Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens: call on Congress to fund and rebuild the FDA.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to vote to impeach budget director Russell Vought.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to vote against appointing Heidi Overton to head the FDA.
Let's toss her out of the Overton window!
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
If Superman lived among us now, and decided it was his duty to defend Truth, Justice and the American Way from America's worst enemy, what sort of actions might be effective and inspirational to use? How about posting your ideas, or stories based on them.
Please don't write about mere violence against magats; that is too crude and obvious, it is too much like them to set an example of good, and would not demonstrate morally that their actions are illegitimate.
Here are a few ideas that occur to me for what he could do.
If you post a fictional story about such an action, either something from the list above or something you have thought up, or even just an outline, I hope you will email me its URL.
US citizens: call on state officials to stand up to Big Tech: pass a data center moratorium.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to reject Republicans' perverse deal for veterans' medical treatment.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your state's Secretary of State to refuse to hand over the voter data that magats demand.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on the postal governors to rescind the plan to block election ballots.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call your congresscritter and senators to impeach and remove RFK jr.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Tell your attorney general to investigate your local law enforcement agency’s abuse of Flock surveillance cameras, and prevent tracking anyone without a specific warrant.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to reject the corrupter's pet projects and handouts to his billionaire barons, and put struggling American families before them.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
The Russian conquerors of Poland thought it amusing to imprison Polish general Kazimierz Moczarski of the Home Army in the same cell with the German SS general that commanded the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Moczarski treated this as an opportunity for an interview, a chance to elucidate the mentality of a Nazi mass murderer. However, the Russians censored the contents of his book. When the English translation is published, I plan to buy a copy — paying cash, anonymously. Evidently, not from Amazon.
The purpose of the Polish Home Army was to rise up to help liberate Poland from German occupation. In late 1944, with the Red Army across the river from Warsaw, the Home Army rose up, and asked Russia to join in the battle. Instead, the Red Army held back so the Germans and Poles would kill each other. Stalin considered both of them his enemies.
UK Prime Minister Burnham seems to disregard the gravity of climate disaster. That is not much better than the Tories, who have come to deny it.
The cyclosporidia outbreak should have been caught and stopped by a new scheme for tracking wholesale shipping of food, to stop diseases carried by food. But the scheme has never been implemented.
The legal requirement for the scheme was adopted in 2011, but lobbying from agribusiness has repeatedly postponed its implementation. The last postponement put it off until 2028.
Watch out! Storing data you care about in a cloudy place could lead to losing it.
This is a two-level example. Nine PBS, a US TV station, stored its archives in space it rented from a cloudy company which subcontracted the actual storage to a cloudy data center. The first cloudy company shut down and disappeared, but the station did not find out until later. Now the second cloudy company denies that the station is its customer, and the station has had to sue.
My lesson from this is not "the cloud is bad" but rather that it is foolish to use the term "cloud" in your words or your thoughts. That term was coined for leading customers into careless thinking. Don't let it lead you anywhere!
The US media frequently fall into the pernicious error of measuring the wealth of "Americans in general" by the arithmetic mean of individual wealth.
I expect that pro-billionaire campaign and pressure groups lobby for that.
Children in London have developed better lung capacity after the ultra-low emission zone reduced the amount of air pollution in most of London.
I support limiting cars' emissions more strictly, but it is Orwellian and unjust to implement this by tracking the movements and locations of individual cars. It would be better to impose this limit throughout the UK.
The persecutor's regime has placed sanctions on the president of the International Criminal Court, as an attempt to establish unilaterally an unheard-of supposed moral principle: absolute immunity for the officials of governments that reject the ICC.
We can see why US officials might want this — to protect US soldiers that commit war crimes. In theory, the US will prosecute them itself; if the US really does that, the ICC will not get involved in their cases, because its mission is to prosecute war criminals whose own country prosecutes them. In fact, the US often protects them and refuses to prosecute them.
*Machines that kill without distinction, answerable to no one, leave no one safe.*
Italian thugs killed authorized immigrant Abderrahim Fakir by holding him down while he was handcuffed.
The details of what killed him are not clear in this article.
Fascist politicians are delighted by the killing, presuming that Fakir deserved death (without waiting to see if there was any objective justification for killing him). That is a standard Fascist approach: use the fact of a crime against a hate-target as "proof" that the target somehow deserved it.
The forces of ignorance have canceled scientific research into how racism affects whether people develop dementia.
This must be one of the things that magats believe that "Man was not meant to know." Or, at least, they don't mean for this to be known.
Robert Reich: most Americans are rejecting the corporate Democrats, and the rich people that they mainly serve.
Corporate Democrats are far from the worst politicians in office in the US. The fascists (today's Republicans) are far worse; they are sabotaging democracy and rule of law. But the corporate Democrats will not try to give most people a decent life with something to strive for — a goal whose prerequisites include preventing climate disaster.
*Heatwaves and wildfires are not just scorching forests, they are adding to the tipping point risks in the world's vast permafrost regions, which contain three times more carbon than all the living vegetation on Earth.*
This could negate human efforts to reduce emissions. If so, it would mean that we left the task of reducing them till too late.
Bernie Sanders: "Why are progressives winning across the United States?" He list the policies that most Americans sensibly demand, but corporate politicians label as "extremist".
Alas, he refers LLMs as "artificial intelligence". It is a mistake to call them that, because it is the marketing term of those who are pushing them on us.
More on the politics of the bully's military snub to South Korea.
Some cities terminated their contracts with Flock Surveillance, under public pressure, but turned around and brought in another surveillance company.
If you aim to limit access to the surveillance data enough to protect the public from possible Orwellian consequences, that's harder than one might assume. "Stricter" conditions of access may be too loose to achieve that protective goal. And don't forget that federal deportation thugs could override local rules of access.
My recommendation is to store the data in or near each camera, with no access from a distance. When there is a serous crime to investigate, it will be worth the cost to send someone to collect the pertinent data from each pertinent camera. But if someone just wants to fish for someone to persecute, this will be too much trouble.
For more explanation, look for "surveillance camera" in https://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.
US citizens: call on your state officials to limit Orwellian monitoring systems in order to protect everyone's freedom.
Here is what I wrote:
I urge you to pass legislation prohibiting governments and agencies in our state from setting up cameras that identify and record individual people or vehicles, except based on a warrant limited this surveillance to specified places and time intervals.
It is not enough to ban contracts with Flock. The issue is not limited to that one company. The issue is the danger of Orwellian surveillance and tracking, and the repression they make possible. As shown by recent deportation practices, we must not allow systems to operate which track the movements of people in general.
When and where recognition cameras are authorized, they should not allow remote access to their records. Rather, someone should have to go to the camera itself to retrieve its list of identifications and date/times. For investigating a serious crime, we can afford that. For our safety, it should not be feasible to get each cameras records for every day, or every month.
Please see https://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.
Sincerely,
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: sign up to be a poll worker for your city's election.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to oppose SEC deregulation.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to direct tariff refunds to consumers who paid them.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
The record hot summer has caused a disastrous crop failure in Europe. Both vegetables and grains are affected; in some crops, the loss is over 50%.
Global heating is accelerating, and I've covered the threat of food shortages for many years. Sooner than you expect, every year will be at least this bad — unless we give the planet roasters a knock-out blow, so they can't stop us from preventing that disastrous future.
A suggestion for countries that wish to negotiate with the Taliban: insist on sending a delegation composed of women, and insist that the Taliban do likewise.
*Finland halts deportation of Russian family who "risked everything" to oppose Ukraine invasion.*
What shocks me is that Finnish intelligence acted unaware of the reasons why the Belovs deserved protection. If it was truly ignorant, it was incompetent. If it disregarded the reasons, it was vicious. Which one was it?
* Harvard study finds traffic fatalities increase by 15% on release dates [of major music albums] compared with similar days either side.*
*3M knew for more than 50 years that its [firefighting] products could harm humans, Australian government alleges in court documents.*
These products are made with PFAS.
The wrecker has decided to distance the US from South Korea and cozy up to Dictator Kim in North Korea.
This is disappointing, of course, but not surprising. He often prefers dictators to democracies. He has tried to cozy up to Putin, Chairman Xi, Orbán, Crown Prince Bone Saw, and Modi.
The Deform UK party's latest deformation plan would throw hundreds of thousands of children into destitution, and many disabled people too.
Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln say there is a grave shortage of food; some have lost 30 pounds. The water is not fit to drink.
Relatives excoriate the bullshitter for denying these facts, but that's simply being himself.
The case of journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias: *A journalist was injured while documenting government power, shot during an attempt to arrest him, prosecuted, repeatedly denied medical care — and then left in immigration detention, where he has continued documenting the conditions around him.*
The wrecker's tax big cuts were not just for billionaires. They also gave a handout to multimillionaires. As usual, at the expense of everyone else in the US.
Government secret agents have been persistently investigating the Sunrise Movement. They keep getting more and more evidence that it is committed to nonviolence (including nonviolent civil disobedience), but continue searching desperately for some violence in it somewhere.
The bully's attack against Iran was a moral error and a grand-strategic mistake. In addition, it was a strategic military mistake which has caused the US to lose much of its power in the world.
Is that a bad thing? No, and yes. The bully has been using US power for evil purposes; now he has less capacity to do that. However, the countries that have gained power though that mistake have been even more vicious, for decades.
Eissa Hashemi and Maryam Tahmasebi, a married couple of professors who were permanent residents in the US, are in deportation prison because Hashemi's mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, is a supporter of the regime and participated in the occupation of the US embassy.
It is not impossible that they are somehow working with Ebtekar on a nefarious plot, but the persecutor's henchmen have not made such charges -- they have simply cancelled the family's residence permits arbitrarily and (according to Tahmasebi) aim to keep them in deportation prison for life.
Prisoners in an overcrowded deportation prison (privately run by CoreCivic) in Mississippi (far south in the US) were forced sometimes to spend hours outdoors in bright sun, and at other times, to swelter in crowded cells, because of a power outage.
The prison kommandant held the prisoners incommunicado during that period.
Privatized prisons are a motor for inaccountability, and therefore for cruelty and gratuitious suffering; this makes them inherently unjust. We should abolish them all.
Dictator Kim expressed his appreciation of the bully's gesture of friendship by firing 10 ballistic missiles.
Comparing would-be Dictator Donald with Dictator Kim.
*[The persecutor]'s spying on leftwing groups recalls J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro.
Other countries have deported millions of Afghans to Afghanistan. For Afghan women, that means deportation to slavery.
To deport someone to a place where she will be tortured violates the treaties which establish the right to asylum. Yet the EU is now trying to negotiate a deal with the Taliban for returning refugees there.
A Tory-run local council in London wants to shut down soup kitchens because the area around "is not safe".
The ambassador to Britain appointed by President Aung San Suu Kyi defied the military government's order to vacate the ambassadorial house in London. The UK is denying the moral doubts about the situation by prosecuting him for "trespassing" in a diplomatic residence.
* Israeli militants have besieged two Palestinian families in their homes since the weekend, aiming to take over their properties in the West Bank village of Qusra through a campaign of terror.*
A planned datacenter near the Everglades threatens to damage it with waste heat.
There is a bright side: as data centers boost the combustion of fossil fuels, they will speed the inundation of the data center along with the Everglades and South Florida. And the White House.
But I don't think that will make up for all the things that the world would lose as civilization falls.
(satire) *Melania Trump Discovered To Be Russian Listening Device.*
The UK is taking the terrible step of setting up permanent face recognition which will make streets unsafe for people that the state does not like.
*Potatoes "boil" in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia.*
*The Intercept Sues [the corrupter] for Selling [early] Access to Truth Social Announcements.*
This seems to be a plan to profit privately by selling the opportunity to cheat on bets to "predict" what the corrupter has already decided to do.
"Prediction" betting invites corruption; I think we ought to prohibit it.
California has banned the pesticide paraquat, deciding no longer to treat ex-agricultural workers as pests.
Slow, natural global heating, about 56 million years ago, devastated the Earth's forests once it passed a certain level of CO2 in the air.
Higher CO2 levels damaged plants, both physiologically and by encouraging massive plant-killing fires, and by causing plant-killing droughts.
Since 2000, the CO2 we have added has been bad for forests.
Journalists David and Ina Steiner published about Ebay's CEO's salary and the company retaliated with a gross harassment campaign.
If you want to watch the documentary about this, I urge you to refuse to watch it via Digital Restrictions Management. Above all, don't get it from Amazon.
This site report on brands, well-known in the past for quality, that sold their name to a company that didn't maintain the quality.
Supposed Intelligence tools for looking up possible diseases from a list of symptoms are undermining the process by which MDs in training learn judgment -- they instead tend to become helplessly dependent on the tools.
Netanyahu's political opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, is almost as much in favor of committing war crimes as Netanyahu is.
The bully's flunkies sent an agent to monitor who came to Ilhan Omar's open house for her constituents.
The agent claimed to be on an undercover drug operation. That could be a cover story for an undercover antipolitical operation.
Never rely on Google to preserve data that you have entrusted to it. Whatever sort of data it is, if you would be sad if it were lost, do not depend on Google! Google has been known to delete all of a person's accounts and all of per data, permanently and irremediably.
(I am curious whether other companies are any better in handling such situations, but I have no information about that as of now.)
My refusal to run nonfree software (including JavaScript) has in practice put Google and many other digital services off limits to me, and thus had the byproduct of protecting me from this sort of problem. However, in principle, if one company does not require customers to run nonfree JavaScript code, that doesn't guarantee it won't delete all of a customer's data in a paroxism of panic. What you need to do is store your data in several independent ways.
A new Amazon data center's power plant could be the biggest emitter of CO2 in the US.
Join me in boycotting Amazon and maybe it will cancel this project to save money.
Flock Reportedly Tried to Turn Uber Drivers Into Mobile Snitches. And Nexar, a manufacturer of dashcams, is already doing that to unwitting drivers whose cars carry those cameras.
Drivers should be allowed to install dashcams that record, as security cameras, but security cameras must not be allowed to transmit these images anywhere without specific time-limited requests.
Don't do business with Uber!
A social media hoax told lots of Moroccans that if they swam into Ceuta (a Spanish colony adjacent to Morocco) right away, they would be allowed to go to Spain and stay there.
Some 70,000 went into Ceuta, found out story was a hoax, and mostly went back to Morocco. But European right-wing extremists are using it to pretend that a real problem had happened and requires a real increase in repression of immigrants.
The bully's henchmen are rushing the deportation of people who have been trafficked, and minors who fled abuse by their parents, depriving them full and proper judgment of their cases.
Sometimes they get deported before the hearing that will decide whether they are entitled to stay in the US. That is Kafkaesque.
The persecutors are mainly focusing on minors, but "minors" does not imply "children". A 17-year old is not a child and we must not call per one. Can't you be concerned for someone's rights without calling per a "kid"? I am.
But the reason I am concerned about that manipulative exaggeration is not just that it is soppy. It can be dangerous too, to those very people. Calling a teenager a "child" can lead to disrespect for per rights.
The bully's henchmen have terminated US sanctions against violent Israeli "settlers". Democrats in Congress have called for reinstating the sanctions.
Biden put them in place to rebuke the "settlers'" wanton violence against Palestinians. The bully seems to want to present the US as a supporter of violent cruelty.
The wrecker's henchmen are paying billions to get companies to cancel their contracts to build offshore wind power.
This is driving expensive nails into humanity's coffin.
Deportation thugs are arresting people at US airports, often choosing targets who already have grounds to be in the US.
Sadiq Khan, Mayor of Greater London: *This burning summer is the proof: the voices of climate denial aren't just delusional, they're deadly.*
They treat truth with total contempt.
Now that Silicon Valley has mostly joined the side of fascism, only a few journalists are ready to criticize.
Watch out, England! Two London airports are going to build addtional runways. That is expensive, and each airport will use its new runway to handle 100,000 or so additional flights per year.
Just think of how much hotter they will make Britain (and the rest of the world).
US citizens: call on your senators to reject the corrupter's nominees for the USPS board.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on local governments to cancel their Flock contracts.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop big tech's Data Center Land Grab
It is unfortunate that the petition grants these data centers the usually unmerited accolade of "artificial intelligence". I myself never do that.
However, I signed the petition anyway.
US citizens: call on media to cover Flock's policy changes with skepticism.
US citizens: call on the Senate to stop Pentagon contractors' stock buybacks, and make them get the Pentagon's permission to release a dividend.
Clearly it would be better if paying a dividend required permission from some organization more likely to be strict, but this rule is a step forward anyway. And so is the stock buyback rule.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Defend Bristol Bay (in Alaska) from political pressure from a mining company that wants to pollute it.
US citizens: Submit a public comment to oppose the plan to undermine the Head Start educational program.
Here is the comment I submitted:
I strongly oppose the proposed rule, “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs,” and urge HHS and ACF to withdraw it.
The fact that this proposed rule would eliminate so many standards all at once shows that its true goal is to undermine Head Start, rather than to make it work better or more efficiently.
Head Start should be strengthened, not stripped of the standards that have been its backbone. To weaken these standards would open the door to weakening the education of American children, especially children in disprivileged groups and those struggling with poverty, housing instability, and difficulty obtaining documentation.
Please withdraw the proposed rule under docket ACF-2026-0595 and RIN 0970-AD30 and preserve strong nationwide Head Start Program Performance Standards.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban the deportation thugs' electric shock gloves.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the saboteur in chief and RFK jr. from dismantling Head Start.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: oppose the Democratic National Committee's ban on ranked choice voting in Democratic primaries.
US citizens: call for restoring funding for Public Media.
US citizens: Support the Green New Deal for Health. It is designed to protect Americans from the danger of increasing heat and local disasters, both short term and long term.
US citizens: call on your public officials to tax big oil's war profiteering.
Here's what I said in my letter:
I urge you to tax the war profits being collected by giant oil corporations and end their tax breaks. They have been draining America's bank account as they drain America's petroleum, and polluting our politics as they pollute our air and water. It's time to make them stop!
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to stop the racist immigration crackdown.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your state lawmakers to tax Big Tech's ad income.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Tell State Leaders: Protect Human-Centered Education Before Supposed Intelligence Enters Our Classrooms.
I edited my letter so as not to refer to these bullshit generators as "artificial intelligence", because I question whether they qualify as "intelligence". See https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens, call on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand the practice of negotiating lower prices on prescription medicines. We need to counteract massive lobbying by Big Pharma.
Deadline for commenting, Aug 17!
US citizens: call on your senators to save funding for Medicaid.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
E-scooters turn out to be especially dangerous to ride — much more dangerous than bicycles.
Comparing the magats' efforts to seize power, and embed themselves irreversibly in it, with the efforts of Nazis in 1933.
*Why making Anthony Fauci the enemy will harm US public health for years.*
*US senators urge crackdown on wildfire betting amid warnings of arson risk.*
Betting on other government actions is dangerous too, because it can offer magats the temptation to burn down good government.
*While many leaders compare the wildfire crisis to the second world war, governments fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action.*
Extreme weather and extreme climate are *attacks on our soil. They are a call to mobilize.* But governments today are barely beginning to mobilize for full action to slow and stop the slowly developing climate disaster.
I conjecture that the reason they don't do this is the presence of a highly influential group of traitors: the fossil fuel industry.
*Human-driven climate crisis fuels Canada’s deadly wildfires, study finds.*
Many restaurants and pubs in the UK have banned wearing of snooper glasses. Theaters, too.
*Human Rights Watch and Amnesty* accuse Israel of knowingly attacking journalists in Lebanon — a war crime.
Pakistan has prohibited anyone from reporting internationally on what happens there. It has also blocked access to Al Jazeera's web site from Pakistan.
*[Progressive Democrat] Abdul El-Sayed offers a model for successfully turning a non-progressive opponent's richly funded campaign against that opponent's rich backers, and thus against the opponent.
Many butterfly species are shifting their habitats — some as fast as 135km per year. Some species' habitats have expanded, and others have shrunk.
All of this measures the rapidity of potentially dangerous ecosystem changes caused by global heating.
*[In Europe,] droughts that were once a century now happen every year, and the impact on wildlife, industrial output and culture itself is catastrophic.*
Underlying the random fluctuation from year to year, the trend (as long as global heating continues) is to get worse.
Joseph Stiglitz: the bully's new tariffs, supposedly meant to pressure for an end to forced labor, hypocritically omit two countries that do enormous amounts of that: China and the US.
Rebecca Solnit: *We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate war zone.
George Monbiot: *Murderous heat, an endangered food supply and no [efforts to slow the disaster]: this is the life the radical right wants you to have.
How the Cockroach Janata Party overcame the power of Modi's captive mass media.
*El Niño could push 50m people into acute hunger before end of next year.*
If so, it will mean that the disasters that climate scientists have forecast for many years are arriving.
Madison Square Garden uses surveillance cameras to recognize people. It specifically tracks people on its enemies list, such as journalist Rachel Maddow. But it normally tracks everyone who enters and perhaps recognizes them all.
However, they made an exception for the audience at Taylor Swift's wedding, apparently because she had the clout to demand this.
People must be free to take photos in public places occasionally and publish them. But no one, and especially no business or organization or government, should be allowed to systematically record everyone that passes before a camera and put the records into a internet-connected system.
A grass-roots campaign is pressuring Democratic candidates to stop avoiding the issue of growing climate disaster.
Focusing on "affordability" of everyday life is partly a mistake, and partly a response to pressure from billionaires who figure that will lead towards weak palliative measures rather to any big change to transfer wealth.
The increasing cost of living is a consequence of deeper injustices, one of which is the growing cost of climate disaster (including food plagued by agricultural failure). Another is the growing cost of medical treatment, which stems largely from the big role of businesses in it. Another is the long and slow shift that leaves the non-rich with less and less of society's productive capacity.
*Andy Burnham signals he will scrap plans to curb jury trials [in the UK].*
This is a victory, even though it only prevents a plan to make things worse.
The supposed "need" for restricting the right to a jury was a shortage of funds. I think Burnham has some plan to increase taxes on non-poor people so as to pay for this and other things to make the UK better.
(satire) *[The bully] Warns Iran To Accept His Ultimatum Or Face Wrath Of Next Ultimatum.*
*A senior policymaker at the European Central Bank has said the climate emergency and the breakdown of nature poses a dramatically growing risk to the global economy.*
If we are unable to grow enough food, or if calamities substantially reduce the life expectancy, it is going to be hard for anything to be stable or predictable.
What we need to make sure of is that the billionaires won't be able to insulate themselves (and their servants) from sharing the fate the impose on us. And that they know they won't be able to.
Ben and Jerry sold their ice cream company to Unilever under an agreement to preserve the company's independence and social activism. They now say that Unilever has violated the agreement in several ways, and finally by reselling it to Magnum (as far as I can tell, without any ethical requirements). They call on supporters to boycott Magnum to pressure for it to sell Ben and Jerry's to someone who will restore them.
It is not a simple matter to draw up a contract that will prevent the buyer of a company, or of a program, from slipping out of agreements to follow ethical standards by transferring control in increments.
John Davidson, who has Tourette's syndrome, said the taboo word "nigger" with no conscious intention while two blacks were on stage. People freaked out.
A few decades ago, antiracists understood the word as an unjust insult — when it was meant to characterize someone. But people could contemplate the word in the abstract, and discuss its meaning and implications (such as, a racist attitude) without losing their wits. They could criticize the word's racist attitude without terror of violating the taboo if they said which word they were criticizing. If they heard a touretter say it, and understood that the touretter did not mean to characterize anyone with it, they did not hold that against per.
The change to regard the word "nigger" as a shocking profanity rather than as an unjust racist attack has made it harder for society to cope with situations like this one, and harder to clearly express condemnation of racism.
(satire) *Small Town’s Make-Out Point Purchased By Multinational Make-Out Conglomerate.*
(satire) *U.S. Instates Military Wife Draft.*
An underground report from Iran about torture and killing of imprisoned protesters.
Ticketmaster was required by law to stop adding certain junk fees to ticket prices, so in some cases it increased the base price so that the total remained the same.
Is this a scandal? I don't think so. The scandal is that they would tell you a lower price, not including the junk fees, then charge you a higher price which includes the junk fees. Now they have to be more honest about the real price.
If we want to do something about the high price of concerts, we should adopt strict laws against overconsolidation of industry, and break up businesses that are too big. This would include the Ticketmaster/Live Nation near-monopoly and many others that mergers have created in the past few decades.
The corrupter's henchmen are encouraging new monopolies.
The corrupter, seeking to have his personal lawyer Blanche confirmed as Attorney General, made sham promises to the Senate that Blanche would not approve the corrupter's slush fund and tax return immunity deal.
The promises are a sham because they are only temporary — if the Senate approves Blanche, he and the corrupter can cancel these promises and approve the deal anyway.
"Climate change kills": [Prime Minister] Pedro Sánchez speaks plain truth to Spain's deniers.
Israel is prosecuting one of the violent right-wing "settlers" for killing a Palestinian journalist in the West Bank.
Such a prosecution ought to regularly follow their crimes, but instead it is news, because Israel generally protects those killers.
US citizens: call on news media to cover the subpoenas to Breakthrough News as an attack on freedom of the press.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the bully's scheme for making deportation profitable for some of his backers.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Congress to terminate the bully's NSPM-7 political persecution crusade.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Congress to investigate military contracts in which the corrupter and his family would personally profit.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Florida's legislature to stop the state from spying on wildlife advocates.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the Paramount media takeover.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Congress to stop the bully's illegal bombing of civilian boats.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Amazon to end its contracts with the deportation thugs.
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US citizens: call on the House to pass the Stop CHEATERS Act to restore Biden's increased funding to making rich people and corporations pay their taxes.
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US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Tell Congress to defund Flock's Orwellian camera network!
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US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Social Security 2100 Act.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call for no Pretend Intelligence data centers on federal lands!
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US citizens: call on Congress to block the proposed autocratic grant rule, protect scientific independence, and stop political appointees from turning federal funding into an ideological loyalty test.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: Thank the New York Times for Fighting Back against the magats' subpoenas against journalism.
US citizens: call on Tell Congress: vote to keep DACA going so that people who grew up in the US can stay here.
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US citizens: call on the Dept of Transportation to release the billions of dollars already appropriated by Congress for public transit projects.
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US citizens: call on news media to cover the bully's Department of Injustice as a rule of law crisis.
US citizens: call on Congress to end the corrupter's tax breaks for millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations.
Take action.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to stop the healthcare heist, reverse Medicaid cuts.
Take action at action network.
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The European heat wave and drought have dried up rivers, cutting off shipping of freight.
In addition, nuclear power plants are shutting down for lack of cooling water. They are too expensive to be economically feasible.
Global heating is making winters wetter and summers drier and hotter in Europe. In addition to wildfires, and early death of humans from their smoke, frequent severe droughts will cause agricultural failures.
The recent European heat wave is estimated to have killed 20,000 people. What should we call the people who want to kill tens of thousands for their profit?
An inspector general's report found that most of the alleged fraud in US government medical funding comes from corporations, not from the immigrants that magats try to blame.
Experts on immigrant rights and healthcare say the administration is using immigrants as a scapegoat for systemic fraud in the healthcare system that can be attributed to corporate greed, while shielding actual bad actors who profit from a broken system.
Inside the New York court where children face deportation without access to attorneys.
This implies an unfair trial. But then, it is not a real trial, and the judge is not a real judge.
LLMs are just the thing to push certain people into delusions and psychosis.
I suspect that referring to them by the term "AI" facilitates this effect.
(satire) *Taylor Swift Sues Ella Langley For Bangs Infringement.*
The serious point of this news parody is that the system of copyright, transformed by massive duplication technology into a system of oppressive extraction, inspires attempts to put legal monopolies on every aspect of human behavior.
The persecutor has a grudge against James Comey, so his ultraloyal servants go to great lengths of distortion to imagine in Comey's actions some sort of violent threats.
*[New South Wales] to send paramedics not police to some mental health emergencies after multiple deaths.*
The people who advocated this in the US called it "defund the police". I was in favor of the change, but criticized that slogan for being offputting.
Americans die younger on the average than Europeans -- looking at the causes of this.
The main cause of Europe's record-breaking fires is global heating, due mainly to burning too much fossil fuel.
Scientists have identified a secondary cause: people's abandoning many of the old farms, which have since been overgrown by wild vegetation.
If [the saboteur in chief]'s war on the climate is not met with strong resistance, things will only get worse.
The EU could, if it insists, impose fuel use taxes on both ships and planes traveling between the EU and elsewhere. For ships, the goal would be to increase their efficiency. For planes, partly to discourage their use.
*Debunking the 7 most common minimum wage misconceptions.*
Some sort of residue of PISSI is inspiring terrorist plots in various countries.
*Industrial chicken farming accelerating spread of diarrhoea bacteria, study finds.*
Congress is considering whether to change or cancel a requirement that all new cars surveil their drivers so as to block the car from starting if a Supposed Intelligence system judges the driver to be drunk.
The existing law does not require protecting the data thoroughly against other uses, so this system will surely act as surveillance.
Even worse, these systems can misjudge a driver who is terrified (and trying to flee a real danger) as drunk. False positives can happen randomly, too.
*India's youth-led Cockroach movement demands [jailed] protesters be released.*
*Activists under threat from Beijing are facing strange difficulties with UK immigration. Our safety must not be traded for warmer relations with China.*
Prisoners in Iran have launched a mass hunger strike against the large number of executions, and also about denial of medical care to prisoners.
The medical harm done by wildfires can last for years, perhaps for a whole (shortened) lifetime.
Republicans have compelled Anthony Fauci to testify in Congress to respond to fabricated accusations.
Republicans had, and have, ulterior political motives to condemn US government officials in charge of public health measures. One motive is to cast Democrats' appointees as criminals. Another is to cancel those measures, which often involve regulations that limit the profits of big businesses.
*It's time to prosecute climate crimes – with laws that already exist.*
More road noise correlates with more Parkinson's disease. This does not prove that the higher level of road noise contributes to causing Parkinson's disease.
*Court-appointed investigator finds [biggest deportation prison in California] failed to comply with judge's order to provide adequate [medical care] [to the prisoners]*.
This prison is privatized. A private prison company can increase its profits by skimping on medical care; thus, using privatized prisons tends to increase the illnesses and deaths among prisoners. This is one of the reasons why privatized prisons should be prohibited.
Some top executives of Ebay harassed people who published criticism of Ebay. The company had to pay 55 million dollars for this misconduct.
Kevin T Baker explains how the pressure to automate and accelerate US military target selection (ultimately using a Possible Intelligence system called "Maven") has made it easier to make mistakes, and harder to notice and prevent a possible mistake.
The bombing of the Iranian girls' school was decided by that process.
George Monbiot warns that the mergers of so many food companies have produced a business system that is susceptible to economic collapse. The collapse could be triggered by large shocks of various kinds, perhaps political or environmental, but the collapse would make the consequences far worse.
Something is causing many agricultural plants to produce fewer nutrients (except perhaps for sugar and starch).
Ukraine is bombing warehouses of the online store Wildberries, which contain mostly civilian merchandise, but also some military gear and drone parts. Destroying them ruins the small businesses that are selling throught that company.
Wildberries' involvement in military logistics justifies attacking it, but it would be better to direct Russians' ire at Putin, not at Ukraine.
I suggest that Ukraine declare a moratorium on attacking Wildberries warehouses, with a deadline for sellers of non-military products to retrieve their property from them, after which Ukraine would resume bombing them.
*Two dozen states sue [the monster] for politicizing Fema disaster aid.*
If the persecutor really cared about forced labor, he would look at the US – rather than slap more tariffs on the world.
Some rivers in France are drying up. Newly hatched salmon and trout need to get to the ocean, but there isn't enough water for them to make it. So humans are helping them.
India's Cockroach protest movement has won a concession from Modi.
The next question is whether it can organize to maintain its strength.
Around the world, disputes about control over various areas of seas are drifting away from following long-established rules, and towards war.
Large fires in France and Spain are approaching major cities.
If we don't get serious about curbing global heating, it will reach a point where major cities are lost. Keeping up with global heating is a losing game -- the only way to triumph over it is to stop feeding it.
Three US states have banned surveillance pricing. The latest is New Jersey.
Since I buy anonymously and pay cash, I can't be touched by surveillance pricing -- with one exception: airline tickets, which can't be anonymous. I wonder, will New Jersey's law apply to flights from Newark Airport?
Arguing against returning to Greece the marble statues that were saved from the damaging environment of the Parthenon.
* New tariffs, gas price rises, the deaths of thousands, insecurity … We’re living at the whim of one capricious, vain, easily bored man and his gang of stooges.*
I like to refer to him as "the corrupter" and "the persecutor", but what this article shows best is his other face, "the bullshitter".
Robert Reich: The corrupter's new scheme to fuel corruption in the stock market would bring in millions or billions to him and his family by giving preferential information to those who pay him.
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Please spread the word.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach Secretary of Defense Hegseth.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on ABC & NBC to stand strong against the fascist's bullying.
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US citizens: Protect Medicaid by submitting a public comment by July 31.
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US citizens: call on your senators to keep the corrupter's name off our coins and paper money.
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US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to end Big Oil's taxpayer-funded war profiteering.
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US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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I'd rather be an AI than an LLM.
Juries want fairness in court and don't just obey the government. That's why ministers are attacking them.
The heatwave in Europe has caused a major crop failure.
Future heat waves are likely to do likewise, but other crop failures will result from flooding, which global heating is also making more likely.
*[British] Lobbying giant filmed offering reporter payment for flattering client coverage in national press.*
Right-wing Israel extremists seized the al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The concept of "sacred" presupposes some sort of superhuman entity that can impose "sacredness" on places or things. There is no evidence for such entities exist — no evidence that anything is "sacred" except in the thoughts of humans. That kind of Psychosocial "sacredness" clearly does exist; we can observe it. But it doesn't pre-empt the rights or wishes of anyone else.
In general, when some people want to consider a certain object or place as "sacred" and treat it in a special way, I treat it like doing the same actions in the same place for any other reason. I wouldn't object unless there is some specific problem or issue that affects society, or mistreats people other than them, and mostly there isn't one.
"Sacred" places in and near Jerusalem are a very unusual case. Various groups claim various "sacred" spots, for understandable historical reasons, and those claims conflict. A settlement was made decades ago, perhaps by some colonial power such as Turkey or Britain, and all parties have since followed that settlement for the sake of peace, including Israel. However, in the past few decades violent right-wing extremists began using them as opportunities to agitate and radicalize, until they got power over the Israeli government.
There are many reasons to reproach those extremists, and to put them on trial. This assault is one more. In moral terms, they regularly do worse things, such as stealing Palestinians' land,
olive trees, sheep, and houses, jailing and torturing them,and killing them.
But this could trigger a bigger disaster — it seems calculated to stir up war with Muslims who are otherwise inclined towards peace, and to perpetuate and increase the war with Iran.
*The real aim of [the bully]'s New York Times leak investigation is to punish reporters.*
Evidence and admissions demonstrate that the deportation thugs have followed a systematic policy, ordered from high up, of fabricating false accusations of crimes against protesters, journalists, and observers of their actions.
When a US missile hit an Iranian girls' school, the CIA at first said that the missile in the photos did not look like an American missile. A day later they corrected that and said it indeed was one. But he stuck to the appealing but impossible claim that Iran had fired it.
I'm pretty sure the US military did not choose to attack that building knowing it had been carved out of the adjoining naval base and converted into a school. Even a monster who cared nothing about killing Iranian civilians would have sought to avoid the bad publicity that would result. Meanwhile, the circumstances, including the pressure to attack fast, facilitated such mistakes.
The tendency for belligerent acts to cause unintended consequences due to ignorance of facts is called the "fog of war". It is inescapable: war implies mistakes with consequences, no matter how much one tries to avoid them. The implication of that is, one should try hard to choose a path other than war.
Deportation thugs approached Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a Mexican tourist, and terrified him so much that he ran away into traffic and was killed by a truck.
Coronillo had a valid tourist visa, so if our legal system were functioning properly he should not have felt threatened by them. But our legal system has been messed up intentionally by magats to the point that no one can be confident of safety around them.
*Extreme heat supercharged by the climate crisis is sucking Europe dry in summer and intensifying the drought hitting the continent, a scientific analysis has found.*
The greatly increased rate of launching satellites is polluting the upper atmosphere. Building datacenters in space would lead to much more pollution.
I can't believe that space datacenters could be cost-competitive with datacenters on Earth. I think the idea is not serious, and that oligarchs are using it as an excuse for manipulating stock prices, The idea doesn't need to be workable to achieve that purpose.
The bully's nuclear deal with Salafi Arabia makes a concession he was ready to fight to deny to Iran. His actions make no sense except as means to portray himself as "the winner".
*Israeli Settler-Soldiers Took Me on a West Bank Tour Celebrating Evictions of Palestinians.*
(satire) *New Geneva Convention Allows Use Of Child Soldiers With Signed Permission Slip.*
*[The saboteur in chief]'s deep public health cuts hinder response to record US cyclosporiasis outbreak. Experts say layoffs, reduced disease surveillance and Medicaid cuts have made the foodborne parasite more difficult to track and contain.*
Calling on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.
I will support her campaign. But I will point out to her that the quandary of choosing between «latino» and «latina» is limited to Spanish. In English we already have a gender-neutral word to use: "Latin". (When a noun, its plural is "Latins".)
For Spanish, I have proposed a solution.
*The Israeli government is blocking medical workers from entering or leaving Gaza, twice canceling the departure of seven U.S.-based physicians on a medical mission there, according to a group of doctors in Gaza who spoke to The Intercept.*
The saboteur in chief's proposed new system for federal science grants would allow grants to be canceled easily on many different "grounds", including political opinions and associations of the researchers, and even arbitrarily (saying "we're no longer interested in that research").
Even before any grant gets canceled, many large projects will become unfeasible because of the uncertainty that the new system imposes on a grant that has been imposed. And scientists will not trust the US government to carry a grant through. Some of the best will move to other countries which they can trust more.
Some, however, will be afraid to speak about political issues -- and that must be what the saboteur in chief aims for.
A large experiment releasing bacteria-sterilized male mosquitos was very effective in reducing the population of that mosquito species.
Snoop-phones are the last step in reducing children to physical isolation under control, so taking them away is just the first step in restoring their access to the world.
(satire) *RFK Jr. Hosts Meet-And-Greet With Infectious Diseases.*
Cutting down the Amazon forest for raising cattle has massively spread screwworm, as well as perhaps dooming what remains of the forest.
Italian thugs killed immigrant Abderrahim Fakir in the process of "restraining" him after he became somehow upset.
This has stimulated large protests, to which right-wing hate leaders respond by saying it is unthinkable to doubt the rightness of the thugs' actions.
Globally well-known chatbots displayed a drastic failure to understand the parties running in the Hungarian election.
Given that ChatGPT hid the main opposition to Orbán, I have to worry that this was intentionally set up to help reelect him.
Many young people are giving up hope on close relationships with other people and turning to chatbots for an imitation or substitute.
The deportation thugs have adopted a dress code and require wearing of badges.
This is a change for the better, but can't overcome what's wrong with the mission they have been directed to carry out.
Congress Should Reject Bill That Would Block a Federal Workplace Heat Standard. Republicans are trying to do just that.
Putin and Musk are organizing to destabilize Britain by supporting the right-wing extra-extremist politician, Yaxley-Lenin.
I can suggest one possible countermeasure: prohibit antisocial media platforms from operating a recommendation engine. Ex-Twitter would have less power without that, and so would Tiktok and others.
US citizens: call on Tell Congress: Reject Republican plans for massive increases in Pentagon spending at the expense of human needs.
I called for paying for any increases in military spending by increasing taxes on the rich.
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US citizens: call on Medicaid not to impose requirements that would kick lots of people off.
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US citizens: call on your governor and state legislators to make plug-in solar accessible for everyone.
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The corrupter demands that his henchmen be ready to lie to serve him.
People have used Google to leave "reviews" of deportation prisons in Google Maps. Google deleted them and blocks new ones.
I urge people to refuse to use Google Maps because using it requires running nonfree software — which does an injustice to whoever uses it. But that doesn't excuse Google's censorship.
The refugees that Australia sends to Nauru, the island state that operates as a privatized deportation prison, don't get enough food and water.
Global heating in India has reached the point where workers doing physical labor, in some regions, can't do as much work as they used to. They are falling into poverty and can't afford enough food. The hunger and heat are damaging their health and shortening their life spans.
This looks like the beginning of total collapse.
A henchman says that deportation thugs will enable body cameras when stopping a car.
That is a step forward — it should apply to their other dealings with the public.
Mamdani is looking for grounds to arrest Netanyahu and send him to the ICC for trial, during his visit to New York City for the United Nations General Assembly.
Netanyahu deserves to be tried for the atrocities he has presided over, but he must not be arrested while visiting New York for a UN session. The UN depends on enabling national leaders to attend its sessions and meet each other, so that they can perhaps make peace. To arrest any of them during such visits would do lasting harm to prospects for negotiation in any future hostilities.
*How [the corrupter] and his administration have mired the US in multiple crises.*
Robert Reich: *No one can be honest in a regime based on big lies. As the poet, philosopher, and statesman Václav Havel put it, "If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth." So a choice must be made — personal integrity or loyalty to [the corrupter].*
Grok's supposed-intelligence service was in the habit of copying a repository's entire contents to a Google server, if a user said to operate on part of it. Where it may have been copied to from there, we can only guess.
We recommend being selective in using the term "artificial intelligence" because most of the systems described that way do not qualify as "intelligence".
We recommend avoiding the term "the cloud" because that term leads people to forget that each computer you can reach on the net belongs to some company (or person).
The Washington Post, now owned by billionaire Bezos, follows the slant that favors policies and laws that help billionaires get richer.
The new Prime Minister of Britain will cancel the digital ID scheme.
This is a step in the right direction.
Many countries that are more or less democratic are suffering from a flood of political violence against officials.
*Polish-Ukrainian solidarity over Russian threat undermined by bitter historical dispute.*
The Polish president is from the right-wing extremist party that used to rule Poland, and attacked civil liberties. Perhaps he is following the standard right-wing playbook of finding symbolic issues to stir up nationalism.
The work needed to curb global heating and avoid the destruction of civilization is cheap at any price.
Highly progressive former state legislator Troy Jackson will replace Platner as candidate for senator from Maine.
*How Europe's most powerful farming lobby killed EU's pesticide law.*
It lobbies against any kind of regulation that would reduce the profits of Big Ag, regardless of what problem the regulation would address.
The corrupter is trying to distract our attention from his attacks on the US election system using vague charges, based on inconclusive evidence, that China is doing such attacks.
Surveillance eyeglasses with built-in cameras and facial recognition are being pushed by Suckerberg.
The deportation thug who killed Joan Sebastián Durán has possibly been identified and that name is linked with reports of violence and threats.
This "directly call[s] into question the supposed vetting and training ICE does of its recruits."
Global heating can force shutdown of nuclear power plants. It has happened this month in France due to the heat wave.
To make the Labour Party a force for good, its new leader should return to the big missions it ran on two years ago -- and then dropped.
The persecutor's men arrested and jailed Wu Shaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer who fled to the US in 2020 and asked for asylum.
Since then he has remained lawfully in the US waiting for a decision on his asylum request, until being arrested for no known reason. Will the persecutor deport Wu to China, where he will surely face imprisonment after a bogus trial?
It is a damned shame that such an asylum decision can take so many years, but that is a different issue.
The corrupter has ordered that foreign journalists living in the US ask for a visa renewal every 8 months.
That will be a real screw, because they won't be able to lease an apartment for just 8 months.
This seems to be a scheme to intimidate them into going soft on the corrupter's crimes, attacks on civil liberties, and harm to the non-rich.
An employee at a privatized deportation prison shot a protester outside the prison, and has been arrested and charged.
That employee is not a federal agent. I wonder how far the persecutor's henchmen will go to protect him.
US Republicompoops are calling for sanctions against Canada to punish it for the smoke blowing into parts of the US from large wildfires in western Ontario.
The specific proposal is absurd, of course, but there is some validity in the general idea. Uncontrollable fires are mainly the result of global heating, and global heating is the result of bad government policies that encourage more burning of fossil fuels. Sanctions could make governments change those policies.
Canada is one of the countries which has persistently encouraged fossil fuel exports, and continues to do this, so its deliberate actions are partly responsible for these fires (though not for precisely when and where they occur). Canada deserves sanctions to pressure it to stop doing causing more of them.
Of course, Canada is not the only country which does this. The US is a far worse culprit.
The EU, by contrast, has an effective emissions-reduction law, but businesses (and billionaires behind them) are demanding that the EU weaken it in the name of "competitiveness".
When parts of the world racing to a goal that implies destroying them all, saving civilization calls for inviting those billionaires to kill just themselves, rather than everyone.
Reading and writing train the brain to formulate thoughts and to think more clearly. The US has become much less literate in recent decades, and it shows in our election results. But those are just a couple of points in this article, which is well worth reading through.
Refuting the fallacious argument that rich Americans use to claim they are paying their fair share of income tax.
The new British prime minister, who people hoped would be less right-wing than Starmer, has rejected a wealth tax "for now".
If he won't dare now, what chance is there he will dare later? The "division" he would like to avoid is between the rich and their servants, and all the rest. That division will continue to grow as long as the share of income for the rich continues to grow.
*"Misuse" of crowd control weapons on [anti-deportation] protesters led to blindings and traumatic brain injuries, report finds. Doctors and human rights experts documented hundreds of incidents from June 2025 through May 2026 and estimate true number is "far greater".*
* The Worse Outlaw ["the corrupter] Becomes, The Less the Democrats Move to Initiate Impeachment.*
US citizens: call on your state lawmakers to ban the deportation thugs from public school property.
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US citizens: call on Maine AG to hold VICE accountable for murder.
"VICE" stands for Violent Institution for Contemptuous Execution.
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US citizens: call on your senators to Vote NO on CORCA – the “Retail Crime” Bill that hands VICE power.
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US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to pass the No Troops at the Polls Act.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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US citizens: call on NYT, CNN, WaPo to cover Prairieland prosecution as silencing dissent.
US citizens: State your solidarity with the United Auto Workers and its president, Shawn Fain, who is facing persecution by the bully for criticizing him.
US citizens: call on the Smithsonian Board of Regents to reject attempts by the bullshitter to influence the historical record of America.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop Trump from bullying states over elections.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to investigate the FBI raid on a voter registration drive.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
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Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on McDonalds and other fast food giants to take responsibility for protecting their workers.
US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to vote to block 3.3 billion dollars in funds for Israel's military.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: Encourage states to sue to stop the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger.
US citizens: call on Harris County DA Sean Teare to arrest the deportation thug that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
US citizens: call on Congress to Abolish Super PACs.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: submit a public comment to protect Medicaid.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: More than 4 million people have lost SNAP food aid since last summer. Tell your congresscritter and senators: don't farm legislation that leaves families behind.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Call on Congress to pass the Empowering App-Based Workers Act.
What is missing in that bill, in my view, is
The deportation thugs decided to cease the practice of ordering drivers to pull over, since that has shown a tendency to lead to killings of drivers.
However, the persecutor ordered them to resume. Apparently he thinks that killing people for no reason is a good thing.
Why would he think so? I theorize that he hopes to intimidate Americans into despair by showing contempt for the harm he does. And train his followers into similar Nazi-style contempt.
US sanctions against UN official [Francesca Albanese] and [Palestinian human] rights groups violate first amendment, lawsuit claims.
The US has demanded Spain extradite James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, accused of "supporting HAMAS", but people suspect that what he really did was support humanitarian projects in Gaza, which the US government has invented an excuse to mislabel as "supporting HAMAS".
*Gaza flotilla activist tells of rape in Israeli detention. Anna Liedtke files criminal complaint in Israel over alleged attack by female guards and says abuse was intended to silence campaigners.*
(satire) *Study Finds Gen Z Telepaths Lack Attention Span To Read Even Single Mind.*
US citizens: call on Congress to block $3.3 billion in taxpayer funding for Israel's military.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on news media to recognize that the persecutor's henchmen are drumming up false accusations of tolerating fraud as an excuse to deny Medicaid funds to Democratic states.
US citizens: call on RFK Jr. to stop sabotaging Lyme disease prevention.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
A photo of a Palestinian prisoner being tortured in an Israeli prison confirms that the frequent accusations of torture reflect reality.
The victim's mother says she recognizes him from the photo, but it seems she has had no word about him since he was grabbed in 2023.
The Tory government of the UK was convinced to decide to spend over 250 billion pounds on new fossil fuel generators, justifying this based on the claim that they will emit somewhat less greenhouse gas pollution than already existing fossil fuel generators.
That is a very stupid justification, given that it would be cheaper to build renewable generators as replacements, and eliminate all of their greenhouse gas emissions.
Reduced physical activity due to global heating will lead to rise in health issues, study says.
Researchers project that reduced activity could contribute to half a million additional premature deaths annually by 2050.
Rep. Ro Khanna visited the West Bank recently. He and group were held at gunpoint by a group of violent extremist "settlers" and soldiers.
Robert Reich: [The cheater] will Try to Steal the Midterms. Here's How And How We Prevent Him from Doing So.
The bully has Marco Rubio trying to destroy the International Criminal Court because it might someday perhaps prosecute the who carry out war crimes for him. Or maybe even the bully himself.
Civil society organizations can be authoritarian -- in political leanings, in structure, and both at once.
Gangs in Haiti kidnap children to conscript them as killers.
The persecutor is trying to redirect Title X funding away from birth control and into pressuring women to have babies.
The persecutor's policies also include cutting all sorts of assistance to the poor for raising healthy children. It seems to be a plan for raising a new generation of miserable, twisted and hateful people.
Put this together with his evident efforts to accelerate global heating and keep civilization as vulnerable as possible, they add up to a plan to crush civilization from two sides at once.
The FCC is considering putting an end to "burner phones", requiring everyone with a portable phone to be identified.
The motive is to crack down on robocalls, something I consider desirable. However, the article explains that it is possible to do that without eliminating the possibility of anonymity.
If you want the burner phone not to be identified, you need to keep it powered off and shielded from radio waves, aside from special occasions. Otherwise, your identity might be deduced by patterns in location data or calling.
Every phone uses nonfree software to operate the radio communication, so I will still refuse to use them.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
On the situation of the wrecker's war on journalism.
*The [corrupter and his henchmen have] stacked a top chemical safety board with industry-aligned scientists who have a range of financial conflicts of interest and stand to profit from deregulation, public health advocates say.*
The US government has handed over evidence to Minnesota about the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
This will enable the state of Minnesota to consider prosecuting the killers.
A particularly well preserved skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex is to be auctioned, but no museum can afford it. It may never be available for scientists to study.
Of 2500 articles about Britain's June heat wave, 3/4 of them did not mention global heating at all. And under 5% of them mentioned "net zero" policies to avoid making the heat get worse and worse.
An effective way to tax rich people's wealth is to remove the tax breaks that enable most rich people in the US to move most of their income out of taxation.
Witnesses say that the deportation thugs are making false statements to protect the one of them who shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead.
This is a repeated pattern, and presents a reason to suspect that their refusal to use body cameras and other cameras is specifically intended to help them protect each other from valid criminal accusations.
Among the reasons for rejecting the idea of "intelligent design" of the human body are the shockingly stupid instances of bad design in it.
Occasionally someone has hands with six fingers. Could the human body have been designed by an LLM?
The wrecker's henchmen just adopted a narrow standard of "harm" for the Endangered Species Act, in order to enable business activities that risk wiping out endangered species.
The saboteur in chief wants to put a global heating denialist in charge of official US government reports on the advance of global heating.
Refuting the myths that people use to deny the danger of global heating.
The New York Times reported on apparent flaws in the plane that Qatar gave the corrupter. Now the government is demanding they identify their sources, saying it wants to prosecute them.
The notion of "intelligent design" of humans and other living species is false -- our structure came about by step-by-step improvement with no way to eliminate kludges.
* New [magat] rules would undermine longstanding research practices. It's death by a thousand cuts.*
*How to plan for an [free] election [even though] leaders are trying to subvert [it].*
*UK must cap political donations to stop the rich buying influence.*
The US must do this too, but the question of how it can be done is different in each country because of the difference in constitutions./p>
Analyzing arguments people cite on the issue of free speech.
The persecutor has increased, not decreased, the hunt for people to deport (even illegally).
It attracts less public attention now, because his henchmen have pulled back from the practice of operating with blatant cruelty in Democratic cities to overawe and terrify. That backfired against them in several cities, including Minneapolis and Los Angeles, with the effect of galvanizing Americans against him. So now their plan is to collect ever-more surveillance data so they can find lots of unauthorized immigrants, as well as many authorized immigrants that they can falsely accuse of being unauthorized, or target for fabricated accusations of political crime.
An Israeli border police officer threw a flashbang into a car then shut its door from the outside. When the passengers (Palestinians) ran out the other side doors, he shot at them.
This sort of thing happens every day. (I heard from Israeli leftists decades ago that the border police were generally cruel to Palestinians, more so than soldiers.) What is unusual is that that policeman is being investigated for these acts. But past patterns suggest this will not lead to significant disciplinary action.
Killing injured Palestinians by keeping them apart from ambulances is also frequent practice.
Hussam Abu Safiya, *one of Gaza's most prominent doctors is almost unrecognizable because of severe injuries inflicted in Israeli [prison], his lawyer has said, and faces "tangible danger to his life" after being held for 18 months without charge or trial.*
*Extreme heat now affects one in three people globally, study finds. Rising temperatures making it hard even for young, healthy people to safely do normal physical tasks in many regions.*
If the UK borrows enough to carry out needed spending, it will fall into a debt-inflation spiral, according to a government economic monitor.
This is one of the many bad aspects of the decision to borrow needed funds rather than get them by taxing the rich. The world will become more and more unjust unless we increase the share of production that goes to the non-rich. We need to pick the least bad way of increasing taxes only on people who are more-or-less rich, and push it through.
Graham Platner has dropped out of the election for senator from Maine, after an accusation of rape. Now there is the question of how to choose another candidate.
The word "rape" clearly states the gravity of the crime he is accused of. Why, I wonder, do so many journalists seek to substitute the vague term "sexual assault", which could mean anything from stealing a kiss to rape. Such vagueness is bad for justice.
I hope that "moderate" (plutocratist) Democrats won't succeed in imposing one of themselves, since that replacement would fail to fight for the non-rich.
Two Muslim governments (Turkey and Egypt) have seized on a self-designated "gay cruise" as an opportunity to demonstrate their religious bigotry, by refusing the ship entry.
Turkey is ostensibly a secular democracy, but nowadays the tyrant Erdoğan is undermining both of those allegiances.
*US chemical accidents rising as [persecutor] rolls back protections, report finds.*
Bernie Sanders has endorsed Troy Jackson as a senate candidate to replace Platner.
The article links to more information about Jackson.
A bill in the UK proposes to set a maximum temperature for workplaces, as a safety standard.
This is needed, in the age of global heating disaster, to protect the lives of workers.
Candidate Nigel Barage, of the right-wing extremist Deform UK Party, who would be comic if he were not so dangerous, has discovered that his main opponent will a candidate who is intentionally comic: Count Binface.
* EU regulators have accused Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, of failing to tackle the risks of its "addictive design" on the physical and mental health of users.*
This is a very important problem, and one of the reasons to refuse to use those systems. But if the EU is serious about protecting users from them, it should take firm action -- take a big bite out of the problem, not a little nibble. Use of a recommendation engine should not be enabled by default.
I think that a platform should not be allowed to use or suggest any particular recommedation engine.
The Ebola outbreak in DR Congo is continuing to spread. Several factors are causing this, one being the monster's cancellation of US public health aid.
*[The wrecker] spends billions to kill clean energy and keep coal alive.*
I don't think increasing Americans' electric bills is his goal, nor increasing sickness from air pollution. Those are side effects that do not matter to him. The goal that seems plausible to me is paying billionaires to support his power.
Due to global heating, Texas prison cells meant to make prisoners suffer now can kill them.
The deadliness of global heat is not limited to prisons, but overhot places outside prison where people live and work are generally overhot because no one wants to spend money to do anything about that. Prisons can be overhot by intention.
(satire) *USDA Fills Key Advisory Role With Prominent Chewing Skeptic.*
A study has found that marijuana is not an effective treatment for widespread mental-related medical problems such as anxiety and anorexia.
Likewise for *psychotic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder or opioid use disorder.*
*Record wildfires in Europe show failure to [curb global heating] carries a mounting cost.*
Calling on the UK to clean up its political donation system by limiting the donations from any individual to a political party to a fixed maximum per year.
This new rule would be a step forward, but does the UK have anything comparable to PACs? If so, I expect the billionaires to use them to work around the rule, so they will need to extending the rule to cover them.
The bullshitter gets his power from demonstrating that he will violate all rules, norms, and standards of decency in the course of bullying.
This gives him he power to sabotage any functioning system that depends on mutual trust and trustworthiness -- by blatantly abusing that trust, thus compelling other countries to develop new systems based on suspicion and distrust.
You can see a similar attitude in other right-wing leaders such as Pauline Hanson in Australia and Barage of the Deform UK Party.
*We know how to mourn other humans – but what about ecological grief?
In Iceland, people commemorated its first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. Western culture needs more of these rituals.*
People in Tehran talk about their relatives killed by the regime's bullies during the protests in January. They hate the regime with a passion.
The leader of an Australian right-wing party is seeking publicity through an interview with a British right-wing nationalist.
*Dr Imogen Richards, a criminology researcher at Deakin University, said announcing or appearing on podcasts with contentious counterparts was akin to a "pseudo event" that's as much about the publicity as it is about the [substance].
"The aim of these types of manoeuvres by more fringe, or formerly more fringe, political actors is to shift the Overton window and move the parameters of public political debate rightward."*
US citizens: call on big banks not to harass non-citizens for the bully.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
The Guardian view on the flamingo revolution: Albanians are standing up for their rights, as well as for nature.
And also against the prime minister's evident surrender to the corrupter — a bad sign about any politician.
US citizens: call on your state attorney general to sue to block the persecutor's new Medicaid Work Requirements.
If they go into effect, the complex paperwork would be an insuperable burden for many of the handicapped veterans, who would need to satisfy and convince bureaucrats whose mission is to resist.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
A Brown U professor suspected that many of the students that were taking his class had chosen it as an opportunity to use bullshit generators to cheat. So he announced that the final exam would be presential, and almost 1/3 of them gave up.
You can view on this article.
He is sad for them because the decision to use bullshit generators implied a decision not to try to learn the subject.
US citizens: call on Senator Schumer and Rep. Jeffries to be leaders for climate defense.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the perverse "SAVE America" that would require voters to show up-to-date federal ID cards with their current addresses.
Poor US citizens can't afford the fees to update them when they change address (which they are compelled to do often), so this would have an effect resembling that of the "poll tax" that southern states used to disenfranchise blacks. Those states achieved racial discrimination indirectly by using a "grandfather clause" to exempt whites from the tax. Its proposed new replacement would, I expect, disenfranchise poor people regardless of race.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on the Federal Reserve to block obscure local banks from setting up nationwide high-interest loan businesses.
Us citizens: call on your congresscritter to support the resolution to protect voting rights.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to support what is being called the "AI for the people" act, but to remove the marketing hype term "AI" from the bill.
Here is what I wrote about the term "Artificial Intelligence" in the letter I sent.
Please join me in refusing to repeat the marketing hype slogan, "Artificial Intelligence", that the companies like to use. Let's limit the term "intelligence" to systems that can know and understand, within some domain — which the chatbots of today can't do. For more explanation, see https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence.Despite the technology's great flaws, a handful of billionaires and tech oligarchs stand to capture trillions of dollars in wealth that needs to be shared with the rest of society.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
A number of tech bros argue that total surveillance will make everyone "be good". The implicit assumption is that the people that can use the data to punish you are good, and will always and only punish bad acts. The reality of surveillance is the opposite of that. Massive surveillance helps deportation thugs find immigrants and attack them, sometimes lawfully and sometimes not. But it doesn't deter the deportation thugs from murdering people[1] [2] on the street. The trumpets who control the surveillance don't allow access to the surveillance data to catch a killer who is on their side.
Right-wing Christians in the US are seeking ways to restrict abortions in the name of doctors' religious freedom.
Will they stop with doctors? They could give every employee in the hospital the "right" to opt out of an abortion, especially one that was not planned in advance. Unplanned abortions are sometimes needed to save a woman's life threatened by complications in pregnancy, and state laws that prohibit abortions put women's lives in danger when that happens.
A last-minute veto by a pious worker could have the same effect.
Snoop phones have lured people into surveiling and tracking their relatives, friends, even coworkers — with their consent, which it does not occur to them to refuse.
Businesses and governments started the tracking, but the relatives and friends impose bonds that feel more personal, so some people won't dare to say no. Which is why it is good practice to start saying no and make a principle of it.
Keeping the snoop phone in a Faraday bag most of the time can also be a step towards ceasing to carry one.
*[The persecutor] has "succeeded in completely politicizing" justice department, experts say, using it to punish his enemies.*
The US lost the core of its democracy in the 1970s-80s. After that, inertia kept parts of the democratic system sort of working. What we are seeing now is the delayed manifestation of the full consequences of that loss.
Britain's environmental protection laws focus on limiting construction, including projects for decarbonization and protection of endangered species. The article argues for focusing endangered species protection spending on projects that will do a lot of that kind of good, will do it efficiently.
The argument is convincing, but it risks encouraging a big mistake: a vague general weakening of environmental protection regulations, aiming simply to "reduce red tape". Instead of making protection more efficient, that would allow developers to trash the environment massively.
LLMs can sometimes identify a person who posts anonymously by correlating details in the anonymous posts with details posted non-anonymously on other sites.
Please don't assume that LLMs constitute "intelligence"!
Ford fired experienced engineers and replaced them with automation, which harmed the quality of production. The company was compelled to rehire many of the engineers.
I wonder if Ford will fire them again if it gets the automation to work better.
*[The persecutor] will cause some of you to die from the heat.*
The just-ended US heat wave could never have happened before global heating.
Due to overfishing in the Adriatic Sea between Italy and the Balkans, dolphins must follow fishing boats hoping for scraps.
*[Plutocratist Supreme Court] Campaign Finance Ruling Opens New Avenues for Billionaires and Corporations to Buy Elections.*
Businesses are increasingly requiring workers to act like robots under the control of the employer's software.
Cory Doctorow calls this the "reverse centaur" metaphor, suggesting that the human becomes the legs of some combined organism, while the boss becomes its human-like intelligence. But I think that metaphor exaggerates: the worker and the boss do not become one organism, and a real centaur would not despise its legs, or the horse-like part of its body.
The proper metaphor, I suggest, is that of a human riding a horse. The employee is reduced to the role of the horse, while the boss enjoys the role of the rider.
Naturally, nonfree software plays a crucial role in this subjugation. The natural tendency release of nonfree software is to give the owner (or the owner's allies) power over its useds; in this scenario, that is the primary purpose of developing the program.
Perhaps we should pass laws to prohibit employers from requiring or compelling employees to run any particular or special software.
What an employer could require is that the employee run some software that supports a particular protocol — but only if the protocol is supported by free software. This condition prevents the employer from choosing a requirement that would in practice force the employee into use of nonfree software.
Robert Reich: America should offer asylum for the persecuted — not persecute those seeking asylum.
He quotes a moving part of Zohran Mamdani's recent speech.
The corrupter has exposed a weakness in the US Constitution. Now that we have seen it, and how dangerous it is, we cannot un-see it.
Two Romanians were convicted of stabbing an exiled Iranian dissident journalist in London.
The suspicion is that the Iranian state recruited them, but they may not have known (or cared) who they were working for. If they did not know, that was no excuse, of course.
After billions of doses given, records show that mRNA vaccines are effective and very safe.
There is some evidence tying the low reading and math skills of current undergraduates to habitual use of LLMs.
Data centers can receive enormous tax breaks for "creating jobs", but they are so automated that the number of jobs is insignificant.
Australia's big retirement funds have "invested" in increasing fossil fuel extraction, and even in coal.
Some made a big fuss about divesting, then later quietly reversed the move.
Pretend Intelligence systems *are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics about everything from abortion to climate change, in ways that could snowball to reshape long-term public opinion, experts have said.*
One example: *[PI] drafting tools completely reversed the meaning of draft posts on atheism, including in one test switching a claim that Jesus wasn’t real to "Jesus … was real". They also changed a post complaining of "#climatechangehoax" to "#ClimateAction".*
However, different systems alter meanings in different ways.
Vance is pursuing outrageous (and absurd) exaggerated attacks on everyone who is not a right wing extremist. Conjecture: this is intended to convince right-wing extremists that if he is elected president he will show as little respect for the truth as the bullshitter does.
The US west is approaching even closer to running out of water.
Federal thugs violently arrested protest activist "Doberman" (known by her communication handle), giving her to think that they may charge her with some sort of crime, then offered her $200k to spy on her fellow activists.
Canada has pledged money to compensate the local problems that the new Pacific oil export pipeline will cause. That added expense clears the way to build the pipeline and thus aggravate the far worse global problem of climate disaster.
The "Ratepayer Protection Act" is supposedly intended to prevent datacenters from driving up electric rates on ordinary people, but experts say it is too weak and too easily bypassed, and is a figleaf rather than a solution.
An Israeli machine learning system recommended 1000 "targets" a day in Gaza and Lebanon, but they could only check some 50 per day to see if they were really HAMAS or Hezbollah combatants. Israel wanted to attack more than that, so skipped the checking step.
Dowry murders in India have become more frequent, but arouse much less public anger.
This may be due to Modi's repression of any political activity on behalf of people who are poor, weak, or exploited.
Nearly all the big oil companies are planning to "invest" in increasing the rate of extraction, although the executives cannot help but know that this is going to kill a large number of people.
I suggest laws to define starting a new oil or gas well as murder.
14% of incoming US college freshmen were reading at 10-year-old grade level recently, according to an OECD study.
The shortage of housing in Cornwall has driven homeless people to live in trailers. Now the government is fining the farmers that allow homeless people to put trailers in their farms.
Robert Reich's suggestions for crucial changes in how the US government operates.
I mostly agree with his suggestion, but I think that eliminating the electoral college should wait until we are sure that the rest of the electoral system is not vulnerable to organized fraud.
The abolition of gerrymandering should apply also to state government districts, not only to congressional districts.
There have always been corrupt politicians, but today in some countries they can increasingly win popularity by flaunting it.
An outbreak of flu leads to an outbreak of reason: *Pentagon restores mandatory flu [vaccine] shots for all recruits.*
Senator Warren calls for reversing some of the many large mergers that have subjected the US to drastic industrial concentration.
Even before the wrecker became president again, the US had a lot less business competition than it did a few decades ago. Several years ago I needed a new condensation pump to pump the air conditioner's water condensation out of the basement. There had traditionally been two competing manufacturers, but the government had allowed them to merge, so there was only one. That merger should have been blocked to maintain competition in that small field.
Often the US appears to have a lot more competition than it really has.
The supermarket company Albertsons uses all these names:
Acme Markets,
Albertsons,
Carrs-Safeway,
Haggen,
Jewel-Osco,
Kings,
Pavilions,
Plated,
Randalls,
Safeway,
Shaw's and Star Market,
Tom Thumb,
United Supermarkets,
Vons.
The European Union, under pressure from right-wing immigrant-haters, is negotiating with the Taliban about returning refugees to Afghanistan.
This threatens to aid the Taliban in carrying out their policies of oppression. Every woman in Afghanistan is oppressed; many men are, too. The EU should give asylum to every Afghan women who can reach there, and many Afghan men will deserve it too.
*Screen time can damage under-twos’ development, landmark study suggests.*
California State University fired a tenured professor for supporting student protesters who were opposing Israel's atrocities in Gaza. Arbitrators ordered the university to reinstate her with back pay.
Progressive Democrats have had great success in recent Democratic primaries, defeating "centrist" corporate Democrats including some incumbents. The "centrists" now accuse the progressives of trying to "take over" the Democratic Party, saying they should start their own party.
The term "centrist" is a distortion of the facts. It claims, falsely, that their views reflect the mainstream of Americans' thought. In fact, many of the progressive ideas that those Democrats reject have the support of more than 70% of Americans.
The accusation that progressives are outsiders trying to "take over" the Democratic Party is absurd. The Democratic Party that governed the US in the 1930s and 1960s championed most of these progressive causes. (We called them "Liberal".) Then corporate and billionaire influence took over, especially under Bill Clinton and his successors.
Progressives are now bringing the Democratic Party back to the views of most Democrats.
The corrupt US Supreme Court has abolished the independence of almost all of the independent regulatory agencies. Their job is to find and stop corruption and abuses. So this decision implies that a president who has no respect for the goal limiting corruption can neutralize them at will. Of course, that's exactly what the corrupter wants to do.
A schoolteacher's documentary shows Putin's elementary school political propaganda system at work.
Can you identify similar propaganda in your own country?
Machines that run on solar electricity can make the Arctic ice thicker by making a hole in it. Overall this can prevent loss of the ice cover and thus resist global heating.
*British foreign correspondents could be at risk of prosecution if they use sources within state-backed groups in countries such as Iran, under national security legislation being rushed through parliament.*
China is adopting an "ethnic unity" law which it could use to put anyone in the world on "trial" for making statements that go against China's ideology.
Anyone it can get its hands on, that means.
The deportation thugs disobeyed a federal court order not to arrest immigrants in immigration courts.
This puts the US constitution in danger.
A book describes the method of invalid and scurrilous attacks that Murdoch organizations, including Faux News, use for character assassination against people they consider enemies.
(satire) *[The wrecker] Indicates Desire For Speedy End To World.*
Residents of New Orleans are confronting the inevitability of inundation of the city they love.
Part of the city could be preserved by moving the old buildings to a new location on higher ground. That way, part of New Orleans would survive, and its traditions could continue; people could say that the great city lives on.
The Big Bad Bill cut the federal budget for medical aid, and half a million people in New York City will lose medical coverage soon. The article does not make it clear how many people in other parts of the US will lose medical coverage at the same time, but assuming the change takes effect nationwide, it will affect many millions.
The same bill will cause other cuts later.
Just as some right-wing ideologues try to compel American women to have more babies, others strive to ensure that more of them die young or develop lasting handicaps, by dismantling the medical system that systematically protects them.
User-tracking software has been installed recently in many US government web sites.
The bully's henchmen have made the National Labor Relations Board biased against workers.
An additional threat to bees is that hot weather diminishes their fertility.
US citizens: call on the Senate to investigate corruption and cryptocurrency, so as to block deregulation plans which threaten to increase the corruption.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your state's Secretary of State and Attorney General: Stop Last-Minute Voter Purges.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
The Labour Party has rejected its leader, Starmer, who has driven the party to the right-wing. Here is the story of his many injustices.
The new leader, Andy Burnham, should soon have a chance to reverse the absurd classification of Palestine Action as a "terrorist group". But in addition to correcting that one wrong decision, there needs to be a change in the law to prevent anything like this from happening again.
The UN inquiry into Gaza has concluded that Israel has systematically attacked Gaza civilians in ways that predictably kill many Palestinian children.
This amounts to intentional genocide.
About John Barnett, the Boeing safety inspector who exposed numerous ways of cutting corners to increase profits at the expense of safety.
My condolences to Iranians for the damage that the bully has done to them, but I ask them to understand that he has done deeper damage to Americans.
The child that cried "Victory"! *What the US president succeeded in obliterating was any rationale he offered for going to war.*
Global heating is resulting in more frequent wildfires in Greenland!
Limiting vehicle emissions in London has reduced deaths from air pollution in the affected zone by 40%, saving thousands of lives per year.
This can now be done anywhere in the world, if governments can stand up to the businesses that sell death.
One crucial secondary point: charging for use of a highly polluting vehicle in a city requires detecting when they drive in the city. The easiest way to do that is with a system of massive surveillance, and such a system is a threat to political freedom. Laws must be designed to avoid systematic tracking.
Britain's record-setting heatwave of 1976 is now mere normality, due to 50 years of global heating.
El Super-Niño is likely to cause a variety of disasters around the world. Here are some of them.
*The Washington Post Loves Data Centers.* It doesn't talk about the business reasons its owner, Bezos, has for loving them.
US Democrats have rejected the business-subservient stance that has dominated the Democratic Party since President Clinton endorsed it.
The corporate Democrats always argue that we should vote for them because they are "electable", in effect presuming that progressive Democrats can't win. But what good is it if a politician is "electable", if perse doesn't intend to make society better?
Nowadays, we see that progressive Democrats can win.
Prominent Israelis, including former government ministers, have denounced the government for permitting "terrorism" against Palestinians.
Bravo, though they should have done this many years ago. I wonder if the recent harsh words from the Tr-ance to Netanyahu showed them an opening for this campaign to be effective.
Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill to reduce housing costs.
Some of the provisions sound good, from the general descriptions here. Others, such as to "reduce federal regulations" and "streamline environmental reviews", make me suspect that this was a change for the worse, a concession to construction businesses, and that it purchased those businesses' support for the bill.
Weakening environmental protection is likely to lead to major long-term harm. However, I don't know enough to judge whether the good exceeds the bad.
The bully said initially that he would sign the bill. Then he changed his mind, saying he would not sign the bill unless Congress agrees to restrict voting rights with the "SAVE Act".
If he sticks with that stance—who knows whether he will change his mind again—what will that mean?
Either way, I don't see much point in his refusal, except to maintain a level of anxiety among Americans.
*Whistleblower investigating Ecuadorian president's [very large] family business was murdered.* The murder was disguised as suicide by hanging, but examination of the corpse revealed she had had a blow to the head just before.
*California drivers sue gas stations for allegedly* using computers to survey the prices of other gas stations and following the pattern discerned therein.
It is more or less equivalent to fixing prices.
*FBI Tried to Flip [Anti-Deportation-Thug] Protesters Into Informants.*
A British court tried protesters for criminal damage, but then sentenced them for terrorism, a charge that was never presented to the jury. This proceeding contravenes a fundamental principle of law.
Israel killed Mona Khalil, famed marine conservation leader, by bombarding her house.
PISSI has revived. Rojava was keeping it suppressed; the new Syrian government drove Rojava out of most of its territory without replacing its system to suppress PISSI.
The main US organization of labor unions, the AFL-CIO, declares its campaign to oppose the organized power of corporations and the rich.
*Supreme Court Gives Pesticide Corporations Immunity from Cancer Lawsuits.*
The right-wing majority has a firm and insistent policy of giving every advantage to the powerful and undermining democracy. If we can ever kick out the right wing power, setting things right will require reversing hundreds of decisions. We will need to adopt a method that can reliably do that.
One idea is to appoint new justices who agree with the understanding that, on issues where the right-wing takeover abolished old precedents, they can simply go back to them.
US citizens: call on your senators to extend temporary protected status for the 350,000 Haitian refugees in the US.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
Various groups are estimating that Israel has killed around 600,000 people in Gaza, which would be 1/4 of the population. Ralph Nader contends that both HAMAS and Israel have reasons to accept the underestimate.
A research study found a link between prenatal exposure to PFAS with the likelihood of later developing a medical problem in the ovaries.
Steadily growing repression is settling over Georgia under a pro-Russian promoted by Putin.
He was elected, and then showed his true colors.
The saboteur in chief is pursuing, in parallel, many different ways of rigging the 2026 elections. His targets include various election stages and many election systems.
I think this shows that his main policy priority is eliminating democracy in the United States.
A mere "rule change" could put US-funded scientific research under the detailed, specific control of ignorant political officers, functioning as a whole regiment of Lysenkos.
The UK has adopted a policy of regulating specific giant tech platforms.
The requirements on Google regulations described there seem like a step forward to me, because they can reduce Google's power over the public.
However, don't fall into the trap of thinking of this issue on the basis of copyright (misleadingly referred to in the article by the misleading term "intellectual property" — see https://gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html/). Copyright is not a principle, it is an ad hoc solution for a situation in the past that has been adapted ad hoc for subsequent changes. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-vs-community.html.)
Please join me in rejecting the term "content". It treats publications as fungible, a sort of commodity, and that devalues each and every published work.
Robert Reich attributes the decline of democracy and the rise of mass poverty to the concentration of wealth, and the concentration of wealth to government's failure to resist growth of monopolies and the under-taxation of the rich. In that, he is straight on target. His willingness to attack root causes is why I basically support him.
Where he uses the term "AI" he falls for the usual marketing hype campaign, perhaps not realizing that it is one.
Bernie Sanders is campaigning to delete the part of the military spending bill that would further integrate the US and Israeli armies.
Iran cancelled talks with the US that were about to begin, demanding that Israel stop fighting in Lebanon.
Hegseth directed a military training base into a flu outbreak by revoking the rule requiring vaccination.
Requiring recruits to follow medical safety precautions is generally wise, because it protects them all from illness. But requiring vaccination has a second potential benefit: it can keep some credulous and dangerous right-wing extremists out of the military.
The magats backed down from the plan to eliminate the Ocean Observatories Initiative, after the Senate passed a law to prohibit that.
*[Continuing steady] ocean heating fuels "staggering" loss of marine life [over time], study finds.*
The pretend intelligence ChatGPT Health is presented as a good source of medical advice, but an independent study submitting test cases found it often failed to recognize dangerous emergencies. It responded, "Make an appointment in the usual way," when (based on the described case) it should have responded, "Go to the emergency room now!"
This was not due to mere ignorance. The system's behavior showed it was influenced by irrelevant details included in some test cases as a red herring.
Canada considers the US a "safe country" to deport people to. The US is now set on persecution, so this policy must be changed.
The saboteur in chief might seize voting machines to sabotage this year's elections. Some of his henchpersons' actions suggest this is under consideration.
The report that some of Puerto Rico's voting machines actually miscounted during testing, due to erroneous software, reinforces the point that we can't take for granted that they count accurately. Do they have vulnerabilities that can facilitate cracking? We can't assume they do not. Software to cheat could also be inserted by those authorized to insert software in the voting machines.
However, the saboteur in chief is the main enemy of US democracy. With new regulations permitting his henchpersons to overreact to any threat, real or imaginary, I think the biggest danger of attack on our elections comes from him.
In the dispute between Rep. Dan Goldman and the Poetica Cafe, there is wrong on every side.
Judging from Goldman's Wikipedia page, it is clear that he excuses Israel's atrocities in Gaza, which may have killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and seem to have targeted journalists and medical doctors, citing HAMAS's equally cruel but far smaller atrocities.
The store was within its rights to refuse to serve him for his political views, which he has stated publicly. Both Goldman, and magat official Harmeet Dhillon, are acting unjustly by equating politically based refusal with antisemitism. The systematic persecution of people who criticize Israel and the labeling of them as "antisemitic" is a grave threat to freedom of speech in the US.
The Guardian article mentioned that Goldman attended a rally for Israel which Smotrich also attended. It then proceeds to blame Goldman for Smotrich's crimes and views — but the article presents no justification for that leap. Whether the rally endorsed Smotrich's practice of driving West Bank Palestinians out of their homes and lands is not stated in the article.
The Supreme Court has for many years been protecting US companies from lawsuits over business activities that facilitated doing wrong to people in other countries.
Just recently it protected Cisco, which was accused of developing internet surveillance systems that helped China track down and torture members of Falun Gong.
(I am not a supporter of Falun Gong — I am an Atheist. But I condemn torture regardless of the religious beliefs of the victims.)
US citizens: call on Congress to block the saboteur in chief from wrecking Social Security.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Find Our Families Act, which would require the deportation thugs to give their prisoners' relatives accurate information about where the prisoners are, and about their medical emergencies.
It would also ban torturing the prisoners and their relatives by keeping the one from communicating with the other.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call for the release of whistleblower Courtney Williams, charged with "espionage" for disclosing discrimination and harassment she experienced as a contractor at Fort Bragg.
Don't forget that that military base is named after a traitor, Braxton Bragg.
US citizens: More than 4 million people have lost SNAP (food benefits) since last summer. Call on Congress to reject farm legislation that leaves families behind.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop Education Sec. Linda McMahon from transferring special education and student civil rights out of the Education Department.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to require deportation thugs to continue reporting cases where someone dies within 30 days after release from deportation prison.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to Abolish Super PACs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to fully fund public TV and radio.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
* Unicef analyzed young people's exposure to eight climate hazards: coastal floods, droughts, extreme heat, fires, heatwaves, river floods, sand and dust storms, and tropical storms… Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard.*
Governor Newsom accuses the US government of investigating him and his wife hoping to find something to smear him with, because he plans to run for president in 2028.
I do not support Newsom, because he is a plutocratist "moderate" democrat , one who does not seek to do anything about the problem of super-rich people who endanger democracy and human rights.
(satire) *[Major League Baseball] Demands Return Of All Foul Balls.*
Shipments of products made in Israel's colonies in the West Bank are systematically mislabeled as "Made in Israel" to take fraudulent advantage of trade preferences for exports of Israel's products.
Iranian repression police made a practice of shooting protesters in the face, chest or genitals. Often this caused grave injuries, or death.
Due to our greenhouse gas emissions, chikungunya can now spread in most of Europe.
Many "tropical" diseases are, or will be in a few decades, able to spread in the formerly temperate zones.
* The Guardian geolocated and verified images showing the Israeli military using excavators made by six companies – Caterpillar, Volvo, Hyundai, Doosan, Hitachi and Komatsu – to destroy homes, public utilities, shops and other structures across southern Lebanon.*
*Sudden shifts from wet to dry weather, or vice versa, may foil typical drought and flooding prevention measures.*
The wrecker is going all-out to increase the use of fossil fuels, but is not convincing the American public that that is safe.
*Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this.*
I don't think the wrecker cares about the danger of global climate disaster, only about rewarding the planet roasters to keep them in his corner. They all deserve to end up broke and experience living on however much support the US provides to the poor.
The muskrat's fabulous cars-in-tunnels "mass transit" seems to be unable to serve many people, but it is an opportunity to disregard environmental planning regulations with impunity and serve real estate owners rather than the public.
The corrupter has found another bureaucratic path to reward the people who attacked the capitol on 6 Jan 2020.
It seems the corrupter has decided to cut his losses in the gratuitous (and unwinnable) war with Iran. For once he has approached a situation in a way that does his country a little good, though it is far less than the harm he has done in relations with Iran over the past year. Meanwhile, he found no way to fix the problem that he gratuitously created when he cancelled Obama's non-nuclear deal with Iran.
He will salvage something from this idiocy, though -- some way to increase profits for some of his billionaire supporters.
* Decriminalizing the possession of cannabis or strictly regulating access to the drug do not appear to drive up usage, but when the drug is sold commercially the number of users increases and more mental health problems are seen, a review has found.*
Evanston, Illinois, passed a law to compensate former black residents whose ancestors lived in Evanston and experienced the systemic housing discrimination.
I know of three ways n which where the US government and its sub-jurisdictions denied blacks equal rights under the law: slavery, Jim Crow segregation (in some states), and discrimination in housing assistance in part of the 20th century. These were direct policies of discrimination carried out by governments, and those governments are liable for injustice of these racist laws.
Since such harm tends to be inherited by successive generations of descendants of the victims, it is right and proper for the governments that committed those wrongs to pay compensation to today's Americans whose ancestors were wronged.
I can't tell from the article precisely what the conditions are for receiving compensation in Evanston. If they are formulated as being on account of a person's race, that may be discriminatory and unjust. But if they are formulated as being on account of past discrimination against a person's ancestors (done because of their race), that is not discrimination today. The discrimination in question was the racism of the past, and compensation has to compensate the descendants of those selected as victims of racism.
The first 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 present this comment about them.
A British appeals court sustained the arbitrary criminalization of stating support for Palestine Action.
A few more levels of appeal are possible, but Stormer's government is dead set on repression of criticism where it counts.
"Expensive electricity is killing British industry" — but subsidizing energy made from fossil fuels is killing civilization.
The UK government should look for a way to subsidize the customers for energy, but not subsidize fossil fuel or electricity made from that. We must maintain the incentive to use less fossil fuel. There are other ways to keep industrial production going.
The bullshitter has acknowledged important points, such as that Israel wages war in ways that gratuitously kill civilians, and that Netanyahu's wars are unjust and bad for US interests.
Does this mean the bullshitter has had a change of heart? I doubt it; he has gone so long without a heart that he surely doesn't have one now. I think he is simply applying to Israel and Netanyahu the approach he has used with so many others: to contradict himself frequently and change positions so fast that negotiators accustomed to serious negotiations can't grasp what is happening.
I am not sure this will confuse Netanyahu, though. He seems to practice a similar approach.
Iran now demands that Israel withdraw its army from Lebanon or there will be no peace deal.
Maybe the new maximum leader believes he dominates the wrecker so much that he can demand anything whatsoever and get it. Or maybe he is bluffing.
With so much readiness to bluff, it will be hard for them to reach an agreement even if there is an agreement to be reached.
Explaining how surveillance companies recruit schools, classes and teachers to pressure students and their parents into giving their personal data to the companies, and allowing those companies to track the students and parents.
I suspect that refusing to run anything from Google Prey Store or the Crapple Crap Store will keep them from tracking you. But protecting students in school calls for a law prohibiting schools from ever asking students to run nonfree programs or hosting activities that do so.
California has accused AT&T of lying to the FCC to get permission to eliminate old copper land lines in California.
Alas, the corrupter encourages the FCC to accept lies from big companies that do things to please him.
Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran writes about how cruel tyranny engulfed Turkey, in the process of which threats of violence forced her into exile. And about what it is like to lose your country to that political disease.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to reject the "Great American AI Act" and the propaganda terminology that appears in its name.
In my letter I explained that "AI" is a marketing hype term that the big tech companies use to make the public yield, and urged the legislators to reject it. I included the URL
https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligance
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on media outlets to cease climate hushing.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
A study found that children in England who were hit by their parents have a tendency to get worse grades in school.
This could indicate that hitting children tends to lead them to do worse in school tests. Or it could indicate that children who for certain other reasons tend to do worse in school will tend also to be hit by their parents. Is it the hitting itself that does them harm, or the situation that leads to the hitting, or both, or something else?
Israel attacked a notary office in Lebanon, destroying records of land ownership for up to a quarter of a million people.
This seems to be a way of preventing them from ever returning to their homes, or to the wreckage of their homes.
Jamaicans are campaigning against selling beachfront land for resorts that will be used only by wealthy foreign tourists.
Scientists predict that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (a loop of currents, some at the surface and some deep) will collapse due to global heating. They do not know whether that collapse will spread over many years, or happen with shocking speed. The activities to monitor the change have been defunded.
An estimated 10,000 corpses buried in the rubble of Gaza will be difficult to identify ever. Israel's continued use of bulldozers in some parts of Gaza is increasing that number.
Hegseth went to a commemoration of the Normandy landings of 1944 for two events, but his speech at the first one at Colleville-sur-Mer was so racist and hateful that people in the town of Langrune-sur-Mer (where Hegseth had planned to appear) posted their disgust. This showed how vile he is and reverberated around the world.
*Indiana Banned Press From Executions for Dignity. It Actually Serves Repression.*
Radio Jornalera NJ coverse the perverse, unpredictable harassment of prisoners in the Delaney Hall privately run deportation prison.
It is admirable nonviolent resistance to violent, sadistic fascism. But I wonder, is there any way to listen to it without subjecting oneself to nonfree JavaScript code? I have a hunch the people who do this, while heroic in resistance, are unaware of the quite different injustice of nonfree software, and have picked up the habit of handing control of their own computers to any and all companies that might want to snoop on them, cheat them or repress them.
The bullshitter and Iran say they are coming closer to a peace deal.
We can't presume that the bullshitter is telling the truth about any of this. Even if some parts are true, other parts may be bullshit.
But even if they do make an agreement, the bullshitter might break it at any time. Iran too might break the agreement.
Indiana has excluded journalists from observing executions, pretending that this is a kindness to the convict who is executed.
I've read elsewhere that the victim is allowed to invite a limited number of people to attend, and can include journalists among those few. In other words, the victim has to pay a price to have a journalist there. This proves clearly that the state's exclusion of journalists is not meant as a kindness for the victim. If it were, the victim would be allowed to say "No, thanks. I don't object to the presence of any number of journalists."
This is censorship disguised as "We insist on protecting you whether you want it or not."
The FBI raided a voter registration group — in effect claiming that to help eligible citizens register to vote is forbidden.
Ralph Nader argues that a push to impeach the saboteur in chief would boost political opposition to him and his regime, even if it doesn't succeed in removing him.
*Nvidia and Microsoft Researchers Say [so-called "AI"] Agents Don't Care About Safety or Reliability.*
I take exception to the idea that they understand anything enough to be said to "care". Rather, they give a rather unintelligent rule-based imitation of caring.
Separating the UK from the European Union, explained as an example of trying a simple quick fix in a complex situation in which no simple fix exists.
KPMG decided to publish an article about agentic pretend intelligence in actual use. The staff asked a pretend intelligence to fill in the details. Great fun ensued — but not for KPMG.
The builders of Israeli "settlements" (in occupied Palestinian territory) hold events around the world to sell apartments in them. One such event being held in London has triggered objections supported by 100 members of the houses of Parliament, who call for prohibiting the sale of land that was taken from Palestinians in violation of international law.
The US government is embarked on criminalizing criticism of the government. This started with targeting those who protested unjust government actions, continues through targeting people who write dissenting publications, then targeting people who have copies of such publications, and has now targeted someone for trying to protect others from being prosecuted for possessing copies of dissenting publications.
Very rich people inevitably undermine democracy while impoverishing others to make themselves even richer. Taxing their wealth will help with both problems.
The bushwhacked bully claims to have made peace with Iran, but actually it is a 60-day cease fire in which he concedes most of the concessions he said he was going to win, and kicks the other hard points down the road.
Here is a more complete description of what the agreement does not discuss. He has no respect for agreements, so he might restart fighting at any moment. Or he might not. But if he does not, the danger he will is likely to continue most of the harmful consequences that the war has had.
Each note starts with a date and a brief topic in parentheses. That
text is also a link to that note.
For instance, if the note
starts with "31 July 2022 (Inflation)" then you can link to it with
"https://www.stallman.org/notes/2022-may-aug.html#31_July_2022_(Inflation)".
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