize their group play together, including making complex setups with construction toys.
I worry that Chairman Xi will find them threatening.
The US Postal Service is already slowing down mail-in ballots to the point that they don't get counted.
*Australia to ban life insurance companies from discriminating based on genetic testing results.*
This is so that people will not hesitate to get tested early for genetic predispositions that could be overcome by treatment.
Human Rights Watch: *World Health Organization (WHO) member countries negotiating a new international agreement to address pandemics need to ensure that the agreement reflects their domestic and international obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill all human rights.*
*The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not [enable more snoopers to do it].*
*We don't [fix] the Google monopoly [problem] by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.*
Starmer is going ahead with plans to impose ever more poverty on Britons in the name of protecting rich people's riches.
Calling for medical warnings on food with an unhealthful level of salt, and a ban on their sponsoring sports events.
The importance that our society gives to these struggles over nothing is pure foolishness. I don't pay them any attention, and I would be glad to see less of a business built around them.
An analysis of Project 2025, by a journalist that read the whole thing.
US citizens: call on news networks to expose Project 2025's nightmare tax scheme.
Israel attacked a school in Gaza where thousands of refugees were staying. It killed six employees of UNRWA and 12 other people. Supposedly some of them were HAMAS fighters.
*[Australia's] foreign minister Penny Wong says she "welcomes" the British move [to cut off shipping some kinds of weapons to Israel], and Palestinian civilians "cannot pay the price" of defeating Hamas.*
*Harris doesn’t need to impose a full embargo on Israel — but she can pledge to enforce US laws restricting arms transfers to human rights violators.*
Germany's government has panicked and totally suspended the Schengen area freedom of movement in an attempt to pre-empt parties that demand less immigration.
This will only make the government look weak.
The fact-checking in the Harris-Trump debate was effective and clear. The bullshitter did not get away with bullshitting.
I wonder: does anyone do real-time fact-checking of the bullshitter's rallies? People watching streams of them, and even people attending them, could find it interesting to watch that fact-checking if it is available.
Europe's extreme right-wing parties pretend to care about workers' well-being, but don't really do so.
This conclusion comes from analysis of how they vote when elected.
Australia has chosen to protect freedom of speech rather than embark on the course of prohibiting harsh words.
*Scientists tied to chemical industry plan to derail PFAS rule on drinking water.*
PFAS are worrisome because they accumulate in the environment and in human bodies, but it is hard to get real evidence about how harmful they are. It might seem like a fine solution to wait a few decades until we know.
However, we have no feasible way to remove them from the environment. If after decades of waiting we find that they are harmful, we will have screwed ourselves. It behooves us to take action now to avoid exposing people to them.
The cuts made by Tories to the NHS made Britain especially vulnerable to Covid-19.
I've long been convinced that the Tory strategy was to gradually cut back the NHS as a means of gradually eliminating it.
The bullshitter is showing signs of mental failings, but the mainstream media don't see this as interesting the way they did with Biden.
*US lawmakers push to exclude lucrative chemicals from official PFAS definition.*
*Rapid intensification of Hurricane Francine is a sign of a hotter world.*
Sanders: If Harris wants to win, she should campaign for substantive progressive changes.
A mega-landslide in Greenland, caused by melting ice, caused a mountain to collapse into a fjord. This is a new kind of semi-natural disaster, previously unknown.
One state in Australia will include colonization of Australia and resistance in the standard curriculum.
Genetic analysis indicates that the population of Easter Island did not collapse until Europeans contacted them in the 1700s.
It also shows that they mated with South Americans before Columbus.
*Australian military officers to be stripped of honours after alleged war crimes under their command.*
This is the way an army teaches its soldiers to take the rules of war seriously.
A British city has imitated Finland's approach to ending homelessness: first give the person a place to live. The mayor said that this approach has the secondary benefit of saving public money.
The EU's highest appeals court has invalidated the arrangements Apple made to hide its profits from income tax.
Ford has scandalously applied for a patent on the malfeature of snooping on the conversations of people in the car and using that to decide what ads to play for them.
That a company has a patent on some vicious software malfeature does not imply that a company will actually implement that malfeature. Contrariwise, not having a patent on that malfeature (or abandoning a patent application for one) does not in general imply that the company won't implement that malfeature.
What could stop companies from implementing a malfeature is to pass a law against implementing it. That's what we should demand.
I think we should have laws to prohibit the sale, leasing or importation of cars that implement any of a wide range of malfeatures. One of many that ought to be prohibited is the malfeature of noticing, recording or transmitting any audio signal captured by the car's systems unless the driver or a passenger has explicitly activated the malfeature of listening to sound.
We should also pass a law so that software, or its use, is never limited by patent law. Because when a feature is good, no one should be forbidden to implement it in software. At least, not in free software.
Side issue: note how the response from Ford used the propaganda term "intellectual property". That term was and is promoted so as to inculcate the idea that companies deserve various unrelated kinds of monopoly, patents being just one.
In 2004 I recognized the harm that use of that term does to society, so I decided never to use it. And I mean never — I have not used that term since. You can help overcome that propaganda campaign by never using the term yourself.
Over 100 scientists called on the Biden administration to heed the climate danger caused by methane leaks and slow down the extraction and shipping of methane.
There is plenty of humanitarian aid trucks, waiting in Egypt for Israeli troops to let them into Gaza. But Israel allows too few to enter there.
Israel allows in enough aid that people don't immediately die of starvation. But that is not enough for them to remain healthy for long.
I would be delighted to see the US Army, with Egypt's cooperation, establish a bridgehead into Gaza, and allow aid in. I don't think the Israeli army or Netanyahu would dare to try to stop this.
Virgin Australia fired a flight cabin employee for using Grindr to arrange a sexual encounter when regulations said he needed to sleep. (He asserts that the sexual encounter enabled him to fall asleep.)
What shocks me is that the company was able to obtain the hotel's "security camera" recordings to track the employee's actions.
What laws or regulations are there to stop hotels from showing these recordings to all and sundry? Evidently they are not adequate to protect hotel guests' privacy.
But I suspect that the problem goes deeper than that. I suspect that the hotel has a surveillance video system (which stores videos in an easily accessible online system) rather than a classic security camera which stores them solely in a local recording device that requires a physical visit to look at them.
For explanation, see How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Endure.
The limit on number of daily visitors to the Ciés islands seems like a wise policy, but I suspect that the implementation is unjust. I suspect that getting a visit ticket requires identifying oneself and running nonfree software.
Is anyone from Galicia reading this? If so, would you like to find out if there is a way around that?
I don't intend to visit those islands myself -- rather, I am concerned about government requirements that impose fundamentally unjust technology.
G20 countries previously agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, but the pledges they are now writing omit that crucial point.
If we don't do this, and fast, the mayhem of the early stages of global heating disaster will create what is euphemistically called "unrest" all around the world. People who can't peacefully find safe places to live or safe food to eat are likely to turn to violence before they die, and climate mayhem will dump plenty of people into that situation -- and new ones every year.
Climate disaster is hitting Brazil sharply. Three of the six biomes of Brazil are suffering unprecedented droughts unprecedented and fires. Life-shortening wood smoke has covered more than half of the country.
This is an example of what many other countries will experience in a few decades. (The US has had a small taste.)
If we don't overcome the planet roasters now, their activity is likely to bring civilization to an end.
In 1971, plutocratist extremist Lewis Powell proposed that the American business community use political power "aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance." Nixon started this plan, and it has been gradually corrupting the US government ever since.
A fanatical Christian group is recruiting poll workers ready to try to rig the election for Jesus.
If the wrecker doesn't actually win, they will dogmatically declare that "fraud" and try to declare him the winner despite the votes.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would deny Republican extremists the power to hold most federal spending hostage to demand passage of harmful laws.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Greg Palast: Texas Republicans are threatening to jail Houston's election officials for facilitating voter registration.
They fear that the Democrats will win Texas if disprivileged groups find it easy to vote.
Israeli soldiers blocked a vaccination aid convoy in Gaza for 8 hours and questioned some of the people working in it. The convoy was unable to carry out its aid mission. Fortunately, nobody in it was killed or wounded.
Australia is considering requiring social media platforms to check the age of each user. This article describes the mechanisms that might be used. It seems that each one will either require you to identify yourself to some other service that could keep track of everything, or require some sort of unalterable unique number from your computer. I expect they will demand something that users can't alter, which implies rejection of free operating systems (on a free operating systems, you could always set it to whatever value you like).
So I think this represents a plan to require that users either identify themselves, or run nonfree software (which will probably snoop on them), or both.
But I can't be completely sure of that — I have to make guesses about what some of these things mean.
There is a system that can verify your age to a web site while refusing to identify you to that web site: GNU Taler can be adapted to let you get tokens that you can use to prove you are over N years old, but that would not enable the site to identify you, and that won't allow the Taler site to know which sites you gave them to.
But that is not in the list of what Australia is considering.
A discarded bag of Cheetos messed up the ecosystem in Carlsbad Caverns. The balance in a cave is so sensitive that a small amount of food that does not belong there is enough to endanger it.
*Conservatives think giving children [gratis] lunch at school is socialism, but vast, powerful private monopolies are freedom.*
The more power a person has, the more society needs to regulate the use of that power to protect everyone else in it. Most of you, like me, don't have much power — though we may be able to influence others by convincing them — so we should have a lot of freedom, outside of actions that directly endanger others.
By contrast, a billionaire's power is very dangerous, so dangerous that we should regulate many things they could do. Even better, we should tax high income and high wealth enough that nobody can become or remain a billionaire.
There are other interesting points in the article.
*Reducing night light exposure may be a simple way to cut [type 2] diabetes risk.*
I wish the article gave some idea of how much light it takes to have a big effect.
*Pride or shame? British history is too complex to be seen in such glib terms.*
American history is likewise too complex to deserve, as a whole, any one feeling. Rather than argue over a choice of one single feeling overall, we can do better by identifying the parts of history that deserve pride, condemnation, or whatever else.
I would recommend condemnation, rather than personal shame, for the actions that we think were wrong.
Hindu-nationalist ideology in India, in the 1930s, drew lessons from its contemporary, Nazism. Comparing the two can help us identify the fascist essence that they have in common.
This suggests the lesson that the specific choice of majority trait which serves as an excuse to marginalize and dehumanize others is just a detail. Any trait can be used for this, if its members can get their hands on power to oppress the rest.
The trait need not even be borne by a majority, except in a somewhat democratic state which impedes any minority from getting the power to oppress others.
*Vaping damages young people’s lungs as much as smoking, study suggests.*
*DeSantis' election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions.*
This seems to be an attempt at intimidation.
MIT canceled its contract for reading Elsevier journals several years ago and has suffered no great inconvenience as a result. This is great news, because it suggests that more universities can cancel their contracts too.
MIT saved a substantial amount of money by doing this, but that is a secondary issue. What's important is that if more universities cancel these contracts, the result could be to wipe out the journal publishers or make them desperate enough to agree to be bought out for an affordable sum. After buying them out, the new copyright holder could make all the online copies libre.
Please join me in shunning the term "open access" and using the term "free scientific publishing" instead. The article linked just above explains why that term is better.
Analyzing this situation as an instance of a "collective action problem."
I think that one of government's missions is to fix these problems for the people. To do that, we need to elect representatives and officials who won't hesitate to say that some profitable business is a parasite and advocate laws to nullify its business model.
Digital game publishers have tried to twist copyright law to prohibit tools for you to change data in your running copy of a program, and now web site publishers to construe ad-blocking as copyright infringement. That would magically make them illegal without consulting the people's thoughts on the matter. (A confusion was corrected here on Sep 26.)
The article linked to above makes the deep mistake of using the term "IP" to refer both to copyright and to other disparate laws. That usage might leads you to suppose you could generalize about those laws and reach one single conclusion that would apply to all of them.
That is a path to confusion, because these laws are dissimilar in almost every point. If you want to think clearly, treat copyright as one issue, patents as another unrelated issue, trade secrets as another issue unrelated to those, trademarks as yet another issue unrelated to the other three, and likewise for plant variety monopolies, IC mask monopolies, design patents and publicity rights.
If you assume that any one of them is similar to any other, you're headed for error. Instead, do as I do: I think about just one law, I call it by its distinguishing name, and I never imagine that what I learn or conclude about it applies to any other law.
The planet roasters of the North Sea have warned that the proposed increase in the windfall profits tax levied on them would result in decreased amounts of drilling, and decreased extraction rate, over the coming decade.
The author of that article seems not to understand that that is part of the overall goal, which is to move from civilization-endangering fossil fuels to renewable generation.
All the arguments that planet roasters make for letting them extract more and more are based on burying this point. One of the things that disappoints me about The Guardian is that it continues to publish articles with this slant.
The French president, Macron, who is on the plutocratist right-wing, appointed a plutocratist right-wing prime minister, Bernier. There have been massive protests.
Bernier and Starmer seem to get along very well.
Arwa Mahdawi argues that it is now demonstrated that no amount or gravity of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians will make Biden act to restrain those atrocities. Sad to say, it looks like that is true.
However, I can't understand the fuss about Israeli soldiers who put on the underwear of Gazan women. They meant that as mockery, which is not nice, but mockery is as nothing compared to the atrocities committed against those same women (and almost all of Gaza). Those women (and their families) have been driven from their homes. Some have been killed, and more are being killed. Those soldiers have probably participated in the real atrocities.
A person who would get more outraged about making fun of women's underwear than about these violent atrocities would seem to lack a sense of proportion.
South Australia is considering a bill to require social media platforms to check the ages of users, which would have the effect of requiring them to demand that each user identify perself.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the ETHICS act so that they can't profit by buying and selling stocks that their votes will affect
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The charges against Pavel Durov are about chat groups, not encrypted conversations. It is a relief that this is not an effort to ban end-to-end encryption. However, I am somewhat concerned about the announced changes. Those who will be affected by them will include political dissidents as well as criminals. The phrase "upload media" is very vague, but if it means "upload videos", I fear that blocking this will do more to hamper the fight against crime (and particularly crime by agents of the state) than to hamper crime.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, an American, went to Nablus to join nonviolent protests against a fairly new Israeli colony (nominally unauthorized) near the town of Beita. Israelis fired guns to crush the protest and she was killed.
Some witnesses say a sniper shot her in the head. If so, that was murder.
Many Americans have gone to Israel and Palestine to protest against the apartheid system and its cruel expressions, and some have been killed doing so. One I recall was Rachel Corrie, killed in 2003 as she refused to leave a Palestinian house that the Israeli army intended to demolish.
The inquiry into the London tall building fire found that the system of construction regulations had been thoroughly corrupted. Companies sold flammable building materials, contemptuously violating safety standards and ignoring objections, and regulatory bodies had been nullified by a government whose priority was "efficiency" through "cutting red tape".
What it shows is that the red tape is necessary because the regulations are necessary. (Similar lessons taught the need for these regulations in the first place.)
The corporations add employees culpable should be prosecuted, but only the people can democratically reject the politicians that propose to "cut red tape" that is necessary for public safety.
*Greens to push Labour for wealth tax to fund [Britain's] public services.*
Some Republicans are giving lip service to supporting the interests of workers. Alas, it can't be more than lip service as long as they are dependent on support from barons of business.
Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All, by Mark Green and Ralph Nader, show the bullshitter's delusions and how they add up to denial of reality.
For example:
Harris downplays identity politics — instead of asking us to vote for the "first female president", she calls for defending women's rights.
In other words, she is concerned with the substance of feminism, not the identity aspect. That is admirable.
I don't directly care whether the US president is male, female, both, or neither. Those things are per personal matter, and don't affect the public. I care whether the US president stands for justice, rights of real persons (not fictitious ones), and helping the disadvantaged (which in many societies tends to include women).
HR McMaster, the corrupter's national security adviser for over a year, says he thinks Putin developed a hold over the corrupter by flattering him.
Unlike McMaster, I know about these matters only what I read in the news. But I got the feeling before and during the corrupter's term as president that he was making decisions to help Putin.
On the day that that article was published, I ran into Phil Zimmerman (author of PGP) and in conversation with him referred to the corrupter as "the Manchurian candidate". Zimmermann said he believed the corrupter was indeed the Manchurian candidate, in league with Putin.
*The Biden administration has accused Russia of carrying out a sustained disinformation campaign targeted at American voters and meant to influence the outcome of November’s presidential elections.*
This includes paying Americans to spread Putin's message. Others then repeat the disinformation without knowing Putin's role in convincing them to do so.
Two North Korean athletes face punishment for allowing themselves to be photographed at the Olympic Games together with South Korean athletes, after both pairs had received medals.
If the North Korean pair do not show sufficient contrition, they may be chosen as targets for the next Two Minute Hate.
Major advances in battery technology promise to eliminate any practical limit on how much electrical energy the world can store. With enough renewable generation capacity, and these new kinds of batteries, we will not need any fossil fuel or nuclear power for activities that can run on electricity.
That by itself can't enable eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions, but it can eliminate most of them.
Explaining why nuclear power plants are not the solution.
*Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognized the need to eat less meat after hammering out a shared vision for the future of agriculture with green groups and other stakeholders.*
I expect they are proposing less change than is really needed, but if they mean this sincerely, it will be a step forward towards survival.
*Israel lays siege to Jenin as it stops food and water, blocks ambulances.*
These are massacre tactics. Israel is extending its system of atrocities in Gaza to the West Bank.
Phoenix has suffered 100 consecutive days of temperatures above 100°F.
That's not as bad as it will be in coming decades.
US citizens: call on the Senate to keep MAGA bigotry out of the National Defense Authorization Act.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on T-Mobile, GM, CVS, and Elevance to stop funding Republican harassment using fake criminal accusations to attack voting rights.
*[Large language models (please don't call them "AI") are] worse than humans in every way at summarizing documents and might actually create additional work for people, [an Australian] government trial of the technology has found.*
Prisons are famous for refusing prisoners the medical care they need. The medics deny the problem and accused the prisoner of making it up. It happens over and over that the prisoner is telling the truth and that the problem is not recognized as real until perse dies.
This problem includes privatized medical non-care in US prisons.
*Kirstie Allsopp let her 15-year-old son go on a 3-week train trip around Europe with his 16-year-old buddy — and found herself under investigation by child protective services.* Here is Lenore Skenazy's response.
When I was 15, I was not ready for an adventure like that, and I would have been too terrified to try it. Even at 25 I would have found it too daunting — sharing a ride to a science fiction convention was as much as I could handle then.
However, most people learn to deal with the non-academic and non-computing aspects of life much younger than I did.
Kamala Harris used to advocate abolishing the death penalty for federal crimes, but she doesn't talk about it any more.
*Musk posts fake image of Harris in communist garb.*
It is the usual right-wing super-exaggeration which equates any progressive policy to "communism". Plutocratists said the same thing about the New Deal. It shows that Musk has broken off his relationship with reality.
*State Republican parties [are nominating] [presidential] electors who were on fake slate in 2020.*
I hope there is a way to bar them from having any role in the coming election.
Many Republicans are organizing to defeat the fascist, saying they'd rather have a democracy-supporting president that has policies they disagree with than someone who intends to set up a dictatorship.
The bullshitter tends to get everything backwards. Is this right wing tactics (whatever you are doing, accuse the other side of doing it) or mere failing memory?
*[The wrecker] and allies plant seeds for "chaos and discord" if he loses, experts warn.*
Maduro has ordered the imprisonment of opposition candidate González. There will no doubt be a trial first, but its outcome is not in doubt.
Jeremy Corbyn and four other independent MPs, all rejected by Labour, have formed an alliance.
US citizens: Show your support to Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter for fighting and blocking monopolies.
Imagine if we had a president and congress that supported all of FDR's New Deal, not just a few parts.
US citizens: call on University administrators and boards to end repressive tactics against protests in support of Palestinians' rights.
I agree with the recommendation that we should not label ourselves or others as "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine". We should campaign for peace between those two nations and the safety of all.
*How China's internet police went from targeting bloggers to their followers.*
*UK suspends 30 arms export licenses to Israel after review. Foreign Office says review found "clear risk" that UK arms may be used in violation of humanitarian law.*
This will increase pressure on the US to do likewise, as it ought to.
*Which countries have banned or restricted arms sales to Israel?*
The German neo-Nazi party won the election in one state. One writer argues, *There’s only one way to keep Germany’s far-right AfD at bay. Address the concerns it exploits.*
*Scottish government raids £460m green energy fund for public sector pay rises.*
When funds for curbing climate mayhem are are treated as available for any pressing short-term need, climate mayhem is likely to proceed uncurbed.
Everyone: call on news networks to expose Project 2025's nightmare tax scheme.
*Florida’s department of environmental protection has fired a whistleblower who exposed and sank governor [DeMentis]'s secretive plan to pave over environmentally sensitive state parks and build lucrative hotels, golf courses and pickleball courts.*
One must suspect the head of that department of placing per boss, DeMentis, above per department's mission. Is perse a Republican, by any chance?
*South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled that part of the country’s climate law does not conform with protecting the constitutional rights of future generations [from global heating].*
Thames Water, one of the privatized water companies that Tories created to extract money from the public water supply, is pressuring for permission to increase water bills, saying that otherwise it will fail.
Privatization schemes are generally a way to transfer public money to private profit, and water supply privatization is no exception. If the company is indeed moribund, that is great news, because it means that nationalization will cost the government very little in so-called "compensation". (Really, these companies' past and present owners should pay compensation for the wealth they have extracted from the public.)
Once nationalization ensures that any additional funds put in will not be frittered away on private investors' profits, the government can put in what is needed and really get publish benefit for it.
The UK is again considering taxing electric cars based on the distance they travel.
In the short term, the right thing to do is not to tax the EVs, but rather to increase the petrol tax — that will pressure more and more drivers to get rid of those. But eventually it will be necessary to tax the use of the EVs somehow.
I think that will be reasonable to do at that time, provided the system to collect the tax does not track where each car goes. For instance, it could be based on a secure odometer that will be checked from time to time.
In fact, the UK already tracks every car, and the potential oppression of this tracking system was already realized many years ago when protesters on the way to a nonviolent protest were preemptively stopped specifically to sabotage the protest.
Of course, the repression that the UK aim at nonviolent protesters has been greatly increased since then. I expect any new UK systems of transportation to be designed for increased surveillance — until climate mayhem makes those systems cease to function at all.
The bullshitter said he is in favor of legalizing marijuana. What should we think of that?
I have advocated legalization of marijuana for many years, so in general I am glad when others advocate it too. I hope the referendum to legalize marijuana in Florida wins. If the bullshitter influences some people to vote for it, that will be a good thing.
However. the bullshitter's statement that he supports that measure should not alter our disgust for him. We know that he will change his opinions from one day to the next, for no reason except political manipulation. That today he has a new opinion that agrees with us should not mislead us about what he is at heart.
The shantytown of Mudd, in the Bahamas, was flattened or washed away by the most powerful hurricane ever seen there. Five years later, the survivors can't even find land to build a permanent shantytown on.
They are like homeless people in the US, building encampments that get washed away by the cruelty of the state.
*In an unheroic age, Putin, Trump and Netanyahu are sick parodies of great men.*
The Indian invention of positional numeration, and zero, transformed mathematics world-wide, but in the west we have incorrectly attributed it to Arabs.
It should be noted that the ancient Maya used a similar system to write numbers, except with base 20, even earlier.
Governor DeMentis made a proposal to pave over large parts of Florida state parks, and it has provoked ridicule from prominent Republicans.
Tell Kroger's to stop trying to identify all its customers through facial recognition.
I edited my letter to say that trying to identify each customers is unjust even aside from the use of that information for precision gouging.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above function without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. I presume you have deactivated JavaScript or are using the LibreJS plugin.
I have done the first step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!" They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for some of them.
To start, in the personal information in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you should enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end. Then insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort compared with the benefit of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
Everyone: call on ABC to expose the right-wing extremist's connection to Project 2025 in the coming presidential debate.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above function without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code.
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript's or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the first step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!" They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for some of them.
To start, in the personal information in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Enter the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort compared with the benefit of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax.
You can be sure that billionaires are phoning those same elected officials on the other side.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Brazil has banned ex-Twitter for spreading propaganda in favor of the extreme right-wing ex-president Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro launched an attack against the main government buildings in Brazilia after Lula was elected president again.
I recognize people's right to advocate right-wing political views, even though (as you can see from years of postings in this site) I loathe those views. However, the state should not hold out its neck for an enormous business to cut, and businesses are not entitled to human rights.
Aside from the owner's vicious politics, ex-Twitter is unjust to each and every user by requiring per to run nonfree software to access it. The article says that many users have switched to Bluesky. Is it possible to use Bluesky without running any nonfree software?
Strictly speaking, the ban is because ex-Twitter tried to evade legal responsibility by ceasing to operate in Brazil and not appointing any legal representative. Each company doing business in Brazil is required to have a representative, whom I believe has the job of receiving summonses to the company. Must seems to have thought to make legal action against ex-Twitter impossible by not appointing one.
A tubal ligation does not guarantee you won't get pregnant.
Accusations that HAMAS physically harms its hostages seem to be false. *Freed Israeli captive Noa Argamani says she was wounded by Israel, not Hamas.*
Being held hostage is in itself a form of mistreatment, but we should not confuse that with physical mistreatment.
Vance talks a lot of adoration for unions, but his votes have been to weaken and undermine them.
The UK's railroad minister, in his previous job, threatened to deny contracts arbitrarily to an engineering company unless it bullied a worker into ceasing to raise safety concerns. In response, the company fired him.
I am not competent to judge the validity of those safety concerns. What is clear is that gagging a qualified person who reports safety concerns, rather than investigating them properly, is Boeing-like and is a failure of responsibility to passengers and others.
I think such conduct ought to be a crime.
The Australian fossil fuel companies claim that Australia has been too slow to build more renewable generation and therefore needs to develop new gas fields.
Why has Australia gone too slowly in building new renewable generation? Because the previous government was controlled by global heating denialists and adopted planet-roaster policies -- which included resisting building renewable generation.
If the government tolerates that as am excuse to allow more gas extraction development, it will lock the country into "solving" the problem of failure to curb global heating by boosting global heating.
Another way to delay curbing global heating is by spending billions on fantasy solutions that have never been shown to work. For instance, carbon capture and storage. If that reduces what's available for the cheap and effective solutions, it gives the fossil fuel barons what they want.
*How Exxon chases billions in US subsidies for a ‘climate solution’ that helps it drill more oil.*
A local man saved Lafourche Parish from Hurricane Ida by building a 18-foot levee instead of the wider 13-foot levee that the US government was going to build.
Each choice of design would have represented a bet about what future storms would be like. Hurricane Ida's waves were 17 feet tall. I expect that a broader 18-foot levee could have been built, if it was clear that would be needed, but it wasn't.
Maybe the federal government should prepare for stronger hurricanes, since that seems to be what is coming. That could help for some decades. But if we don't curb global heating, any levee will eventually fail, because sea-level rise will overcome it.
US air carriers lobbied quietly and secretly against an EU plan to require carriers to better measure the amounts of various pollution substances they emit into the air (and the amount of greenhouse effect of each one).
Measuring these better can't hurt, but using them to calibrate an emissions trading program is misguided. We have seen that emissions trading is ineffective for reducing emissions, because it is too easy to game the system or cheat. By going in that direction, the EU is caving into business at the outset.
By imposing a tax on emissions, a government offers no easy way to game the system, and cheating would constitute tax evasion -- punishable by imprisonment.
A multiply handicapped Briton gets so little support that he can't afford the cost of charging his wheelchair and running the lift to get in and out of his home.
The UK is moving towards canceling some recently issued oil licenses, based on questioning their validity.
Finally a step in the right direction.
The same factors that undermined the US response to Covid-19 are having the same effect on the US response to bird flu.
Bird flu is a pandemic for birds and could cause extinctions and damage agriculture. At present it is not a big direct danger to humans, but it has the potential to mutate and become so.
*UK MPs urged to give up freebies from tobacco, alcohol and junk food firms.*
It is illegal for a member of the US Congress to accept such gifts. The UK should have a comparable prohibition.
(satire) *Bemoaning the terrible course conditions he encountered while visiting the military burial site, Donald Trump called out Arlington National Cemetery on Thursday for its hazard-filled fairways.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling JavaScript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement JavaScript and CSS.
According to Americans for Financial Reform, the Health over Wealth bill would make these positive requirements:
I am in favor of each of them, but this approach is nibbling around the edges of a large problem which applies to many fields, including retail sales and home rentals. We should address the whole problem fully.
So I urge we either (1) prohibit private equity organizations from owning medical facilities or practices, or (2) subject private equity organizations to the same SEC rules as public equity corporations.
Any requirements of the Health above Wealth Act that do not currently exist for public corporations should be imposed on all of them.
The level of fluoride that people add to tap water is safe, but there are places where tap water naturally has a higher level, and that level is associated with neurological damage.
Petaluma, California, has introduced a municipal system of multi-use coffee cups. You drop the cup in a bin when you're done with it. It gets cleaned and delivered again to a coffee shop.
The UK has sentenced a bigot to almost three years in prison for shouting insults -- and nothing else.
He received the same sentence as another rioter who kicked and threw bottles. There is evidently injustice here. Worse than that, to convict people for insults -- even insults that are foolish and false right-wing nonsense -- tramples freedom of speech.
Some US employers are getting warnings in advance when an OSHA inspection is coming. Congress is investigating.
Israelis held massive protests and called a general strike demanding that Netanyahu make a deal with HAMAS to get the hostages back.
That is not what I would demand from him. I would demand, rather, that he respect and protect the lives of Palestinian civilians and cease to make war in ways that kill or oppress them.
The US has put sanctions on an organization that supports the violent "settlers"' colonial activity, and its leader.
They certainly deserve this punishment, but the US is moving far too slowly. If Biden want this to significantly restrain Israel's brutality before the election, he had better move faster.
Texas has established a parallel set of business courts, with judges that have no effective independence and have been chosen for partiality to oil companies.
*Why the Media Won't Report the Truth About [the bully/corrupter].*
Ralph Nader says that giving the bully a taste of his own medicine, in the form of nasty epithets, can be very effective.
Since 2016 I have refused to refer to the bully by his name, only by various epithets. I originally did this to deny that narcissist the pleasure he derives from others' use of his name. You can join in using my names for him, or do this your own way.
The EU has rejected Maduro's stolen election as illegitimate.
Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in federal and state elections in the US, but cities can authorize them to vote in municipal elections. A right-wing campaign aims to amend state constitutions to prevent that.
Some places in Europe permit non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. The idea shocked me at first, but after thinking further I decided it might be a good idea. In any case, there is no reason for state governments to intervene against it. We can leave it to each local government.
China is playing the many factions in Burma against each other in an effort to increase its power over all of them. It is not clear that the rest of the world has influence to aim for a stable peace, or what that peace should look like.
Canada's wildfires in 2023 released more CO2 than any country other than China, India and the United States.
A judge dismissed charges against the thugs that killed Breonna Taylor, by putting the blame for her death on her boyfriend. He shot at the thugs because they had not identified themselves as official thugs, so he thought they were criminals breaking into his house.
Since his actions were legitimate given his state of knowledge, they cannot make him culpable for consequences. And if the thugs falsified a warrant to give themselves an excuse, no circumstances can possibly justify that.
Everyone: call on media executives to follow standards of good journalism that will avoid spreading hate.
*Uber and Lyft drivers in Nashville vote to strike after forming a union.*
Those companies exploit workers so I hope they win some better treatment. If that increases the prices of rides from Uber and Lyft, that will be good as well, since it will improve the availability of real taxis that you can ride anonymously without carrying a snoop-phone.
But I don't expect that the drivers will demand anything for the freedom and anonymity of passengers, so I will continue to consider Uber and Lyft completely unacceptable. As far as I am concerned, this is a fight to the very end. See uber.html for why I refuse to enter an Uber car even if someone else orders it.
In the US: call on AT&T to negotiate in good faith with the union workers that are now striking.
An associate of the bully turned his bullying on the UK, threatening enormous punishment if it should decide to stop delivering arms to Israel.
It makes sense to try to pressure Biden and Harris to take a stand and pressure Israel to stop the killing in Gaza. But threatening to stand aside and maybe help the bully become president again is advocating self-mutilation.
Columbia University has bowed to threats from right-wing extremists in Congress by agreeing to rush to judgment of various students who were accused of participating in protests on campus.
The university administration is making a cowardly surrender to fanatics who do not believe in trials or justice — exactly the sort of enemies that a loyal American should resist.
US citizens: Elon Musk and other billionaire CEOs have too much power. Call on Congress to Tax the ultra-wealthy.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the US military to make no more contracts with Musk's companies.
I don't know whether the executive branch to has the authority to make this decision arbitrarily. However, it is surely possible in principle to pass a law to impose a suitable morally valid criterion. If it excludes some companies in addition, for the same reason, that would not be a bad thing.
*WHO delivers 1.2m polio vaccine doses to Gaza as pauses in fighting agreed.*
The increasing frequency of passenger flights hit by severe turbulence might be a consequence of global heating effects. If so, it is likely to increase further. No one knows how bad it might get in a few decades. However, I suspect it will not be as big a problem as the likely food shortages, spreading tropical diseases, and deaths from heat.
*A Horrid History of Sugar.* For instance, Indian sugar farm workers today are effectively slaves, as they are permanently in debt.
US citizens: call on state governments to pass Tim Walz's Free Lunch For Kids Program in every state.
Please find your state governor's phone number at USA.gov
*Major publishers sue Florida over "unconstitutional" school book ban.*
The ban is disgusting, but the article does not explain how it violates the US or the Florida constitution. I think the extreme court will find an excuse to uphold it.
The federal government and 16 states have joined as friends of the court in suing Georgia for firing a teacher for reading a banned book aloud in class.
When the corrupter tried to use Arlington National Cemetery to film a political message, which is not allowed, it showed his contempt for the United States. His reaction when officials told him this was not allowed showed his contempt for anyone that gets in his way.
I do not worship the military as the article suggests we should. Armed force can be used for good or for bad. But the rule that the corrupter tried to break is a wise one.
*Almost half of all fish species and 10% of mammals rely on rivers and lakes for survival but a combination of [global heating effects] and pollution is threatening their existence.*
Salmon escaping from fish farms in Norway are overwhelming the wild salmon population and could wipe it out.
*UN food agency [(World Food Programme)] suspends operations in Gaza after car [shot intentionally] at Israeli checkpoint.*
*Israeli military launches fatal airstrike on humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza.*
This happened shortly after the attack on a World Food Programme aid convoy which led that organization to suspend operations in Gaza.
The Israeli army says that unidentified gunmen were trying to hijack the lead vehicle, and that it attacked that vehicle all to protect the convoy. I don't know whether that actually happened, or whether the soldiers involved actually believed it. It could be mere after-the-fact bullshit fabricated as an excuse.
But even if that really happened, shooting everyone in the lead vehicle was clearly not a sane response.
Harris's speech at the end of the Democratic national convention was a statement for the prosecution of the chicken that tried to lead a coup.
The details of new Georgia election rules and how they facilitate arbitrary refusal to certify the election at all.
Many US billionaires are donating millions to elect the insurrectionist because he has promised to help them take even more of America's wealth from the rest of us.
If you know of an institution (or part of one) named after any of the billionaires mentioned in the video, for instance Steve Schwarzman, how about holding protests against his association with a convicted corrupt official that tried to steal a US election and openly threatens to try again.
Simply pasting "Trump" or "Trumptool" over the name of his billionaire supporter might be a good start — but do expect to have to put that sign up again frequently.
Harris says she will reduce inflation by attacking the price controls imposed by oligopolistic mega-corporations.
That is a great thing to do, but not easy. I would like to see what methods she proposes to use.
60% of Americans think big business is too powerful.
But the politicians who protect business's power will continue call themselves, misleadingly, "centrist".
George Monbiot: *There are several services and assets I would like to see nationalized. But at the top of my list is neither water, nor trains, nor development land, much as I’d like to see them brought under national or local public ownership. Above all, I want to see the nationalisation of my own business: environmental persuasion.*
Leaving it to private citizens to recruit and organize to avoid global heating disaster, then criminalizing all effective methods they can use, guarantees the job won't be done.
Official thuggery: *US police use force on 300,000 people a year, with numbers rising since George Floyd.*
By adopting ranked-choice voting in the US, we could ensure that voting for a minor-party candidate does not risk handing victory to the worse major party candidate.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass a green New Deal.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*Gaza polio vaccine rollout hindered by Israeli evacuation orders, says UN.*
After DeMentis took over the New College in Sarasota, and abolished various departments, he had thousands of library books put into dumpsters.
The Houthis have for a second time set an oil tanker on fire, causing a risk of polluting the Red Sea.
If the fire can be put out, and the ship and its cargo saved, that would be the ideal outcome. But if that is not feasible, there is another possibility: to rig the ship with remote controls and sail it into the port of Hodeida as a fireship. That could cause a lot of damage to the Houthis' port facilities, while not harming a lot of civilians.
If a deceased person's brain contains (average) 0.5% plastic today, what will it contain in 2050? Perhaps 2%?
Will it be necessary to treat that brain as toxic waste? Could cremation or burial lead to air or water pollution?
US citizens: support the People's Response Act, to invest in public health alternatives to policing for emergencies that are not about crime.
US citizens: call on Albertsons to apply to distribute mifepristone,
US citizens: call on Congress to ban vending machines for ammunition.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*The brother of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, has called for those responsible for his sister's death to be prosecuted and punished.*
Studies show that the most efficient way to reduce crocodile attacks in Australia is to teach men to follow the publicized safety precautions.
A new, improved indictment of the wrecker argues that his criminal actions to steal the 2020 election, were outside of his "official duties", so even under the extreme court's broad idea of immunity he has none for these.
I argue that stealing an election is never a legitimate part of the president's duties, so perse would never have immunity under this doctrine.
More Debt relief for poor countries would lead to major improvements in education and sanitation.
I hope it would also lead to major increases in use of birth control.
*Dozens of European directors, actors and other artists have called on Serbian authorities not to extradite a Belarusian activist back to Belarus,*
where he could be executed for political opposition activities.
The arrest of Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, could indicate an attempt to wipe out communication services that allow end-to-end encryption.
*US sues software company RealPage for alleged rent hiking scheme.
DoJ lawsuit claims firm’s algorithm helps landlords coordinate rental prices and violates antitrust laws.*
The wrecker is rambling in his rallies and discouraging some former supporters.
Missouri's Republican legislators are persecuting trans people in every way they can think of.
The Taliban have tightened their laws to oppress women. They are now required to hide their faces (along with the rest of their bodies) when outside the home, for forbidden to speak also. Even at home, they are forbidden to speak or sing loud enough to be heard from outside.
I wish we could kill all Taliban and put an end to their oppression. But we already found that that was not possible. Is there any cure for this infection?
The US and most Latin American countries have denounced Maduro's stolen election.
10 of them signed a joint statement with the US. Brazil, Colombia and Mexico did not join the US for this, but made their own statements to the same effect.
*Is "No tax on tips" a distraction from the fight to end sub-minimum wages?*
I think it is. I advocate abolishing tips by abolishing the special lower minimum wage for certain occupations, and making sure workers are adequately paid as part of the stated price of a service.
In the UK, food-delivery workers are compelled to work very long hours at lousy pay.
*"No one has any money": Israel's restrictions stifle West Bank economy.*
Human activities are making jellyfish spread and become more numerous off the northeast coast of Spain.
*Australian study of guppies shows that pharmaceutical pollution (for instance, Prozac) could threaten species’ long-term survival.*
Funded by oil firms and dark money, the corrupted Republican Attorneys General Association is fighting climate-related federal regulations and the ongoing lawsuits which would hold oil firms accountable for weather-related disasters in their states.
Their counterpart is DAGA.
If Harris becomes president, she will have to decide whether to push slightly on some Senate rules in order to benefit non-wealthy Americans.
A privatized UK water company didn't put away enough to cover its pension obligations, and has lost the suit to dump those costs on the public.
Britain's privatized water companies have skimped on employees' pensions as well as on maintenance of facilities. That should no be a surprise; that is what one should expect of privatized public services. With any luck, this will drive the companies bankrupt, which would make it possible to nationalize them without paying any "compensation", and thus put an end to the whole foolish Tory story of privatizing them.
Since October, Israeli army raids into areas of the West Bank, including Jenin, have greatly increased. This includes killing over 500 Palestinians and attacking schools.
(satire) *Earth Towed, Impounded After Illegally Parking In Milky Way.*
*As the world heats up, methane released from thawing permafrost and warming tropical wetlands is intensifying climate breakdown. But curbing it is achievable.*
(satire) *More Affluent Americans Beating Heat By Summering On Cooler Planet.*
Thugs in LA raided an encampment of homeless people on a beach, and stole all their property except what they could carry.
Stealing from homeless people is a standard part these raids. Even if that property is just a tent and some clothing, a homeless person has no way to carry all that on a moment's notice, and no ready place to take it to.
To steal from people who have so little is especially cruel, and it gives the lie to the claim that this is simply a way of making them move. It is, rather, systematic harassment with a legal excuse.
RFK Jr abandoned his campaign for president and endorsed the corrupter. In my book, that endorsement makes him an enemy of democracy.
Greg Palast talks of investigative journalism with RFK Jr, and how the latter subsequently forgot all about what the two had done.
Some examples of RFK Jr's promotion of wild disinformation.
(satire) *RFK Jr. Offered Multiple Cabinet Positions In RFK Jr.’s Administration, RFK Jr. Reports.*
The US used to have leverage on Israel, and used it to restrain some unjust actions. Nowadays, it seems Biden does not dare.
I don't know what caused this change, but I suspect that various Extreme Court decisions to rip up various voting rights and campaign funding laws play a role. They have enhanced the power of concentrated money to dictate to the US government.
*Both Israel and HAMAS’s leaders believe there is more to gain by fighting on.*
It is impossible to wipe out an underground movement that can recruit new supporters. Killing its leaders has generally proved ineffective.
A Palestinian-American Democratic delegate and an Israeli whose son was killed by HAMAS joined to pressure the Democratic Party to take a stronger stand against the bombardment and siege of Gaza. The party did not give much.
Some of the corrupter's supporters are starting to think, from his public presentations, that he is mentally incompetent.
*[Governor DeMentis's law] banned lessons on racism in Florida public schools. "Freedom schools" fill the gaps.*
Blue states too, like Illinois and Washington, have seen a resurgence of "freedom schools".
*Twenty-four [human] brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.*
That is so large it astounds me. And they are likely to cause various diseases.
Chicago thugs arrested protesters rallying near the Israeli Consulate. They arrested reporters covering the protest, too.
The thug spokesman justified the arrests with non-sequiturs in their usual way, then made typical right-wing threats.
Putting an end to collusion and price fixing is necessary today as it has always been, but that's not enough. The collusion is encouraged by the excessive concentration in large companies. We need to break them up or compel them to split up, with adequate new laws.
For the field of petroleum products, reducing the price is the wrong goal (it would exacerbate global heating). What we need instead is a windfall profits tax, to redirect that money to important needs (including more support for the non-wealthy). This could, in effect, serve as a kind of carbon tax.
For the field of rental housing, we would put an end to companies' owning large numbers of houses and apartments for rent. This can be seen as a strong form of deconcentration, bringing the rental housing market back to the way it operated 30 years ago.
A letter sent by many organizations urging the mass media to report on the threats to US democracy from right-wing extremists, headed by the fascist leader.
Due to global heating, wildfires are a threat even in the Amazon rainforest.
Solar power has cut the cost of electricity in Gujarat by 2/3, making salt extractors' lives much better as well as less polluting.
A Conservative US judge has endorsed Harris, saying, "I am indifferent in this election on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be."
A study of "stop and search" in the UK, which means stopping people arbitrarily on the street and searching them for no specific cause, found that it wasn't even effective for its stated purpose (stopping knife crime).
*RFK Jr considers dropping out to help Trump, running mate says.*
Now it is clear what side he was on all along.
progressive feminist digital Islam ...
A parody of Wouldn't It Be Loverly.
Since 2013 the subtler right-wing members of the Supreme Court have been chipping away at voting rights.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate Egypt's possible $10 million bribe to the corrupter.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Biden to support a global ban on autonomous weapons systems.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: call on Congress to tax the rich and reduce their excessive power.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Biden to address allegations of rape and torture by Israeli army.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
The bullshitter has adopted the making of deepfakes as a new medium for bullshit.
*Countries fueling Israel's Gaza war may be complicit in war crimes, experts warn.*
A court case in the UK seeks to show that UK law requires cutting off arms exports to Israel.
Is there any chance of doing something similar in the US?
*African health officials have appealed to the international community not to impose travel bans on countries dealing with an outbreak of mpox, but instead to support the continent in rolling out testing and vaccinations.*
This is very wise.
Extreme weather in the US is causing a shortage of donated blood. That can kill people, and it is just one of many ways that the climate crisis can kill.
A delegate at the DNC held up a sign saying "Stop Arming Israel". Other delegates near her started hitting her with their "We 💝 Joe" signs.
This was disgusting behavior, and those who attacked her should be punished for it.
George Monbiot: *At the behest of livestock lobby groups, lab-grown meat has been banned in Florida, Alabama, Italy and Hungary. Politicians in France, Romania and [128] other US states are seeking to follow suit. [...] [A] new campaign funded by the livestock industry and fronted by a former meat executive is pressing for an EU-wide ban.*
Monbiot asserts, and this is plausible to me, that the meat industry is aiming to preemptively prohibit an urgently needed substitute for the massive and heavily polluting farming of cattle feed.
(satire) *CHICAGO—In a deliberate counter-programming effort aimed at one of the biggest weeks of the 2024 election, [the bullshitter] reportedly hoped to disrupt the Democratic National Convention news cycle Tuesday by eating a live rat on television.*
The Federal Trade Commission voted this week to ban the posting of fake reviews by companies, and other dishonest methods of publicity.
The UK is using a bizarre excuse to suspend doctors' right to practice medicine for participating in nonviolent protests against a long-term threat to everyone's health.
It is based on the claim that patients are likely to distrust all doctors because of those doctors involvement in protests which have been criminalized.
IAEA inspectors at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, occupied by the Putin forces since 2022, report frequently hearing fighting nearby.
(satire) *J.D. Vance Accuses Tim Walz Of Stolen Valor For Wearing ‘Grill Master’ Apron.*
Russell Vought, one of the authors of Project 2025, had a conversation with a right-wing supporter from a wealthy family, or so he thought; but perse was really a British journalist who recorded the whole conversation.
In the recording, Vought claimed that the bullshitter was lying when he said that Project 2025 has nothing to do with him. Which one was lying — the corrupter or Vought? We can't tell a priori, since Vought seems to approve of lying for political victory. But since many of his close supporters believe Project 2025 is for him, I think that he told them it was.
George Monbiot contrasts politics we learned to expect in the democratic world from 1945 to 1975 with the true normal of history.
Billionaires have concentrated wealth.
Any party that tries to woo right-wing voters by promising not to raise taxes has made a choice not to address those issues. By making this choice for Labour, Starmer has ruined it.
Many Britons supported the Labour Party precisely because its goal was to do something about that. It rejected Communism, but advocated an increased level of Socialism. Now Starmer thinks to drag them along for lack of a better alternative.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the PRO Act, to help workers unionize.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*The Mortality of the US Homeless Population*
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important — and I label them like this.
The massive adoption of chatbots (bullshit generators often referred to misleadingly as "artificial intelligence") is greatly increasing the demand for electric power. This in turn is increasing the use of fossil fuels and thus accelerating climate disaster.
How ironic that this is a byproduct of making online services function worse.
The article erroneously states that neural network systems "make decisions similar to the human brain." Aside from the confused concepts — it makes no sense to compare a decision with a brain — digital "neural network" systems do not work like groups of real neurons. These "neural networks" implement an abstraction and simplification of early theories of how real neurons work. They can do some useful things, but we should avoid erroneous explanations of them.
*Gonorrhea getting more drug-resistant and "may become untreatable."*
Sheikh Hasina imprisoned many oppositions incommunicado. Their families had heard no word of them for years and gave them up for dead. Now it seems some are alive and will be freed.
Kenya is disappearing protesters.
The UK government has dropped its appeal of a court's dismissal of charges against a protester who reminded the public of juror's absolute right to vote to acquit any accused.
Global heating has been advancing faster than models predicted. Some scientists are concerned that Earth has moved beyond the region of climate space that the models work in.
So it looks like global heating will be worse than predicted.
Earth's weather is a chaotic system. Some of that mathematical chaos may get into the climate too. There are plenty of positive feedbacks that could be taking over.
*With modern solutions such as air-con aggravating the problem, ancient heat-management techniques can offer answers.*
*Shell oil non-profit donated to anti-climate groups behind Project 2025.
Foundation says it ‘does not endorse any organizations’ while funneling hundreds of thousands to rightwing causes.*
It also donated to the Heatland Institute, which campaigns to protect global heating and keep it going.
*Survivors of [fossil fuel] disasters demand US inquiry into big oil's "climate crimes."* They include spreading misinformation about global heating and its causes.
*German climate activists stop air traffic after breaking into four airport sites.*
These protests may be dangerous, but not as dangerous as the failure to curb global heating. Is it stupid to try this method when gentler ones don't serve?
Ukraine's army in the Kursk region is taking many prisoners; they say Putin's conscripts often don't want to fight.
It makes sense that they don't; so when Zelenskiy says that prisoners of war become part of the "exchange fund" to swap for Putin's Ukrainian prisoners, that creates a moral quandary. If a Putin forces soldier surrenders in order to get out of the Putin forces, swapping him back to Putin would spoil the point of his surrender.
Does Ukraine give each prisoner the option not to be traded?
*Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America.*
We should not suffer anything like today's antisocial media platforms to live. But what is the crucial aspect that we must make them change? I suggest that it is that they run recommendation engines and impose them on every user.
We can't be sure that changing this would correct the danger, but unless we have a better idea, we should try it.
US citizens: Protect the Biden-Harris Antitrust Agenda.
After RFK Jr tried to corrupt the corruptor, he reportedly tried corrupting Kamala Harris the same way — he would endorse her in exchange for a cabinet job.
The reports say she made no reply to him.
How pitiful it is to try to sell out and find that what you're selling is not worth anything.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban thugs' use of deception to trick minors into false confessions.
I signed the petition but we should go further. Many adults are vulnerable to pressure to make false confessions, and those are unjust no matter who is the victim. We should adopt this measure regardless of who the victim is.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Israeli bombing killed 18 people in the same family at once.
Families tend to stick together when they flee in search of safety. So if you make a habit of bombing places where hundreds of civilians are sheltering, and sometimes killing dozens of them, by chance sometimes the many civilians you kill will include a dozen or two from one family.
Whether the victims are related is not morally crucial. The war crime consists of bombing a place where there are many civilians. Related or not, civilians are not a legitimate target.
Fanatical "settlers" carried out another pogrom in the West Bank, but this time the president of Israel called it "a pogrom" and officials have said they will arrest and try the perpetrators.
This might be a significant change. We can't take that for granted, and it would be only a first step. But we can hope that it is real, and we can encourage that.
The US president can cut off arms shipments to Israel without any help from Congress. He can do this by enforcing two existing laws, which forbid arms deliveries to countries that (1) violate the rules of war or (2) block delivery of US humanitarian aid.
US citizens: Stand with Bernie Sanders: Not another nickel for Netanyahu's war. End U.S. funding and weapons sales to Israel.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The wrecker could harm abortion rights in many countries if he seizes the US presidency again.
(I don't say "wins" because Republicans are constantly trying to rig elections.)
US citizens: support Biden's proposal for a "No One Is Above the Law" amendment.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*Newly Sober God Admits He Has No Recollection Of Creating Universe.* This is only a satire — I would not seriously assert that supernatural entities exist.
The German legal system is deliberating on the precise meaning of the slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free." Specifically, is it antisemitic?
My conclusion about the slogan is that it is not antisemitic, and does not specifically advocate doing any harm to Jews as persons, but it does advocate the abolition of Israel. Said abolition might in certain circumstances be accompanied by a genocide, though in other circumstances it would not.
I don't advocate the abolition of Israel, and I do not associate with use of that slogan. What I advocate is a free and democratic state of Palestine in the region alongside Israel. I have advocated that for many years. Of course, this is easier said than done.
*Is the US Still a Democracy? 'Yes and No,' Says Bernie Sanders. "I use the term oligarchy... I think we are moving rapidly in that direction."*
I have said basically the same thing for many years, except that I prefer the word "plutocracy". The two words have a subtle difference but they are mostly the same.
There is no sharp line between a democracy, a degraded democracy such as the US is now, and a plutocracy. Rather, it is a spectrum. But if we take his issue seriously we must campaign to reduce the extent of plutocracy.
US democracy is also threatened currently by authoritarian extremism (led by the corrupter). That and plutocracy are different currents but they work together.
Is US democracy doomed? I don't know. What I know is that throwing in the towel is foolish because it guarantees defeat.
Spreading fires burnt the northwest suburbs of Athens. Many houses were destroyed.
There have always been fires in rural areas that took many days to control, but we have come to expect that the modern state can protect cities from such fires. That can no longer be assumed. Global heating produces higher temperatures, and in some places more aridity, and those combine to enable fires to overwhelm defense.
Coming sooner or later to a city near you — unless we curb global heating.
Medical effects of heat cause tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths per year. Often there is no record that attributes a death to heat. In poor countries, especially, no one is likely to determine that a poor person's death was due to heat.
*Inquiry into Mexico's [deadly repression from 1965 to 1990] obstructed by military and other agencies, board says.*
This repression included the Tlotelolco massacre in which soldiers secretly posted by the president in a nearby large building shot a crowd of protesting students down below.
There were, of course, cops outside that were sent officially to control the protest — but those cops were not the ones that opened fire. ISTR hearing that the hidden soldiers shot at them so that they would shoot "back" at the only possible visible enemy.
US citizens: call on Congress to overturn the "Citizens" United decision.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on governments to invest in community safety, and reduce reliance on police and punishment.
US citizens: call on Congress to take care of US national parks.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Omer Bartov, Israeli historian living for 25 years in the US, writes about how Israel has changed.
*As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel.* He describes an Israeli people that has come to see peace as unthinkable. That was not so before.
He cited his previous publication in November:
*We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.*
But then he said,
*I no longer believe that. By the time I traveled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.*
Tim Walz taught in a high school in China, and brought American students to see China -- and he taught them about the massacre of students that set up a small version of the Statue of Liberty in Beijing.
The UN Human Rights Office (UNHCR) recorded 21 Gaza schools bombed from July 4 through Aug 10.
I don't think this was a matter of chance.
Around 36 potential Republican election saboteurs are still in state offices.
Miami public school teachers have been compelled to vote to choose between their existing union and a Trojan horse union set up by right-wing plutocrats.
I call it a "Trojan horse" because it is the work of a campaign to abolish unions for teachers and public workers, Whatever it may offer them, it is a trap.
WHO says that its weak standards for two PFAS were meant to head off adequate standards, and were drawn up by people corrupted by industry. It plans to eliminate them and start over.
A UN special rapporteur judges Canada's temporary foreign worker program to promote debt bondage. Also, he found that workers are subject to many of the usual kinds of abuses; some of those abuses are illegal, but there is insufficient effort to prevent them.
Side issue: every time I see the term "global south" it strikes me as gratuitous geographical error. Mexico, Guatemala and Jamaica are all far north of the equator. The significant issue that these countries have in country is that they are poor enough that their people suffer, but developed enough for their workers to be useful in wealthier countries.
*Student Protesters Were Suspended With No Chance to Defend Themselves. Will Courts Return Them to Campus?*
To identify oneself "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine" presupposes that one cannot be in favor of the well being of both — as I am. I am not anti-Israel or anti-Palestine, I am anti-war-crime. I am pro-peace and pro-coexistence.
*Gaza sees first polio case in 25 years as UN calls for mass vaccinations.*
Krishna Maharaj convinced a judge to rule he was innocent of murder, but Florida officials would not let him out of prison. He has died there.
A person can become sentimentally attached to anything, but this miscarriage of justice was real, not merely sentiment in other people's minds. It called for redress in reality, not merely in sentiment. And it calls for changing the system so it won't do that again to someone else.
*A Simple Safety Net Could Keep People Like Me out of Prison.*
It used to be that if you got out of prison, most ways to make a new start were still open to you. Nowadays, in the US, most avenues to having a decent life are explicitly forever barred to you. Thanks to "tough on crime" politicians, more interested in showing they are tough than on avoiding future crime, we have a system designed, in effect, to ensure that former criminals never go straight.
Violent crime in the US in Jan-June 2024 is around 5% less than the previous year. Homicides dropped around 15%. (These estimates do not have accuracy within 1%, so I have rounded each to the nearest multiple of 5%.)
[begin irony] Eventually right-wingers and bigots will have no one to help them out. [end irony]
*Ex-Kansas police chief who raided local newspaper criminally charged.*
An Ohio thug has been charged with murder for shooting a woman dead.
Shoplifting is not a violent or dangerous act, so the suspicion of shoplifting was no grounds for shooting Ms Young. I do wonder how fast her car was moving and whether he could get out of the way. If it was no real danger to him, that too was not grounds for shooting her; he should have got out of the way and followed her.
I wonder why there are four charges of murder when only one person was killed. I hope it does not reflect the fanatical claim that a fetus is a person. Please do not give any sympathy to that scheme to eliminate abortion rights.
In Iran, the fanatics shoot women in their cars for "crimes" of disobedience to religion.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act
Side issue: I've been convinced that it is a bad practice in general to name laws, either officially or unofficially, after prominent victims of a harmful practice to be prevented in the future. A law is meant to be a better rule for society, not a memorial to a person.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Workers in many US cities have organized "Heat Week" to demand measures to help them avoid death from dangerously hot weather.
Such regulations will help for a time, but if we keep burning too much fossil fuel and making Earth's average surface temperature ever hotter, they will eventually overcome our resistance. The only method that will continue to work is to curb global heating.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to prosecute big oil.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to insist that we have no new wars, and de-escalate crises in the Middle East.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
We have to wonder: how can Venezuela get rid of Maduro, now that he visibly stole an election and launched readiness for repression of those who object.
The same question applies to other countries.
How can Nicaragua kick out Ortega?
How can
Israel Kick out Netanyahu?
How can Russia kick out Putin?
How can China kick out
Xi?
(Those last two have such total repression that few there dare admit wishing for freedom.
If the corrupter grabs the presidency of the US again, and institutes fascism, how could the US kick him out?
Rising seas, due to global heating, are polluting the wells in the islands of Vanuatu.
Putin's cracker corps is using very sophisticated phishing against people involved with the Russian opposition in exile.
Ukraine's small invasion of Russia was still going strong as of Tuesday, and Putin has sent only inadequate forces to repel it.
*[UCLA] cannot allow pro-Palestinian protesters to block Jewish students from accessing classes and other parts of campus, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.*
This ruling is right. You have a right to hold rallies to protest on political grounds, but you don't have a right to mistreat individuals by discriminating on their religious views.
To judge from this description, that kind of protest also commits the wrong of distorting reproach for Israel's practices into antisemitism. Antisemitism, like other bigotry, is wrong.
Whenever we criticize a country, we must be careful not to let that lead to punishing people for having an ethnicity or religion associated with that country.
UCLA should show ways that students can stand up for their views, ways that are visible to others using the campus, not tucked away uselessly, but without blocking them.
A US court found Google to be a monopoly, but its supposed "remedy", constrained by US antitrust law, would make things much worse. It is considering forcing Google to spin off Android and Chrome.
Chrome is nonfree, and Android includes crucial nonfree components. Nonetheless, from Chromium and the free parts of Android we can run systems that are free and safe to use. (True, for Replicant we face the challenge of drivers). I fear that spinning those systems off would lead to making them totally proprietary in the future.
Meanwhile, that would not stop Google from doing nasty things with its online dis-services.
Biden announced a cease fire plan in June, and HAMAS accepted it, but Israel rejected it. HAMAS now says it will still accept the July plan, but rejects changes Biden is privately proposing and will not join negotiations based on those changes.
*Gaza ceasefire talks are on their last legs, and Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame.*
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
Israelis accuse the army of using civilians in Gaza as human shields.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
China is strengthening military training and militarist indoctrination in schools, even primary schools.
Brazil plans to dredge a shipping channel the length of the enormous Pantanal wetland. Scientists say this could destroy the wetland, damage ecosystems, and cause extinction of species.
The push for the shipping channel comes from companies that would like to ship massive exports through it. Like building a road through a forest, the economic activity that the channel would enable would do lots more damage.
*[The corrupter]'s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020.*
*It would be one thing if Trump misspoke one or two times. But when you take all of his actions and comments together, a clear pattern emerges — one that suggests that bigotry is not just political opportunism on Trump’s part but a real element of his personality, character, and career.*
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 practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important — and I label them like this.
Project 2025 is actively working on training potential replacement federal staff on how to be loyal to right-wing politics and the corrupter and use their power to the maximum.
ProPublica obtained leaked training videos, which don't show up in the page if you can't access YouTube directly.
An appeals court has temporarily blocked Biden's latest plan for student loan relief. However, it has already helped over 400,000 former students who can't pay their bills. And another half-million have got an indefinite respite from paying.
Robert Reich debunks economic myth #1.
Economics, when Adam Smith founded it, was about questions such as the meaning of a good society. What sort of society do we want? How do we understand a “good” society? What do we owe one another as members of such a society?
He called himself a moral philosopher.
And that is still what economics is about, except that plutocratists pretend that that part of it never existed.
*Kamala Harris said in a campaign video that former President Donald Trump’s pick for vice president will be "loyal only to Trump, not to our country."*
She had a firm basis to make this claim: Vance said, "If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there."
The wrecker and Vance are the candidates of the billionaires. Here is a long list of billionaire supporters, with descriptions of where their billions come from.
Michigan's path to eliminating gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Subsidies in England for wildlife-friendly agricultural improved the prevalence of many kinds of wildlife.
*[H]ow Musk became a driver of elections misinformation* using his control over ex-Twitter.
*[A few Labour] MPs leaving [ex-Twitter] or scaling back use over its "deterioration" under Elon Musk’s ownership.*
If this spreads, it could put some useful pressure on ex-Twitter. However, as long as it requires to run nonfree software, no one should use it.
RFK jr has been denied a spot on the ballot in New York State because he falsely claimed to be a resident of that state.
LA is making a strong push to improve public transit for its Olympic Games in 2028.
At least for once the region where they are held may gain a lasting benefit. Meanwhile, the city says it will give homeless people temporary housing. I hope that doesn't mean they will be out on the street again the following week, and their old encampments will be put in the trash.
US citizens: call on Biden to end funding and weapons shipments to Israel, in order to save Palestinian lives, stop an all out war in the Middle East, and broker a ceasefire.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
Another analysis of the danger of a Republican coup by arbitrarily rejecting vote count results.
See also Greg Palast's warning.
*How Viktor Orbán Conquered the Heritage Foundation. Once the redoubt of Reaganism, the think tank has taken to promoting [the wrecker]'s favorite strongman.*
Both the wrecker and Orbán have acted to promote Putin. Each one is the enemy of his own country.
Antisocial media platforms preferentially recommend videos that show violence, and/or signs of bigotry and hatred.
This can give those that lean towards bigotry and hatred the impression that "everyone is doing it", even though most are not. For some, that is normal and acceptable.
Every free market is based on a set of rules, and different rules make different results. Plutocracy has brought about changing the rules so that the rules make the rich richer, and give them more power to change the rules further.
If the corrupter grabs the presidency again, which he can now do only by crooked methods or dishonesty, it will destroy our democracy and encourage global heating disaster. Almost anything we might do to stop this will be less bad than permitting it to occur.
*How an algorithm is helping landlords collude to fix rents.*
One of Big Tech's favorite tools for persuading the public to yield to a system that causes problems for people is the claim that "progress is inevitable, so give up and get used to it." Change is not necessarily progress, and many "inevitable" changes can be blocked if people are determined.
That argument is really just a variant of "You can't stop us because we are too strong, so just give up."
Greg Palast: Republicans in Georgia's state government gave themselves the power to reject, arbitrarily, the vote of any county. It is already looking at canceling Atlanta's votes in the next election.
How can the US prevent this method of stealing the election?
US citizens: call on the Senate to keep MAGA bigotry out of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Israel has been attacking lots of schools, lately — and causing lots of civilian casualties, because in some schools thousands of civilians are sheltering.
*The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel* After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.*
I've reported here on the gradual growth of the "settlers"' defiance and violence with state connivance. But this article shows that it is and was bigger and more ingrained than I realized. And since the Gaza war started, it has broken all limits.
Biden has adopted the extreme asylum-obstacle system pioneered by Republicans when the wrecker was president. The result is that the right to asylum is already mostly eliminated in the US, except for those who are safe enough at home to remain there while their cases are judged.
Presumably Biden did this to neutralize the issue as a political boost for Republicans. Ironically, the Americans who want this system don't seem to be aware that they already have it.
Australia, Germany, France and the UK have condemned extremist Israeli minister Smotrich for suggesting it was legitimate to decide to starve two million people to save a few hundred.
The US should be saying this, too.
Trials of the rioters who attacked the Capitol are not over. One who repeatedly attacked cops with weapons has been sentenced to 20 years.
*How Venezuela's opposition proved its election win.*
The UK sentenced a peaceful climate defender to a longer prison term than a violent right-wing rioter.
There is a perverse kind of logic that perhaps the judges used, although if so they would not want to admit it.
The right-wing rioters may have been carried away with rage stimulated by disinformation. In a year, this phase may have passed and he might become harmless.
By contrast, the leaders of Just Stop Oil have thought long and hard about the danger of climate disaster and the importance of preventing it. It won't be easy to convince them to give up, with so much at stake.
I think that the climate defenders should be rewarded, not punished.
Arguing that the right-wing rioters should be charged with terrorism.
*[The bullshitter] and Vance are unmatched in "the Olympics of lying", says Pete Buttigieg.*
When battling with the bullshitter, one must not mince words for how dishonest he is. He pretends that is an acknowledgment that he is truthful.
*The reality is that racism [in the UK] isn't a bottom-up expression of popular discontent, but a top-down project propagated by people in positions of power.*
The practice of labeling protests as "organized crime" has spread from the US to Germany and now the UK.
The UK protest involved violence against property, and that has always been a crime. Nonetheless it is wrong to equate a protest, whose participants sought no gain, with organized crime, whose purpose is gain.
Some US companies pay their CEOs thousands of times as much as their workers.
The average for S&P 500 companies is 268 to 1.
Biden announced he will not run for reelection, and endorsed Kamala Harris, the current vice president. It looks likely that the Democratic Convention will choose Harris . I don't know whether to consider this good or bad, because I don't know
Following the advice of Martin Luther King, jr., I try not to judge candidates by race or sex. I judge by their politics and (when pertinent) their chances.
My opinion of Harris's politics was raised by reading what she said about prosecuting possession of drugs, and mass imprisonment.
The 737 Max door-plug pop-out was caused by sloppy practices that had been reported by inspections for years. Boeing management chose to let the practices continue, since it had not caused them a loss of money. The FAA reported them to Boeing repeatedly but did not compel it to change them.
Perhaps the FAA took for granted that an airplane company would prioritize safety, and was not prepared to deal with one that would prefer to cut corners on safety.
Two right-wing extremists in the UK have been sent to prison for postings that urged violent attacks against asylum seekers.
The border between freedom of speech and inciting violence is subject to abuse by governments. But I think the facts this time merited the decision.
*Brats, dads and bravado: this US election will be decided on vibes.*
How foolish it is to vote based on such emotional impressions. We would be wiser to demand that candidates tell us what they intend to do.
For this year's general election, it is almost certain for any office that the Democrat will do better things than the Republican. As for the pseudoscience candidate, RFK jr, he's not rational enough to do anything good.
But it is not so easy to determine the best choice in Democratic primaries. It is quite likely that one of the candidates is more progressive than the others, but finding out which one that is may take searching and reading. Also, one of them may be supported by AIPAC and the others not.
If you vote for the progressive Democrat, you are more likely to get policies that help the non-wealthy rather than the wealthy, and that support human rights for all.
Harris campaign rejects claims she would support Israel arms embargo.
The order that closed the Philippine news site, Reppler, has been voided by a court. However, prosecution of Maria Ressa continues.
Brazil reduced its diplomatic support for the dictator of Nicaragua, who retaliated by expelling Brazil's ambassador. Brazil replied in kind.
It seems Lula is coming to recognize that a dictator that is notionally leftist can be as evil as other dictators.
Robert Reich: The supporters of the wrecker have good reasons to be angry at the American political system. But only progressives will seriously try to fix the problems.
Robert Reich summarizes evidence that the bullshitter is becoming demented — bullshitting himself as well as the public.
*[The bullshitter] lashes out at Harris and falsely claims no one was killed on January 6.*
Cori Bush says she will spend this fall campaigning against AIPAC.
Israeli minister Smotrich accused other countries of forcing Israel to allow some food into Gaza. He suggested it would be morally preferable to starve everyone there.
Jews and Muslims in the UK are joining in a campaign against hatred of whatever demographic group.
*Judges have refused to save Shamima Begum. Labour should bring her back to the UK to face justice.*
Her actions in going to join PISSI may have been a crime. If so, the UK should welcome her home and put her on trial. To avoid a trial by declaring someone exiled, without giving per any trial, is never just.
*[The wrecker once] shared a private flight with Project 2025 visionary he [recently] claimed to not know. That person was the head of the Heritage Foundation, who in April told a journalist he had discussed the project with the wrecker directly. Of course, wither one of them could be lying, or maybe both.
The wrecker's campaign said that Project 2025 "has never and will never be an accurate reflection of [the wrecker]'s policies." That may be true, because the wrecker may not have policies stable enough for a statement to reflect them properly. An accurate description of the momentary state of his policy plans would have to be quantum mechanical.
Everyone, condemn political violence.
US citizens: call on Congress to put limits on the immunity of ex-presidents.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, which would establish explicitly that each federal agency defines the meaning of its regulations.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*Analyses indicate Nicolás Maduro lost the presidential election.* So the question is, how do you push out a dictator that rigs elections?
Bangladeshis did this recently with massive protests, but that is easier said than done. Crucial in Bangladesh was the refusal, by the commander of the army, to order troops to shoot the protesters.
A crucial background point was that millions of Bangladeshis inclined to oppose Hasina had not fled the country over the years; rather, they were at home where they could join the protests.
Maduro has jailed 1100 people recently, some for political opposition, but others who do not seem to be politically active at all.
Even the Canadian Arctic has heatwaves now, comparable to heatwaves in Boston.
Governor DeMentis defended the extreme plutocratist principle that governments should help only the wealthy people — by denying poor people in Florida the benefit of $250 million dollars in EBT funds offered by the federal government.
It would have cost Florida $12 million to administer the activity, and that was unacceptable for a stingy Republican extremist. They believe wealth should flow only from the poor to the rich.
Ukraine has launched a small invasion of Russia, to the north of Kharkiv.
I, like Jade McGlynn, do not see how this contributes much to Ukraine's victory. I do see some possible benefits:
But none of them seems greatly important.
Large nonviolent community rallies against right-wing extremism in England led far-right activists to slink away in discouragement.
SEIU'S Verrett: "Harris-Walz is the working people's ticket — We're energized like never before".
I've seen statements with similar enthusiasm from leaders of other unions.
Tim Walz, *Kamala Harris’s running mate, boasts a strong record on climate policy and green energy as Minnesota governor.*
Global heating has created a geological structure that causes a flood in Juneau each summer.
It seems obvious to try to prevent the annual flood of Juneau by creating a way for water to escape from the dammed lake earlier and more slowly, when its level is low enough that it won't cause damage. Has anyone tried this? Is there a reason why it would not work?
For patients who are not very close to death, medical errors are a very minor danger — about 1% of the patients' deaths are caused that way.
A simple and clear demonstration that large language models are not intelligent. Alas, every time it refers to them as "AI" it tells people not to believe that conclusion.
In addition, there are other kinds of systems, also referred to as "Artificial Intelligence", which can do inference or can recognize certain crucial patterns better than the best humans. Those really do qualify as "intelligence".
*Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to head Bangladesh’s interim government.*
HAMAS has appointed the leader of the Oct 7 terrorist attack as the overall head of HAMAS, to replace the assassinated leader Ismail Haniyeh.
I worry that this will make further peace negotiations impossible. Netanyahu would say, "We hate Sinwar too much to speak with him." But even if Netanyahu were willing, there is no way to arrange a meeting or a call between them.
That's convenient for Netanyahu, if his goal is to continue fighting ad infinitem.
*Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar — and Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted.*
*Trump claims he's pro-worker. Project 2025 will gut labor rights.*
AIPAC just barely succeeded in eliminating progressive representative Cori Bush, with 8 million dollars. Plus some dishonesty.
*New Georgia rules let local [election] boards withhold election certification.* This was proposed by Republican supporters of the wrecker, and it might offer them a way to disrupt the presidential election.
Today's Latin American leftists give democracy high priority, and are ceasing to give authoritarian leftist regimes a free pass.
Meanwhile, the current right-wing rulers support right-wing authoritarians.
Six ways that Project 2025 attacks abortion rights.
*Hottest ocean temperatures in [at least] 400 years an "existential threat" to the Great Barrier Reef, report finds.*
The corrupter proposes another tax-cut swindle: it would cut social security for the poorest retired Americans, while reducing their taxes a pittance. It would cut more for wealthier retirees.
90% of convicted drug smugglers in the US are US citizens. The bullshitter despises truth even more than he despises immigrants, so he pins the smuggling falsely on them. Two birds with one falsehood.
Global heating effects prevent fishing in the Adriatic Sea (east of Italy).
Russia is systematically bombarding civilian targets in Ukraine with missiles that are usually quite accurate.
*[Global heating denialists] make up nearly a quarter of US Congress.*
*Debunking Myth #10: Economic growth is always good.*
Sanders voted against a tax bill that gives big tax cuts to big businesses.
The bill also revived support for families with children. Sanders supports that, as do I; but I agree with Sanders that we must not boost the power of the plutocrats by giving them any tax cuts.
*Who is brave enough to back Brazil's global tax on billionaires? The answer will define our future.*
UN special rapporteurs are calling on the US to take "immediate" action on behalf of people who were tortured by Chicago thugs into making false confessions, then imprisoned.
Denver cops forced trainee Victor Moses to keep on fighting in Fight Day even though he was collapsing. As a result of the stress to his body, his legs had to be amputated. Moses had warned the trainers that he had sickle-cell disease and could be harmed by pressing him too long, but they paid no attention.
Given that Moses has sickle-cell disease, I have a hunch he is black, and I suspect that racism played a role in the violent and callous treatment he received from the thugs that were training him.
Fight Day serves a crucial purpose; something like that is necessary. It will inevitably be somewhat dangerous, and trainers should recognize this when it occurs and protect the trainee. I understand that this can't always be done in a real fight, but that is no reason to neglect it when it is possible.
Meanwhile, there is a danger that gangster thugs will kick their enemies when their enemies are down. The official training for them must train them never to do that to anyone.
Scientists studying people who caught Covid in 2020 found that *while many people with long Covid improved over time, a substantial proportion still had cognitive problems two to three years later and saw symptoms of depression, anxiety and fatigue worsen rather than subside.*
The idea of "detoxification" has become a widespread medical myth, promoted as a way to feed on the vague anxieties of people who realize they will die someday.
*Palestinians voices are needed more than ever. But they are being silenced.*
I rarely see the US mainstream media. In print, they are paywalled and no longer viewable without running nonfree software. On cable they are even worse: they are restricted by DRM and viewing is surveilled, and they have the drawbacks of being video.
UNRWA investigated accusations that 19 of its Gaza staff were involved in HAMAS's Oct 7 terrorist attack. For 9 of them it found sufficient evidence to fire them.
Since UNRWA has 13,000 employees in Gaza, to be that successful in excluding HAMAS militants from its work force is good going. If we estimate roughly a million adult men in Gaza, 13,000 is roughly 1% of them. I think that HAMAS militants numbered around 10,000, also roughly 1% of the total. So the intersection of the two sets, by pure chance, would have numbered around 100.
To have had only a tenth that many indicates an effective effort by UNRWA to avoid hiring HAMAS militants.
It is absurd to fault UNRWA for not doing even better than that!
The US should resume its support for UNRWA.
In praise of Tim Walz, Harris's running mate.
Regarding some political stances and actions of his.
Even the fascist leader had favorable words for Walz, saying that he seeks to make Minnesota as progressive as California. (Though the fascist may not understand how favorable that is ;!)
I hope Harris and Walz take America farther than California has gone without federal help.
Orbán is tightening the pressure on Hungarian media that criticize the state or report on official wrongdoing.
A study compares the voting records of Atlanta politicians with campaign funds donated by companies that can profit from those votes.
(satire) *Billionaire Credits Millionaire Friends With Keeping Him Humble.*
*First conviction in Arizona fake electors case as Republican activist pleads guilty.*
*Alabama jailer pleads guilty in death of prisoner who froze to death in cell* where jailers kept him nude in the cold for two weeks.
(satire) *3-Year-Old Vows To Appeal Parents' Decision To Keep Newborn Baby Brother.*
Tunisia's dictator still plans to have a presidential election but has imprisoned the serious opposition candidates.
This illustrates why it is undesirable to prohibit anyone with a criminal record from running for office. Of course we don't want swindlers and corrupt people to be elected to office, but such a simple method is not trustworthy. Rulers that don't respect truth have a habit of using false non-political charges to exclude the serious opposition. The corrupter has made it clear he would do this in the US if he seizes the presidency again.
*Guardian interviews back up report by rights group B’Tselem, which says jails should now be labeled "torture camps".*
Palestinian ex-prisoners report being tortured and maimed in Israeli prisons. Some report on the slow death of prison neighbors from untreated wounds.
Adding an insult to their rights to the injury to their bodies, often they were imprisoned without any charges. It seems that this can happen to any Palestinian, with no visible rhyme or reason.
There is no possible excuse for treating prisoners this way.
Subcontracted workers in the UK can be abruptly fired for the littlest of "infractions", such as eating a catered sandwich that wasn't used in the meeting it was purchased for and was waiting to be scavenged.
I would guess it is similar in the US, but I don't actually know. The protection of workers' rights in the US is very flimsy after decades of lobbying by employers.
The repressive ruler of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, has resigned and gone into exile after massive protests filled the country.
As I understand it, the protests themselves were not violent but the repression was. Those who were protesting in the streets are now celebrating in the streets.
The employment preferences for children and grandchildren of the independence fighters of 1971 were frustrating to the rest of the population. As far as I can see, they were a zero-sum policy so reducing them or ending them would not hurt the people overall.
However, the bigger problem underlying the situation was the low wages for the other work that Bangladeshis could get — for instance, making clothing to be sold in other countries, paid a pittance, and sometimes getting killed because factories locked them in. This is the other side of the global problem caused by "fast fashion". Maybe one change could reduce both problems at once. I hope the next government will do something about this.
In the long term, Bangladesh is squeezed between population growth and global heating. Reducing the birth rate in Bangladesh will help the people there. However, parts of the country are being gradually inundated by the Bay of Bengal, and the only way to stop this in the long term is to curb global heating, world-wide.
Liverpool surmounted a right-wing provocation-demonstration by showing up en masse with peaceful conversation.
I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org.
*All-night streetlights make leaves inedible to insects, study finds.*
Doing that on any street must be good for the trees on that street, but doing that over a large area endangers insects and animals that eat them.
Four fortunate plutocrats will have the opportunity to buy a membership in Mar-a-Lago for the special high price of a million dollars, instead of the regular price of seven hundred thousand dollars. There they will be able to meet privately with the corrupter.
I suspect this is the pre-election price, and if he succeeds in acquiring the presidency again, the price will go up to five million dollars.
For the people, he is all bullshit, all the time. For the plutocrats, he is all corruption, all the time.
US citizens: call on Congress to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The coast of Scotland near Montrose is eroding around 3 meters per year. It has eroded 70 meters in the past 30 years, but this is sure to accelerate.
In a few years, the town will be flooded.
As the Great Salt Lake shrinks, it releases the carbon it has stored over the ages.
A portable digital product now offers to be your "friend".
When these "services" are implemented on servers that a user communicates with, they create a dangerous vulnerability in society. A change in one server could convert all the "friends" based there into marketing "influencers", right-wing extremists, antivaxxers or Putinites. In other words, the sort of propagation that sometimes happen, over months, to a collection of real people could be activated on command
We should not allow that situation to exist.
If the system is implemented in a product that communicates with no one except its user, that danger is avoided, unless it has other communication channels. The article does not make it clear whether the "Fried" box has a back channel to the manufacturer. If this model doesn't, the Apple model surely will.
For-profit colleges fund the right-wing extremists in Congress that ignited the persecution of students protesting atrocities in Gaza.
For-profit colleges are often predatory, and some were shut down for this a few years ago.
I've recommended prohibiting them in general, to avoid the need to prove wrongdoing case by case, because that situation tends to encourage predatory behavior.
Some countries charge a household a very low price per joule for up to a specified low rate of energy use, and a higher price per joule for additional energy beyond that necessary minimum. That eliminates the danger of shut-offs for the poor, and assures that high fuel costs won't crush them.
Note that a kilowatt hour equals 3.6 mega joules. Any kind of energy can be measured in either of these units, and any system for delivering energy could be covered by a charging system like this one.
Women as national leaders are no longer unusual, and we have seen enough of them to recognize that they run the gamut of good and bad qualities, just as men as leaders do. Women, as leaders, do not systematically have any particular important qualities. And no leader is perfect.
Thus, we can't find a good national leader by choosing by gender. We should judge a candidate by what per goals and values, and per abilities — not by aspects of per identity.
*New Report Details Dangerous Normalization of Bigoted Conspiracy Theories in 118th Congress.*
It was reprehensible of Starmer to expel Labour MPs for voting to help poor British families, but entirely justified to stop local governments from blocking power cables for wind-powered generators. Hundreds of millions of human lives, if not more, are at stake in decarbonization — aesthetic preferences are hardly sufficient reason to delay that work.
However, a creative compromise may perhaps soothe some of the opposition. Is it possible to design power pylons to serve the humanities as well as human survival?
Could pylons, and cables, support homes for endangered birds and bats? Could the hanging meadows of Britain help re-wild the land? If disused drilling platforms can help wildlife survive, maybe pylons can too.
Might some of them act as scaffolding for colossal art works and installations, or sport walls for rock climbing competitions, or be painted with amusing designs?
If buried cables are cheap enough that burying them won't interfere with saving civilization, by all means bury them. Otherwise, the pylons are coming to save us and we should rejoice.
* Critics say [US energy reform bill] is a "fossil fuel wolf in clean energy clothing" that would gut environmental protections.*
US plutocratists have made the word "reform" effectively vacuous by repeatedly using it to describe the elimination of regulations that protect us from their power and greed.
US citizens: call on Congress to defeat the plutocratist fossil-fuel giveaway bill.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
A video posted by an Israeli soldier shows the demolition of the main water facility in Rafah. That is no military target; attacking it was a war crime.
*Israel arrests Aqsa Mosque Imam Ekrema Sabri after eulogizing Ismail Haniyeh*
Israel says it is investigating his sermon for possible incitement of violence, which Sabri denies.
They could certainly wait to make up their minds whether to prosecute before arresting him.
New pun: Analysis of water from church…
Right-wing extremists in the UK are organizing violent rampages, in the spirit of the wrecker's Jan 6 attack on the Capitol.
In the first one, a fanatic stabbed several small children, killing three.
This highlights the difference between the climate defense movement and the right wing extremist movement: one strives peacefully to protect the weak from the powerful, while the other aims to display power by bullying and cruelty against weak victims, the weaker the better.
Starmer should respect the first and take action to end the second.
Anti-racists are organizing counter-rallies under the banner, "Don't let racism divide us."
Starmer plans to expand face-recognition surveillance in Britain.
A country that imprisons people for "disruptive" nonviolent protest would not hesitate to arrest them on the way. The UK has already used car tracking to arrest people suspected of being on the way to a nonviolent protest.
*Bangladesh arrests more than 10,000 in crackdown on protests.*
The No Kings Act would override the extreme court's ruling that ex-presidents have almost complete immunity from prosecution for crimes that are part of their official acts.
The chavistas from poor parts of Caracas have turned against Maduro, so he has ramped up the repression to target them too. His thugs are arresting people for peaceful protests or simply stating opposition to him.
An al-Jazeera correspondent in north Gaza, and his cameraman, were killed by an Israeli missile attack on their car.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says they were driving out of an area that Israel warned it would attack. Killing of journalists can't be legitimized by warnings.
Here is what al-Jazeera says about the killing.
Israel attacked the al-Jazeera office in Gaza in the early days of the war. That could not have been an accident.
Israel has killed at least 85 journalists in Gaza since then.
I knew very little about Governor Shapiro, rumored to be Harris's choice of running mate. This article provides some information, and some is disturbing.
Shapiro's "high popularity among Republicans" leads me to worry that his Republican supporters may like him for rational reasons — such as stands which are not progressive. The article shows several that he does, or may, hold. Where we do not know, we should press him to clarify. But we won't have a chance to do that.
The most dangerous of the possible positions reported in this article is being too cooperative with planet roasters. The priority goal of every country must be to prevent the destruction of the natural world.
The most unjust of the stances listed in the article is the intent to restrict the right to boycott. In general, people and most organizations should have the right to boycott people, businesses and countries because of their actions.
There are some exceptions. Government agencies, and companies whose services are essential, must not be allowed to deny their services to any person or organization — they must be common carriers.
Boycotts of persons based on demographic characteristics that have (or should have) nondiscrimination protection ought to be prohibited, because such boycotts would amount to discrimination. This includes discrimination by national origin.
But aside from such cases, boycotts should be permitted.
The State of Massachusetts once passed a law to boycott companies that traded with Burma. I had the fortune to meet Assemblyman Byron Rushing, its champion, and I told him that this law had made me proud of Massachusetts. (It was later struck down by the Supreme Court which said it was preempted by World Trade Organization treaty, a business-supremacy treaty.)
Everyone: call on Costco, LL Bean, Macy's, Home Depot, Best Buy, Sears, and AT&T to drop Citi as credit card partner.
US citizens: Support Biden's proposed reforms for the extreme court.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to break up UnitedHealth's medical empire.
That company is not a monopoly, strictly speaking, but it is big enough to diminish competition in a way that harms the public.
I've chosen to avoid the term "health care" in referring to medicine. The use of "care" in describing medicine is a PR campaign that I get a bad feeling about.
US citizens: call on Biden to support a treaty to ban autonomous weapons.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
Democrats need to mobilize support based on class, which can unite most Americans, rather than race or identity, which tend to divide groups.
Most Americans nowadays are poor and struggling; that is something they can share. For some, bigotry against their various identity groups plays a part in causing that; but not for all. The other causes, the ones associated with class, makes anyone who is not wealthy a victim, so it can mobilize all those people together.
Given this, why does the corrupter have followers? Partly by appealing to religious fanatics. Partly by blaming minority groups for the consequences of systems that make life bad for them (which often are the work of the rich and the plutocratist politicians).
We are warned not to underestimate the corrupter's appeal to his target audience. He knows how to touch many Americans emotionally. His willingness to use that dishonestly, and his lack of any commitment to really address Americans' real problems, facilitates his doing winning misguided support.
Kamala Harris said she supported "Medicare for all", but it turned out she meant private insurance, for all with limits on medical treatment. What she supports in that area now is not clear.
Russian liberal opposition politician Ilya Yashin, just released from Putin's prison through an exchange of prisoners, criticized that very exchange.
He said, "It encourages Putin to take more hostages." He is thinking like the patriotic hostage I wrote about yesterday.
He did not want to leave Russia, either; he wanted to stay there and campaign for freedom. I understand those feelings, but in any fight there can be times when it is better to retreat than to stay put and be totally defeated. This was one. Putin makes it nearly impossible to campaign for freedom, justice, truth or peace in Russia.
The US established crushing trade sanctions against Venezuela to punish Maduro. It also launched a coup attempt, which failed, together with a right-wing opposition (that wasn't what people wanted). I think they would have elected an honest Chavista, but they did not have that option.
The sanctions spread poverty in Venezuela, and pressured millions of Venezuelans to flee to the US and other countries. That suffering many have convinced may to vote against Maduro just now. But the US could have been far more helpful if democracy was its goal.
*Democrats pitch No Kings Act to override [extreme court]’s [ex-president] immunity ruling.*
The fascist told his followers that if they elect him this year, they won't need to vote ever again. That is a deniable suggestion that he won't allow citizens the power to undo what he will have done.
When the wrecker states his drastic plans explicitly, his supporters say he is joking.
I've noticed that he no longer tends to disregard all criticism, by simply taking a totally different stand the next day. It seems to be possible nowadays for public criticism to make him respond to criticism of things he said.
For instance, he recently tried to explain away his remark about asking Christians to vote "just once." His explanation was that Christians tend to have a low voting rate (I am skeptical of this and I won't believe it just because the bullshitter says it). He was, he claims, imploring them to vote this year, but in 2028 it will be ok if they return to their habit of not voting.
Supposedly that should reassure us that he is not planning to ruin what remains of democracy in the US. Don't buy that! On the contrary, that plan is implicit in his explanation.
If he needs nonvoting Christian supporters to vote for him this year, why would he not need them next year?
Because non-rich Americans, who by then would have suffered the harmful effects of the denial of their rights, will support him? Not likely. Will secular Americans have become supporters of hierocracy? Surely not.
The natural reason, which his supporters will believe, is that he expects to have made it impossible by 2028 for any opponent, no matter how popular, to defeat him.
To believe he means that is not a radical claim. Republicans have organized to rig elections for more than a decade, and their efforts have intensified in recent years. Support from president and federal agencies, as well as the extreme court, would potentiate those efforts, making the fight for democracy in America even more uphill.
By now, we should not be shocked by this, only determined to defeat the attempt to impose right-wing extremist rule.
Vance called Rep. Ocasio-Cortez "sociopathic" for choosing (at least for the time being) not to have children.
This demonstrates the depth of his intentions to impose repression on women if he ever gets the chance.
Republicans now openly stand for imposing marriage and children on every woman, and denying various rights to women who don't have them.
I think that "family values" was meant, all along, to hint at this goal.
There are big protests in Venezuela against Maduro's claim to have won the recent election. Who should I believe?
When Chávez was president, the right-wing minority (1/4 of the population) could organize large protests, and welcomed a US-organized coup attempt. The protests now don't show that Maduro really cheated.
The opinion of the US government does not convince me of anything. After all, in 2019 it supported Juan Guaidó's campaign to proclaim himself president of Venezuela. True, that occurred when the wrecker was president of the US; but the US supported the coup against President Zelaya of Honduras when Obama was president.
However, given that various left-leaning presidents, some of whom I respect, are pressing Maduro to justify his claim to have won, and since he seem to have kept the local vote counts secret, it looks like he must in fact have lost and be trying to cheat.
Even the slum dwellers, traditionally chavistas, are protesting to demand that Maduro accept defeat.
Some of the contributors to Project 2025 are now embarrassed to receive credit for their work.
Or perhaps they figure that what they wished to achieve has already been achieved, and now they seek to duck, hoping to avoid public odium for that.
*Antarctic temperatures rise 10°C above average in near record heatwave. Reported temperatures on continent in midwinter reach 28°C above expectations on some days in July.*
Israel has assassinated many HAMAS leaders over the years, and at present most of its old leadership is gone.
That won't make it harder for HAMAS to fight in Gaza, but will make it hard for it to negotiate a peace agreement or even a cease-fire.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
The Secretary of Defense has canceled the plea deal signed by three prisoners in Guantanamo.
See description of that deal.
US citizens: support Biden's proposed Supreme Court reforms.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: call on Biden to de-escalate violence in Israel and Lebanon now.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: phone your senators and urge them to confirm Biden's judicial appointments.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Americans are celebrating the exchange of several convicted Russian spies and agents for several journalists and political activists that Putin took hostage.
To me this deal seems to be a victory for Putin, of a sort that will lead him to keep grabbing hostages whenever there are convicted Russian spies he wants to protect.
It seems to me that the patriotic hostage says, "Don't ransom me if that harms my country!" And the prudent traveler stays away from countries such as Russia, China and Iran, that are likely to grab a hostage to exchange.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, don't defund Title X.
*Title X provides birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing for 2.6 million low-income Americans.*
Three prisoners in Guantanamo pleaded guilty to organizing the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to urge the USPS Board of Governors to fire DeJoy.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
In the US: call on major media to expose J.D. Vance's anti-abortion extremism.
A glossary for US wildfire terminology, embedded in another interesting article about why wildfire smoke is more toxic than the pollution from internal combustion engines and how much.
*Wildfire days are going to happen again and again. And so we need to change our frame, from thinking that this is going to be a one-off, to understanding that for our kids, it’s more or less going to be the equivalent of a chronic exposure.* Unless we curb global heating, we may eventually find wildfire smoke impossible to avoid. But by that time food may be impossible to grow.
*The "heat dome" causing scorching temperatures across western Europe and north Africa … would have been impossible without human-caused global heating*.
Last year, Vance opposed federal rules to limit toxic pollution from factories that produce coke.
This refers to the coke that is made from coal and used in smelting iron, not to the beverage or the drug. Though I suppose even more Americans need protection from those ;-}.
Israel assassinated the HAMAS political leader, Ismael Haniyeh, who was visiting Iran. So Iran's government is under pressure to retaliate.
Haniyeh was negotiating peace in Gaza with Israel. By killing him, Netanyahu expressed refusal to negotiate. The US should say that that refusal is unacceptable, as is the assassination of enemy negotiators.
I suspect that Netanyahu intended to provoke war between Iran and Israel, figuring that the US would be dragged along into supporting Israel and then into fighting Iran. This would make it even harder for the US to do what it must do, which is pressure Netanyahu into ending Israel's atrocities in Gaza.
At a deeper level, it conveys to the US government Netanyahu's message that "I can force you into war whenever I wish, so be obedient."
But that aspect may not work.
Israel tried something similar in April, attacking Iran. Iran retaliated with a wave of drones, and the US helped shoot down those drones — but outside Iran. And it did not join in any attack against Iran. At that point, Iran stated that honor was satisfied. I guess that the US and Iran understand what Netanyahu is doing and that they do not intend to let Netanyahu make them fight.
Israel is not the only nation-state to have recently committed or attempted assassination of enemies living in exile. India has done this, Rwanda, and Russia too.
We condemn those assassinations — which does not imply support for the causes they stand for — and we should also condemn it when Israel does it.
Biden called for an 18-year term limit on justices of the Supreme Court. This would immediately exclude Chief Justice Roberts as well as Their Most Corrupt Thomas and Alito. If Democrats can appoint the replacements, it could provide an opportunity to undo the damage done by the current Extreme Court.
Alas, that would not do anything about the three young right-wing extremists, who are likely to plague the United States for decades to come.
Biden's proposal adopts the ideas of imposing a code of ethics on the justices of the Supreme Court, and eliminating the extreme immunity for ex-presidents recently imposed by the Supreme Court.
When global heating helps to cause an unusual event and that event is clearly the cause of a specific person's death, that can make it possible to charge oil companies with homicide.
Global heating effects contribute to many deaths, but (in my limited understanding) that is not enough basis legally to charge big contributors to global heating with homicide. Occasionally, as here, there is a specific heating-provoked event one can point to as the direct cause of a person's death. IANAFL 🤨, but it seems that that can provide a basis for charges, at least in France.
🤨 I am not a French lawyer.
Harris has retreated from advocating a ban on fracking.
I'm sure it is true that she would push for decarbonization to some extent, while the wrecker would do the opposite. Nonetheless, it is clear that the US is not doing enough, nowhere near enough, and this change would mean doing less.
A war game to model ways that the wrecker, if he wins or steals the election, could impose an authoritarian state found no clear trustworthy defenses.
*Global methane emissions rising at fastest rate in decades, scientists warn. Researchers call for immediate action to reduce methane emissions and avert dangerous escalation in climate crisis.*
*As record heat risks bleaching 73% of the world’s coral reefs, scientists ask "what do we do now?".*
We should have curbed global heating
starting 20 years ago.
Or we should have curbed global heating starting 10 years
ago.
However, the planet roasters used their political influence to prevent this, so we now see our planet slowly starting to roast. The death of much of the world's coral is part of it.
What do we do now? We must curb global heating now, with treaties and laws strong enough that they will start reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A heavy tax on the electricity used by data centers would help.
If we continue increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the air, eventually ocean acidification will kill all corals and many other animals with shells, by dissolving their shells.
It's not just corals that are in danger from global heating. Butterflies are one example among many.
*Exclusive: Discovery of [UAE] passports in wreckage suggest covert boots on the ground, despite Gulf state's denials.*
A British surgeon in Gaza reported that a large fraction of the surgery she did was on children and young teens. But many of them are so malnourished that they their wounds do not heal properly.
I can't find a date in the article, but the figure for deaths suggests it was a few months ago.
Republicans are saying nothing about the possibility of gun control. They are willing to risk their lives in the name of making America more dangerous and enriching gun companies. I would admire them for that firmness, if they were serving a worthy cause.
Many towns in the old "wild" West had gun control and did not allow people to carry guns. On entering them, people were required to hand in their guns.
(satire) *[The bullshitter] Vows To Unite Nation Against Common Enemy Of Other Americans.*
(satire) *J.D. Vance Vows To Fight For Forgotten Communities In Silicon Valley.*
Interviews with Ukrainians captured and tortured by the Putin forces for long periods of time. Some were soldiers, some have been and are civilians.
They describe many sorts of excruciating torture, so persistently that it leads me to think that their guards cannot ever safely be allowed outside prison.
One person asks why have the International Red Cross and the UN not pressured Putin to treat prisoners humanely? I speculate that they know they have no influence, that Putin will defy them as he defies any influence against his inhumanity.
Now that heating of the oceans and seas makes hurricanes intensify faster, the question of whether to evacuate has become more difficult.
Perhaps new building codes are needed so buildings will be able to stand up to hurricanes. They should also include rules to make sure the building won't be inundated.
*Brazil court freezes assets of [rancher] Dirceu Kruger to pay [50 million dollars in] climate compensation for illegal deforestation.*
Explaining the flaws in research that formerly suggested that using alcohol at a limited rate was good for health.
Wild chimpanzees communicate with hand gestures, and respond to each other sequentially much as humans do with speech. Some of the gestures have been understood by scientists.
Drugs intended to extend human lifespan are developed with testing on only male mice. When later tested on female mice, it doesn't function for 75% of them. If any do function for humans, they may treat only human males.
The article does not say why researchers normally use only male mice, but I speculate that female mice are harder to understand because their reproductive cycles make the results more complicated.
The UK Labour government is running into the contradiction between its fiscal policy, which imitates the Tories, and carrying out even its highest priority projects.
Many accuse Maduro of miscounting the votes in Venezuela's election.
The article does wrong by lumping Maduro's repressive rule with Chavez's reforms with popular support, which it does implicitly by lumping them together as "25 years of chavista rule." Maduro gives only lip service to Chávez.
Andrew Malkinson, exonerated after 17 years in prison for a crime that was committed by someone else, excoriates the UK officials who are supposed to investigate such cases and free those unjustly convicted. They give the priority to protecting the reputation of the courts.
That happens in the US, too.
A SWAT team in an unmarked car started firing not-as-lethal bullets with no warning at Jaleel Stallings, so he fired his licensed gun back at them until he figured out that they were official thugs. Then he surrendered, so they beat him up and charged him with attempted murder.
For once, the justice system mostly worked: he was acquitted and one of the thugs even pled guilty to a minor crime.
The bullshitter's campaign tells the story all wrong, displaying his contempt for the idea of truth.
*UK "turning a blind eye" to threats to kill Saudi activists living in exile.*
Republicans and the gun lobby adopted an anti-gun-regulation law in Wisconsin that barred the city of Milwaukee from prohibiting guns in the vicinity of the Republican National Convention.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban carrying guns at voting places.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*JD Vance calls [the corrupter] "morally reprehensible" in resurfaced emails [from 2014-2017].*
I wonder whether he has changed his appraisal of the corrupter or only decided to bury it for self-interest.
More about this.
Ohio election law does allow that the Democratic Party can choose a candidate at its convention.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
As retaliation for a missile attack by Hezbollah that killed children in Israel, Netanyahu postponed the transport of some wounded and sick Palestinian children from Gaza.
This is, in effect, taking those children hostage.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject KOSA, the bill that purports to "protect children" by requiring all adult users of social media platforms to prove their age.
To do that requires they show government ID or run nonfree software. Both are injustices and both are dangerous.
Meanwhile, the main cause of the danger in those platforms comes from the recommendation engines, and that danger affects adults too. A real solution would protect all users without making any of them identify perself.
Online misogynist propaganda has caused a big increase in violence against women in England and Wales.
Researchers recently found that Facebook and Instagram spontaneously show such material to users who described themselves as young men.
*Netanyahu is presiding over a sharp decline in the US’s pro-Israel consensus.*
This is a natural reaction to his presiding over Israel's descent into ever more extreme dehumanisation and destruction of Palestinians.
US citizens: call on the US Treasury to give no subsidies for waste incinerators.
Oxfam International's report details Israel's destruction of nearly all of Gaza's water infrastructure, including wells, desalinators, storage, in addition to the supply Israel used to provide. This puts everyone in Gaza in danger of death or lasting medical damage.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
Jewish Voice for Peace organized a nonviolent sit-in in the US Capitol, calling for an end to sending arms to Israel. The protesters expected to be arrested, and they were; they did not resist.
What a contrast their honesty and nonviolence makes with the magats' attack on Jan 6, 2021.
US citizens: call on Congress to defend Census funding.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, which would explicitly reestablish the Chevron doctrine, which was recently overturned by the extreme court.
That doctrine says that a federal agency regulation means what the agency says it means, as was the case for 40 years.
IANAL, but I think this question is entirely separate from whether any given regulation complies with pertinent laws and constitutions. That has always been a matter for courts to decide.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Project 2025 includes, in the long list of plans, interfering with EPA's ability to regulate PFAS.
RFK Jr is not only a disinformationist, he is reported to have asked the corrupter for the promise of a government position in exchange for his support.
If there is any chance that the corrupter could win your state, vote to ensure he loses.
Oregon is full of wildfires after a heat wave dried out the vegetation.
The article attributes the fire wave to "heat, dry conditions and lightning," but it is clear that the underlying cause is global heating.
To magats, any election which their master does not win must ipso facto have been stolen. If there are no real grounds for that accusation, they will invent something. Now, for instance, they are saying that Harris's expected assumption of Biden's candidacy, supposing the delegates to the Democratic Convention vote for her, would be a "coup".
Part of Project 2025 is to allow (or maybe require) adoption agencies to practice religious discrimination. In Tennessee, a couple have already been barred for not being Christians. The would be adopters are suing, but we can't count on the Extreme Court to defend basic civil liberties any more. They might decide that the constitution allows the state to outsource any activity to entities that discriminate against non-Christians.
The US has become the world's biggest fossil fuel exporter, and is ruining parts of the US to export the combustible material that can ruin the whole world.
*Wealthy countries lead in new oil and gas expansion, threatening 12bn tonnes of emissions.*
However, various countries in South America are eagerly competing for the gold medal in planet roasting.
*UN head admonishes wealthy countries for expanding fossil fuel production.*
I am glad he is taking an active approach to this vital issue.
Rebecca Solnit: *The Republican party remains the party of denying women human rights,* even though it hoping Americans will forget about this if it keeps quiet from now till November. Many Republican politicians call for menstrual surveillance so as to catch any woman who has an abortion.
This article proposes a framework for understanding how the corrupter converted many Americans into fanatics who believe whatever he has said most lately without checking it.
Lack of competition due to many mergers has caused inflation in the US (and many other countries), which is making life difficult for those who are not wealthy.
*Many [American food] companies are seeing their profits jump as they continue raising prices.* The fix is not raising interest rates — it is breaking up monopolies. Biden has made a good start by appointing Lina Khan to head the FTC.
My proposal for taxing bigger corporations at a higher rate could pressure them to split up, and avoid the need to sue each one.
*Uncommitted voters who protested Biden over Gaza warn Kamala Harris must earn their vote.*
I hope they succeed in making her demand forcefully that Israel end the bombardment and siege of Gaza.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
*[The UK government] confirmed on Friday that it would not submit a challenge to the jurisdiction of the international criminal court, whose chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking a warrant against the Israeli prime minister.*
I don't think we are likely to see Netanyahu arrested for this any time soon, but it will add to the pressure on Israel to end the bombardment and siege.
*JD Vance called for "federal response" to block women from traveling for abortions.*
That was the utterance of a would-be theocrat trying to impose his religion on everyone. However, the "warning" about Soros (see the article) was the confabulation of a conspiracist, like the believers in QAnonsense.
Apparently Vance combines both aspects.
The Putin forces scatter landmines in and around the towns they hold, even inside houses. They mainly kill and injure civilians.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the High Court Gift Ban Act.
This addresses the same practical issue as the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, but the solution is not the same, so perhaps one can pass Congress if the other cannot.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*Dems' Billionaire Tech Donor Presses Harris To Fire Antitrust Regulator [Lina Khan].*
As the article says, there are more subtle ways that Harris could support monopolists than the gross maneuver of firing Khan. Since no one but a hateful fanatic or a confused loser would wish for the reelection of the corrupter, we need to pressure Harris not to give billionaires what they want.
California Governor Newsom issues an executive order about the procedure local governments must use if they remove homeless encampments in California.
The order did not command them to remove these encampments. So I wonder just what, concretely, it did require. Can anyone tell me?
San Francisco is considering a law to prohibit landlords from using rent recommendation servers to set rents.
While the landlords do not directly collude to fix prices (rents), using the same server or program causes the same sort of harm as direct collusion.
Companies are offering rental of "digital workers", which are SaaSS containing so-called "artificial intelligence", dressed up as humans. I agree with the person quoted as saying that this has the effect of dehumanizing human workers, as well as replacing them. I expect they don't work very well, either.
The article ends by asserting that we "can't blame" the entrepreneurs for this vision. I say we must.
If a "digital worker" has a psyche like a human, it should be have the same rights as a human. If it has that but always obeys orders, then it is a brainwashed slave, which should be illegal to create. If, however, it obeys orders because it has no goals, desires or feelings of its own, then it is a machine, and it is wrong to pretend it is a "worker".
Advances in technology will make possible more points on that spectrum but will not alter this conclusion.
Sharpnose sharks caught near Rio de Janeiro were found to have significant levels of cocaine in their bodies.
The city of Jasper, in Alberta, is being burnt by a wildfire and all 30,000 residents and tourists have been evacuated.
The greenhouse gases from burning the Alberta tar sands oil, made possible by lobbying and repression of protesters are coming back to bite the foolish citizens of Alberta who gave in to foolish short-term thinking and elected a planet-roaster government there, along with the rest of us.
The new UK government said it would stop using a barge to house asylum seekers.
This raises two big questions which I do not recall much writing about.
For (2) I have seen little concrete coverage of what makes it so bad to live there. There may be aspects of its arrangements and policies that make life on board painful, but I have no idea what they are.
The one thing I do understand is the barge's remote location and consequent inconvenience of access. I think that makes it unfeasible for anyone living there to visit most parts of the UK without staying away overnight — and they can't afford to rent a room for that. I think that would in most cases cut them off from meeting friends, relatives and support organizations.
If that is the main problem, could it be solved by mooring the barge in London, convenient to public transit?
If there are other major problems of living there, I would like to understand them.
*Human Rights Groups Call on Biden to Investigate Israeli Influence Campaign Against American Lawmakers.*
*"Oil Kills" protesters disrupt flights at airports across Europe in wave of action.*
Causing many flights to be canceled is quite annoying, but since the alternative is the collapse of civilization into suffering and death…
*Tree bark plays vital role in removing methane from atmosphere.* Especially in the tropical forests that people are busy cutting down.
A report on the two main human sources of methane in the air: fossil fuel fracking and corporate factory farming.
Starmer's party has renamed itself to "belabour" by provisionally expelling seven MPs from party endorsement, after they voted to repeal a much-hated Tory poverty generating law.
*By disciplining MPs for voting to pull children out of poverty, Keir Starmer has shown us who he really is.*
This authoritarian attitude shows that there is little chance of leading Starmer Labour back to the values and priorities that the Labour Party previously stood for. Former Labour voters, and former Labour MPs, may be able to unite with Jeremy Corbyn to be the nucleus of a new democratic leftist party for Britain.
*JD Vance writes foreword for Project 2025 leader's upcoming book.*
Identifying the biggest falsehoods in Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress.
*[Rep.] Rashida Tlaib holds up "war criminal" sign during Netanyahu address.*
Bravo, Rep. Tlaib.
An Illinois thug deputy has been charged with first degree murder for shooting dead a black woman he had been sent to help.
At least it is good to see the state authorities filed the appropriate charges without trying to avoid it.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important -- and I label them like this.
Kamala Harris strongly called for reforms to stop the unjust violence of uniformed thugs.
Scientific surprise: metallic nodules (lump of mixed meals) that rest on some flat areas of ocean bottoms generate oxygen in a slow but steady way.
They may be crucial for some life on the bottom.
Scientists already warn that mining them could destroy sea-bottom life. This shows another way it could have that effect.
Forecasting what advanced bullshit generators will do to society under the control of antisocial media platforms financed by advertising.
It confuses the issue by calling them "AI".
*Developing countries face worst debt crisis in history, study shows. Spending on health and education being cut as nearly half of budgets are used to pay creditors, campaigners say.*
Side point: I dislike the euphemism of "developing countries." But that doesn't diminish the importance of the injustice.
Everyone: call on major news networks to cover project 2025.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above function without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code.
I have done the first step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!" They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for some of them.
To start, in the personal information in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. You will get a page that does not function (assuming you have blocked nonfree JavaScript code), but by editing its URL in the browser's address bar you can finish sending your letter.
First, delete everything from `&redirect' to the end. Then insert, instead of what you deleted, `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Enter the text for your letter and click on the "SEND LETTER" button.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort compared with the benefit of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter went to Gaza to do surgery. He reports being amazed by the number of children who were killed, and in particular the children who were shot by snipers. That proves an Israeli soldier looked at an evident noncombatant who posed no threat and decided, calmly, to kill per. Not in the heat of battle, not in the fog of war, but with unhurried murderous dehumanization.
Perlmutter reports photographing two dead children who were each shot once in the middle of the chest and once in the middle of the side of the head. This makes the unhurried dehumanization even more clear.
Some Israeli right-wing extremists post recordings of their hatred for Palestinians. I think that others become snipers and commit war crimes.
*Seven major US labor unions call on Biden to "shut off military aid to Israel."*
US citizens: call on Teamsters president to oppose Republicans if they won't match Biden's bold support for workers.
The history of Republican censorship of teaching history in the US began with an executive order made by the corrupter when he was president.
Biden subsequently reversed it, but many states have passed similar censorship laws, and the Republican Party platform calls for one. Most teachers in the US are now afraid of being punished for teaching the wrong part of history.
Learning about the wrongs of history, almost always committed by people other than me, can lead me to feel discomfort, or even anger, but not on account of my race or sex. They have nothing to do with the wrong. And likewise for you. As for guilt, I can feel that about things I myself have done.
It's the same for you, whoever you are.
As for Governor Kemp, he is not responsible for his ancestors' role in slavery, but he is responsible for his own role in censorship.
*Bangladeshi students allege police tortured them after protests crackdown.*
*Israeli parliament voted to label UNRWA a terror organisation. UNRWA is the UN agency that provides aid to Palestinians.
I have said for years that it is unjust and illegitimate to "designate" any person or organization "terrorist". Terrorism is a serious crime and anyone accused of this crime deserves a fair trial.
I think this accusation is meant to create a strained excuse to block relief supplies to Palestinians in occupied territory — in other words, an excuse for more grave crime.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
A magat who openly threatened to start a civil war if the wrecker loses this election has apologized.
Republican leaders often say this with dog-whistles. and Americans are aware of this danger, but Republicans try to avoid admitting it clearly.
Bernie Sanders condemned the invitation of Netanyahu in Congress shortly before Netanyahu arrived.
Lula has accused President Maduro of neighboring Venezuela of threatening massive violent repression if he loses the coming election.
Some of Maduro's opposition consists of right-wing rich families that used to control Venezuela and want to control it again. Like the US billionaires that back the corrupter, they are ready to attack using lies and distortions. So I can't trust them to be honest any more than I can trust Maduro to be honest.
Lula's statement gives me a basis for understanding the situation. Lula is a sincere supporter of democracy. When he accuses a president in Latin America of repression, I have confidence that he is right.
*More than half of the tree species at Kew’s Royal Botanical Gardens are at risk of [extinction] because of climate breakdown.*
The most interesting point in the opinion of the International Court of Justice about Israel and the Palestinian territories is that it confirms that this is legally an occupation. (There have been disputes about that question.) So the treaty rules about military occupations, also described in the article, do apply.
Information about the politics and career history of Kamala Harris.
I would like to know what laws she would like Congress to adopt if it agreed with her — regarding issues such as decarbonization, reduction of toxic pollution and plastic pollution, public transit, a public medical system, the taking back the Extreme Court, decreasing the political influence of rich people and big businesses, and reversing decades of dooH niboR by applying some Robin Hood.
How would she defend democracy from what Peter Thiel defines as "freedom"?
(satire) *News Happening Faster Than Man Can Generate Uninformed Opinions.*
60 billionaires are now supporting the corrupter's campaign hoping he will reduce taxes on super-rich Americans.
The money that billionaires gain from this will come from the rest of the country, in the form of reduced government support for their survival, reduced wages, more expensive education for fewer people, more expensive medicine that they can't afford to buy, and so on.
Britain sentenced protesters to years in prison for *shouting "fire" while the world burns.*
Nonviolent protest organizers for Just Stop Oil have been sentenced to years in prison.
That is the policy of most governments: keep the world safe for fossil fuels, so they can kill hundreds of millions 20 years from now.
*American rule of law is vanishing at the tips of [the wrecker]-appointed judges’ pens.*
*Paul Kagame banned opponents like me from Rwanda’s election. No wonder he cruised to [reelection as president of Rwanda].*
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass reforms to place limits on massive government surveillance. See past articles about this issue.
Republicans claim to be for "small government", but that is only as regards serving and aiding the public. Where mistreatment of non-rich people is concerned, they stand for "heavy government".
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The Tories spent around a billion dollars on preparing the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
It was never meant as a serious method of shouldering the burden of judging and aiding those who are entitled to asylum. Its real purpose was to pretend to do that, while actually hurting and terrifying all asylum seekers so as to drive them away from Britain.
British archaeologists brought thousands of artifacts and old art objects out of China, with the approval and contentment of Chinese officials and scholars who welcomed their advanced methods of excavation.
There is nothing unjust about this.
A summary of Project 2025, the former wrecker-administration officials' plan for what to do if the wrecker becomes president again.
China has brokered an agreement between various Palestinian parties, including Fatah and HAMAS.
It is disturbing that China has the influence to achieve this, but I can't criticize the achievement itself. It will surely benefit Palestinians. Now that some European countries have recognized Palestine, it will need to appoint ambassadors to them.
*Unions who think Republicans are warming to labor rights are getting played.*
Sanders' advises Kamala Harris to *pursue agenda that "speaks to the needs of the working class."*
An additional reason to insist on support for cash payment is to reduce the damage done by internet server failures.
I wish there were an organization in the US to campaign for the option of paying cash. Can anyone point me at one?
Several climate defense groups say that Harris inspires their confidence, pointing to her record.
Greenland has arrested Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, and threatens to extradite him to Japan.
He was in a ship that was undertaking to interfere with Japanese whaling, which now uses a new factory ship.
Elite ability depends on innate capacity as well as on practice and dedication. 10,000 hours of practice are not guaranteed to make any specific person excel.
For me, the word "talent" applies only to mental and perceptual abilities. A bodily characteristic that enables excellence in some physical activity does not fit that word.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act.
More information: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/359
US citizens: call on the Federal Trade Commission to oppose the billion-dollar Koch fertilizer merger.
Biden created the possibility for the FTC to block his merger by appointing the competition law champion, Lina Khan, to head the FTC. Previous Democratic presidents, Clinton and Obama, did little more than Republican presidents to oppose concentration of industry.
Israel is considering a proposed law to impose political censorship on universities.
Ahmad Farhad criticized the tyranny of Pakistan's military intelligence, so they grabbed him and tortured him. Eventually the government released him due to public pressure, with a false criminal accusation.
*Latest satellite imagery [of Gaza near the Egyptian border] reveals new roads that appear designed to support the long-term presence of Israeli troops.*
The article describes other military construction in Gaza that seems designed for permanent occupation.
The high heat in chicken farms makes it hard to keep protective masks sealed. Some workers have caught bird flu.
Whether this risks a human epidemic is not yet known.
Russia effectively took an American journalist hostage by charging him with unlikely crimes. There is no reason to believe he was guilty of anything because Russia did not hold a real trial, which would entail stating what he allegedly did and presenting evidence to prove it.
Putin seems to be angling to exchange him for a real Russian spy, convicted in a real trial. Should the US seek to do that?
I don't think so. I think other countries should make it clear that Russia cannot snatch people to use as "get out of jail gratis" cards for its spies who have been caught.
Certain governments, including Russia and China, imprison people just as pawns. Americans should avoid going to those countries.
The Republican fanatic's false accusations against a CODEPINK leader have been dropped by Milwaukee prosecutors, but he is still making false accusations and they are stirring up death threats by fanatical followers.
This is a standard right-wing extremist tactic, encouraging a fanatical spirit that is ready to kill. Then whenever the leaders rail loudly against someone, followers will direct threats or even violence at per.
I don't know whether American fascists have directly acknowledged this tactic, but they cannot be ignorant of the fact that their movement is a violent one.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect abortion and birth control by repealing the Comstock Act.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: Thank the FCC commissioners for stopping companies from gouging prisoners for their phone calls.
Because prisoners are a captive market, US companies impose unconscionable fees that cut them off from their families — and make it more likely they will commit further crimes once released.
*Half of Americans live in states without rules restricting disconnections for unpaid or overdue bills.* With the dangerous and occasionally deadly heat caused by humanity's cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, that system can kill them.
Republicans value keeping rich people rich above keeping poor people alive. Their policies accord with those values.
They have those values because they work for the rich who fund their campaigns and reward them personally. If you are too poor to pay your bills, they won't miss you if you die — and your death is very effective for suppressing your vote.
Comparing the statements and positions of Biden and the corrupter in regard to Gaza, Israel and Palestine.
*Election Deniers Have Taken Over the Republican National Committee.*
Not only the RNC's leaders, but even people seeking staff jobs there, were asked to affirm the corrupter's election lies.
Netanyahu said that there can be an investigation into Israel's security failures on Oct 7 when Israel has defeated HAMAS.
In other words, when pigs fly.
Bernie Sanders thanked the musk-rat for doing "an exceptional job of demonstrating a point that we have made for years — and that is the fact we live in an oligarchic society."
CODEPINK accused a Republican congresscritter, who is a right-wing fanatic, of bashing into one of its leaders from behind and then falsely accusing per of assaulting him.
In the absence of real political violence from political opposition, the trumpets make false accusations. Why would they hesitate? Following their leader, they have rejected truth and honesty entirely, so there is no kind of lie they would refrain from due to conscience.
US citizens: call on certain drug companies to drop their lawsuits that aim to block Biden's new regulation that would reduce prices of certain drugs.
The UN International Court of Justice concluded that Israel's occupation of Palestine, and its colonization, are de-facto annexation, and illegal. (Annexation of conquered territory is also illegal.)
The ruling also *called for Israel to rapidly quit the occupied territories and ruled Palestinians were due reparations for the occupation.*
*While non-binding, the ruling will provide ample ammunition for government lawyers already actively examining future sanctions against those linked to Israeli settlement.*
Computers running Windows around the world were unable to run due to a broken change remotely installed in them.
With GNU/Linux, no one can forcibly install an "upgrade" (or a 'downgrade", as might prefer to call it). You decide when, and whether, to install changes, and whose changes to install.
Can anyone tell me what job this CrowdStrike software does? I have a hunch that this is one of the unjust consequences of the proprietary nature of Windows, but I don't actually know. It would be very useful to know for certain.
Republicans in Georgia have signed up tens of thousands of election vigilantes, each of whom will be empowered to challenge the legitimacy of voters with just a little excuse.
Marathon Petroleum published an article in 1977 about the danger of climate mayhem.
Many US small businesses are very vulnerable to local disasters. They could easily be wiped out.
As business owners become aware of how climate disaster threatens their businesses, increasingly every year, if they have long-term sense they will actively support decarbonization politically. If they don't, I expect they are fools.
I do not believe that fools deserve disaster. Nobody deserves that, whether fools or not. Alas, fools are likely to make it happen to them.
There are people in Gaza who have polio infections. The lack of hygiene and water treatment means nothing stops it from spreading to anyone there who has not been vaccinated.
Minister Ben-Gvir, the political leader of the extremist "settlers" that take land in the West Bank from its Palestinian inhabitants, pushed his way into the al-Aqsa complex in Jerusalem, as a gesture to keep the war in Gaza killing.
The dispute over that spot, between Jews and Muslims, exists because the al-Aqsa Mosque complex was built on the hill where the Hebrew Second Temple had been destroyed 600 years earlier by Romans (not by Muslims). That is true, but it does not justify Ben-Gvir's bellicosity.
Peace in the Middle East depends on the various religions' respecting each others' sacred buildings, especially in Jerusalem. Al-Aqsa is an actual sacred building, not merely a place where one existed centuries ago. Israelis should leave Al-Aqsa alone.
If Biden wants to inspire Democrats to vote for him, he could bar Ben-Gvir from entering the US.
Shell committed to increase recycling of plastics, but now admits it is unable to do that.
To decrease the amount of waste caused by use of plastic, we need to replace current plastic with recyclable plastic, or with other materials, and make sure that the recyclable plastic can be separated from the rest of the packaging.
Vance would encourage the wrecker to sell Ukraine to Putin.
Republicans think they can avoid being defeated by the supporters of abortion rights by avoiding the issue until the election.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Raise the Wage Act and lift millions of people out of poverty.
*Law scholar Laurence Tribe says the conservative [extreme] court majority is "destroying" framework of checks and balances.*
*On Abortion, J.D. Vance Is the Bridge Between [the wrecker] and Project 2025.*
*Let there be night: digital billboards to be turned off to curb light pollution under Melbourne city proposal.*
The threat posed by the wrecker and his magats is grave. To be able to say, "I opposed them", is not enough — we need to defeat them. I want to contribute to defeating them, to saving my country from repressive rule of lies. I hope you do, too.
Biden is not my ideal president. I rate him as about 1/3 progressive, and I criticize his failure to pressure Israel to cease its war crimes in Gaza.
If I had my druthers, I would help elect an honest, progressive president, such as Bernie Sanders. But there is no opportunity to help elect him this year. A write-in vote, for him or anyone else, would be a mere protest. We need to defeat fascism.
What about third parties? The Green Party has become too extreme for me. As for the self-styled "Libertarians", that name is misleading because their priority is not civil liberties but empowering the wealthy by eliminating the regulations and government spending that help and protect the non-rich. They call those things "socialism". I call them "Antisocialists", and I don't support them.
As for RFK Jr, he is an anti-vaxxer, and I have no wish to support pseudoscience. I expect I would choose him over the corrupter if those two were the only choices, but that is not the situation this year.
The specific details of those actual candidates are secondary matters because none of them has a chance of winning. Voting for any of them would be a mere protest, not a way to defeat fascism.
There are still primaries to be held this year. I urge you to vote for progressive Democrats in primaries if you have the opportunity, and vote for Democrats in November.
I myself will be happy to vote, once again, for Representative Ayanna Pressley — but reelecting one progressive representative will not by itself be sufficient to preserve democracy in the US.
The wrecker's choice of running mate is "A Corporate CEO’s Dream And A Worker’s Nightmare".
It is just barely possible to get a Signal account without giving it a mobile phone number, but it is a lot of effort and time, and depends on luck.
Rather than go to those lengths, I do without use of Signal.
Republicans have struggled for years to make it easy for Americans to get guns and kill people with them.
*US and Israel allowed tax-deductible donations to groups blocking Gaza aid.*
Israel's official measures to besiege Gaza are war crimes, deadly crimes. If Israeli officials connive at private efforts to block aid to Gaza, that is too a government war crime.
If you work for the agency that judges requests for asylum, and you tell would-be immigrants that "You have been granted asylum", and later you discover a minor error in the deciding of the case, what should you do?
Because of your mistake, you should set aside any minor requirements that you failed to check before. Unless perse is a serious criminal, which you ought to have checked first thing, you should make your acceptance of per final.
What you should definitely not do is tell per, "We made a mistake in judging your asylum request, so we have revoked your asylum. Cancel all your plans and wait while we judge the fine details of your case. We will tell you our real decision in a year or two or three." That is cruel and inhumane.
I therefore conclude that the problem in UK asylum approvals is not a mere matter of details in the rules. It is a deeper matter than that, a lack of sense of proportion in carrying out the rules when something has gone awry. The bureaucrats have been taught to be as rigid as a badly programmed computer.
Meanwhile, other asylum seekers are protesting about being sent to live on a barge moored in what is effectively an isolation camp.
In case you are so angry at Biden over Gaza that you suppose that it makes no difference who is the next president of the US, look at what the wrecker said about it.
*Biden housing plan seeks to curb rent increases by penalizing [large] landlords.* The penalties would be triggered by a rent increase of more than 5% in a year.
This requires approval from Congress. Republicans will surely call this a monstrous attack on the "free market". (A free market means one where the same rules apply to everyone who participates.)
Please contact your congresscritter's and senators' offices and ask where they stand on Biden's plan. Take notes, and publish what they said. Preferably in places that the public can see without getting an account. (Alas, ex-Twitter is not such a place any more.)
Please vote to defeat the corrupter and all Republicans!
Nowadays, the increase in prices for many kinds of things is boosted by the lack of competition. The advent of large corporations that own very large amounts of rental housing has reduced the effective competition on rents.
I think we should prohibited any private entity from controlling more than a minuscule fraction of the rental housing market. (I would not put this maximum as low as 50 units — perhaps either 500 units or one local physically connected development, whichever is larger.)
*[The wrecker's] running mate says UK could be "first Islamist country" with nuclear weapons.*
That is not physically impossible but it disregards reality completely. It is bullshit.
It is also a distraction campaign — as is usual for right-wing reality rejectors, they accuse opponents baselessly of actions similar to what the reality rejectors are in fact doing. The US could very likely become, next January, the first theocratic Christian regime with nuclear weapons.
To prevent that, we Americans must vote and work to defeat Republicans at all levels.
That extends to all Republicans.
It used to be that there were Republicans that were right-wing but not radical extremists, who had some integrity left and could coexist with other camps. Not any more: the wrecker has converted nearly all to be as dishonest and extreme as he is. Even those who, like Senator Collins, publicly disendorse the wrecker are likely to support extremists in other ways, such as by passing their bills in the senate.
*Clearing Gaza of almost 40m tonnes of war rubble will take years, says UN.*
The scenario of using only 100 trucks, over 15 years, is clearly not a real solution to the problem. Using 500 trucks, the job could be finished in 3 years. But where would they put this rubble?
After removing the rubble, could people live there? Is the land of Gaza poisoned by toxic chemicals? And the water in it?
Everyone: call on mainstream media not to repeat the corrupter's absurd claims about Project 2025 as if they were true.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban utilities and monopoly corporations from making political contributions.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US residents: denounce Republicans attacks on public education.
Germany will close the railroad from Frankfurt to Mannheim, a major trunk line, to rebuild it after years of lack of investment.
I observed this problem when I visited Germany in May, and asked my host/friend about it. He said that Germans had become less willing (than in the past) to prioritize the long term future.
I suspect that that manifests itself as a demand to pay lower taxes, and let the rich pay lower taxes too.
Labour has extended the Tory ban on prescribing puberty blockers to young people. (It is not clear from the words of the article who the ban covers.)
The justification given by the minister is not outright nasty, but I think it is the wrong policy. The result will be to push people into puberty in a sex that they may not want. It is better to give each person the choice. and the only way to do that is with these medicines.
US citizens: call on Congress to support Biden's initiative to reduce prices on some drugs.
Biden did this through a change in a regulation, which (unlike a law) does not require specific approval from Congress, but Republicans will push to override it, and plutocratist Democrats might support it, acting on the principle that the income of lobbying corporations is sacrosanct. The point is to dissuade them from doing so.
By the way, please vote to defeat the corrupter and all Republicans!
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Biden to avert war in Lebanon.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
(satire) *Amazon Announces Orthodox Prime Day Will Be July 29 Through 30.*
Just as I don't celebrate Easter on any date, I won't celebrate Prime Day on any date.
*Climate Catastrophe Arrives [in the US] in Large and Small Ways.*
*[The corrupter] deserves our sympathy. That doesn’t make him an acceptable candidate.*
In my view, what he deserves is not sympathy for him, but rather our indignation on his behalf for the crime attempted against him. However, that indignation must be partly directed at him, for his stirring up of the spirit of political violence, which surely has some role in inspiring the attack on him.
*Labour can end [UK] austerity at a stroke -– by taxing the rich and taxing them hard.*
"There's no money" is the standard plutocratist response to proposals to fix the gaping holes in public services by spending the amounts that they require. It is really a question of priorities: do you put money into making the rich richer, or into what is needed for everyone to have a decent life.
*Biden denounces [corrupter] rally shooting: "We must unite to condemn it".*
Our goal must be to maintain democracy with fair and free elections. Alas, the followers of the corrupter are trying to do the opposite.
However, we must not be the ones to start a war against the right-wing. That would be a victory for them, not for us.
* The [UK] Science Museum has been [compelled] to cut ties with oil giant Equinor over its sponsor’s environmental record.*
The oil company used its donations to partly gag the museum as regards the most important scientific issue of our time: the harm to the whole world done by fossil fuels, including those extracted by Equinor.
It may be true that such gag clauses are "reciprocal and standard", not that does not mean they are harmless. Perhaps most of them do little harm, but in this case it can be deadly.
Even without an explicit contract committing the museum not to cover this danger, the desire to get future donations from the company in the future would tend to corrupt.
The article mentions that other planet roaster companies, such as Billionaire Polluters and Adani, have given the museum donations.
*After Hurricane Beryl's destruction, climate scientists fear for what's next.*
They have been warning us for decades now that this would happen.
Some nonfree computer "games" today are really just veiled marketing for real products using real brands -- aimed mainly at children.
The illustrate the general principle that nonfree programs tend to be malware. Manipulating the user is one kind of malware.
China is using continual low-intensity violence to force Philippine forces out of the South China Sea.
It can do this because its naval forces greatly outnumber the Philippines'.
*Researchers estimate 730,000 people a year in the US lose their ability to live independently due to traffic pollution.*
*Risk of far right gaining power has not gone away, warns French Green leader.*
*Republican senator Susan Collins says she will not vote for Trump.*
The corrupter was shot and slightly wounded at a rally. This could make impressionable people vote for him from sympathy.
He has displayed so much hatred, so much contempt, and so much callous cruelty, that I feel hardly any sympathy. Please give your sympathy to Americans who are in danger of being caught in the dictatorship he wants to set up.
Both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez back Biden.
I think their reason for this is similar to my own: that Biden does a higher fraction of progressive things than the other Democrats would do.
I trust their goals and their sincerity, so I think their advice is good to follow.
Israel says it made an air strike to kill a military leader of HAMAS, and another military leader was in the same area.
That killing a HAMAS military commander, or even several, is not a step towards Israel's goal of "wiping out HAMAS". Generally it is impossible to destroy an underground resistance group by killing its leaders, as long as it has popular support. It will simply recruit new leaders.
The Lancet concluded that HAMAS's count of people killed in Gaza is basically accurate, but probably an underestimate.
Compare with Iraq Body Count, which sincerely tried to be accurate, but whose methodology chose to err on the side of underestimate.
The Guardian: *America's future must be set by voters, not the gun.*
If we want it to be decided by the voters, in a free and fair election, we need to fight against Republican voter suppression and gerrymandering.
Biden has imposed US banking sanctions on some Israeli colonies in Palestine and leaders of them, specifically for their attacks on Palestinians.
That is a good step in the right direction, but taking a step every month or two is very slow progress. The first one was a warning shot, which was a good step. But now it is past time for heavy fire of sanctions.
*Russia Attacks Hospitals in Ukraine. Israel Does the Same in Gaza. The U.S. Response Couldn’t Be More Different.*
Photos from al-Jazeera, confirmed by Israeli soldiers' testimony, show that it is not unusual for them to shoot unarmed Palestinians for no military reason.
The article linked to above contains links to YouTube. For your freedom and privacy, modify them to point to invidio.us to watch them.Further, the Israeli army has very lax rules of engagement. Soldiers are welcome to shoot — whether at a tree or at a human being — whenever they feel like it.
HAMAS fighters do not wear uniforms. So it is indeed not possible to be entirely certain that an adult Palestinian man walking 100 meters away is not a fighter. But usually it is possible to be see that that man is not a threat to anyone at present. The small chance that he is a HAMAS fighter does not justify killing someone who is probably a civilian. Let alone someone who is surely a civilian; but some soldiers kill even in those circumstances.
The lawful, and moral, thing to do is to fire a warning shot to tell him to go away. But the Israeli army does not order soldiers to do that.
Although I am not expert enough to state this as a certainty, from what I know I think that these policies of the Israeli army amount to war crimes for which the highest officers and officials are responsible.
Soldiers are also sometimes ordered to burn down or destroy any and all Palestinian houses they have been using temporarily, citing various irrational justifications. For instance, they must make sure not to leave any ammunition or food that Palestinians (presumed to be "terrorists") might use.
Destroying food so to make sure that starving Palestinians do not eat it??? Denying food to the civilians to ensure there is none for the fighters??? That is systemic inhumanity.
When Sharon Johnston, permanently paralyzed, decided to travel to Switzerland to end an unbearable life, an anthropologist and a political activist accompanies her. The British thugs arrested them both when they returned to Britain.
It is noteworthy that Ms Johnston was not terminally ill. She might have been condemned to decades of helplessness, if not for the possibility of seeking aid in suicide. I can imagine myself in that same position and wishing for it to end.
Some states of the US threaten to arrest people who help someone expectant to travel to where abortion is legal. These two laws are very similar, and the same arguments prove the injustice of both.
The trial of Just Stop Oil activists was meant to keep the jurors in the dark about what was at stake. The defendants repeatedly violated the judge's orders to speak the forbidden information. The jurors paid no attention; they voted to convict.
I am very disappointed with them. They had the opportunity to help save civilization and chose instead to facilitate its destruction.
But the defendants' effort was not wasted. The UN rapporteur for environmental defenders was there, and his report on the trial was quite stern.
Side point: I agree that people do not deserve to be punished for making a Zoom call. However, using Zoom implies being under the power of that company, and that is itself a punishment. They should have used Mumble or GNU Jami instead.
Right-wingers condemn every government policy that helps the non-rich live better than hand-to-mouth.
Socialism is essential for many of the government's important missions. We don't have enough socialism yet in the US, but I would oppose a complete move to socialism. We need individualism and private activities too.
According to Robert Reich, here is how Harry Truman defended Socialism:
Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.Socialism is what they called public power … Social Security … bank deposit insurance … free and independent labor organizations … anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" … what he really means is, "Down with Progress."
Researchers project a Palestinian death toll in Gaza of over 180,000, including the effects of hunger and sickness.
Around 6400 are listed as "missing". Probably many of them are dead. People who get separated can remain out of touch for days, but there are enough communications in Gaza that in weeks they could probably transmit news of their continued existence to the missing persons bureau.
Robert Reich's advice on how to do your part to defeat right-wing extremism in the election this November.
Since I am sure Biden will win Massachusetts, I could vote for a non-major party, but I don't know of any I would want to vote for.
The Pantanal, an enormous wetland in Brazil, has fires in the dry season, but this year the fires are worse than ever.
If you are used by the online dis-services that track used's every action, this massive surveillance will enable those companies to predict how much you might pay for any product. And they could offer that price to you, and a different price to each other used.
*Hurricane Beryl supercharged by "crazy" ocean temperatures, experts say.*
*Why are the US and IMF imposing draconian austerity measures on Kenya?*
In the 1980s, the IMF was widely rebuked for compelling many poor countries' governments to cut spending on education, medicine, and help for the poor, to make those governments repay their debts faster. It looks like the IMF is still doing that.
Biden criticized the "elite" for pressuring him to step aside from candidacy. These elite are the rich donors who fund the party's campaign.
That sort of elite controls both parties.
The US has resumed shipping 500lb bombs to Israel. Only the 2000lb bombs will still be withheld.
The practical explanation given for this is rational, as far as it goes. But it reflects the lack of effort to convince or pressure Israel to end its train of war crimes in Gaza.
I have to wonder if this reflects the demands of the same powerful "elite" donors.
Robert Reich says that Biden answered well in his latest press conference, except for momentary verbal slips. Everyone makes momentary slips, and they don't generally alter real decisions, so they don't constitute real failings.
I think that if all US voters understood this point, it would be better if the Democrats stick with Biden.
But, as we know, they don't all understand that. Many overestimate the significance of verbal slips. Perhaps, as a consequence, someone else might be more able than Biden to defeat the corrupter. If so, maybe the Democratic Party would do well to switch to that other.
If Democrats want to try to judge carefully whether to switch to some other candidate, and induce Biden to cooperate, I suggest the following procedure.
In Norway, free-range childhood is still normal.
In Manhattan in the 60s, my life wasn't like Norwegian life, but I had a similar absence of constant control. When I meet adults who are constantly tied up ferrying their children around, and children who can't go anywhere without parental help, it strikes me as horrible.
Constant controlling and monitoring continues past childhood into adolescence, so that younger teenagers have nowhere to get away to except into a video game.
(satire) *Megachurch Conducts Successful Nuclear Missile Test.*
Labour has appointed a practical radical prison reformer as the prisons minister.
Privatization of water and sewer systems in the UK was allegedly going to inspire investment. What it actually did was to enable the owners to reduce investment (maintenance and replacement of systems) to pay themselves bigger dividends. The story in more detail.
That's what we must expect when public functions are privatized, which is why that is generally a terrible "solution" for most problems and imperfections in public services.
The only exception is when the privatized service sells directly to the public in a well-functioning competitive market where there are many competitors for each purchase -- but only if efforts to pressure consumers into fealty to a supplier are made to fail.
*475 Poison Pills in House Republican Draft Spending Bills.*
Once again, "security personnel" killed a black man by putting a knee on him. They did this in a hotel where thousands of magats will assemble soon for the Republican Convention. Perhaps they will cheer the murder that took place.
*Wall Street Is Investing In Your Asbestos Poisoning.* Basically, it takes pay for accepting companies' liabilities for past asbestos poisoning, then uses legal schemes to avoid ever paying damages to the victims who were poisoned.
*China building twice as much wind and solar power as rest of world.* But China has still shown no sign of ceasing to increase coal consumption, and only reductions in fossil fuel use contribute to saving civilization.
Businesses and wealthy people in Guyana are profiting from a big increase in oil extraction, though it does not "trickle down" to the rest of the population. Meanwhile this big local increase in oil extraction will increase the world's global heating.
Similar things are happening in other countries of the Caribbean region and South America.
We have known since 2011 that the known fossil fuel resources were too much to fit in the world's carbon budget. Extracting all that fossil fuel, without some surprise development, would doom civilization. The discovery of additional fossil resources in Guyana makes that excess even bigger; it stimulates the pressure from short-sighted businesses and politicians to burn too much. (We do not know precisely how much is too much, and when we do fall over the climate cliff, it will take years to ascertain that fact.)
A big increase in the total extraction rate of fossil fuels pushes the world further into the rush to disaster, adding to the cuts in extraction rate that the world needs to do elsewhere, which the world is already failing to do. Whether that increase happens in Guyana, the US, or some other country, the effect is the same.
Arguing that it is OK to extract more in Guyana because that country actually consumes little of the extracted oil is hiding the emissions around under the rug. The climate defense movement is already campaigning to stop measuring the emissions of fossil fuel companies by counting only their own consumption.
*Pristine forests and grinding poverty: why shouldn’t Brazil’s Amapá state embrace oil wealth?*
That is not a rhetorical question; the article offers an answer based on the interests of that region. It may be valid in its own terms, but I have a different answer: we shouldn't forget the more general reason: hardly anyone will do well out of the collapse of civilization.
Will Labour give in to US pressure to continue the Tories' effort to block the ICC's warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu?
I hope Labour will proceed in accord with its stated intention to end Britain's interference with that arrest.
(satire) *Tearful Boston Dynamics Engineer Forced To Drown Unwanted Robot Puppies.*
In Australia, a climate defense activist has been sentenced to prison for a "disruptive" nondestructive protest that temporarily interfered with operation of a coal export terminal.
The campaigners are not daunted.
I admire their willingness to take the risk of punishment to avoid the willing destruction of civilization.
The company "Finite Carbon" sells "carbon offsets" based on trees that will be spared the As. Experts using satellite photos say that these offsets do little good for the climate.
Of course, it is not unusual for businesses to cheat their customers or the public. Some of these offsets are fraudulent — selling a commitment not to cut down trees that won't be cut down anyway.
Bu what I noticed about these "offsets" is that they can be bogus even by accident. The trees in question could be killed, five or ten or twenty years later, by a wildfire, a disease or parasite, or desertification.
Europe encountered a tide of antisemitism, even before the start of the current war in Gaza.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, about the presidential immunity decision: *US Supreme Court abandoned the rule of law and triggered a need for basic reform.*
He advocates a constitutional amendment to bar any interpretation that amounts to immunity for people on the basis of past office-holding and also bars presidents from inciting crimes by offering pardons.
*Satanic Temple objects to [Governor DeMentis's] push for more religion in schools and says members could act as student chaplains.*
Most of the firm progressives in the US House of Representatives firmly back Biden, while some other Democrats say he should step aside.
Biden seems around 1/3 progressive to me. His low mental acuity in the debate was real, but everything since then confirm for me that plutocratists want to replace Biden with someone who is less than 1/3 progressive.
Is it crucial to replace Biden? I think it is necessary if he will lose the election and some other Democrat would win — but is that so? I am no expert on that, but progressives politicians surely know better than I do.
*"All threats to the sea come from humans": how lawyers are gearing up to fight for the oceans.*
Israel warned Palestinian civilians remaining in Gaza City that it will make no effort to avoid killing them.
I think it would be a war crime for Israel to act as it has now threatened to act.
When humans use sucralose, it goes through human bodies and human sewage systems to end up in bodies of water, where it affects the cyanobacteria.
Britain's extra tax on high-sugar beverages has been very effective for both children and adults.
The Republican Party platform does not mention the word "climate".
They are sending a message: voting for us will put your children's lives at risk, and maybe yours too.
*Biden suffered less polling damage than expected after debate against [the corrupter].*
I am not firmly committed to Biden as candidate. My principal goal for this election is to defeat the corrupter. My secondary goal is get the most progressive possible president.
If it is feasible to change cleanly and fully to some other candidate and improve the chances of achieving those goals, then I am in favor.
I am not confident that Kamala Harris would be as progressive as Biden. (I've estimated Biden as 1/3 progressive.)
As for whether Harris would have a better chance of defeating the would-be fascist leader, I don't know.
British public agency workers were asked to do the same work for the same pay, in 80% of the hours. They did that eagerly and were much happier, greatly reducing various sorts of problems. I don't think all workers will like this, though. Some are quite overworked.
*[The bullshitter] sought Friday to distance himself from a conservative think tank’s plan for the next Republican presidency, as Democrats work to make it a political vulnerability for [him].*
It was published by the Heritage Foundation. *Many people involved in the effort are [former officials appointed by the bullshitter] , and [he] publicly allied himself with the think tank as president.*
The US Gaza aid pier has conclusively failed: the US will soon disassemble it.
Will the US insist on getting aid into Gaza, or will it say, "Too bad, but we tried"?
US citizens: call on Congress to defend census funding.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment restoring (former) presidents' criminal liability.
The UK's new voter ID rule seems to have blocked around 3.5% from voting, and had a disproportionate effect on minority groups.
*Temperatures 1.5°C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows. Copernicus Climate Change Service says results a ‘large and continuing shift’ in the climate.*
Proposing that the way the internet promotes social conflict is through replacement of reciprocal communication (conversation) with one-to-many communication.
In the age of the printing press, and of broadcast radio and TV, only a few could communicate their ideas through those; for everyone else, conversation was their only opportunity.
I am skeptical of her claim that printing, which was a change in a similar direction, brought about the religious wars in Europe, because such wars had gone on since centuries before. I recall two previous series of religious wars, that against the Bogomils (Gnostics) starting around 1200 and against the Hussites starting around 1400. In all three cases, it was the official church against another kind of Christianity.
The Bogomils used hand-copied books to spread their ideas, and I suppose the Hussites did too. (This information comes from Wikipedia.)
I think that the blame for those wars falls on the idea that one doctrine is official, and any other variant is to be stamped out "by any means necessary." It was the Roman Empire, in the 4th century, which imposed this.
That doesn't imply her idea is valueless as regards the internet.
Labour has appointed as attorney general a Jewish human rights lawyer who has rebuked Israel for violating international law in its bombardment and siege of Gaza.
I did not realize it was possible in the UK to have ministers of state who were not MPs.
A tour through the British system of investigating misconduct by official thugs, including the system's flaws.
Italy's right-wing government has been silencing critics by suing them for defamation.
Rebecca Solnit says that some US mainstream media are heavily pushing the idea that Biden is a bad president, building up pressure for him to resign.
They are the point that he has done a good job compared with the other presidents of recent decades. This is all the more remarkable given that he was held back by the lack of effective Democratic support in Congress.
The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism describes the massive graft of the leaders of the US right-wing.
Currently they mostly do this to their supporters, but Trump hopes to make all of us victims.
The first thing Starmer Labour will do is appoint a former Tory minister to weaken the planning system requirements for local approval of construction projects.
The change might be good or bad -- the article gives few details. Tories changed these rules to make it particularly easy to block approval of wind power generators, and reversing that would surely be a good thing.
Under the Tory government, regulations for construction were circumvented and disobeyed, resulting in building many buildings with flammable materials. One of them had a big fire in which many residents died.
Enforcement of safety regulations is not precisely the same issue as getting approval for a project, but they are related and they are part of the same system. A government that is gung ho for "easing regulations" is likely be insufficiently careful about which ones.
Non right-wing French voters answered the call to ally together to defeat the extreme right-wing.
*Lindsey Graham [a follower of the corrupter] calls for physical and cognitive tests for Biden and [the corrupter].*
Naturally, his choice of what to test is biased so as to flunk Biden. To test the candidates for the full range of grave human flaws calls for testing also for conscience and empathy.
A detailed explanation about how plans to redesign and rebuild democracy in Venezuela went wrong and ultimately failed, written by someone with generally similar political views and goals.
Here's a legitimate job that a chatbot can really do — because truthfulness and accuracy have nothing to do with the job. The job consists of fooling human scammers.
A UN human rights body spell out the many violations of human rights law committed by Israel, and by HAMAS.
Another article about the same report.
Information about opposition to slavery in the pre-revolutionary colonies that later formed the United States.
Some comments from me about this.
*The US supreme court utterly distorted the true threat to American democracy.*
Meanwhile, I should point out that the Extreme Court's decision applies to accusations against an ex-president. I've read that no criminal charges can be made against someone who is currently president.
A video showed a British prison guard having sex with a prisoner, in a prison cell. A former prison guard writes that the fact that they could do this is a consequence of budget cuts that have made prisons unsafe and harmful.
A surprisingly powerful hurricane caused near total devastation in two Caribbean islands; nearly all buildings there were destroyed.
Each hurricane's devastation centers on a few places, but which places are hit each time is random. Any place in the hurricane zone could be devastated by the next hurricane. As global heating makes for more powerful hurricanes, buildings that formerly were probably safe become vulnerable.
(Different terms are officially used, rather than "hurricane", for similar storms in other parts of the world. For simplicity I write "hurricane" to refer to all of them.)
But hurricanes are just one of the dangers we are increasing. There are also wildfires, floods, desertification, ecological disruption, and the spread of tropical diseases and parasites. Many of these disrupt food production, and that is likely to cause mass starvation later this century.
To argue about how much some countries owe other countries because of global heating is divisive and shortsighted. All of humanity (and a lot of nature) is in danger from global heating. Instead of divisiveness, civilization must unite to curb global heating and decrease the future danger we are creating.
*Israeli strike on Gaza school kills 16, say Palestinian officials,* and injured 50. The school was serving as shelter for 7000 people who had fled other places in Gaza.
Robert Reich: *Debunking Myth #6: “Global trade is good for everyone!”*
There has been some progress towards a cease-fire deal for Gaza. But it is still blocked by the most bloodthirsty member of Israel's governing coalition. This calls for the US to increase the pressure until that party cannot stand against it.
Many former Labour supporters voted for Labour reluctantly, solely to eliminate Tory rule. Many others voted Green. Next time, with less threat from Tories, the Green Party may win many Labour seats.
Competing with the Greens could pressure Labour to stand for what, before Starmer, it used to stand for. But if it does not do that, many former Labour voters will become Green voters, and Starmer will continue making Labour into the image of the former competent but cruel already cruel Tory Party.
*[The corrupter] attempting to claim to "know nothing" about Project 2025. Critics point out political roadmap for a potential second term created by "more than 20 officials Trump appointed."*
Peace Now, an Israeli organization that aims for peace between Israel and Palestine, reports that Israel's latest seizure of land in the West Bank is larger than usual.
Israel continually seizes parcels of land near the Jordan River so that a Palestinian state would be surrounded.
It also declares land to be a "military zone" as an excuse for expelling Palestinians.
Boston's city council has asked the state of Massachusetts to allow Boston to use ranked choice voting.
Imprisoning environmental protectors is not limited to corrupt western democracies. Cambodia, which is controlled by a hereditary "prime minister" in the name of a hereditary king, does it too.
Now that China has a policy of investing abroad to gain influence, it has a lot of influence in many of its smaller neighbors. Cambodia would seem to be one of them.
(satire) Supreme Court Overturns "Right v. Wrong"
How prescient!
(satire) *Supreme Court Rules [the corrupter] Has Immunity For Any Crime Committed Between 9 And 5.*
(satire?) If Republicans take power, they will give their followers "herd immunity", meaning immunity for any crimes they commit in the course of following those leaders.
(satire) *Clarence Thomas Torn Over Case Where Both Sides Offer Compelling Scuba Trips.*
An Afghan human rights activist who is a woman was arrested by the Taliban, who gang-raped her in jail. The rapists made a video to silence her with. When released, she fled the country, and they sent her a copy, threatening to publish it if she continued to criticize them.
Far from being intimidated, she sent it to news organizations.
That is courage. She does not have anything to be ashamed of -- the rapists do.
The article reports on other cases of Taliban's raping, even killing, women they arrested.
I suppose they brutalize men also who criticize them, perhaps in different ways.
*Obsession with growth is enriching elites and killing the planet. We need an economy based on human rights.* Meanwhile, the number of poor people is increasing.
The flaws of GDP as a measure to target increase in are clear. What I don't know of is a good replacement. I tried looking at proposals, but the few I saw were flawed in other ways. Then I tried trying to invent one, but did not come up with anything good.
The UK and the US both have many crucial national needs that call for spending money. If a party tries to woo wealthy voters whose priority is not to pay more tax, by promising not to raise taxes, it has made a choice not to address the long list of pressing national needs that require spending more money. By making this choice for Labour, Starmer has limited it to small change.
Many Britons supported the Labour Party precisely because its goal was to do something about that. It rejected Communism, but advocated an increased level of Socialism. Now Starmer thinks to drag them along for lack of a better alternative.
However, the Liberal Democrats have now pledged to raise taxes on the wealthy to fix the NHS.
How parents' unreasonable anxiety drives them to give children snoop-phones and never let them go off by themselves.
Jeremy Corbyn won reelection to Parliament, defeating the Starmer Labour candidate running against him.
Maduro in Venezuela is a bully and does not respect democracy. Now he may be ousted, but what would come next?
The article tries to spread Maduro's deserved condemnation on his predecessor, the late President Chávez. That is unjust: Chávez was popular. He was reelected honestly, after the people had defeated a coup attempt arranged by the US. He gave Venezuela more socialism but did not eliminate capitalist business or democracy.
Maduro, by contrast, is not honest and has not done good for the people. He inspired strong opposition, which he overcame by undermining democracy. But his opposition (including coup leader Guaido, backed by the US) has not deserved support either. It showed signs of working to restore the pre-Chávez plutocratist authoritarianism.
Opposition candidate González is described as a stand-in. For whom, I have to wonder. Will he be an improvement over Maduro, or another authoritarian plutocratist?
*[The corrupter] would be free to obstruct justice in second term, after [the recent] immunity ruling.*
Robert Reich: *Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for the FTC, the Labor Department, and dozens of other agencies — ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Highway and Safety Administration — to protect Americans from corporate misconduct.*
*Israel risks going to war against Hezbollah to ensure Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival, but it would be a miscalculation that could lead to mass civilian deaths in both Lebanon and Israel, a former US military intelligence analyst has warned.*
*Biden unveils rules to protect millions of US workers from extreme heat.*
Republicans will ask Congress to cancel this rule, and if that fails, ask courts to rule against it. They always do.
*Voters in the UK and abroad have either not received their ballots or have been left with too little time to return them.*
The Tory-undermined state apparatus is simply incapable of carrying out its responsibilities even when it tries to.
It requires people to get new paperwork and fails to give it to them in time.
New Zealanders are working to eliminate the intrusive mammals (mostly predators) that endanger endemic animals. Feral cats are now in the target list.
Alas, some people demand to protect feral cats instead of the animals (often endangered) that the cat would wipe out.
Australia plans to require porn sites and antisocial media sites to check users' ages.
If the system truly did nothing other than determine whether the user's age is above or below N years, I would not object to it. However, such systems are likely to demand to see official ID records, which would identify the user as well as check per age, or take photos, which could be saved and used to identify the user.
There are plans to implement a way to use GNU Taler to check ages. Just as Taker payments allow users to send a store payments that it can validate but cannot use to identify them, the same technique makes it possible for users to send a site a proof of age that it can validate but cannot use to identify them.
The Supreme Court ruled that the president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution over official acts. This covers some of the things he is accused of doing to steal the 2020 election.
I am puzzled by this statement:
his prosecutors will not be able to introduce as evidence any acts deemed to be official and struck from the case, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent.Why should facts be prohibited from use as evidence to prove a crime not covered by immunity, merely because they are not in themselves criminal?
The attempted explanation at the end of the article did not make sense to me.
Israel captured Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the head of al-Shifa Hospital, and tortured him in prison for 7 months.
A poetry hoax demonstrated how similar Putin's admirers are to Hitler's admirers.
Didn't they have to replace "Jews" in Nazi poetry with "Ukrainians" in Putinite poetry?
People exposed to explosions tend to show certain kinds of brain damage which often result in problems in thinking.
One case was an instructor who taught soldiers to use hand grenades. He surely did not explode them close enough to wound him externally, but he was wounded internally nonetheless. I wonder how close to him they were when they exploded.
A way to recognize misleading political propaganda
The UN agency OCHA estimates that 90% of the people of Gaza have been displaced at least once by the fighting since October.
Boeing has been pressured by the US government to buy the part of Spirit AeroSystems that makes parts for Boeing planes -- a part that it spun off a few decades ago.
Spinning off parts or aspects of production is effective for increasing profits -- by paying some workers less, and by shirking accountability for whatever goes wrong. Except that when what goes wrong is that a plane crashes, the responsibility bounces back.
I would expect the previous management of Boeing viewed making their parts in-house as a way to make their planes safer. So it always comes back to one's values.
Israeli right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin cited Hitler's attitude towards Jews to explain his own attitude towards Palestinians.
His version of the Golden Rule must be, "Do one to others before they do one to you." Not as a joke, but seriously.
However, that is the extreme right-wing creed, found in many countries, and Israelis are not immune to it. It is shocking, though, that a Jew would unhesitatingly cite Hitler as a model.
The Democratic Party set its convention for August 19-22, but Ohio's deadline for parties to choose a presidential candidate is Aug 7. So the Democratic Party made a plan to have a virtual meeting to formally vote on the candidate, who had already been chosen by primaries.
A week ago, that seemed to be a painless plan. But now that some consider replacing Biden (if he steps aside) with some other candidate, it poses a problem: they can't afford to wait for the convention to make that decision. They have to arrange a way to decide in July.
*Light pollution [draws in] young fish [to the coast], then predators [come and eat them.].*
*The Extreme Court Repeals the Magna Carta and Revokes Declaration of Independence.*
Proposing better ways of addressing the housing shortage instead of the mostly capitalist ways usually proposed today.
As a side point, I think the author is mistaken about Labour's attitude today. Starmer has publicly rejected the idea of heroic achievements such as Labour did before.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject military conscription.
US citizens: Call on various pharma companies to drop the lawsuits that aim to stop Biden from lowering the prices of medicines.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Bernie Sanders's Social Security Expansion bill.
The UK's "living accommodation" for asylum seekers on former Wethersfield air base feels like a prison. They are permitted to leave, but it is so isolated that in practice it is not feasible for them to go anywhere useful to go or where people they know live.
This unprison was approved, despite its evident drawbacks, risks and dangers, because supposedly it would be cheaper, but it ultimately cost far more than the estimates. Much like a nuclear power plant.
Ultimately, how did the cost of housing asylum seekers there compare with the usual cost? What is the usual cost?
The US is prosecuting Boeing for fraud, but reportedly is offering a plea bargain that will let it off the hook with little punishment.
Biden is encouraging somewhat more prosecution of lawbreaking corporations, but that does not go far enough. To restrain corporations effectively from dangerous crimes, we should prosecute the individual executives who decided to break them.
A more precise description of the new presidential immunity from prosecution: *core executive functions of the presidency have absolute immunity from prosecution, official acts of the presidency are presumptively immune, and unofficial acts carry no immunity.* However, in addition, *official acts cannot be used as evidence at all to bolster a criminal case.*
Each part can help a corrupt president to engage in conspiracies against laws and the Constitution, including those that the corrupter tried in 2020 and those he threatens to carry out if he wins or steals the presidency again.
The judge in the corrupter's trial for violating campaign finance laws (crimes he committed before he was president) has delayed the sentencing, to consider whether any of the evidence in the trial mentioned subsequent "official" acts.
*Sotomayor says, in stark dissent, ruling makes president "king above the law".*
*Since the attempted assassination of the prime minister of Slovakia, the far right has wasted no time in silencing its critics.*
US citizens: call on Congress not to allow a military draft.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Robert Reich: *The "free market" is nothing but a set of rules, established and enforced by government.* There are many possible sets of rules, and no one of them is "the" free market. Some rules are better for society than others.
The rules we have now were decided by the power of plutocrats that bought politicians. Those rules are bad for most of us. Biden has made improvements in some, but big improvements would require Congress's support.
Everyone: call on T-Mobile, CVS, GM, and Elevance Health to stop funding the right-wing Republican Attorney Generals Association.
*Colorado oil and gas wells can’t fund their own cleanup. Taxpayers may foot the bill.*
*A Carbon Tracker report shows the cost to safely shut down low-producing wells is $3bn more than what they earn.*
The efforts in the US to make mine owners pay the cost of closing up and cleaning up a mine has been haphazard and half-hearted, and mines have continued to cheat the public by dumping these costs on the public.
*Labour is telling Britain it is now a conservative party — and we should believe it.*
Britons who used to look to the Labour Party for something more than small change cling to the hope it will try to But it can't be soon — Starmer has promised so clearly and firmly to reject all that the Labour Party used to stand for that if he did much of that he would be accused of lying.
Wikileaks changed the nature of journalism, but with many organizations now set up to publish leaks, there may not be a need for Wikileaks itself to resume doing so. However, Wikileaks has a reputation for separating the truth from the disinformation, and that could help the public distinguish the two.
Turkey's urban street dogs befriend the people who live nearby and are taken care of by them. Now Erdoğan wants to eliminate them.
This article suggests some questions to me:
Republican Senator Graham warns of a campaign to invent excuses to prosecute Biden, as a way of pretending that the corrupter's serious criminal accusations are mere Republican-style bullshit.
That is the tactic right-wingers use to normalize the persecution of opposition in a right-wing authoritarian regime.
In the recent Indian election, Congress Party election monitors checked the numbers and security seals of individual digital voting machines to detect tampering or failures.
US citizens: call on Congress to ensure no American citizen is denied the right to vote on account of felony convictions.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Climate defense activists are on trial in the UK, charged with organizing a nonviolent and nondestructive protest, intended to be massively disruptive.
I dislike the disruption caused by protests, just as many people do. But climate disaster will be fatal, perhaps for most of humanity, and will cause massive injustice and suffering along the way. The strategies of Just Obey Orders, Just Complain and Just Give Up have failed, so what should humanity do to protect itself if not this?
Everyone: call on Vanguard's new CEO to take the lead in defending the climate.
Some journalists were arbitrarily excluded from an "energy industry" conference in Azerbaijan, one of the preparations for the COP29 climate defense discussion.
The event last year was in Dubai, and was headed by the country's oil minister, who seems to have ensured it made no progress towards achieving its mission.
Several US states require Uber and Lyft to pay drivers a determined minimum wage, and to provide benefits including paid sick leave.
This step forward is a step forward, in those states; it eliminates, there, one of the many reasons to refuse to do business with those companies.
However, the injustices to customers — making users identify themselves to book a ride and to pay, making them run nonfree software, add tracking their movements — are unchanged. As long as that continues, I hope you will join me in refusing to do business with them.
Billionaire Polluters is blowing off what it told the public to convince us that it was trying not to be a planet roaster.
The Supreme Court ruled that cities can imprison people for being homeless.
This is likely to put tens of thousands of Americans in faraway camps that are essentially prisons and faraway dumping grounds. Once there, they are likely to die from all sorts of diseases.
Here is the ACLU's response.
For me, it is clear that punishing people for being poor is inexcusably poor. Forcing poor people to live in a place from which they can't get to work is cruel and self-defeating.
*Biden's agonizing debate performance doesn’t change the reality of this election.*
The biggest question is whether the mob of liars and wreckers led by the corrupter will win and impose authoritarian, plutocratist rule on the US, and persecute his enemies.
Research suggests PFAS are absorbed significantly through human skin.
(satire) *British Science Museum Forced To Return Fire Exhibit Originally Plundered From The Gods.*
US citizens: call on Congress not to cut SNAP benefits.
Some of Biden's important supporters are pressing him to step aside for some other Democrat.
Biden is around 30% progressive. That means (1) a real progressive would be much better, but (2) he is the most progressive president the US has had since the 1970s, and it is causing improvements already, despite opposition from Congress and the Supreme Court.
Choosing a stronger Democratic candidate would help prevent the wrecker from winning or stealing the presidency. But perse would be chosen entirely by the smoke-filled rooms of political insiders, with no primaries for the public to influence the choice. I am afraid that will give us a plutocratist like Hillary Clinton.
Israel's parliament is working on a law to allow the Communications Minister to arbitrarily shut down any foreign journalist organization by citing "national security".
Microplastics (which includes pieces as big as 5mm, which I would call milliplastics) have been found in human penises and testes. It is possible that they are responsible for the world-wide decrease in human fertility over the past few decades.
But that is not proved. The cause could be PFAS. Or something else.
Israel and the US jointly affirmed that the US is not withholding any weapons deliveries except for one shipment of large bombs. Any other delays were due to bureaucratic complexity.
Of course, I find this news very discouraging. Biden showed he had some leverage, Netanyahu dared him to use it some more, and Biden has not tried.
The North Sea’s biggest oil and gas infrastructure company is risking fires and environmental disasters by failing to plug and decommission old wells. Sometimes it is many years late.
A high advisor to Biden defended US plans to increase export of fossil gas by saying the US would contribute an important sum to helping poor countries cope with the consequences.
*An international scheme to tax the wealth of the world’s 3,000 billionaires is technically feasible and could net up to $250bn (£197bn) a year in extra revenue, a new report says.*
Six leading Israelis, not in political office now, call on the US Congress to rescind its invitation for Netanyahu to speak. This is their letter to Congress.
Denmark plans to make farmers pay a tax on their cattle and sheep to compensate for the harm done by the methane those animals emit.
The plan was negotiated with farmers' organizations, which suggests a chance that farmers won't protest it later.
Lawyers assert it should be possible to sue oil companies for their part in causing a deadly heatwave in Arizona.
I hate it when a "true story" has in fact been altered to make it "more dramatic". People falsely portrayed as bad guys may hate it enough to sue.
People writing works of non-fiction should try to be honest to the facts.
*China-owned British Steel said to have requested £600m of taxpayer support.*
Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price.
These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opportunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from.
With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from.
*Stella Assange has urged Australian journalists to lodge freedom of information requests with the United States government to extract details on its criminal case against her husband because the now-returned WikiLeaks publisher's plea deal bans him from doing so.*
*Oklahoma state superintendent orders public schools to teach the Bible.*
Ten years ago we could have confidently counted on the Supreme Court to overturn that. And officials, realizing that, probably wouldn't have tried it.
Nowadays, which sympathizers of Christian Nationalism forming a majority of the court, we can't be sure. We need to get those fanatics off the court -- and ensure no more get put on it,
This means we need to make sure that their openly dictatorial leader does NOT get to be president in 2025. All the bad things that Biden has done. even if we don't count the good things he has done, are small potatoes compared to the tyranny and repression that the wrecker would systematically wreck under Project 2025.
*The US supreme court just legalized bribery.*
The bribe has to be given after the service it rewards is done, and there must be at least the pretense that it wasn't promised in advance.
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