Ferguson is planning to raise more revenue by increasing fines.

Other information confirms that this includes fines for traffic offenses. That will fall heavily on the poor, increasing the oppression they already suffer. Some will be jailed because they can't pay these fines, which will be an excuse for other fines.

A thug union objected to a right-wing city councilor's union-busting plans, so their private investigators tried to frame him.

I too object to those union-busting plans — the fact that the union members are thugs doesn't excuse them — but this form of opposition is pure thug.

A US high school basketball team was kicked out of a tournament for wearing "I can't breathe" protest shirts while preparing for the match.

What strict repression! I am sure the tournament organizers will say, "We're not racist, we only oppose criticizing racism. We're not in favor of cops' killing people, we just insist that nobody rebuke them when they do."

The NSA plans to crack into millions of computers and take remote control of them.

Alexei Navalny was given a suspended sentence of over 3 years — meaning that Putin can hold this over Navalny for any sort of protest activity that Putin chooses to declare illegal.

This is similar in spirit, though not in legal detail, to the practice in the UK and the US of making arrested protesters agree to refrain from protests as a condition of bail.

China is imposing strict conformity on views expressed in universities.

Western countries such as France which prohibit disagreement with the official view of certain issues, such as the genocide of the Armenians, provide China with an excuse for its own restrictions on permitted opinions.

Many working people in the UK are effectively working for nothing because their wages pay for less than the costs of working.

I suspect the right-wing government would punish them if they quit.

Senator Bernie Sanders: The Trans-Pacific Trade (TPP) Agreement Must Be Defeated.

The Prison State of America: prisons are a scheme for forced labor, charging prisoners fees and fines to make them work for companies for a pittance.

The private prison companies lobby for many measures, some explicit and some subtle and indirect, to put more people in prison.

The last independent TV station in Russia is being shut down.

Red knots, birds that migrate very long distances, are in danger from global heating in several ways at once.

The public school system of a city in Pennsylvania is being turned over entirely to a company.

US TV shows about the real lives of teenage mothers convinced thousands of US teenagers to avoid following that path.

It appears that these shows caused a 6% drop in the rate of teen pregnancy, from 2008 to 2012. (A further 11% drop was due to other causes.)

The UK government has decided to permit the main nightingale habitat site to be bulldozed for new housing.

Police officer Joseph Crystal was hounded out of his department after reporting a thug for attacking a handcuffed prisoner.

The thug was convicted, got a slap on the wrist, and remains employed by the department.

Campaigners are putting labels on goods in UK stores that make demands to pay their workers a living wage.

A headline-minded prosecutor in Arizona tried to charge people with intentionally killing dogs under their care, hoping to bury evidence that an air conditioner failure was the cause.

Perhaps kennel companies should be required to take care to detect nighttime air conditioner failures in time to do something to save the dogs, but prosecuting hapless employees is not the way to establish such a regulation.

Compared with 40 years ago, Americans are better off in some ways and worse in many others.

The GDP is worthless as a measure of society's economic well-being. If a plutocrat gets a billion dollars of income by taking $100 in income away from each of 10 million working people, that is a big change for the worse, but the GDP registers it as no change. When an article presents GDP figures as if they mattered, that indicates a bad framing of the issues: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Using the word "monetize" embodies and thus promotes the attitude that the article opposes.

When computer manufacturers have back doors to get people's data. that creates many threats over and above an antidemocratic government.

Al-Sisi is ruling by decree and has imposed a series of diktats against human rights.

A US-linked radio station in Azerbaijan is being shut down and its staff persecuted.

The Mall of America and its pet city government plan to sue "black lives matter" protesters into ruin.

Big banks' losses due to betting on a high oil price could be imposed on taxpayers due to the betrayal budget bill that Senator Warren tried to stop.

Obama, obedient as always to the banksters, lobbied the Senate to pass it.

Mexican farm workers, growing produce for the US, are treated as slaves and forbidden to leave the farm. If caught escaping, they are brutalized.

Forced to buy food from stores that gouge them, they end the season in debt.

A Femen protester is imprisoned in the Vatican.

Picking up a statue and holding it in a protest is not "stealing". What nonsense! As for "offending religious sentiments", that's at the core of freedom of speech.

Pfizer is trying to bully pharmacists not to prescribe generic drugs.

The Dodd-Frank bill was not strong enough in the first place, but the Federal Reserve keeps giving banks extensions on complying with it.

A court told London Activists they could reenter the unused bank building to serve a meal to the homeless on Christmas, but the court betrayed them immediately after and they were not allowed to do this.

One of the activist points out that the UK has 10 unoccupied buildings for each homeless person.

The state's refusal to let homeless people live in those buildings demonstrates its evil priorities. Making squatting a crime was vicious too.

Does anyone know whether the Green Party advocates legalizing squatting?

Mehmet Emin Altunses faces the criminal charge of insulting the president of Turkey.

Anyone who loves Turkey must fight to get these charges dropped so that Turkey does not disgrace itself.

"No Justice, No Respect": Why the Ferguson Riots Were Justified.

Treaties are needed to restrict development of autonomous AIs with deadly weapons.

A SWAT team raided Chad Chadwick's house based on a false report, shot him, beat him up, and tased him, then fabricated a series of charges against him.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

They did not convict him of anything, but they ruined his life as well as rendering him deaf in one ear.

These thugs must be punished or they will ruin someone else's life next.

Privatized UK parole officers put people back in prison for taking jobs that start too early in the morning.

Jeffrey Deskovic was falsely convicted of murder, and freed after 16 years. Now he dedicates his life to freeing others wrongly imprisoned by a system that makes slapdash mistakes.

A cinema in the UK called the thugs to arrest some 12-year-olds for bringing iThings with them to the movie.

The fact that they did not in fact record the movie is a side issue. What if they had done so? Since that is not a crime in the UK, the only complaint the cinema could make is that they violated its rules. That should not qualify as an "emergency" — the thugs should have refused to come.

This is in addition to the general point that laws against sharing copies of published works are an injustice.

Protests Erupt in Nicaragua over Inter-oceanic Canal.

The canal raises two issues. One is that farmers who will lose their land don't trust that they will be compensated. There is an obvious solution: start buying their land at a fair price now.

The bigger and harder issue is that of potential ecosystem damage. I don't know if there is a way to prevent that.

Advice for Americans dealing with debt collectors.

How the nebulous idea of "cloud computing" led millions of internet users to lose their privacy.

The one flaw in the article is that it presumes we have all fallen for the trap. For example, "When the technology industry embraced 'cloud computing' and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain." Maybe you made that bargain — I never did. I hope you will join me in rejecting it now.

Some kinds of services are acceptable to use in specific ways. But if you adopt a policy of trusting a service without first carefully checking who you would be trusting with what, you'll be mistreated over and over. This is why I have adopted the policy of not identifying myself to businesses I deal with except under very narrow conditions (for instance, the company that hosts stallman.org knows it's mine).

In other words, you've got to stop thinking that there is a "cloud", and start thinking about each particular service.

Life and business in occupied Palestine are tangled in hundreds of absurd Israeli regulations, each with its own excuse, but all designed simply to make life poor and difficult.

Obama continues to claim that the war in Afghanistan made the US safer.

A public hospital in Alabama makes patients waive their legal right not to be sued for hospital bills.

I don't think poor indebted Americans should feel the slightest shame about using bankruptcy to escape the medical bills that a civilized country would never have tried to impose on them.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether the hospital's contract with these patients is valid. If the law says hospitals can't do something to their patients, can the hospitals set it aside just by getting the patient to say yes?

Democracy protests in Hong Kong have resumed and thugs arrested dozens.

The UK government celebrates the 1914 Christmas truce because it doesn't threaten the idea of war. Contrast it with the reception of acts and movements that did.

Obama plans to send mercenaries to Iraq so he can deny he is sending ground troops there.

Mercenaries are troops.

Faux News cut a protest chant in mid-sentence to misrepresent it as advocating the kill of thugs.

Now cat litter comes with DRM.

How a woman won election as MP for Timbuktu.

Syriza's Marxist economist does not propose leaving the Euro. Rather he demands debt relief with that threat in the background.

Is Sony's Crackdown a Bigger Threat to Western Free Speech Than North Korea?

Russia reports that an unidentified witness saw a Ukrainian fighter plane take off with missiles and land without them, at the time flight MH17 was shot down.

If true, this would not be conclusive proof that Ukraine shot down the passenger jet. There could be other reasons for the fighter to return without missiles.

But is this testimony real? We have only the Russian state's word that the witness made this testimony — and that the witness exists at all.

The UK has used bail conditions to arbitrarily ban hundreds of activists from protests.

The bogus charges are dropped eventually, but in the mean time, democracy is the loser.

Israel arrested members of an anti-Arab hate group, accusing them of various violent acts.

Brazil's new Agriculture minister is the obedient servant of big agribusiness and will energetically promote deforestation.

The NSA and its friends undermine general internet security in many ways.

The NSA has created a web of cooperating companies. It helps protect them from cracking, and they allow help the NSA spy on others.

The low price of oil may be Saudi Arabia's plan to hurt Russia and Iran.

The article speculates that it may cause a big decrease in oil production a few years from now. I hope that leads to more renewables installation then, but it would be better to have a high oil price now to incentivize renewables now.

Israel's parliament is considering a law to bar the most outspoken Palestinian legislator from parliament.

I disagree with Ms Zoabi on her controversial statement: I think kidnapping children is wrong even in fighting a colonizing occupying power. Nonetheless, barring her from election to Parliament attacks the democratic rights of hundreds of thousands of people, and that is also wrong.

New Jersey is trying to clear away the democratic procedures that allow the residents of a city to block water privatization.

Governor Christie has a chance to block this by vetoing the bill. If he does not, it may hurt his presidential chances.

Homeless squatters joined activists who sought to feed them, to occupy a disused bank in London. The government sent thugs to kick them out, true to its policy of screw the poor to help the rich; but two of the activists climbed on a balcony rather than leave.

This shows that the UK state regards the idea of feeding homeless people on Christmas as a danger so urgent that it warrants an eviction on Christmas eve to prevent it. (For me, as an Atheist, I don't particularly care that it was Christmas; I'd disapprove of the eviction equally much on any day of the year.)

The court ordered the activists be allowed to return temporarily to feed the homeless today. I guess someone decided to try to smooth over resentment over the eviction. I hope it does not succeed in that aim.

Dissecting the US "evidence" supposed to tie the cracking of Sony to North Korea.

It's flimsy argument, misleadingly cited multiple times as if that made the conclusions stronger. In other words, total bullshit.

The North Korean regime is viciously oppressive; there is no need for false accusations where so many valid accusations are available. But these accusations smell like a PR campaign meant to shape US public opinion.

Further arguments.

Don't forget Sony's cyber-attacks against its own customers.

boycottsony.org

Thugs in St Louis (near Ferguson, that is) shot another black teenager, saying he was pointing a gun at them.

If things happened as the thugs claim, I don't think they did wrong this time. But people are right to distrust the thugs and demand proof, as the thugs have lied so many times before.

The US government asks courts to order computer companies to remotely give access to people's computers — when the companies have power (through back doors) to do so.

The defense is to use free software that probably does not have a back door, rather than proprietary software that almost certainly does have one.

Let's Leave Behind the Age of Fossil Fuel. Welcome to Year One of the Climate Revolution.

The UK gave 1.5 billion dollars in subsidy to all sorts of power plants just for existing and doing what they were going to do anyway.

The subsidy was supposed to be an incentive to bring new generating capacity on line, but it did none of that.

Since a large fraction of this generating capacity uses fossil fuel, that fraction of the subsidy is subsidy for continuing to use fossil fuel (rather than building renewable capacity).

Global heating is disrupting butterflies, so that caterpillars mature in the autumn and can't survive the winter as adults.

US citizens: tell Congress to stop giveaways to Wall Street.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

The TTIP would require US states to pay foreign companies in order to regulate toxic chemicals such as Bisphenol A.

TTIP stands for "This Treaty Is Plutocratic". Its other name, TAFTA, stands for "Turn All Freedom To Ashes".

A solidarity hunger strike persuaded Israel to release Nahar al-Saadi from solitary confinement after 570 days of it.

Solitary confinement is a form of brainwashing common in US prisons.

Israel blatantly disregards the Fourth Geneva Convention in its treatment of occupied Palestine.

Another way Comcast tries to buy support for its planned merger with a large competitor: by handing out cards that entitle the bearer to decent customer service. In Washington DC, these cards are often given to people with political influence.

As two children (ages 10 and 6) were walking home from a park, thugs grabbed them, took them to their home, then threatened to shoot their father.

I think the father should have refused to sign any papers making absurd promises, even for a few days, and told the kids, "I can't stop them from taking you prisoner, but mom and I will rescue you." Any child of 6 will understand what that means.

When I was 6 years old, I walked to school every day. That's what all the boys and girls in first grade did, in my ordinary neighborhood public school in New York City. How cowardly TV has made Americans.

A police officer in Buffalo was fired for trying to stop a thug from choking a handcuffed man.

Quite a few security experts doubt US claims that the crack attack on Sony was carried out by North Korea. This article presents their reasons.

Santa Claus and his crew joined a protest against a natural gas storage facility that is likely to pollute the regional water supply in nearby Seneca Lake.

There is still a chance for the many streams of climate defense activism to prevent the worst level of disaster — but we need to push for deep changes that go beyond changing our individual lifestyles.

CO₂ emissions are putting mussels in danger.

Everyone: call on Mississippi Attorney General Hood to drop his plans for a mandatory ISP censorship list.

It does work to sign with Javascript disabled — the page of JSON data that you get indicates success.

Australia's carbon tax was effective in reducing CO₂ emissions. That's why the fossil fuel companies' men were so determined to get rid of it.

Nepalese workers are dying in Qatar at the rate of 15 a month. And this doesn't count the workers from India and other countries.

Another fine mess for freedom of speech in Egypt.

Luxembourg should not bring charges against the person who leaked the tax avoidance schemes of Luxembourg.

Amazon Anonymous claims its boycott in the UK has cost Amazon 8 million dollars.

While I support the boycott, I can't say I have bought any less from Amazon than I did in the past.

In 1995, Senator Moynihan proposed to abolish the CIA.

US torture extends beyond the CIA, and everyone responsible ought to be chased down and prosecuted.

Reportedly three other countries have made a secret agreement giving Ukraine a veto over publishing results of the investigation of the destruction of flight MH17.

This article belongs to a body of writing that claims that MH17 was shut down intentionally by Ukraine. That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof — it is much more plausible that badly trained missile operators were mistaken about the target. The articles I have seen are not extraordinary proof: for the most part, the evidence is attributed to people I can't find much information about, and I am not convinced it is for real.

For instance, this article says that the unusual flight path of MH17 has never been explained, but I recall reading that it (as well as other flights before and after) were diverted away from a storm.

Nonetheless, the author personally attests to getting a runaround in requests for information about this agreement, and I think that point is credible.

The Smartest Cities Rely on Citizen Cunning And Unglamorous Technology (as opposed to fancy sensors that spy on everyone).

Refugees from Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea report on life under the rebels and/or Russia.

Some of these people could be motivated to exaggerate, but it is consistent with what Putin does in Russia, and some of them had no other reason to flee.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has laid charges of torture in Germany against two officials of the Bush regime: former CIA Director Tenet and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

Contrast the difference in reaction between the unusual event that someone shoots a thug dead and the frequent event that a thug shoots an unarmed man dead.

The producers of a documentary about Edward Snowden have been sued by someone who claims they are "profiting from the theft of documents".

From what I have read, the use by journalists of leaked documents is lawful in the US. (The movie isn't where they are used; it is about Snowden, not whet he showed us.) But the US government might try to use this lawsuit as an opportunity to press its case to label Snowden as a criminal.

US universities host raving supporters of the occupation of Palestine, but those who criticize it are labeled "antisemitic" and excluded.

Sony Threatens to Sue Twitter Unless It Removes Tweets Containing Hacked Emails.

The Lima agreement is weaker than weak — a "roadmap to global burning."

A Milwaukee thug shot an unarmed homeless man, apparently beating him up first, then accused the homeless man (apparently falsely) of attacking him. The thug will get off without prosecution.

1/4 of the tenant families in the UK have cut back on food to pay rent.

Ukraine is planning to join NATO, and NATO does not reject the idea.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

That seems calculated to push Russia into war.

Thugs don't seem to mind so much when right-wing fanatics kill thugs.

The oppression of North Korea is no joke.

Nonetheless, I think it is a fitting target for jokes — ha ha, only serious.

The world's wheat harvest is predicted to decrease 6% with each 1C rise in world temperature.

Maybe we could cope with a 12% decrease, but 30%?

Koalas are headed for extinction due to human destruction of their habitat.

Pressure for prosecution of US torturers is growing.

The New York Times editorial uses the word torture which many other media have avoided. It omits the ringleaders, Bush and Cheney, from the list of suspects to be investigated, but they should be the prime targets.

The senate talks about setting up a "truth commission" to investigate, as a substitute for prosecution. That won't be enough to cleanse America's name, or repudiate tyranny. The Bush regime's secret memos trashed the whole Bill of Rights.

So much evidence has been published already, including Dubya's and Cheneys' public confessions, that there should be no need to offer any of the major organizers immunity.

A Taliban-supporting cleric in Pakistan threatened violence against protesters, and is being investigated for these threats.

Italians have been charged with planning right-wing terrorist violence.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Painting a pretty face on the harsh life of servants is a way of romanticizing inequality.

Accepting sponsorship from arms companies promotes arms trade and war.

It's comparable to sponsorship from tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, or Big Pharma.

Large dam projects in Amazonia lead to deforestation, and may have something to do with the failure of rains in Sao Paulo.

A high-ranking New York thug posted a tweet that appears to endorse intentional extrajudicial killings.

Listing the 32 Democratic senators that sided with the Republican betrayal budget bill.

What the banksters got from the betrayal budget bill: taxpayers potentially on the hook for giant losses from speculation in derivatives.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Facebook blocked access in Russia to a page proposing a protest in Russia, in obedience to the Russian regime.

US citizens: call on the FDA not to approve genetically modified salmon.

Eating them is probably safe, but growing them in the ocean endangers wild salmon.

US citizens: call on Obama not to renominate Wall Street's Antonio Weiss to regulate Wall Street.

US citizens: call on Obama to show some spine in opposing Wall Street's corruption of Congress.

The UK's anti-immigrant party's leader reacted with bad grace to a satirical app.

I hope that the developers released the app as free software.

The New Economy movement calls for making economic activities smaller-scale and under local ownership.

Syriza could win the next Greek elections, and says it will destroy austerity — but the forces of repression could stage a coup in Greece.

US citizens: call on Holder to prosecute JP Morgan.

Everyone: call for dropping the "feticide" charge against Purvi Patel.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: call for prosecution of the CIA officials responsible for torture.

I added a note saying to prosecute Cheney and Dubya as well.

Ten medical problems that modern contraception can prevent or make lighter — aside from pregnancy.

The Christian story of Christmas encapsulates disgust for female sexuality.

Thugs are not always the killers — occasionally they are killed. Someone shot two NYC thugs, just before killing himself, and after killing someone else.

Other thugs have seized on this as an opportunity to campaign for their own impunity, and to attack the public for the anger that has been provoked by the actions of many thugs over a long time.

In effect, the thugs claim that their lives matter astronomically more than yours or mine, and that protesting when they kill mere citizens is equivalent to shooting them.

I don't think those two thugs deserved to die. But I feel less concern about each of them than about each of the many innocent people that thugs have killed — because the thugs are part of a group that has power and uses it arrogantly to oppress.

The reason I call them "thugs" is not primarily because of the killings they do, many of which are due to haste and unconscious racism rather than malice. Rather, it is primarily because of the numerous protesters and other innocent victims that they grab, punch, kick, pepper spray, or beat with sticks, and then frame for various bogus charges. That, they do from arrogance.

Only a fraction of thugs would do those things, but when they lie about it, all their buddies support their perjury. That's why they all deserve the name of "thugs".

Once in a while someone in a thug department stands for justice and rejects the arrogance and impunity of the other thugs. Those people deserve the name of "police officer".

The Taliban are winning their war against Pakistani children's future.

The Tor project reports that some government (the US, it appears) may try to disable its directory authority servers and shut the Tor network down.

Christian fanatics falsely claim that some birth control methods are abortion, so they can stretch their restrictions on abortion rights to restrict birth control too.

From my point of view, the difference between contraception and abortion, while real, has no moral significance: they should both be legal and the state should provide them both gratis.

The EPA's proposed rules for handling coal ash are too weak to do the job.

A case in point.

It's not a good thing for everyone's email to be published. Or collected by the NSA.

When Maria Lopez cut her finger on a meat saw at the Hormel plant, because they had sped up the production line, they kept the line running dripping her blood into the food.

The higher production speed causes accidents and contamination, but the companies have bought the support of the US government to allow them to replace government inspection with their own half-hearted inspection. To trust these companies to inspect themselves is to invite them to cut corners on safety — for their workers and for their customers.

The UK has imposed onerous and unnecessary restrictions on volunteers returning from helping to care for Ebola patients in Africa.

These people can be trusted to tell medical personnel if they develop symptoms suggesting they might have Ebola. And if they don't have those symptoms, they are not contagious.

As Egypt's government plunges to new depths of tyranny, it is getting full military support from the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

A practical study in Chicago found that red-light cameras caused a small increase in injuries due to car crashes.

It wasn't a significant increase, but the lack of benefit is enough reason to get rid of them.

Why does Obama insist on sending Shaker Aamer to Saudi Arabia (where anyone may be tortured) rather than to Britain, which is ready to accept him back?

Turkish opposition editors and journalists have been arrested under absurd accusations.

The Lima climate talks seem to have failed, leaving human civilization on course for global disaster.

The political will to avoid disaster was not strong enough to overcome short term interest plus the corruption spread by fossil fuel companies.

The only agreement reached was that countries would propose unilateral measures they will take, starting in 2020, when it will be too late to avoid more or less disaster.

I think that the countries expecting to be hit first by deadly climate disaster have grounds to declare war on the main greenhouse emitting countries. They may as well die resisting climate attack rather than give up and die helplessly.

Such a war would not be mere revenge — those countries may have a chance to protect themselves from part of the expected damage. By destroying fossil fuel export or import infrastructure, they could cut the use of fossil fuel, which could reduce the extent of the disaster they face.

Actions to block activities that are likely to kill of hundreds of millions of people could be justified legally under the defense of "necessity".

The US is posting blimps near Washington DC to scan for cruise missiles up to 340 miles away.

That's a good thing to do, if it works (which is not clear), but the blimps could also watch cars and people.

Vermont's governor has abandoned the single-payer health care plan that was enacted.

He says this is because the tax required to fund it would be too high, but it will surely be less than what the same people would have to pay under the current system.

The Senate report identifies 26 men who were imprisoned wrongly by the CIA and tortured, but it seems there were hundreds more.

The CIA claims these mistakes were a tiny fraction. I don't trust the CIA to count them honestly. But even when someone was a real terrorist, that doesn't excuse torture.

Can you tell a gun from a power drill in half a second? Seeing a picture of a black person's face makes some people see the drill as a gun. This is unconscious racism at work.

The article also describes simple methods of reducing these unconscious prejudices.

If the American public considers torture acceptable, perhaps it will balk at destructive experiments on unwilling human subjects, which the CIA also did.

The two tend to go together (there are clear examples from German concentration camps).

Over-protection of children: New York City is removing swings and welding spinning disks so they can't spin.

This goes with the attitude that leads to prosecuting parents that let their kids go to the playground alone.

The lawlessness of the CIA extended to Guantanamo, and the published details provide the lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners with arguments for motions in their "trials".

I don't think it matters greatly how much imprisonment without trial was done by the CIA and how much was done by the US Army. They are both part of the US government.

A woman driving by said "fuck the police", and they arrested her. A court gave her a $100,000 punitive judgment to teach the thugs respect for freedom of speech.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

They would learn the lesson better if they had to pay the judgment personally, but chances are that won't happen.

This contrasts with other countries that fail to uphold freedom of speech. In France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and many other countries, insulting officials is a crime, although they often deserve the insults.

The CIA has known for a long time that torture doesn't "work" for getting intelligence, so Bush and Cheney must have known this too. Why then did they choose to use torture rather than get better information?

One possibility is that they are sadistic savages. Another, more sinister, is that they wanted bad intelligence (fabrications) to justify attacking Iraq. Torture works great for that.

The precise headline used for an article affects how readers understand it and which parts of it they remember later.

This is part of the general human tendency to stick with first impressions or first conclusions, and not change them sufficiently when subsequent information calls for correcting them.

This is, for instance, why it is so important to talk about "free/libre software" and not "open source".

Eight proposals for how to make Wall Street cease to threaten the US economy.

Everyone: call on FIFA to insist that Qatar put an end to slave labor conditions in construction for the World Cup.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

In one province of Pakistan, 40% of all criminal trials label the defendant a "terrorist". In most of those cases, there was nothing remotely terrorist about them. And Pakistan is about to execute someone based on a confession beaten out of him when he was 15 years old.

As Pakistan fights the Taliban, I hope the thirst for "blood" does not lead to more injustice like these.

Inequality of wealth distribution in the US continues to increase.

Chevron has abandoned plans to drill in Canadian Arctic waters, acknowledging it is unable to meet safety requirements.

Nobody can drill safely in Arctic waters. Even drilling safely in the Gulf of Mexico is not to be counted on.

Where to learn, at one remove, what it feels like to be tortured.

Western mining companies gladly accept slaved labor from the Eritrean government.

Movie theaters refused to show Sony's film, The Interview, after bomb threats against theaters, so Sony cancelled the release.

This is censorship by threat. Even worse, it is likely to make others self-censor in anticipation of a threat. (I wish they didn't call these crackers "hackers" — it seems clear that playful cleverness is not a significant part of their mentality.)

We should not be quick to believe claims about who is responsible. I wouldn't put this past North Korea or China, but I also wouldn't put it past the FBI to falsely accuse them.

It takes no expertise to make a false bomb threat. Anyone could have done that. Reportedly, Sony's computer security was so incompetent that even a kid could have cracked it.

Senator Feinstein is already using this to promote the privacy-threatening bill that would allow companies to give your personal data to Big Brother in bulk "voluntarily".

Sony is not an innocent victim: it has a history of launching cyber attacks against its own customers.

Remember the Corrupt Disks with the rootkit that took over the users' operating systems to install DRM software? Remember when Sony forced each PlayStation 3 owner to forfeit either the ability to run GNU/Linux or the ability to talk with Sony's game network? Remember when Sony sent thugs to arrest George Hotz for publishing how to jailbreak the PS3?

We must take action to prevent further attacks of the sort that was made against Sony, and to prevent further attacks of the sort that Sony launched. But governments are not interested in protecting us from the power of big business. The US is negotiating treaties such as the TPP that would strengthen the power of companies such as Sony against us.

Thus, I continue to say, Boycott Sony!

Reportedly some Iraqi Sunni tribes want to fight PISSI, and the US is training their soldiers.

The US is not above exaggerating good news in war, but it would be good if this is true.

After a long public campaign, Ebay has dropped ALEC.

South Korea banned a leftist party that supports North Korea.

If the party was a vehicle for plotting rebellion, this decision was legitimate. But were the trials of the imprisoned legislators fair?

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The accusations against him cannot be credited, coming from Putin.

The UK government is doing a subtle but effective job of undermining the development of ocean-wave-powered electric generation.

It offered huge guarantees for new nuclear plants, so that uncertainty would not hold back investment, and could do the same for wave power, but renewable is not its priority.

Meanwhile, it gives big subsidies to fossil fuels.

In Ireland, a brain-dead pregnant woman's body is being kept on an incubator so as to make the fetus turn into a baby born motherless.

A dead body on an incubator is not a human being, and has no rights. A fetus of 17 weeks is not a human being, and directly has no rights, but causing it to develop into a human being in disadvantaged circumstances would be harm or cruelty to that human being. That's what Ireland is trying to do here.

Western mining companies gladly accept slaved labor from the Eritrean government.

The New Era low-rent housing in London has been sold to a foundation that will keep the rents low.

This is a victory for public protest, but it is a small one. Bad laws in the UK are pushing house prices and rents up, just as bad laws have pushed wages down 10% since the financial crisis. Bad laws encourage the well-off to occupy more space, leaving less for the poor. Bad laws have enabled privatization of the housing that was built to provide homes to the poor, while other bad laws reduced the tax on businesses and the wealthy so there are no funds to replace what was lost.

All these laws need to be changed.

US citizens: call on Congress to end the embargo on Cuba.

People are mounting TV cameras on their houses in ways that violate their neighbors' privacy.

I've stated it should be illegal for anyone — including the state! — to set up a camera pointed at a place where the public is admitted, which permits remote access, except under a specific court order specifying the place to be surveilled and the time for the surveillance to continue.

This shows that if the camera can observe someone else's private space, it infringes that person's privacy even if it only makes a local recording (or no recording).

Jeb Bush is a global heating denier.

The Israeli army has closed 7 investigations into possible war crimes in Gaza, with no charges.

It also opened 8 more investigations, but it seems unlikely they will lead to charges either.

If we don't put the US government torturers on trial, it will happen again. The CIA tortured in Vietnam, but those responsible were not punished; just 30 years later, the CIA re-offended.

The main difference seems to be that now the US government doesn't even have the decency to apologize. Culpable officials such as Cheney are brazenly barbarous now.

Pakistanis are united against terrorists, but maybe not all terrorists.

The judges of the Wisconsin Supreme Court will decide whether their rich backers broke the law in supporting their campaigns.

Statistics suggest that teenagers use e-cigarettes instead of smoking.

The war in Afghanistan has cost the US a trillion dollars, 80% of which was spent under Obama.

Or should we call him O-bomber?

Ukraine has established a "ministry of information policy", supposedly to counter Russian propaganda, but it threatens to impose censorship of dissent.

Ukraine is in the middle of a civil war; some action against Russian propaganda is legitimate. But this kind of action threatens to be dangerous. What claims to be "hate Russia" could really be "like Russia".

Fights Break Out in Kenyan Parliament over Controversial Anti-Terrorism Laws.

The dangerous law has been passed, threatening journalism and dissent in Kenya.

George Stinney would be 84 years old if he had not been executed on false charges at the age of 14.

This is one of the reasons why the death penalty should be abolished.

The judge suspected Stinney was tortured or tricked into making a confession. The latter is often easy with naive kids that aren't street-smart and believe thugs are to be trusted.

Another secret "trade treaty", the "Trade in Services Agreement", attacks internet freedom in the ways that plutocrats generally want to.

I expect it does other things to deregulate companies and weaken democracy, because those are the purposes for which plutocrats set up those treaties. We don't need to see the details to determine they are bad.

The right-wing government of Australia is making Indigenous people work for 5 dollars an hour.

Australian phone companies and ISPs want to block customers from accessing the metadata about them.

The real issue is that companies should not be allowed to keep this data except about specific people subject to court orders.

A Republican senator blocked a program to help veterans not commit suicide. He considered its price, $22 million, too high.

During World War II, the US recognized waterboarding as a form of torture, and said so clearly.

The betrayal budget bill shows how Congress will try to squeeze through fast track for the TPP.

Hong Kong is trying to take a 14-year-old protester away from his parents on the grounds that they "neglected" him by not stopping him from protesting.

The willingness to do something that everyone will regard as deceptive and cruel is a stage frequently seen on a government's path to complete tyranny. It is a way of declaring open war on human rights. Putin passed through this stage a few years ago, and Erdogan is going there now.

The London bicycle rental scheme tracks all its users.

Amazingly, the company published a data base, thinly anonymized, that allows anyone to try to figure out who each user is. But I think that's just a minor add-on to the bigger danger of Big Brother, who already knows who they are.

US citizens: call for cancellation of the planned pointless and destructive road through the Tongass National Forest.

Some kinds of birds know enough to avoid getting hurt by offshore windfarms.

A Chinese version of Android has a universal back door.

In fact, nearly all models of mobile phone have a universal back door in the modem chip. So why did Coolpad bother to introduce another? Because this one is controlled by Coolpad.

The Campaigners Who Won't Forget the Schoolgirls Kidnapped by Boko Haram.

Rescuing prisoners is difficult and risky. The government could do a better job of fighting Boko Haram, but freeing the girls will be possible only with a lot of luck.

Kurdish forces are attacking PISSI, trying to recapture territory.

I hope they will be prepared also to welcome and care for women freed from PISSI captivity.

Most children kept in institutions are not orphans. Their parents can't afford to care for them.

The US is mainly ruled by political dynasties.

I won't vote for either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush unless they go through a big transformation.

Over 700 Million People Taking Steps to Avoid NSA Surveillance.

However, such measures are only partially effective. You can encrypt the contents of your email, but there is no way to stop various governments from seeing who you are sending the email to.

A proposed EU directive on trade secrets would endanger whistleblowers.

A cease-fire in Ukraine is holding.

New York State has banned fracking for two years.

It's a start.

The Taliban's massacre at a school in Pakistan has generated intense anger that might make a difference to defeating it.

The European Parliament voted to endorse a Palestinian state "in principle".

Hamas may well deserve to be labeled as a terrorist group, but such decisions should always be the result of putting the group in question on trial.

Spy agencies have persistently undermined computer and network security through many avenues.

The movie companies want to impose DNS-blocking on US ISPs.

A law professor says that organized hypersensitivity of students is an obstacle to the teaching of rape law.

Other kinds of violence can make people uncomfortable too. There are many subjects that can't be taught to or learned by the squeamish, including law, history, sociology, biology and medicine.

There are many other fields where this is not an issue, including math, physics, chemistry and some kinds of engineering. Students who are particularly sensitive may need to choose those fields. However, schools should encourage students to overcome squeamishness rather than hold back education to cater to it.

Low-wage employers in the US have received billions of dollars in subsidies from state and local governments.

People who supposedly got rich "on their own" got a lot of help from subsidies too.

Investigating how Bedouin in the Negev were driven off their lands.

Palestinian bus drivers in Jerusalem face attacks from Jewish bigots; there is an attack every day. 100 bus drivers have quit because of the danger.

The media talk about Palestinians that attack Israeli strangers, not mentioning that it goes the other direction too.

But it's not always random bigotry. A Palestinian woman was shot by a soldier after she stabbed an Israeli — but she says she was defending herself from him.

US citizens: call on your senators to stay in Washington to confirm Obama's judicial appointments while that can still be done.

I'm not saying each and every one of them is a good choice. At least one is right-wing and should not be confirmed at all.

But in general they should be confirmed.

Everyone: urge Michigan governor Snyder to veto the law to authorize religiously-motivated discrimination in Michigan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Everyone: call on El Salvador to stop imprisoning women for having abortions or miscarriages.

Everyone: call on fast food chains not to use GM potatoes, which have not been properly tested.

The US and Cuba have renewed diplomatic relations, in a deal brokered by the Pope.

The three imprisoned Cubans and American Alan Gross have been freed as part of the deal.

The Cubans were imprisoned for spying on terrorist groups harbored by the US, which planned attacks on Cuba. I supported a campaign to free them.

Alan Gross's work was also legitimate, even though the Cuba government did not like it.

"Smart cities" represent a scheme to regiment and control people, which threatens democracy too.

England may prohibit smoking in a car with minors in it.

This seems like a good idea. Children get the idea of smoking from watching adults.

I object to referring to teenagers as "children", though. That is misleading.

Pakistan's response to the murder of many students by suicide bomber-gunners: resume the death penalty.

Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than the idea that execution could deter attackers who expect to die in the attack?

Most of the plastic in the sea seems to end up in sediments at the bottom.

Maybe this means the oceans will clean themselves over time — if we stop dumping more. But it doesn't change the fact that plastic is doing lots of harm to wildlife now.

As the US moves step by step towards legalizing marijuana, use by teenagers is slowly decreasing.

What should the US do with prisoners that can't be tried because torture corrupts all the evidence against them?

It's simple: release them. Imprisonment without trial is injustice and will inspire people to hate the US. (It already does.)

It makes no difference whether these men might fight the US once released. Suppose a few did — on top of the the thousands who are flocking to fight for PISSI already, they make no significant change in the situation. However, if the US stops committing gross evil, that would, over time, reduce the recruitment of its enemies.

Thugs in the US overall kill people more than New York City thugs, although the statistics for the rest of the US are incomplete.

The betrayal budget bill has one possibly good provision, intended to stop the Justice department from prosecuting state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.

But it may fail in its goal because it is written badly.

Congress passed a law to limit one kind of massive surveillance started by Reagan. The EFF says it is a real but small step forward.

Here's more detail.

In the US, is it "bad enough yet" to motivate people to fight the plutocrats?

Many pizzas in the US contain more salt than an adult ought to consume in a day.

Western sanctions are causing economic disaster for Russians. There is no sign Putin personally is suffering, but he is suffering a defeat.

I don't think he will go down passively to defeat. His specialty is attacking in surprising ways, and I think he will do that again.

I also suspect that this is not just a reaction to Putin's aggression in Ukraine. It seems more likely that Western plutocrats used that as an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway.

Three congresscritters got a bill for harsh confrontation with Russia passed by "unanimous consent".

US mainstream media decline to call torture what it is, and say they have to "present all sides", but they never show the side of the victims of torture.

Human Rights Watch says that the Sudanese army is using rape systematically as a method of repression.

Five proposals for avoiding the mass extinction we are on the way to cause.

If "Change our economic system so it values nature" means assigning monetary value to wild ecosystems, I fear that will backfire by encouraging them to be purchased and destroyed.

Taliban attacked a school and killed 130 children of Pakistani army officers.

The article explains that this mass murder of children is meant as intimidation. Let's hope that revulsion will cost the Taliban support among the people who now support them.

Turkish protest organizers face charges of trying to overthrow the government.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Although the charges appear to be false, overthrowing a repressive government is not wrong anyway.

Three UK parties including the Green Party formed an alliance against austerity.

US citizens: call on Kerry to pressure El Salvador to stop prosecuting women for having abortions or miscarriages.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Luxembourg Tax Whistleblower Says He Acted out of Conviction.

The thug who shot Tamir Rice, age 12, never ordered him to put his (toy) gun down. He shot Rice almost immediately.

The Mexican federal thugs in Iguala were informed about the attack on protesting students as it started, and monitored it as it occurred.

The UK Labour Party endorsed the right-wing goal of eliminating the deficit.

Increasing taxes on companies and the rich would have the effect of reducing the deficit, but making the latter the goal would encourage doing it by abandoning the poor and helpless.

Reporters Without Borders supports the Japanese journalists that are challenging the state secrecy law.

How Huge Companies Like Apple Are Actually Parasites on America's Tech Industry.

The Sydney Siege Should Not Be Used to Justify Draconian New Anti-Terrorism Laws.

If Australia can suffer the roughly 1300 deaths per year from car accidents without going mad and destroying its freedom, it ought to be able to stay sane when violence kills two people.

North Korea says the UN should investigate US torture rather than North Korean human rights violations.

North Korea's human rights violations have millions of victims — dwarfing the scale of US torture. The reason I demand the US prosecute its torturers is that I love my country and want it to deserve everyone's good opinion.

If you look at the number of people driven out of their homes by US-started wars, it may be comparable with the crimes of North Korea.

Cryonic preservation could offer a way to preserve the biosphere and avoid global heating disaster. If we could convince 4/5 of humanity to get frozen for later revival, the part of humanity remaining active would generate a much smaller amount of greenhouse gas, and could develop space habitats providing enough room to unfreeze everyone.

Belgium was shut down by a general strike against right-wing poverty-spreading policies.

The CIA Tortured Abu Zubaydah, My Client. Now Charge Him Or Let Him Go.

The EU may ban use of diclofenac for animals so that their corpses don't kill vultures.

Egypt's repression extends even to visiting foreign academics.

Cheney's morality is that of a terrorist.

The UK government is blocking a fair trial for a pair of Burmese immigrants accused of a murder in Thailand.

Estimates of the rate of Greenland's ice melt may be too low because they don't take account of the secondary effects of surface melting.

In general, these estimates tend to be too low. Heat tends to flow from what's hotter to what's colder, and can do so in many ways. We know the ways it is flowing today, but as the temperature rises, it can find new ways to flow — which are missing from our models.

Karl Rove said that Dubya personally approved CIA torture methods.

We must give him a chance to repeat that in Dubya's trial!

Public marriage proposals are a form of emotional blackmail.

How the plutocrats are destroying the "disposable" half of the US population.

It would be good if the US population goes down to half what it is now, but not by crushing people who exist. The only ethical way to get there is by having fewer births.

Time to Ban the Bomb.

Beware the three false assumptions in the limited discussion of US torture.

1. The most important question is whether torture "worked."
2. U.S. torture ended when George W. Bush left office.
3. The only kind of torture that really "counts" happens in foreign war zones.

Affirmative action can help all of us avoid unconscious racism.

Many products contain endocrine disruptors that can cause various human illnesses. A rough estimate suggests they cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage annually.

Coal extraction appears to be headed for a new record. Just the thing to destroy civilization.

Spain's new law forbids sites that link to snippets of news articles unless the sites pay the publishers. The response, Google will omit Spanish news articles.

The stated motive is to direct more income to the publishers. My solution for this problem is to allow publishers to charge a little anonymous digital cash for viewing an article. This would also make it possible to eliminate the advertising and the surveillance of most web sites.

Unless the law has some exception that has not been mentioned, I think these political notes would be illegal if stallman.org were in Spain. Fortunately, it is not.

However, the EU seems to be considering imposing a similar law — whose justification is the bogus term "intellectual property". Use of that term always tends to be harmful.

Cheney Calls for International Ban on Torture Reports.

(This is satire. I expected this to be obvious, but a reader said he could not tell, because it was plausible Cheney would really do this.)

In the UK, good jobs require doing unpaid internships first, and only the wealthy can afford to do the internships.

It appears that these internships are illegal but the interns don't dare complain.

Sea walls built to protect beachside housing tend to destroy the beaches, which then can be maintained only by artificially replenishing them.

A few decades from now, with sea level rising ever faster and various disasters striking, no region will be able to afford to sustain beaches artificially; rich people will do it in private enclaves.

I am no expert, but I suspect that the natural process that creates new beaches may be too slow to keep up with the speed of the rise as it will be a few decades from now. The process may not get a chance to work again until hundreds of years from now, when the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps have melted and sea level is a 100 or 200 meters higher.

Torture unites the US and PISSI with the Nazi regime and medieval barbarism.

Cheney defends US torture by stretching the definition of the word and claiming the Sep 2011 terrorist attacks were torture too.

His definition is wrong, but more importantly, his implicit premise is that the US should match its enemies for barbarism.

More sick ideas from Cheney: torturing innocent people is forgivable if the US does it, and they should never be released afterwards because some of them might be so angry they would fight against the US.

This is part of an all-out campaign to legitimize torture by the US. Americans, if you love your country, now is the time to insist that Cheney stands trial for his crimes, along with Bush and their underlings.

After Ohio thugs shot John Crawford dead as he carried an air rifle he was about to purchase, they interrogated his girlfriend making wild accusations and threats.

Angela Davis talks about repression of blacks in the US from slavery to the present.

China is snooping on Hong Kong Democracy protesters and trying to crack their email accounts, as well as punishing them by barring them from entering China.

US citizens: support the Grand Jury Reform Act.

The UK government proposes to discourage poor people from having extra children by providing no funds for any extra children they have.

It makes sense to discourage excess children, but imposing penury on them and their families is neither effective nor legitimate.

The UK's privatized air traffic control system shut down because the company skimped on long-term investment.

Well, what do they expect? It had to skimp on something; how else could it extract a profit?

Israel continues its slow expulsion of Palestinians from Jerusalem, by ordering the demolition of additional homes and businesses.

China told the US, regarding human rights, "Who are you to criticize China?"
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Here's China's report on US human rights violations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

The first section concerns private crimes of violence. While the lack of proper gun control in the US is a serious problem, it does not fit the category of human rights violations by the state, so it doesn't belong in this report.

Here's the US report on China's human rights violations.

A fraction of the list concerns the law limiting number of children. I support such laws, so I don't regard those items as valid criticisms. However, the rest of the list includes many grave crimes.

Overall, China is a lot worse than the US, but "we're better than China" is hardly an adequate standard for any country to apply to itself. The US ought to strive to be #1 in respect for human rights.

The US government has pressured most US colleges to hold unofficial rape trials which can (in effect) sentence the accused to permanent exclusion from higher education. They fall far short of the legal standards of real trials.

Saudi women are in jail for driving cars to the Saudi border and trying to enter their country.

AT&T is connected with several major attacks on US democracy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Humans are causing Earth's sixth mass extinction. Between destruction of habitats, overfishing and global heating, we could destroy more than 3/4 of the species on Earth.

Local governments in the UK are resorting to complex schemes to prevent their public housing from being privatized.

The UK Parliament will ask the US Senate for full information on UK participation in CIA torture.

An Indian man who operated a Twitter account posting material in support of PISSI has been arrested and charged with "abetting war against the state", though so far there is no evidence he did anything but distribute propaganda.

To eliminate human rights in the name of fighting PISSI is missing the point about what is bad about PISSI.

The CIA Is Still Running Amok — by lying about torture and trying to cover it up.

Obama's proposals for policing do little good. They won't stop the militarization of US thug departments.

It is important to note how making thugs wear body cameras requires privacy protections and is helpful to restrain their violence only if the rest of the system upholds that goal.

Learned Helplessness: the Enduring Effects of Torture That Haunt Victims.

The UN will ask the NSA to show its radio intercepts bearing on the assassination of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöaut;ld.

Michigan is considering a bill to allow businesses to discriminate against customers as long as the motive is religious.

Senator Wyden has proposed a bill to reject requiring back doors in computers.

European countries have been fined at least 4 billion dollars under treaties that subject governments to foreign corporations.

Other cases, not yet resolved, demand over 35 billion dollars in "compensation" to foreign corporate overlords — and that's only half the cases that are in process.

All such treaties are antidemocratic; we must fight until we eliminate every last one.

US citizens: call on the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect Arctic ring seals from the danger of oil spills.

In the Cincinnati Enquirer, "investigative journalism" means covering organizations that might pay for advertising.

This article uses the word "monetize" in the sense of "contemptuously regard mainly as a source of income". I reject that usage of the word because I reject the attitude that it embodies.

"Monetize" properly means "to use as currency".

NPR systematically avoids calling US torture "torture", because that would mean criticizing it.

The Washington Post does the same thing.

The effect is to support the torture apologists and Obama in trying to downplay US torture. Example in point: ABC television's story that is more concerned with the blowback from US torture than with the wrong of torture itself.

That attitude is "whatever we do, we don't deserve to be punished for it."

A pregnant woman in Wisconsin was put in solitary confinement because she had used methamphetamine while pregnant.

It is unjustified and cruel to punish a pregnant woman for possibly damaging her fetus. Barring her off from employment is stupid — that would do much worse harm to the possible eventual child.

It can, in principle, be legitimate to stop a pregnant woman from doing something that would cause permanent damage to a future human being, but that's easier said than done. It might be better to abort the fetus instead — if it never becomes a human being, then no human being is damaged.

The new head of Australia's government research lab believes in dowsing.

I guess that's part of what falls down on you if you take the suppository of all ignorance.

There were 87 complaints in 2014 that New York thugs put people in choke holds (which is against their rules), and only once was any action taken against the thug.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Ireland passed a law to allow foreign governments to snoop on communications and force ISPs to cooperate in secret trials.

"Focus on the Family"'s irrational "sex education" was plagiarized from someone else's joke.

A Seattle thug that punched a handcuffed woman and fractured her skull will not be prosecuted.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

When Americans sue a thug for illegal violence and win, the thug is never personally held liable.

No wonder they feel they can get away with murder.

The UK's internet censorship blocked access to a UK government site about investigation of US kidnapping and torture.

An experiment found students rate their instructors more highly when they think the instructors are male, than when they think the same instructors are female.

The actual sex of the instructor (concealed from the students) did not correlate with the ratings.

How medical doctors participated in CIA torture.

The UK government has used a string of sleazy tricks to conceal its involvement with US torture.

A US court ruled that telling people how to remove DRM is lawful.

I suppose the perpetrators of DRM will appeal this decision, so it won't be final.

Dubya's torture did "work" … to provide the false information he wanted as an excuse for the war he wanted.

The Oregon GMO-labeling referendum was defeated: a judge refused to stop the election authority from applying an arbitrary criterion to exclude 4,000 votes.

If you point out evils of the US government, such as torture, apologists pop up to claim you just want the US to look bad.

I do it because the US government needs some "tough love". I want the US to stop doing evil, so I could be proud of my country.

At a solidarity die-in in London, thugs arrested 70 peaceful protesters for fictitious "violence".

Aleppo Faces Catastrophe If Assad And Rebels Don't Agree to "Freeze" Fighting.

The Egyptian government claims there are just 866 Atheists in Egypt, after defining secularists as Atheists.

The Obama regime is concealing interviews with CIA torturers and their victims, which might occasion criminal charges against the former.

Sudan's Anti-Dam Movement Fights the Flooding of Nubian Culture.

France may legalize medicating terminally ill people into unconsciousness at their request.

US citizens: phone your senators saying to vote against the budget deal that attacks America in so many ways.

I suspect that using the site to call your senators involves running nonfree Javascript; if it does, just call the switchboard directly.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

US citizens: call on your representative to support the bill to ban fracking on public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: phone the White House and call on Obama to prosecute the officials responsible for torture — starting with Dubya.

The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.

US citizens: call on the EPA to impose strict standards to reduce toxic smog.

In the US: support decriminalizing the feeding of homeless people.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

An Indonesian editor has been accused of blasphemy for a cartoon that criticized PISSI.

An FBI interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah without torture, reports on how the CIA torturers took over, then lied about what he had achieved, while not bothering for months to question Abu Zubaydah at all.

Human predation of whales and seals has created ecosystem catastrophes, wiping out other species of animals and plants.

20 years ago, when Russia's war with Chechnya started, Yeltsin was determined not to negotiate with Chechnya and made foolish excuses.

Protesters in Oakland discovered two infiltrating disguised thugs and a few attacked them, whereupon one thug pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the surrounding crowd.

I understand that the thug might have felt threatened at that moment — but he should not have been there in the first place.

The thug department says that they infiltrated the protest to "keep the public safe". If they shot protesters, they'd say that was "keeping the public safe" too.

Italians have launched a general strike against austerity.

Thugs appear to be covering up the murder of 17-year-old Lennon Lacy by calling it suicide.

His mother is wrong to criticize the older woman he was having an affair with. That prejudice might be the same one that motivated the murderer, and it is wrong no matter who expresses it.

Turkish writers that criticize the government have been accused of being part of the "international literature lobby" by supporters of Erdogan.

Hong Kong's umbrella movement has not won, but it has not failed.

The UN special rapporteur on human rights says the US attorney general must prosecute those responsible for torture.

It is strange, however, that he thinks Dubya deserves immunity as the then head of state. Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Uhuru Kenyatta were not granted that privilege.

UK officials held 24 meetings with US Senate investigators pleading to cover up the UK's involvement in CIA torture. It looks like they got what they wanted.

There are many things a government can do to curb the power of corporations.

All that is needed is political will.

Occupy protests gained public attention because of two factors: disruption and personal sacrifice.

CIA Director Brennan arrogantly repeated his past lies in Congress, and refused to affirm that the CIA would not torture again.

If I were in Congress I would vote to cancel all funds for the CIA until it is cleansed of torture supporters.

Thugs in Baltimore attacked a woman with a taser and pulled her out of her car, then erased the video she was making of how they were attacking another victim.

Then, as is typical for thugs who think courts will believe any lie they tell, they falsely accused her of trying to run them over.

Some unidentified person has been charged with leaking the Luxembourg tax dodging schemes.

The apology offered for these deals makes no sense to me. What difference does it make whether they are similar or different? The point is that they help companies at public expense.

Canadian prostitutes feel threatened by a law that makes it a crime to be their customers.

Prisoner abd el Rahim al Nashiri might be guilty of deadly terrorism, but US government torture gets in the way of proving this in a fair trial.

The "military commission" doesn't aim be a fair trial.

A Catholic council acknowledges that the celibacy required of priests may have contributed to leading them to have sex with children.

With Help From USDA, Factory Farms 'Masquerading' Products as Organic.

All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates and the House Is About to Pass.

How to break the DRM on Keurig coffee pods.

I think that coffee pods are a bad idea because they involve more non-biodegradable waste.

Elizabeth Warren fights hard against Wall Street, but doesn't talk much about permanent war I will vote for her if she is the Democratic candidate (which I would not do for Ms Clinton), but I'd rather have Bernie Sanders running, since he opposes both Wall Street and permanent war.

High levels of phthalates in mothers' blood is associated with a decrease in IQ for their children.

Since the experiment that would prove without a doubt that phthalates damage IQ would be unethical, there is no use waiting in the hope of clearer proof. The US should follow Europe in banning phthalates in anything meant to come in contact with food or people's bodies.

Why Afghanistan's government can't stand unless propped up by the US.

In addition, it oppresses women almost as much as the Taliban would. Do the people of Afghanistan want the US to prop up this government indefinitely at the cost of continuing the war?

Spain's right-wing government has imposed a million-dollar fine for some protests, and large fines also for publishing photos of thugs.

The latter one seems to be intended to stop people from documenting the thugs' violence. The people of Spain, under repression, need to develop networks for anonymously posting evidence outside Spain.

The same law also represses insulting a thug. Many thugs do things which provoke well-deserved insults. Prohibiting insults against anyone is inexcusable censorship.

I will suggest to people in Spain that they turn the word "policÃa" into an insult. Then it will be possible to insult a thug just by saying "es un policÃa", and it will be difficult for them to prosecute this.

The US has closed its notorious Bagram prison.

Henceforth the government of Afghanistan will be responsible for abuse and torture of prisoners in Afghanistan. It's still barbaric but the guilt will only indirectly be on US hands.

The European Commission plans to cancel proposed EU clean air and recycling directives.

In today's US wars, the very idea of a future peace has been discarded.

CIA/military torture and killer thugs are part of the same spectrum of injustice and impunity.

Obama: the US does not have to prosecute those responsible for torture because it it is exceptionally good.

For the US to be good at all, it must prosecute its torturers and its killer thugs.

Women in Brazil that get underground abortions face repression and even death.

The idea that there is something wrong with an abortion is nothing but religious ignorance.

The UK's mandatory censorship by ISPs has a persistent tendency to go beyond the pornography that the UK requires them to block.

In France and Ireland, the parliaments have voted in favor of recognizing Palestine.

It is too bad they make this vote advisory only.

Darfur Radio Station Exposes the Use of Rape As Weapon of War.

What the US must do to clear away the blot of torture.

This applies to military torture, too.

A mother in South Carolina was jailed for allowing her child to play in the park.

So crazy has the US become. And the result of this insanity is that parents have to transport children everywhere — causing burden on the parents and making children feel a lack of autonomy.

An oil spill threatens the Sundarbans forest, home to rare dolphins as well as tigers, but perhaps not for much longer.

The CIA spent 180 million dollars to build up a group of psychologists to legitimize torture.

A leader in PISSI explains how it was set up inside a US prison in Iraq.

A bar manager in Burma is being prosecuted for displaying a lack of respect for Buddhism.

Too bad the Buddha isn't here — he would tell them to stop making a fuss about that bar and go back to meditating.

Freedom of speech means the freedom to criticize, offend, insult, or mock any person, idea, practice or thing — even the Buddha. Even you or me. Burma should start respecting this freedom.

The Hong Kong government is shutting down the democracy protest camps.

A few activists will remain to dare the state to arrest them.

People will try again later.

The bipartisan deal in Congress allows rich people to pay more to buy the support of major political parties.

Kerry asked Congress to approve "flexible" and perpetual war.

Islamic terrorists killed 5000 people in November, mainly in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.

Note the absence of any Western country in that list. While Islamists are vicious and evil, they are not a significant danger to people in the West. It would be foolish for us to give up vital freedoms for fear of a danger that doesn't come near us.

Australia is not quite as obstructionist in Lima negotiations as its public statements would suggest.

I find this very surprising. The extreme statements are not going to please many people in Australia besides the coal companies, and those will care more about results (preventing an effective climate agreement) than about statements.

The US infiltrated the Cuban rap scene to try to stimulate opposition to Castro, but it backfired.

Antibiotic resistance is killing almost a million people a year. Projections suggest it may kill 10 million a year by 2050.

I agree that we should give high priority to curbing antibiotic resistance. The first step has to be banning giving antibiotics to farm animals (except to individual ones to treat a sickness).

"A lot of These Gomers Didn't Know Shit": Former CIA Officer on Torture Report.

The Keystone XL pipeline and Australia's new coal mines, if not cancelled, could render the climate negotiations futile.

E-cigarettes are of little interest to anyone other than smokers, in the UK at least.

For CIA, Truth about Torture Was an Existential Threat.

The article presents proof that CIA lawyer John Rizzo thought that the CIA's activities were torture.

Shame on the Obama regime for imprisoning John Kiriakou for telling the truth about torture, while CIA officials were lying to everyone.

With the attention focused on CIA torture, don't forget that the US military carried out torture too in Guantanamo, Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Around 100,000 people protested in Dublin against charges for water.

Every kind of business should have to pay for water at market rates, but each person should get a reasonable amount of water gratis.

The costs of ordinary amounts water and sewage for people should be paid for by income tax on the rich, not by those people.

Earth's oceans contain roughly 270,000 tons of plastic trash, mostly in tiny pieces that endanger sea animals.

6 years of CIA attempts to obstruct the investigation of CIA torture.

Obama withheld almost 10,000 CIA documents from the Senate torture inquiry.

Republicans threatened to shut down the US government again, and won small acts of sabotage: canceling out Washington DC's initiative to legalize marijuana, and a little deregulation for banksters to cause future financial havoc.

The banksters were aiming for more than this. If they don't get all that now, they will try again soon enough. They have lobbyists and lawyers who will work full time for years to be able to create bubbles and pop them, swindle their clients, and fraudulently foreclose millions of people's homes.

Their first victory was blocking the US from imposing adequate regulations to prevent another crisis.

Everyone: Write to Saudi Arabia calling for the release of imprisoned journalist Raif Badawi.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

A copyright lawsuit demanding royalties for a small sample of music has been defeated, but the judge's criteria seem to favorable to the plaintiff, leaving copyright still an impediment to remix.

A minister in the Palestinian government was killed by Israeli troops while engaging in a peaceful protest.

He was teargassed, then a member of the extremely violent border thug unit bashed him with a rifle and kicked him. It's wrong to do that to someone who is young and healthy, but this man was old and not well, so the abuse killed him.

Everyone: call on Oregon to count every valid vote in the initiative on labeling GMOs.

Violence against women in India is part of a pervasive attitude of sexism.

Brazil also has a new torture report, which demonstrates that torture of prisoners was a systematic policy in the 1970s.

The question is whether the torturers will be prosecuted.

Crucial conclusions from the report on CIA torture.

Senator McCain continues to denounce torture.

However, right-wing fanatics continue to glorify and praise, torture and call bloodily for more.

They hope to make their cruel and bloody lies prevail over truth by repeating them. It might work. They have convinced a large fraction of Americans to continue believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003, despite the fact that investigation found he did not.

US citizens: support the move to legally limit use of US ground troops in Iraq and Syria.

The US Supreme Court ruled workers don't have a right to be paid for the time they are required to wait for a security check.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

I am no expert on US labor law, but this is a bad policy: it is good for the rich and hurts the working poor.

In Hebron, Israeli soldiers watched as fanatics attacked Palestinian children then destroyed a Palestinian's car.

This has happened many times before.

Israel has started 8 more investigations of possible war crimes by Israeli forces in attacking Gaza.

It is a step forward, but these investigations tend to be whitewashes.

Palestinians in occupied and besieged territory are governed under secret Israeli regulations. In some case the enforcers have lost their copies.

The head of the ACLU suggests that Obama formally pardon torturers if he does not prosecute them, as a way to affirm that what they did was a crime.

While I see his point, I doubt it would achieve the goal very much. Any torturer that could potentially be prosecuted, either in the US or by an international court, should not get a pardon. The ACLU points out that there is no statute of limitation for many of these crimes.

Some of those responsible may be prosecuted in other countries or in the ICC.

Everyone: call on Proctor and Gamble to remove known carcinogens from its cosmetics and other products for people to put on their bodies.

US citizens: call on Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to prosecute the officials responsible for US torture.

Everyone: kick the fossil fuel industry out of climate negotiations.

Why did the FBI give a computer security advisory secretly to some businesses and tell them not to inform the public?

The CIA made prisoners stand for hours on broken feet.

CIA torture was useless for finding Osama bin Laden; prisoners who were tortured gave only false information.

We should keep in mind that finding Osama bin Laden was of no great importance in fighting al Qa'ida. Killing leaders such as Osama bin Laden does little damage to an underground group that can recruit more leaders.

Choosing to kill him, rather than try to arrest and try him, was murder.

To the Criminal Justice System, Black And Muslim People Embody our Nightmares.

Australia Is Now Known Around the World As the Most Inhumane, the Most Uncaring And the Most Selfish of All the Wealthy Countries.

This is what comes from being ruled by the suppository of all cruelty, Abbott.

CIA Torture Report: Europe Must Come Clean About Its Own Complicity (in US torture, kidnapping, and imprisonment without trial).

The US is relaxing requirements for home mortgages, inviting another housing bubble that could pop and make another crisis.

Noteworthy ways in which Vice President Cheney supported torture.

As US Occupation Drags on, Afghanistan Suffering at Record High.

This is not uniquely the fault of the US. The Taliban are to blame too. They kill more Afghan civilians than the US, and often do so intentionally.

However, the badness of the Taliban is not a good reason to prolong an unwinnable war.

The Australian government now plans to impose internet filters for censorship and to punish people for forbidden sharing.

Pushover journalists are inviting US officials to lie to cover up the torture they are responsible for.

The UK method to abolish rights is to define them as something only criminals and poor foreigners need.

New Zealand, on a weak pretext, has authorized the state to spy on anyone for 24 hours without a warrant.

I wonder, can they do this to you day after day?

Right-wing Japanese nationalists are agitating to ban a US film that depicts torture of American prisoners of war by their Japanese guards.

Some Japanese soldiers were convicted of war crimes consisting of torture including waterboarding. Japan has an obligation to acknowledge and condemn its torture, just as the US does.

Protests against the violence of thugs continue in Berkeley, California.

Five recent oil spills have polluted the Peruvian Amazon and made indigenous people ill.

Political leaders are meeting in Lima, but most of them are better characterized as "fossil fuel leaders" than as "environmental leaders".

Only the Most Cynical Could Have Guessed in 2008 That It Would Be Obama's Own Administration That Stood in the Way of the Torture Report's Publication.

Uber has been banned in Spain and Thailand.

Portland, Oregon, is suing to shut down Uber there.

South Sudan's civil war, a mixture of personal rivalry and tribal rivalry, has brought hunger to millions.

The State of Georgia is determined to execute Robert Halsey notwithstanding the incompetence of the lawyer who failed to defend him properly.

The death penalty is wrong even after a properly-run trial.

Electrical brain stimulation helps some people think better, but it harms other people.

The senate report shows CIA tortured Gul Rahman to death, and the agent in charge got a commendation. Janat Gul, by contrast, begged to be killed but the CIA did not grant his wish.

Janat Gul fell into the standard horror of those who are tortured for information they don't know.

A summary of CIA torture methods.

Torture is wrong even in the unlikely event that it "works".

But it often resulted in fabricated information which the CIA took for true.

Those guilty must be prosecuted, if not by the US then by an international human rights court.

This includes Dubya, who has already confessed his guilt.

The CIA used forced enemas on prisoners on hunger strike.

Sudan a Dangerous Place for Journalists Who Cross State's 'Red Lines'.

The same is true in the US,even for prize-winning reporters. In the UK, even journalists' spouses are in danger.

China and North Korea used the Senate CIA torture report to tell the US it shouldn't talk about their human rights abuses.

In fact, both China and North Korea oppress the people much more than the US, but given the bad things the US has done, it lacks the moral authority to criticize them without being ridiculous.

This is an additional reason why the US must put its torturers on trial.

The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men.

If thugs can't help instantly assuming the worst about blacks, in a split second, perhaps it is necessary to tell them not to be so quick to shoot anyone.

In US-Supported Egypt, 188 Protesters Are Sentenced to Die Days After Mubarak is Effectively Freed.

The new world-wide plan for failing banks is that depositors lose their deposits, because derivatives owed to other banks get first priority and there won't be enough to pay them.

Depositors are supposed to be protected by deposit insurance, but there isn't enough money in the insurance fund to cover the depositors of a big bank.

A part of London plans to fine those that leave buildings unoccupied, but only buildings constructed in the future.

Maybe that's the best a local government can do. If so, criticizing that local government for not doing better is pointless. The national government must do something better.

In Sierra Leone, if you report Ebola in your family, you are likely to be put in with people that have Ebola, and thus catch it yourself.

Protests in Washington against the TPP.

An OECD study concludes that dooH niboR policies (taking from the non-rich to give to the rich) over recent decades have reduced overall economic growth.

In other words, the idea of "trickle down" is wrong all the way down to the root. We already knew that helping the rich get richer at the expense of the rest does not help the rest. Now we know it hits them twice: they get a smaller share of a smaller pie.

Increased US fossil fuel exports cancel out reductions in the US's own use of fossil fuels.

Climate defense activists protested the fossil fuel company influence that pervades climate negotiations in Lima and elsewhere.

The protesters shut down a panel that falsely presented CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) as ready for widespread use.

Wally Kowalski is a licensed medical marijuana grower in Michigan. Thugs raided his house, taking his plants and equipment, all of which was legal.

Subsequently they returned and arrested him.

Laws against growing marijuana do great harm to society, and enforcing them is harmful even if done correctly.

Everyone: call on PBS not to put any global heating deniers in positions of authority.

Sony's web site was cracked and effectively taken down.

Most people don't know it, but Sony has done things even worse to its own customers. Sony sabotaged all PS3 computers: it released a malicious firmware downgrade which gave each PS3 owner a choice of two ways to be harmed. The owner could install the downgrade and be unable to run GNU/Linux on the computer, or not install it and be locked out of the Sony game network.

Sony also sent thugs after George Hotz when he found out how to jailbreak them.

US citizens: call on the US Forest Service to block a wolf-killing competition.

US citizens: Call on PepsiCo to stop fueling deforestation to get palm oil for chips.

Reflections comparing the first and second world wars.

I reject the idea that there is something wrong with fighting an invading army. It was right for France and Britain to fight against Germany's aggression (in Poland) in 1939, and just as it was right for Iraqis to resist US occupation in the 2000s. This doesn't exempt the conduct of the war from moral criticism. If the greatest legacy of the second world war is massive deaths of civilians, the German air force may have started it, but that doesn't justify the the US and UK in responding in kind.

As it turned out, the bombing of German cities was not even effective in stopping German weapons production. They moved the factories underground, but not the civilian population.

New Spanish pun La Rioja

California's drought is the worst in 1200 years.

The drought's cause is mainly natural climate fluctuation, but global heating made its effects worse.

Most of California is in a condition of "exceptional" drought.

Anti-abortion protesters in Australia are intimidating women to the point where they try to kill themselves.

Failure to confront the evil of US government torture will endanger American lives.

Everyone: call on Starbucks to stop funding the Grocery Manufacturers Association's lawsuit to overturn Vermont's GMO labeling law.

Jersey, which has not signed up to all the human rights treaties, is a testing ground for total surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

It is also used as a route for extracting profits so they can't be taxed.

Putin is supporting right-wing parties in Europe.

I think he is doing this to sow chaos rather than for a specific purpose.

Yes, People Can Starve in Benefit-Sanctions Britain.

It is even worse in the US.

The UK weather bureau says 2003-like deadly heatwaves will occur 'every other year' by the 2030s.

They won't kill as many people each time as were killed by the 2003 heatwave, because many of the old people who might be killed by heatwave N will have been killed a couple of years before by heatwave N-1.

Workers will strike in an Amazon warehouse in Germany.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Too bad US labor law makes organizing so difficult.

The UK government proposes to make it essentially impossible to sue to challenge legislation.

The UK government plans to make food banks a standard solution for the poor who can't afford food. That basically means giving up on keeping people properly supplied.

The UK's Green Party MP opposes the Infrastructure Bill that would put lots of money into increasing car traffic and maximize fossil fuel extraction.

Everyone: tell the Walton family to stop opposing home solar power installations and start donating to promote them.

This is an additional reason not to buy from Walmart, added to its mistreatment of employees.

US citizens: call on the remaining supporters of ALEC to stop.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: call for reforming prosecution of rapes of military personnel by military personnel.

US citizens: call on the US government to make all financial advisers accountable for how they treat their clients.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: call on the Senate to oppose additional sanctions against Iran.

Right-wingers want these knowing they would kill the nuclear negotiations which are the only chance to stop Iran's progress towards nuclear weapons. Sanctions can't achieve that goal.

A report by the Council of Europe rejects the idea that "secret, massive and indiscriminate" surveillance is justified.

Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

Transgender people are frequently denied basic rights and face discrimination.

Campaigning to prove benzene responsible for leukemia.

Uber has been banned in Delhi after a driver raped a passenger.

Nuclear weapons on instant launch readiness pose a risk of accidental war, while stockpiles are not secure enough and could tempt thieves.

Perhaps the US, Russia and China could agree to mutual observation of each others' launch vehicles to verify that they are not being readied for launch.

Australia's government is accused of sabotaging climate negotiations by insisting on legally binding targets.

This may be true in a narrow tactical sense. However, the US and China, by rejecting legally binding targets, are doing their part to make these talks fail to reach their goal. Just when the world needs the mother of all crash programs, governments that bow down to fossil fuel companies are blocking it from happening.

Diesel engines need to be eliminated over time because of the effects of pollution they cause.

With possible improvements in technology for storing electric energy, maybe we could replace them with electric vehicles.

There are protests across Haiti to remove the US-imposed "president" Martelly. Perhaps the Haitian senate could impeach him.

It's the US that keeps him in power.

Some US thugs comment on the killing of Eric Garner.

An audio recording of the shots that killed Michael Brown proves that thug Wilson's statement of what happened is false.

In addition, the prosecutor misrepresented the law to help Wilson escape prosecution.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are starting to cooperate in fighting the Taliban.

With all the protests, US thugs feel they are being persecuted.

However, to say they are getting a taste of their own medicine would be an exaggeration. No thugs have been killed in these protests. They are moaning because people are not fawning on them as they think they are entitled to.

Ralph Nader: Ten Reasons Why I Don't Have a Credit Card.

I have one, but I never use it except for flights and occasionally to donate to a political organization in a hurry.

Obama has released 6 more prisoners from Guantanamo, including one who has been left wheelchair-bound by cruel treatment.

The US government is still pushing to conceal videos of how he was tortured, claiming that knowledge of this would make people angry. They should have thought about this before they acted that way.

Republicans say publication of the CIA torture report could make people in the Middle East angry enough to commit violence. What a laugh! Lots of people there are already that angry at the US. They just assume the worst.

For the US to confess and take its punishment, then punish those responsible for torture, is the only way it can regain any moral authority.

136 prisoners remain in Guantanamo. The US owes each of them either a fair trial for some charges, or release.

Paraguay is considering a dangerous data retention bill, so vague it could apply to cybercafes as well as to ISPs.

That the proposed law places no limits on what sorts of offenses could be investigated by searching everyone's phone records is an additional nasty detail, but don't think that narrower limits would fix the wrong.

Antivirus companies should stop concealing the US-implemented attack software they detect.

Everyone: tell Chevron to pay for its pollution in Ecuador.

Also call on the US state department not to give Chevron an award.

Everyone: tell Best Buy not to use paper made from ancient forests.

Congress is considering repealing the regulations adopted after the financial crisis.

They were too weak in the first place.

The only people arrested for the killing of Eric Garner were two witnesses.

Leaked audio recordings prove the corruption and dishonesty of Egypt's military rulers.

A student was labeled as a drug user for breathing in crushed candy in order to blow it out visibly.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

A PR guide for thugs about cleaning their image after they kill unarmed people.

A cleaning company that cleaned corporate offices is going bankrupt, leaving the cleaning workers unpaid for weeks of work.

This is one of the dangers caused by the increased use of subcontractors where in the past the company would have hired workers directly.

Forget North Korea — the Real Rogue Cyber Operator Lies Much Closer to Home.

Ecuadorian indigenous leader José Isidro Tendetza Antún, who campaigned against mining on his tribe's land, has been murdered, and apparently tortured first.

The EU agreement allowing individual countries to ban GMOs seems to have a legal loophole that could lead courts to overturn those bans.

A city in Libya has joined PISSI; fanatics are killing all their opponents.

Obama is slowly increasing the number of US troops that will stay in Afghanistan.

There are two possibilities for Afghanistan: prop up its government or let it fall. The US can keep propping it up indefinitely at high cost in money and Afghan lives, but what's the point?

A Cleveland thug shot Gregory Love clear out of the blue, then handcuffed him and fined him. Thugs also punched and kicked a witness before handcuffing him and taking him away.

The UK government has boosted investment in oil extraction in the North Sea, which is bad news for all of us in the long term.

7 Ways Saudi Arabia Is Silencing People Online.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Calling on western countries to restrict export of surveillance technology to repressive countries.

The New York thug that unintentionally shot Akai Gurley then contacted his union representative right after. Only then did he call for medical assistance for Gurley, who was still alive.

Gurley later died from his wounds. I don't know whether getting aid sooner might have saved him. The thug couldn't have known it would not save him.

Grand juries nearly always indict accused non-thugs, but almost never indict accused thugs.

Catching thugs' killings (and other brutality) on video isn't going to deter them if they enjoy impunity even once their guilt is recorded.

Many New York thugs have killed people for no good reason, but hardly any were prosecuted.

Another unarmed black man was shot dead by a thug who then made accusations against him.

AT&T condemns government regulation, except when it's a regulation to forbid cities from setting up public WiFi networks.

The US has published the full list of military equipment given to US thugs.

That's a good first step. Next we have to close down most of the SWAT teams so that they don't endanger people when they make a mistake.

The US forced most Latin American countries to deport Germans to the US, which put them in prison unless they agreed to go to Germany as World War II continued.

Articles about rape accusations should include interviewing those accused.

Pregnant women and mothers of babies are now under impossible pressure to avoid many activities, most of them based on little evidence.

This general tendency continues as children get older, with pressure not to let them play alone, walk on the street alone, or just be home alone.

People with cancer felt a similar pressure during the years when many people believed that a positive attitude was crucial to survival: it led, in effect, to blaming the sick person for not getting well.

Everyone: call on New York City to fire the thug that killed Eric Garner.

On ALEC's agenda: companies' right to do secret political spending.

Laws requiring seed companies to test their seeds are being used to shut down noncommercial seed exchange libraries.

Thugs in Denver attacked a man, then knocked his companion to the ground, then forcibly took a witness's tablet and deleted the video.

A group of Chicagoans out for the evening were attacked by thugs in disguise. Since 2010 they have been fighting to get justice from a system that tries at every step to protect the thugs.

This includes repeatedly trying to threaten them into dropping their complaint.

Most thugs would not intentionally beat you up. But if one thug does so, all the rest will join in protecting that one from justice.

Journalists must not try to be "balanced" when freedom of speech and privacy of communications are at stake.

Interesting political comments from comedian Chris Rock.

Air strikes against PISSI flattened a residential building, killing several civilians.

Because of US secrecy, we don't know what happened. Was that house an intentional target? Was it hit by mistake? Some civilian casualties are inevitable in war, but reckless disregard for civilian life can't be justified. The secrecy which prevents us from telling whether the US is reckless in Iraq, combined with certainty it has been reckless elsewhere, makes it plausible the US is reckless in fighting PISSI in Iraq and Syria as well.

In general, air attacks on anyone other than fighters with arms will tend to cause civilian casualties.

US citizens: tell the FDA not to approve GMO salmon.

EU citizens: support network neutrality.

The CIA has renewed its pressure to kill the Senate's release of the executive summary of its torture report.

Some companies get enough information about most people's desktop use and enough information about most people's smartphone use that they can usually figure out when the two computers belong to the same person.

This is more reason not to let any company get that much information about what you do with any of your computers.

New York and Los Angeles give false figures about tying up children in school.

I Told a Grand Jury I Saw a Cop Shoot and Kill an Unarmed Man. It Didn't Indict.

The thugs at the scene tried to discourage him from even making a statement. That must be part of their habitual routine for pushing away accountability for their crimes.

Prosecutors control the grand jury's decision. When they want someone indicted, they almost always get their way. In this case, the prosecutor wanted to protect the thug, so he cut the witness off, stopping him from presenting crucial facts.

This is why we can hold the prosecutor in Ferguson personally responsible for making sure Michael Brown's killer was not indicted, in addition to Governor Nixon for not appointing a special prosecutor.

The New York Thug department attacked a protest about Eric Garner with a military sonic weapon that causes intense pain.

This was after the protesters responded to more direct violence by thugs.

Some residents of the tent city in San Jose explain why they can't find any other housing in the city, even with offered rent vouchers to supplement their pay.

What this reveals is a system totally stacked against people who are homeless, which combines with the shortage of affordable housing so that someone — whoever is weakest — must be shafted.

The US government appears to have tracked all the cell phones of people attending a protest for Eric Garner in Chicago.

Senator Wyden has introduced a bill to ban government requirements to put back doors into digital products.

It doesn't go far enough. The bill should ban all back doors whether mandated by government policies or not.

The Iraqi government has made a deal with effectively independent Kurdistan about oil revenue and fighting PISSI.

The UK is considering a new scheme to privatize NHS hospitals.

Any form of privatization in the NHS is harmful, since it will temp companies to harm patients and cut staff pay. The right-wing government doesn't mind this because its long-term goal is to abolish the NHS and impose a lousy US-style system. It can't do so directly (too much opposition), so it plans to ruin the NHS and present the results as "proof" there is no point in having one.

Council of Europe Recommendation on Net Neutrality — Unclear And Unhelpful.

UK thugs are using a run of vandalism as an opportunity to intimidate and insult anarchists.

However, one senior leader, to his credit, opposes asking thugs to decide on the limits of freedom of speech.

Israel blocked an Irish political leader from visiting Gaza. He wanted to talk with leaders of Hamas.

Beware of products and treatments that claim they will "cleanse" or "detox" your body. The idea is medically nonsensical.

There are some toxic elements, such as lead and mercury, that can accumulate in your body over time and cause you harm. But removing them from your tissues is a specialized job and these products don't even try.

The International Criminal Court has dropped its case against Uhuru Kenyatta, president of Kenya, accusing him of intimidating witnesses and denying access to pertinent documents.

I don't know the details; in particular, I can't take for granted that the retracted testimony was true. But I also can't take for granted that it was really a lie.

What we can tell is that the ICC by itself has trouble acting against the politically powerful unless other stronger governments exert pressure too strong to resist.

Who is legally responsible if you set a robot running and it commits a crime?

I would not assume a priori that the same answer fits all kinds of crimes.

Cutting CO₂ emission is the way to cut emissions of medium-term greenhouse gases also.

The UK's ban on sending books to prisoners has been cancelled by a court.

New York City has curbed "stop and frisk", but the crime rate is getting lower anyway.

How about ending the practice of harping on minor offenses that led to the death of Eric Garner?

Heating of the Southern Ocean seems likely to start melting Antarctic ice sheets and raising sea level.

San Jose, California, has a shantytown where 300 poor people live. The city now plans to evict them, which will make them homeless.

Renting space has become so expensive that even people with jobs are homeless.

Two thugs in Texas that banged a prisoner's head into a table then dragged her across the floor by her feet escaped criminal charges.

However, the root of this scandal is that she was jailed for an unpaid parking ticket. In today's US, the system that fines the poor is a pipeline to jail (and opportunities to be beaten up, maimed or killed).

The UK government is talking about plans to tax income that Google and Topshop transfer out of the UK, but apparently only to very small extent.

A lawsuit by sick workers has obtained and revealed documents showing how chemical companies have worked to undermine the scientific results showing that benzene is toxic and carcinogenic.

Scotland's devolved government is talking about land reform, taxing rich people's hunting estates, and so on. Even to identify and disclose landowners is a radical step in the UK.

The cost of adapting to global heating will be far more expensive than previously believed. It could cost up to 500 billion dollars a year by 2050 even if we hold heating to 2C.

Some fracking chemicals cause a risk of sterility and birth defects for humans and animals too.

The UK budget proposal increases subsidy for oil and doesn't even mention renewable energy.

Obama should suspend the donation and sale of military weapons to thug departments until strict limits are in place.

The NSA spies on emails of employees of phone companies in "allied" countries to find how to attack their phone systems.

It even goes as far as introducing security weaknesses into phone systems, undermining security against an crackers whatsoever.

A prominent Pakistani Muslim faces charges of blasphemy.

Maybe the country will self-destruct in a web of crossed blasphemy accusations.

Kerry proposes to continue war against PISSI for years, but there is no reason to think such a war could ever be won.

I think this is part of a plan to slowly send a large number of US troops to fight PISSI on the ground.

Attrition, and death of some leaders, can't defeat PISSI. Land battles can push PISSI back, but doing this with US troops would not work because their occupation would inspire the same resentment as before.

It is impossible to defeat PISSI except by giving Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis a way to be safe from Shi'ite repression. If they get this, they may well throw PISSI out. However, the current repressive behavior of Iraqi Shi'ite militias surely convince them to they must keep supporting PISSI

Thousands of fast food workers and airline workers and medical care workers went on strike across the US to demand a living wage.

Obama promised plutocrats he would impose the TPP over the opposition of most Democrats and most Americans.

I've always considered him a Republican in disguise.

Many cruise ships dump poorly treated sewage into the ocean, and now they refuse to answer questions about this practice.

Unless you're shallow in your approach to life, I suggest you avoid taking a cruise as a vacation. I went on one once, invited to give a talk, and found it to be more "Here's the next thing you're supposed to enjoy" than truly enjoyable.

Most people that view images depicting sexual abuse of children will never do anything to real children. However, they are all likely to be imprisoned.

The UK Tories now propose drastic further spending cuts. This could make the center-right Labour appear comparatively better, but that only means it won't attack the poor quite as much.

The effects are likely to be disastrous. And that's aside from the recession it can cause. The worst harm will fall on the poorest.

Australia has given one minister arbitrary total power over boat people. He can order that they be secretly deported to be tortured, or abandoned at sea. I wonder if he has the power to order they be secretly shot.

Refugees sent by Australia to Nauru are nearly prisoners even if they are granted some sort of "refugee status".

The St Louis thug department is being criticized for publicly warning about toy guns that look real.

The advice was not a threat, and it was wise. People should not give children toy guns that look real, unless the children are mature enough and trained enough to handle a real gun properly — to do so invites many kinds of trouble, starting with scaring people, even if thugs do not get involved.

This is independent of the many cases where thugs have wrongfully killed adults and children.

A US court rejected an attempt to give chimpanzees the rights of persons, on the grounds that they are not capable of assuming the legal responsibilities of persons.

A fully grown chimp is quite dangerous to people (and often to other chimps), precisely because it can't fulfill these responsibilities. A human being with the mind of a chimp would be committed to an institution as mentally incompetent and dangerous.

The US has obtained immunity from prosecution for its troops in Iraq, which looks like preparation for sending a lot of troops.

The Church of England, which owns stock in Shell and BP, will file shareholder motions to push them to curb global heating.

The Cleveland thug department has been rebuked for hundreds of cases of brutal treatment of citizens.

We Can't Be Complacent about Pregnant Women's Rights.

The pygmy chameleon might be extinct already — but if not, it will have a hard time surviving now that humans have cut down nearly all the forest it used to live in.

ALEC has more legislators as members, but perhaps less money to buy their support with, since most of the companies that used to support it have stopped.

Protesters in Canada have thwarted a pipeline project to take tar sands to the Pacific Ocean.

Investment in fossil fuels is increasingly risky: extraction will be stopped, either by a climate-preservation deal or by a collapse of global trade, and the rest will lose its value.

Stop Police Officers from Killing Our Children.

Everyone: oppose Ohio's proposed bill to keep execution methods and consequences secret.

Heathrow Airport set up an astroturf "community group" to pressure for building another runway there.

It's a mistake to increase airport capacity in the London area, or just about anywhere. The world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

US citizens: tell Congressional Democrats not to join Republicans in a tax cut for business.

US citizens: call on Obama to get ready to veto Republican bills that attack the non-rich.

Student protests have resumed in the UK, and so has repression by thugs.

The insecurity of a zero-hour contract convinced a teacher to work in a supermarket instead.

Government policies are the reason for widespread insecurity. Insecure work where workers can't be assured of enough hours to support themselves should be banned.

Low-tech indigenous peoples, not at all responsible for global heating, are being slammed by its effects.

Kiribati is not yet underwater, but drought may render it uninhabitable first. It is too late to prevent this; denialists have delayed action too long.

It may be too late for Miami, too.

An indigenous group in Australia has appealed to the UN about government plans to allow fracking in their lands without consulting them.

Ecuador's thugs repeatedly harassed climate activists trying to go to the Lima conference, with false accusations.

Two Australian activists decided to make their marriage a joint commitment to love the world by campaigning for humanity's good. They were recently arrested trying to interfere with coal mining promoted by Abbott, suppository of all pollution.

The massacre of radical Mexican students by the narco state has led to a broad demand for the resignation of the right-wing president.

Brandon McKean was stopped on the street by a thug for walking with his hands in his pockets.

Perhaps it wasn't solely because he had his hands in his pockets. Perhaps he was mistaken for someone else who was under suspicion because the two had the same skin color.

It looks like 2014 will set a world heat record.

Many small volcanic eruptions have temporarily suppressed part of the heating that our greenhouse gases would have caused.

The US treats pregnant women and mothers very badly.

I don't agree that "motherhood is the most important job in the world". Humans need to have fewer children. But when a child is born, we should give it what's needed for it to have a good and healthy life.

The executive summary of the Senate CIA torture report has been released. It has many gaps and flaws.

Australia is trying to sabotage global climate negotiations in order to boost coal to the max.

Campaigning for the right of heterosexual couples to choose a civil partnership instead of marriage.

In France, any two people can form a civil partnership. It does not suppose that they are lovers.

When Big Brother makes Facebook and other companies run algorithms to spot "terrorists", they will trigger for thousands of other people by mistake.

Canada is having a green-energy boom despite the government's efforts to promote fossil fuels, but investment depends on foreign banks.

A New Net-Neutrality Battle Brews Over…Text Messages.

The publisher of Nature is trying a cynical form of "open access", dependent on DRM implemented in nonfree software.

This illustrates the weakness of the term "open access". It leads people to think that schemes like this are acceptable. We need to campaign for free scientific publication instead.

Many governments are using the DMCA to censor critical publications made through US internet companies.

Today's copyright descends from an English censorship law adopted in 1565.

The UK government's latest tax cut for house owners is likely to increase house prices, making things worse for the non-rich.

Cuba's Extraordinary Global Medical Record Shames the US Blockade.

The great Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, apparently killed by the regime, admired the achievements of the Cuban revolution in areas such as medicine, education and agriculture, and wanted to preserve them.

The impunity of thugs continues as the thug that choked Eric Garner to death escapes charges.

Cameras Aren't a Miracle Cure for Police Brutality.

The ACLU calls for a reform of the New York Thug Department to prevent more such killings.

The Justice Department is investigating whether to charge the thug with violating Garner's civil rights.

Hacking as a protest against prudish censorship: artist Rokude Nashiko has been arrested for distributing plans for a kayak based on the shape of her vagina.

Megacorporations pay most of the world's bribes, and often the people who pay them are executives or high-level managers.

The current low price for oil is the greatest market failure in history.

It is due to failure to make greenhouse gas emitters pay for the harm they do.

In the US, being accused of a crime and jailed can leave you in debt for thousands of dollars. Poor people who can't pay those debts can be jailed again for that (i.e., it is debtor's prison) and thus given even more debt they will never pay.

Since states expect that less than 1/10 of this debt will actually be repaid, it's not a serious attempt to collect money, but rather a way to repress the poor. We should cancel all these debts and abolish fees for all aspects of being accused of a crime or imprisoned.

Support the Environment or the U.S. Military?

Bernie Sanders presents his economic program.

While he doesn't advocate all the points I think are necessary, I would be glad to vote for him because of this much.

On Monday there were protests on behalf of Michael Brown (and by extension others killed by thugs).

The UK plan to censor speeches in universities means the end of intellectual freedom, in a sad contrast with the tradition of liberty.

Evictions in the UK are hitting a record pace. Traps placed in welfare benefits by the Tories are almost certain to cause an eviction when they go off.

The main problem is that the wealthy are using a larger fraction of the UK's total housing space than before. This can be reversed at least partially by raising taxes on large houses and apartments, which will move the middle class and somewhat wealthy towards somewhat smaller spaces, making more buildings available for poor people to live in.

Baby coral animals may be able to adapt to higher acidity.

Everyone: support US fast food workers on strike for $15 an hour.

Japanese corporation Sumitomo tried to get a license to mine in the Solomon Islands by telling the Japanese ambassador to threaten to cut aid for a hospital.

The ambassador didn't dare say no, but fortunately he avoided carrying out the order.

Common "complementary medicines" claimed to assist cancer chemotherapy are likely to undermine its effectiveness.

Eating Less Meat Essential to Curb Climate Change, Says Report.

Most people don't realize how big a footprint meat production has. Especially beef.

Fixing this problem does not require "telling people what to eat"; making greenhouse-emitting activities pay for the damage they do would be enough.

Soap, Sunscreen And Steroids Found in Antarctic Waters And Wildlife.

Some of these chemicals can be harmful to wildlife in minute quantities because they mimic hormones.

Important EU countries are pushing to end Luxembourg's tax-dodging scheme.

When thugs disbelieve a woman who makes an accusation of rape, they often threaten her until she falsely confesses to lying. Then she gets prosecuted and may be caught in prison until the rapist is caught raping someone else.

Antisemitism Is Racism. We Need to Acknowledge That.

The rifle manufacturer Kalashnikov, whose weapons are used in wars around the world, now advertises itself as "promoting peace and calm".

Reminds me of how the US renamed the War Department as the "Defense Department".

A journalist in Bangladesh has been fined for questioning the government's claims about the number of political murders in Bangladesh's war of independence.

Ironically, he was instrumental in calling attention to these murders.

Such vile censorship is not unique to Bangladesh. France has two laws each explicitly prohibiting disagreement with the official views on a particular question. One was adopted just a few years ago.

Fracking threatens to exacerbate water shortages in Mexico, earthquakes in China and Indonesia, and wipe out indigenous peoples in some other countries.

All this while encouraging people to keep burning fossil fuel.

Obama isn't proposing to stop militarizing US police, only to monitor the process more.

The US is dragging its feet in Lima climate talks, acting as if we could take our time curbing global heading slowly.

The US spent a lot of money for war but won't help Syrian refugees.

I think the US should offer funds for permanent resettlement of these refugees, not just to keep them alive in refugee camps, because that way the problem will be solved.

Australian immigration seems to have pressured Monica Jones to agree to be filmed for a TV program, on pain of receiving harsh treatment.

Clinton's criticism of fracking presumes that there are some places where the risks are acceptable.

Clearly she is considering only the local risk of polluting water and not the guaranteed harms of (1) using scarce water and (2) contributing to global heating.

The Labour Party would have used a little less austerity than the Tories applied, but both would have spread poverty.

Obama plans to somewhat limit the militarization of US thugs.

Why is this program "popular in Congress"? Probably because of the money of the companies that make the equipment, which have arranged to divide the work around nearly all congressional districts.

We must reject the idea that an elected official's proper job includes pulling jobs to their districts from other parts of the US, or getting the government to do misguided spending in their districts.

Where to draw the line between online death threats and jokes or self-expression?

A just criterion can't rest on the subjective understanding of either party. It has to be based on what is reasonable in the situation.

In addition we must stop publicly posting our private musings. Web sites such as Facebook that encourage that practice are harmful.

The Iraqi army, trained by the US, had 50,000 "ghost soldiers" on its payroll who were not really acting as soldiers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

This alone does not explain PISSI's triumph. The 10,000 real soldiers in Mosul greatly outnumbered PISSI, and could easily have held the city — if they were inclined to fight.

The Spanish right-wing government cut off funds for finding and identifying the graves of people massacred by its predecessor, the dictator Franco, during the Spanish civil war.

Franco was a general, and tried to stage a military coup, but ran into resistance from the people so that it took him three years to conquer all of Spain.

Friends in Spain told me a few years ago that Franco's supporters still occupied positions of power. It is no surprise, therefore, that right-wing politicians want to Franco's crimes to be forgotten.

A Bahraini human rights campaigner was sentenced to prison for attacking two thugs. That's what the thugs generally say; more likely they attacked her.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

The effect is to keep her in permanent exile.

London residents facing eviction by a new tax-evading landlord protested at the company's office.

No stallions for the cast!.

US citizens: call on Congress to renew incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators not to wipe out nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

Studying Syrian censorship through leaked logs.

Thousands of Hong Kong democracy protesters occupied a street, and were attacked by thugs with dogs and pepper spray.

It seems to be a very strong form of pepper spray.

Putin is exerting control over publishing in Russia, not just "news".

In general I object to using the word "content" to describe publications, because it disparages them. However, it may be a fitting word for the publications of Putin's flunkies.

Millions with HIV die because they can't afford the drugs to keep them alive.

The World Trade Organization and its TRIPES (*) agreement is partly responsible for the high price of these patented drugs. The leaders of that organization, as well as the politicians that signed it and ratified it, should be tried for mass murder by the International Criminal Court.

* Trade-Restricting Impediments to Production, Education and Science.

How to Police the Police: What Rules Should Govern Police Use of Body Cameras?

When a US company has data in a server in Europe, which country has jurisdiction to seize the data?

1000 protesters tried to enter Tahrir Square and were attacked by thugs.

The Suez Canal has allowed toxic tropical jellyfish to invade the Mediterranean, where they endanger people and fish. And other dangerous invaders too.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture rebuked the US for failing to punish torturers, as well as use of solitary confinement and violence by thugs, and imprisonment of large numbers of people facing possible deportation.

The small health risks of some birth control methods are smaller than the health risks they prevent, and trivial compared with the health risks of pregnancy.

Many US women are in prison for being unable to stop their husbands from beating their children to death.

The legal system fails to consider that the women were terrorized by those men.

The grand jury gives prosecutors a secret opportunity to indict anyone — or, as in the case of Michael Brown's killing, to avoid indicting someone. This article proposes a replacement system.

The UK is giving out "counter-terrorism" leaflets whose only use is to make people scared and ready to give up freedoms for security against a tiny danger.

(You know already what these campaigns are for, but the article is so funny it would be a shame not to show it to you.)

The way for the UK (and the US) to minimize the danger of terrorism by Islamists is to wind down the many interventions in mainly Muslim countries.

In 1944, just after freeing Greece from the Nazis, the UK joined with Greek collaborators to massacre unarmed leftist demonstrators in order to impose a right-wing government of the former flunkies of the Nazis.

This led to the Greek civil war an dictatorship, and to today's Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.

It is quite likely you are already responding to fear of what internet surveillance can do to you.

Scientists protecting endangered species on the Galapagos Islands have run out of money because competing local people made them close their gift shop.

Human inhabitation of the Galapagos Islands endangers the unique species there, and so does tourism.

Chicago's schools lost 100 million dollars after banksters led them into a tricky financial scheme, telling them not to worry about the fine print.

The crucial point is that banksters had shortly before procured a state law to permit this sort of scheme. That's the way they work. All the "financial deregulation" laws of the past 20 years should simply be repealed.

In the UK, homelessness and destitution are becoming normal: people are starting to accept it as a permanent state of affairs which need not be corrected.

The same happened in the US in the 1980s; it is part of Reagan's legacy.

Right-wing Japanese officials are pushing denialism of forcing women from occupied peoples into prostitution, using one piece of questionable evidence as a false excuse to deny all the evidence.

Germany's biggest electric company will split off fossil fuel generators to concentrate on renewable energy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US thugs that get fired for misconduct typically have no difficulty getting jobs as thugs in other places in the US.

The person who did the autopsy on Michael Brown seems to be hardly qualified for it, and not very honest.

Why, I wonder, did the state entrust such a sensitive job to someone like that?

Tibetan singer Kalsang Yarphel has been imprisoned for encouraging Tibetans to learn and speak Tibetan.

Evidently China aims to erase Tibetan culture.

Having a baby is substantially dangerous; occasionally the only way a woman can save herself is with a late-term abortion.

Washington DC thugs have planned years in advance how to spend the money they expect to take from people not convicted of crimes.

An example of research that should not be done: tracking people automatically from one camera to another.

Note the idiotic non-response given in the article to concerns that this is dangerous. They suggest that if the video is encrypted in transmission to Big Brother it will protect you from being tracked by someone else. As if anyone were as dangerous as Big Brother!

I've proposed making it illegal to have remotely accessible cameras pointed at public places.

US citizens: call on the US to stand for strong measures to curb global heating in the Lima negotiations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

In my message, I used the term "global heating" to underline how serious the danger is, rather than the denialists' term "climate change".

Michael Brown's killer quit the Ferguson thug department.

The buying fever on Black Friday is a disgrace to society, as well as a distraction from more important things.

The people who do it don't understand how pathetic their obsession with appliances is.

According to reports smuggled out of Raqqa, PISSI lords it over the inhabitants like an occupying army, and doesn't bother defending them from Assad's bombers when they attack civilian areas.

If this is accurate (it could be an exaggeration), it would be easy to get people's help in pushing PISSI out, if only there were a decent alternative on offer. But there isn't.

I wonder why Assad continues making them hate him.

Note: PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Murder and corruption charges against Mubarak and some of his henchmen were dismissed in an arbitrary way.

With the supporters of democracy and human rights under total repression, I guess al-Sisi doesn't need to pretend to hold the previous military ruler accountable for anything.

Italy is trying to weaken EU standards for network neutrality.

Brazil's Javari Valley Threatened by Peruvian Oil, Warn Tribes.

The Peruvian president, Ollanta Humala, gave an impression of being vaguely leftist, but this does not seem to be very much the case.

The harm done by fracking could be comparable to that of thalidomide, tobacco or asbestos.

The Germany spy agency came up with a tricky legal excuse to spy on the communications of some Germans.

Your Face Is Not a Bar Code: Arguments Against Automatic Face Recognition in Public Places.

This article is as valid as when it was written a decade ago. However, I must disagree with one point in the article: fear of terrorists is not justifiable for Americans in general. The danger of terrorism in the US is so tiny that it is foolish to worry about it, unless you're one of the small fraction who has a job to do to prevent it.

The Massachusetts "fusion center", created to try to find "terrorists", was used to monitor Black Lives Matter protesters in Boston last week.

David Brock used to get Republicans elected; now he proposes to work for Ms Clinton, who is almost a Republican.

An example shows how mainstream media propaganda for Wall Street works: by grossly misrepresenting what progressives said.

And it handles the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline by presenting a "debate" between two associates of the oil industry.

Haitian thugs shot and wounded protesters who want the US-supported sweatshop next to their town to provide them with electricity.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Chinese activists are being tried for fictitious acts of "disorder".

The UK legal system leaves many women vulnerable to their ex-abusers who are released from prison, unless they have extra money to spend.

Of course, women in that position tend to be short of money.

The US needs to seriously address the question of racism and its effects.

Practical racism interacts with the growing inequality of wealth. With ever more Americans poor, groups that are targets of prejudice will tend to get poor first.

The UN human rights report reproved the US for imposing sleep deprivation on prisoners.

Pope Francis, visiting Turkey, calls for responding to religious fundamentalism by helping the poor and marginalized.

It seems that he and I agree on political issues, except for those related to sex and reproduction.

A Chinese official threatened Tibetan students with punishment later if they study the Tibetan language.

Some of China's methods of spreading propaganda about Tibet.

Israel deploys balloon-suspended cameras over Jerusalem which can track all protesters, and everyone else too.

A man in the US was arrested after pointing a banana at a thug as if it were a weapon.

It is foolish to pretend to threaten armed people with a gun, even if it without anything that looks much like a gun. If he had succeeded in fooling them, they couldn't be blamed for shooting him in perceived self-defense.

However, once they knew it was a banana, they also knew it was never seriously meant as a threat. Thus, it was wrong for them to arrest and charge the man with threatening anyone. Mere folly should not be treated as a crime.

A study estimates that over 10,000 people in the UK are in slave labor.

In general, the estimates for numbers of slave laborers in various countries include a lot of guesswork.

Exit International teaches how to commit suicide painlessly. People flock to learn this in case they will need it later.

I think everyone should have the right to commit suicide, though it makes sense to impose a waiting period and to treat people for depression if that's the root of their wish to die.

Death is unfair; that people must die is a fundamental injustice in the universe (though there is no one to blame for it). But when life is so horrible that even death is better, forcing the person to go on living is a kind of torture.

Ohio has been embarrassed by a series of botched executions, so now Republicans plan to block even courts from investigating how they are carried out.

A thug in Ferguson shot at a woman in a car, causing her to lose an eye.

US citizens: stand with Elizabeth Warren in rejecting bankster Antonio Weiss as an official of the US Treasury.

Peaceful protests closed shopping malls around Ferguson on Fools' Friday, and other activities around the US.

Some e-cigarettes contain a lot of formaldehyde, which is carcinogenic.

I suggest that they should be sold like tobacco itself: to adults but not to minors.

US citizens: call on the EPA to push harder and faster to reduce CO₂ emissions from power plants.

Women on Climate Change Frontline Make Big Impact on Small Grants.

Weather has devastated olive production in many countries.

Specific occurrences of these kinds of bad weather are random, but our global heating activities are making them more frequent.

Most poultry in the UK is contaminated with potentially fatal bacteria, and the UK government is failing to tackle the problem.

Instead it is considering an industry proposal to cut inspections.

An Indian version of Hamlet faces censorship threats.

Thugs beat up Hong Kong protest leaders after arresting them.

The European Union is trying to impose the right to have articles dropped from searches for your name on Google world-wide.

I don't think this particular requirement is a big deal, but it is dangerous for any country to have the power to limit search engines world wide.

Dostoevsky predicted the totalitarianism that can occur when people abandon individual morality by going to any lengths to fight for some cause.

It is a mistake, however, to equate morality with religion.

The problem he presents is not in having ideals, not as such, but in approaching them with the assumption that they justify any means whatsoever.

Pakistan's Geo News to Appeal against Owner's 26-Year Jail Term for Blasphemy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Two people in the Indian film industry were sentenced to 26 years for "blasphemy" consisting of having a religious song playing during a wedding scene.

Pakistan should beg the world forgiveness for censoring criticism of religion, but in the second case it wasn't even criticism.

India is not very good in this department either.

One railroad line in the UK was run by the state, and was run so well that it became an embarrassment to right-wing politicians who insist on privatization.

Privatization of the railroads in the UK has been a rip-off. They should all be re-nationalized.

Indonesia's president proposes plans to protect forests and peatlands.

The Five Leaders Who Failed Ferguson.

A former UK Tory leader lost his libel suit: the judge believed the thug who said the politician called him a "pleb".

The judge said that the thug didn't have enough imagination to have made this up, but lying in court, for a thug, is not the stretch it would be for you or me.

I can't find either of them credible enough to believe.

Nuclear weapons can be detonated by accidents and rebellions, making them so dangerous we need to eliminate them all.

Refusing to ransoming hostages from PISSI, so that they got beheaded for propaganda instead, may have done the US and UK more harm than ransoming would have done.

US public schools are so poorly supported that they charge students for lunch, and when students' parents have not paid, they go hungry. Some students receive lunch gratis, but they are treated as objects of scorn.

When I was a child, the public school gave all students lunch.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that rejecting the idea that the poor deserve to be looked down on is one important lesson for schools to teach.

Indian rich fritter away millions on frivolities, displaying contempt for the rest of society.

A judge rejected DNA testing that might support Rodney Reed's claim he is innocent of murder. The judge would rather kill a man than recognize doubt in a past verdict.

The death penalty is inherently wrong, because it can't be undone when evidence shows the convicted person was innocent. And other reasons too.

US citizens: call on Holder to give justice for Michael Brown and to defend the right to protest.

US citizens: call for stricter carbon emission standards for existing power plants.

US citizens: Call on Obama to give justice for Michael Brown.

The Oregon referendum on labeling GMOs came out so close that it requires a recount.

Canadian scientist Alfredo Frid explained why he joined in civil disobedience against an oil pipeline.

Frid is mistaken when he accuses the Canadian of "inaction" on "climate change". The Canadian government is a strong supporter of global heating and takes many kinds of actions to speed it up, including gagging scientists and shutting down research projects that can monitor heating.

The thugs clamped down hard on protesters in Ferguson.

One thug begged people not to burn down their city. Considered by normal standards it is foolish for people to burn down their own city, but then, if they had normal lives and considered normal standards applicable, they wouldn't want to do so.

The killings of blacks around the US is the extreme manifestation of a racist system that needs systemic change.

Of course, the system in the US oppresses whites plenty as well; just not as much on the average.

Obama is planning to send some more US troops to Afghanistan.

The US can never actually lose the war in Afghanistan, but it can't win either, and continuing the fight means continuing the suffering of Afghans and the expense and militarization of the US.

The resumption of night raids will increase the suffering.

I don't think war is justified under these circumstances.

A Venezuelan opposition politician faces charges of organizing to kill President Maduro.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

This is not an absurd accusation, given that the opposition launched a coup attempt against Chavez a decade ago, organized by the US.

However, it could also be stretching the facts.

A UN committee's resolution against massive surveillance left out the crucial issue of recording who talks with whom.

Records of who talks with whom are absolutely crucial. Whistleblower Donald Sachtleben is in prison because the US government exhaustively studied the phone records of dozens of journalists from the Associated Press.

The UK asked Vodaphone for the phone records of one journalist, so Vodaphone handed over the phone records of everyone at the same newspaper.

We Should Cash-Bomb the People — Not the Banks.

On the other hand, if officials' goal is to help billionaires, not the rest, handouts to banks make perfect sense.

Mexico's Missing Students Draw Attention to 20,000 'Vanished' Others.

Deforestation in Brazil has become substantially less this year.

It is not clear why.

In Egypt 78 teenagers were sentenced to prison for protesting for Morsi.

The EU has taken a feeble first step towards controlling CO₂ emissions from ships, but it won't even start until 2018.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Charging a fee for emissions would cover this naturally; shipping any load by air or sea should be charged for the emissions involved.

Three (or more) factions are now fighting over Libya.

I am not sure whether there is a basis to prefer any one of them to the rest.

Islamist fanatics killed two polio vaccinators in Pakistan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

This is an extreme example of the harm religion does to society.

UK thugs are distributing fear propaganda which will aid their campaign for further surveillance and censorship.

Human overpopulation is leading to increasing human incursion into a national park in Mumbai.

The UK government wants to follow the US in weakening the inspection rules for farm animals.

This would save money for companies in ordinary operation and make some rare big dangers more likely.

US citizens: call on Obama to require increases in fuel efficiency for trucks.

US citizens: call for federal guidelines to prevent racial profiling by state and local thugs.

Although most countries have signed the treaty to ban cluster bombs, Russia, China and the US have not, and many banks and funds have invested in their production.

A gene modification treatment for an obscure disease costs over a million dollars per patient. What will happen to the poor?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

The ham-fisted UK spy-on-all agencies are blaming Facebook as an excuse to get themselves off the hook for incompetence in detecting jihadists planning an attack; but the real problem is the unjust interventions that make people so angry they will kill.

It seems incorrect to call that attack "terrorism", because it was aimed at a soldier, not at civilians.

In the Greek "economic recovery", the state drains people and schools to support banks that hardly lend money.

I'd say it's an extractivist government of occupation.

Warm weather in autumn leads some frogs to breed now rather than in spring. But it is a risky bet.

Turkey has banned reporting about the investigation of corruption accusations against members of the government.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Erdogan dismissed the prosecutors that brought the accusations long ago.

Suggestions for fixing the racist system that leads to killing so many black people in the US.

It appears Mexican thugs arrested protesters more or less at random and charged them with attempted murder.

This is in addition to attacking other protesters.

The conduct of the thugs so far has already demonstrated that protesters have plenty to worry about (including being murdered like the 43 students that all this started with).

US Republicans enabled the current Canadian government to gain power.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Ferguson, goddamn: No indictment for Darren Wilson is no surprise. This is why we protest.

The law may have spoken but the Ferguson verdict is not justice.

The Australian whistleblower who leaked a report about an apparently corrupt scholarship given to Prime Minister Abbott's daughter will not face charges, but still seems to face more criticism than the parties apparently involved in the corrupt proceedings (the school and the prime minister).

How did Mari Sherkin end up on a dating site unwillingly? Through a new scam by Facebook: it pops up windows showing other companies' sites, which then trick Facebook useds into "agreeing" to let those companies get their personal data from Facebook.

The extremely sophisticated cracking software referred to as "Regin", used to attack computers in many countries including Belgium, seems related to Stuxnet which ties it to the US and UK.

Arguing against term limits on elected officials.

I have always opposed term limits for legislators.

Global heating will endanger honeybees by helping a parasite.

Hong Kong thugs arrested two of the main protest leaders.

The new owners of low-income housing in London, who plan to evict the poor to raise the rents, will evade taxes on the increased income.

I hope the victims organize physical resistance to the evictions, and to further use of the building by the anonymous new owners.

1/6 of all killings in Utah are committed by thugs.

Russia is moving to annex Abkhazia, a breakaway part of Georgia.

It is not exactly comparable to the case of Crimea: the Abkhazians rebelled on their own rather than experiencing a Russian invasion. Still, to be ruled by Russia is to suffer tyranny.

Welfare cuts in the UK are leaving disabled children hungry and sick, and their parents are in even worse state.

But it's even worse in the US, where over 2 million children were homeless during 2013.

Texas approved textbooks which list Moses as one of the founding fathers of the USA. And other wacky stuff.

Thugs shot a 12-year-old boy dead when he tried to pull a pellet gun on them.

The orange "this is a toy" indicator had been removed, so it looked real. Thus, I can't criticize the thugs for this one. I would not take their word for what happened, but if the boy's family saw the video and doesn't disagree, I suppose their story is true this time.

Hagel's resignation should provide an opportunity to debate Obama's wars.

The US mainstream media will, however, express no doubts.

Human emissions have already locked in 1.5C of global heating, and the consequences will be disastrous. The question is how soon we stop making it worse.

The Senate torture investigators did not try to talk with prisoners in Guantanamo about how they were tortured.

The US government has a secret search engine to search through the billions of records of Americans' and other people's communications.

The agencies that use this data pretend that they didn't use it and it doesn't exist. They are legally required to minimize their retention of data about Americans, but they ignore that.

Monsanto asks people to calm down and have a civil conversation about GMOS, even as it sues to overturn the laws passed by Vermont and Maui.

Deforestation, "Development" Connected to Spread of Ebola in West Africa.

In a Country Without Formal Unions, 8,000 Chinese Teachers Strike for Higher Pay.

The [US] Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist.

Phony "scholarly journals" will accept any junk whatsoever for publication.

I occasionally receive an invitation to register for a conference in some foreign country. Often the stated topic is human trafficking. I wonder whether these events really occur, people use them to take a vacation and claim it's for a conference, or whether they only commit credit card fraud.

Putin is carrying out stiff repression of Crimean Tatars, including murder of activists.

The Tatars reject Russian rule of the Crimea but have not engaged in violence.

What global heating denial will look like in 100 years, assuming civilization still exists.

Rasmea Odeh's lawyer calls for reconsideration of the verdict that convicted her of concealing how she had been framed and tortured in Israel in 1967.

US citizens: call for protecting wilderness areas in Colorado from fracking.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Obama's "climate change" envoy recognizes that lots of fossil fuels have to be left in the ground.

Now if Obama would only start doing so.

Obama appears to have dismissed "Defense" secretary Hagel because Hagel wasn't suited for Obama's war plans.

Societies with little religion can be quite good to live in.

This does not prove that Atheism, by itself, will make a society good to live in. (It did not make the Soviet Union very good.) But this does show that religion isn't necessary for a society to be good to live in.

Please don't buy the book from Amazon.

How religions cause psychological harm to some (many?) believers.

Great apes imitate fellow apes when there's an advantage in it, but humans imitate other humans even for no reason.

Human see, human do.

US targeted 24 specific men in Pakistan with multiple drone bombings each. The bombings killed only 6 of them, but killed 868 other people including about 140 children.

Some fraction of the other people killed may have been Taliban soldiers, but clearly a large fraction were bystanders and relatives.

The Atlantic mackerel catch limit has been reduced 25%. Since the fish stock is at quite a low level, I think it is nuts to allow people to catch any of them. To try to fine-tune catch levels presumes more knowledge than we really have. We should do everything possible to give the fish a chance to bounce back; if they do, then we can start catching them again, with luck much more of them than now.

The multiple traumas inflicted on Americans are causing a massive breakdown.

Saudi Arabia has defined criticism of the state, and any defense of Atheism, as "terrorism".

The US took a start down that path by defining "animal rights terrorism" to include actions such as running a web site or loosing farm animals.

I can understand prosecuting that as destruction of property, but calling it "terrorism" is another example of a lying law.

Religion does lots of harm to society.

A Thai editor has been sentenced to over four years in prison for "defaming" the king.

Any law making it a crime to defame, insult or offend someone is a violation of freedom of speech.

The UK proposes to make universities censor "radical" speakers.

Initially this is to be applied to radical Islamism, but who knows when it will be extended to cover refusal to run proprietary software, support for the Green Party, or opposition to censorship.

The UK already has a vicious regime of censorship, but that's no reason to tolerate more.

Imposed exile without trial is also proposed, as well as an arbitrary ban on flying without trial.

It's not clear that breastfeeding is good for babies. Perhaps it's being raised in a middle-class home (which is where mothers are likely to do this) is what's good for babies.

Private companies are finding ways to squeeze money out of supervision of criminals on parole.

These companies function by mistreating their employees, the public, the prisoners, or some combination. Sometimes the indirection means they can't in practice be held accountable for how they treat the prisoners.

The California initiative just approved, releasing many prisoners that there is no need to keep in prison, is very good notwithstanding this problem.

The peace talks with the Taliban endanger the fragments of women's rights in Afghanistan.

I supported the invasion of Afghanistan to liberate women (and to some extent men) from the oppression of the Taliban. However, the existing Afghan government has allowed a large part of the same oppression, even in the places it effectively controls. I can't say that the small freedom Afghan women have gained justifies unending war.

Ebola Is Scary, But Antibiotic Resistance Should Scare Us More.

Australian thugs listened sneakily to a prisoner's discussion with his lawyer.

The government refuses to tell him why he was arrested and forbids newspapers to mention his name. I wonder if he has been gagged as well — I suspect so. Is any information about this available outside Australia?

If your relative is arrested, spread the word immediately so that the state can't put the cat back into the bag.

Psychological experiments reaffirm that it is possible for social structures to encourage and reward cooperation more, and selfishness less, than the ones existing in the US and UK.

Comparing the free software world with the proprietary software world demonstrates the same thing.

Present-day society has been reshaped by plutocrats to weaken society's defenses that restrained them. If we recognize them as the enemy, and defeat them, reversing the changes they made is a map for undoing the harm they have done. Simply to reverse all pertinent changes since 1980 would be a big improvement overall.

A few of the changes since 1980 may be considered improvements (for instance, equal rights for gays, most advances in medical technology, improvements in renewable energy technology, PCs before they were designed for DRM, the internet before apps, and the web before Javascript), so I would advocate aiming exactly to recreate 1980.

Amnesty's Detekt program may give a false sense of security.

In Massachusetts: oppose holding Olympic Games in Boston.

The Olympic Committee is leaning towards Boston because of Boston's record of clamping down arbitrarily on millions of people, when it forced everyone to stay indoors.

Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington DC should start organizing too.

If people with enough democracy to reject Olympic Games do so, the games will be held in dictatorial countries. At least that way they won't lead to tyranny worse than what those countries already have.

US citizens: Call on Obama to raise the pay limit for workers to get overtime pay.

Here's a list of products made by companies largely owned by the Koch Brothers, so you can choose alternatives.

The World Bank says it will "focus" future investments on renewable energy, but falls short of ceasing to invest in fossil fuels.

I am worried by the escape hatch to allow coal investments in cases of "extreme need". Billionaires can claim with a straight face that they have "extreme need" for the profits from a coal mine, and ways to convince politicians to endorse the claim.

Horrific pictures of casualties don't seem to stop war.

Israel's cabinet approved a law to officially make non-Jews second-class citizens and remove Arabic as an official language.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

This seems ideally calculated to provoke more Israeli Arabs into random acts of violence, but Netanyahu calls it a "deterrent" like other acts of collective punishment.

There is no word on whether Netanyahu also plans to punish Jews collectively for acts such as firebombing Huda Hamaiel's house.

Conservationists are pressuring Australia's big banks not to invest in coal companies.

If those banks are looking for long-term return, they should try to make sure that Australia isn't knocked to its knees by global heating.

The Hong Kong government defeated democracy protesters by yielding nothing and waiting for the public to get tired of protests.

Lesson: people who get tired and stop protesting don't win.

Blanket Data Retention Does Not Come in "Good" And "Bad" Forms.

Communication and server companies have an interest in letting people think they care about privacy, but not so much in effectively doing so.

I disagree with one point: encryption is not a fraud or a sham. However, it can only protect specific limited aspects of privacy, which are not enough.

It's a different harm but it's still harm. Recall that the dictatorships of South America in the 70s said that the people they disappeared were "terrorists".

As expected, the grand jury decided not to indict the killer of Michael Brown.

This was predictable; hardly ever do killer thugs face justice.

The decision led to predictable riots.

It is wrong to vent this rage by burning down private buildings that have nothing to do with the killing. At the same time, I understand that many in Ferguson feel that rioting is their last recourse after trying everything else. I hope it leads to some good.

Civil rights and justice groups called on Governor Nixon to appoint a special prosecutor, but he didn't. He could still do this, but he would rather provoke riots and repress them. He is directly and personally responsible for giving a killer thug immunity. We should not let him shrug it off.

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of Hong Kong citizens who protested for democracy have been banned from China.

Much like the US no-fly list, they don't find this out until they try to cross the border.

The EU foolishly relaxed its requirement to adopt LEDs for street lighting, inviting a giant waste of energy and money.

Beyond Ferguson: we need to stop giving carte blanche to militarized thugs.

US citizens: call on Obama to appoint some Federal Reserve governors who don't represent banksters.

US citizens: call on the Justice Department to charge JP Morgan now with the crimes that Alayne Fleischmann has witnessed.

US citizens: Call on Senator Udall to personally release the Senate's torture report while he is still a senator.

US citizens: support network neutrality again.

Pakistan's uniformed thugs say they go on raids to kill major criminals. Others say the thugs are killing whoever is convenient in order to run up the tally.

Claims of Satanic child abuse are coming back. These are based on convincing people to remember things that never happened to them.

Bluefin tuna in the Atlantic have recovered to some extent from past overfishing, so governments jumped at the chance to increase fishing quotas.

I hope eventually it will be possible to catch these tuna at a higher rate sustainably, but it is foolhardy to be hasty. The current numbers of tuna are more than in the 1950s, but they could be minuscule compared with the 1850s.

A variant of an RFID turns out to be a prime method used by US and Russian agents (and maybe others) to sabotage computers.

A UK politician has been forced to resign from some positions because his swiped credit card number was used to buy pornography depicting children. The fact that it wasn't him is, apparently, not sufficient to protect him; being falsely accused is considered reason why he must resign.

Isn't this nuts?

These events illustrate that the crusade against "child pornography" endangers everyone. This result tends to happen whenever possession or purchase of some sort of publication is illegal. We must abolish such laws because they whip up witch-hunts.

Many Syrian rebel groups are joining with PISSI, or at least making truces with PISSI, because they regard the US as an enemy for fighting PISSI.

PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian who was trying to catch birds and went too close to the Israeli border.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Israel has no right to kill people in Gaza for walking around in Gaza. If Israel wants a buffer zone, it should construct that buffer zone on Israel's side of the border.

Putin launched a plot to kidnap Bill Browder, after killing his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in prison.

Al-Shabaab terrorists captured a bus and murdered all the passengers that were not Muslims.

French thugs killed an anti-dam protester with a grenade, inspiring continuing protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Puncturing the fiction of a "recovery" in the UK, the number of poor people going to food banks continues to increase.

This includes people who have work but their wages don't cover food.

Japan is entering a recession, and as usual financial powers are pushing for spending cuts to make it worse, but the government is determined to stimulate the economy instead.

Britain seems to be entering another recession (although working people have not started to recover from the last one), so the plutocratic government plans more budget cuts to make sure of this.

Banksters are taking over state pension funds in order to drain them with high fees and risky investments.

UK newspapers were ordered not to report on sexual abuse by politicians, and the records of these orders appear to have been destroyed, or else the orders were fake.

Either way, it is very fishy.

Experimental subjects paid more to protect strangers from electric shocks than to protect themselves from shocks.

The article ends with a very good refutation of one of the typical fallacious cynical attacks against altruism.

The Australian government is attacking public broadcasting for not being right-wing.

The Chilean officers that tortured Alberto Bachelet and his daughter (now president) have been sentenced to prison.

Walmart workers plan strikes and protests on the day that foolish Americans typically start shopping for mandatory Christmas presents.

Since they are looking for support from the public, I suggest that people participate.

Robert Holsey is set to be executed, and the state of Georgia doesn't care that his defense team was nonfunctional because its leader was drunk.

The death penalty is wrong even if the criminal has competent defense lawyers. This case points rather at the willingness of the US legal system to insist on upholding decisions that were made laughably.

United nonviolent resistance is defeating the Mafia protection racket in Sicily.

A new study finds that allowing people in general to carry guns leads to more crime, in the US.

Occupy London protesters are returning to Parliament Square.

The Gates Foundation has insisted on free scientific publication for research it supports.

They use the term "open access"; I think that term is misguided because it tends to lead people in the direction of weaker positions than this. Fortunately the Gates Foundation overcame the weakness of the term itself, and took a strong stand.

There are so many ironies in this.

Meanwhile, France cut its research budget in order to pay publishers such as Elsevier.

Obama has authorized remaining US troops in Afghanistan to continue fighting the Taliban directly, hoping people won't notice.

Global heating means big snow loads from the "lake effect".

Whistleblowers are repeatedly subject to dishonest retaliation and false accusations by those in power whose errors or crimes have been exposed.

US phone companies are trying to push customers off the superior copper cables onto VOIP, by refusing to maintain the copper cables.

The idea of requiring the VOIP replacement to be improved before forcing the changeover is not sufficient. VOIP is inherently less reliable as well as subjecting people to digital monkey-business.

Algorithmic decision making is leading to many strange kinds of troubles caused by mistaken identity.

Obama proposed a bankster to be the Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, and Elizabeth Warren came out swinging against him.

Senators have introduced a carbon tax bill.

This has no chance of passing, but introducing it is at least a political step.

A movie exposes the methods of the paid global heating denialists.

US abortion doctors say the harassment and restrictions are the worst they have ever seen.

The last remaining "Angola 3" prisoner had his conviction overturned, but the state may appeal this decision to keep him in prison more years until he dies.

Regardless of the issues of his guilt and his trial, keeping anyone in solitary confinement for so long amounts to brainwashing.

Growth: The Destructive God That Can Never Be Appeased.

Six Vital Steps World Leaders Must Agree to Take to Protect Earth.

Here's what the agreement needs to do and why.

US citizens: Call for establishment of a clear and practical way to report abuses by US border patrol agents.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: call on Obama to make sure the pollinator health task force takes sufficient measures to truly protect bees.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Jewish Voice for Peace mourns the Jewish and Palestinian casualties of individual violence in Israel and Palestine.

An example of how US mainstream media promote escalation of war against PISSI.

Examples of how they promote the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.

When they do acknowledge the real argument against the pipeline, next they claim it's impossible to stop the extraction of tar sands oil.

"Stop resisting, you can't win" has been used against every successful resistance movement.

Are "We the People" Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?

American women are ceasing to feel ashamed of accusing men of raping them.

The idea of being ashamed of being assaulted in any fashion makes no moral sense to me. I can only understand it intellectually.

It was common to for families to despise women who were raped, along with women who had sex without authorization, treating women as possessions of the family rather than as persons. For instance, a legend about the foundation of the Roman Republic admires a woman for committing suicide after being pressured into sex. In some twisted societies, this attitude continues today and is the basis for "honor killings".

I suppose women internalized this condemnation and converted it into shame.

Everyone: sign up to boycott Amazon.

I gave this as my additional statement.

There are additional reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon. It keeps a database of what people buy, and does not accept cash. Amazon ebooks are a surveillance system and Amazon can erase them remotely: see stallman.org/ebooks.pdf.

See also stallman.org/amazon.html for more bad things Amazon does.

Thus, I agree to boycott Amazon, but it won't change anything, since I'd never consider buying from an organization that treated me that way, even if it didn't abuse its workers and evade taxes.

Always-listening, always-watching computers are supposedly meant to serve people, but when they're full of nonfree software they are actually tools to subjugate people.

Many car companies now make cars that track where they go. The companies are trying to make this acceptable with weak promises about what they will do with the data.

Those policies are irrelevant because real protection for the driver's privacy consists of not tracking the car in the first place. If you own a car, make sure its tracking hardware is deactivated.

FISA Judge To Yahoo (in 2008): If US Citizens Don't Know They're Being Surveilled, There's No Harm.

Two men in Ohio spent 40 years in prison because thugs bullied a teenager into testifying against them.

At least they weren't executed.

GCHQ Whistleblower Calls for Public Interest Defense.

It's a rare moment in the US when black victims get justice for the violence of whites.

When Police Spy on Journalists Like Me, Freedom Is at Risk.

A Haitian opposition march was attacked by supporters of the president, who was imposed by the US through a twisted election.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Walmart pretends to be trying to protect the environment, but it gets its electricity from coal.

Utah's legislature proposes to shut off the water supply to the NSA's data center.

A subtle point in the TPP would make transitory copies (such as loading a program into memory to run it) copyright infringement.

Iran has worked around western sanctions at the cost of destroying its environment. The result is dust storms.

You might think that humanity won't wake up to the dangers of global heating and extinction until it sees catastrophes, but the catastrophes are already happening, and the only awakening is by businesses that want to abolish environmental regulations.

Many US cities arrest blacks far more often than whites. Ferguson is not the worst.

The UK government is losing billions of pounds by not keeping track of tax give-aways to businesses.

This while they nickle-and-dime the unemployed and disabled into homelessness.

Aarhus has an interesting personal active approach towards people returning from fighting in Syria, which seems to have been effective at preventing more youths from going there.

Meanwhile, the UK plans a system of internal exile for such people.

U.S. Firms Accused of Enabling Surveillance in Despotic Central Asian Regimes.

UK journalists are suing the thugs for spying systematically on them as they covered protests.

Thugs have long regarded democracy as their enemy; what is new is to have proof.

New Report Finds Little Oversight of Surveillance, Intelligence Agencies in Latin America.

US citizens: call on Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline.

Menlo Park's license plate cameras recorded car license plates 263,000 times in a few months. Just one of them helped solve a crime. All the rest were massive general surveillance.

The question of cost is a side issue; what's wrong here is injustice.

Alayne Fleischmann has gone public about how JP Morgan and Attorney General Holder conspired to cover up JP Morgan's crimes. She offered her testimony several times, but they worked together to stop this from coming out in court and to avoid really punishing the bank.

It should be noted that "securitization" of home mortgages is a harmful practice even if it is not done fraudulently. Your mortgage should be owned by a local bank that has the power to adjust it if you fall behind, and the incentive not to give you a mortgage without confidence you can pay it. Thus, I think that the practice should be stopped entirely.

Rich countries have not pledged enough to do the job of helping poor countries cope with the effects of global heating.

But it is a hopeless job, because the costs will go up each decade. If we don't stop the heating, sooner or later the poor countries will be overwhelmed, followed by the rich countries.

Thugs in Brisbane, where the G20 meeting was held, brutally attacked a man with no legs. They will probably claim he was trying to run away.

Of course, the thugs accused the man of various crimes. I am skeptical.

Harvard students have sued Harvard for mismanaging the school's endowment by investing it in fossil fuel companies.

These companies' value is inflated by the carbon bubble, which has to pop some day.

The American Nursing Association has given its support to a Guantanamo nurse who faces a military trial for refusing to participate in force feeding.

North Dakota's public bank is more profitable than US private banks.

The oil boom in North Dakota is not an occasion for humanity to rejoice, given the grave danger it contributes to. But that is orthogonal to the merits of a public bank.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation helped develop a treatment, then sold its share of the patent rights to a company that is charging almost $400,000 per year. Most of the patients can't afford that.

Other countries' national health systems will negotiate a price that will probably be far lower. US law, paid for by Big Pharma, does not allow this.

A proposal: instead of network neutrality regulation, create a competitive market for ISPs.

Causing competition between ISPs is a good idea, but I would not trust that to replace network neutrality. Four competitors are too few to make a truly competitive market. And even companies in a competitive market impose nasty terms on customers. Consider the hotel that "fined" customers for bad reviews. It competes with lots of other hotels but that didn't stop it from pulling a fast one.

Competition would pressure ISPs to improve their performance, price, and customer service. Those are things that customers notice all the time. We need common carrier regulation also for all the things that are less visible.

US officials refused to explain to the Committee Against Torture why nobody was prosecuted for US government torture.

Bankers, after being led to think about their work, become more likely to cheat than people in general.

In other words, it's not that bankers are inherently dishonest but rather than working as a banker encourages dishonesty.

The Swedish appeals court did not cancel the arrest warrant against Julian Assange, but pressured the prosecutors to accept his invitation to question him in the Ecuadorian embassy.

If the Swedish prosecutors were really concerned about the sexual allegations against Assange, they would interview him in the embassy so as to advance that case and either charge him or not. Their refusal to do this demonstrates that they are using the allegations as a pretext to send Assange to the US.

Women are speaking about their abortion experiences to counter the harassment against women who have abortions.

If anything, it's not aborting a pregnancy that raises questions as the human population continues to grow.

Thugs attacked protesters in Ferguson already, after creating pretexts, although the decision on prosecuting Michael Brown's killer has not been announced.

A UN agency called for prosecution of North Korea's ruler in the International Criminal Court. North Korea responded by threatening to throw a tantrum.

This UN move was entirely justified, but I wish it would go after the even more flagrant human rights violators such as Bush II.

Australia's government has sunk to shameless self-contradiction.

Frackers polluted clean aquifers in California with fracking waste water.

The weakened USA Freedom Act is so weak that Obama plans to revive it.

US citizens: sign this petition to amend the constitution to stop the rich from using their money to dominate US elections.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Republicans used Twitter to disguise their violation of US election laws.

Journalist Sarah Lacy writes about how an Uber executive said he would punish her critical journalism by using lies to smear her family life. It was the culmination of years of contempt for the company's drivers and passengers.

By the way, I don't see anything wrong in offering taxi rides driven by attractive models of either sex. Since I believe sexual services should be legal, I would not object if they offered to fly you while driving you. However, this need not and should not be accompanied by Uber-style contempt towards women (and men).

UK spending cuts have reduced tax income and caused a fresh budget deficit. The insane remedy is to cut spending more, and never mind that it has failed in its ostensible goal, because the real goal is to reduce workers to desperation.

In teenage girls' fascination for the Hunger Games, they show a form of political maturity.

The world of The Hunger Games is a projection of today's starve-the-poor plutocracy. It's much worse than today's USA, but the America of 2100 might be even worse. If globalized manufacturing collapses, we might be left with nothing but low-tech.

Refuting the claim that unemployment insurance causes unemployment: a study shows it is mostly false.

Note that the claim really argues for lower wages; but US wages for many jobs are not enough to live on, so they must be raised.

The US has many other policies that discourage employment, which we should change. For instance, charging employers for social security and medical care is a mistake. That money should be obtained by taxing rich people and businesses' income, independent of how much they pay to workers.

The Illinois legislature is considering raising the minimum wage but banning cities from adopting a higher minimum.

This measure would be harmful to workers. The statewide raise will probably not be enough, and living in Chicago is even more expensive.

A hotel charged guests extra, on their credit card, for posting a bad review of the hotel. The hotel claimed it was entitled to charge them because it had put that in the contract guests are made to sign. I suppose most guests don't read the contract; but if they did, having arrived and with perhaps nowhere else to stay, refusing to sign would not be much of an option.

Hotels should not be allowed to write their own conditions arbitrarily to impose on guests.

Many big US companies pay their CEOs more than they pay in taxes.

When Mega Corporations Get Mega Tax Breaks, We All Pay.

Financialization of rental residences means that people live in financial instruments.

Under Putin, the former KGB now runs Russia and has returned to actively harassing and intimidating journalists and dissidents.

By contrast the US style of massive surveillance is done quietly, so people don't realize how much they are being tracked. Digital technology means that both the US and Russia have a higher level of general surveillance today than was found in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could not tell where everyone went all the time; its agents could follow only a limited set of people.

Although the NSA and FBI don't entirely run the US, the level of oversight by Congress and courts is very weak.

US citizens: call on the Secretary of the Interior to cancel a wolf-killing competition.

The defeat of the USA Freedom Act could, ironically, backfire and abolish part of the PAT RIOT act, reducing mass surveillance even more.

However, we need more than just to abolish the PAT RIOT Act, since that pertains only to certain methods of massive surveillance.

http://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.

Prisons can help prisoners escape from gangs. Like other forms of rehabilitation, it costs money and requires not adopting the goal of being as tough as possible.

US citizens: call on the US not to allow Shell (or anyone) to drill for oil in the Chukchi sea. A spill would turn it into the Upchukchi sea.

The USA Freedom Act, already weakened so much that even Obama supported it, was defeated in the Senate.

This means our next battle will be against renewal of the PAT RIOT act.

Due to the shortage of ambulances, people who go to the MSF treatment center in Sierra Leone because they might have Ebola are sure to catch it by the time they arrive.

Secret disenfranchisement lists denied Democrats 4% of the vote, and enabled the Republicans to steal control of the senate.

Netanyahu plans a "harsh" retaliation to the murder of 5 Israelis.

This harshness will be on top of the harshness of decades of Israeli occupation. The killers were retaliating for a much larger set of murders and other crimes committed against Palestinians by Israelis, together with persistent oppression.

Retaliating against them with additional crimes (house demolitions, which are illegal collective punishment) and additional persistent oppression is more likely to inspire more Palestinians to retaliate in their turn.

I suppose Netanyahu knows that.

Trying to silence individuals considered misogynist has become a substitute for campaigning to change sexist institutions.

The US plans to allow fracking in the George Washington National Forest.

Solitary confinement regularly drives prisoners mad, but the US government continues to do it and to misrepresent it.

Ten illegal attacks on protesters that thugs in Ferguson might plausibly do.

2.5 million children in the US were homeless at some time in 2013. That's up 8% from the previous year.

Traffickers now recruit or even force teenagers to run boats full of people from Africa to Europe.

Most of the people using Britain's food banks went there directly because of government policies of harshness to the poor.

CO2 emissions must be cut to zero by 2070 to avoid disaster.

How much it will cost to achieve this depends on how actively we cut emissions before 2030.

The lack of toilets in rural India goes with gender discrimination that makes it even worse for women.

Energy drinks are dangerous for children.

A US coal company is accused of falsifying its environmental reports.

The slowly-closing ozone hole has altered climate and ecosystems in the southern hemisphere.

A male TV presenter wore the same suit every day for a year, just to prove that nobody cared in the slightest about his clothing style, unlike the way viewers treated his female counterpart.

Students in the UK marched on Parliament to make university gratis again.

The Greenpeace boat that was captured by Russia has now been captured by Spain.

Human Rights Watch reports on political prisoners in Uzbekistan, which relates to the forced labor of picking cotton.

A survey of clod computing practices.

Mainstream media continue to parrot the Obama regime's claims that the casualties of drone attacks are mainly "militants".

Astroturf and intimidation are the proposed methods to gain approval of an "backup" alternative to the Keystone XL pipeline.

A Spanish navy boat rammed a Greenpeace boat that was interfering with oil drilling.

In Nairobi a mob of men stripped a woman because they disapproved of her miniskirt. This led to a protest in favor of women's right to dress as they wish.

The idea that revealing clothes are "not African" is ludicrous given that women in many parts of Africa did not cover their breasts until Europeans taught them prudery.

Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon proceeds over the murder of land defenders.

A Briton was convicted of possessing a copy of a book about how to make a bomb, after a secret trial.

This case illustrates the principle that possession of a copy of a publication must never be illegal. Such prohibitions are outright tyranny, and so is a secret trial.

The governor of Missouri declared an emergency, preemptively attacking expected protests over the expected decision not to prosecute the thug that killed Michael Brown.

The governor was asked to appoint a special prosecutor but refused. Looks like he's on the side of the thugs.

The Australian government nullified environmental planning requirements for a giant coal mine by saying the environmental impact study could be done after the mine is running.

Campaigns to silence people whose views we dislike endanger a fundamental freedom.

This includes even PISSI, the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

US citizens: call on the EPA, in reducing power plant CO₂ emissions, not to encourage fracking.

Everyone: Send a message of support for Ghoncheh Ghavami.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: support a proposed EPA regulation to reduce ozone pollution.

A teacher's resignation letter: "my profession no longer exists" due to bizarre school reforms.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's permitting system for pipelines and other gas and oil facilities is designed to let companies have what they want.

Germany's law punished WiFi network owners for what people download through those networks. The result is — very few publicly usable WiFi networks.

This law is unjust because (1) it is a system of collective responsibility, conscripting anyone that has a WiFi net as an enforcer, and (2) the War on Sharing is unjust in its entirety.

It would be ironic if a mere economic consideration leads to elimination of this unjust law. In the mean time, Germans should operate WiFi networks without passwords, to refuse conscripting as enforcers in the War on Sharing.

Even the US Supreme Court cites junk science to interfere with abortion.

Elizabeth Warren: Corporations Are Taking Over the Courts with the GOP's Help.

I suspect they got help from some "Democrats", too.

Is there room on Earth for humans and wildlife?

Sometimes it is justified to evict humans from an area so that other species can survive. After all, we humans occupy so much land on Earth, and we tend to take all the land there is.

Mexico is revealed as corrupt from top to bottom.

Peña Nieto's election was corrupt too.

But it was the reaction to the killing of protesting students that ended society's willingness to tolerate it.

A refugee who escaped from North Korea sends balloons over the border to teach the people of North Korea the idea of freedom.

The CIA believes arming Syrian rebels to fight PISSI is hopeless, and Obama knows this.

So who does he think he is fooling when he proposes to do more of this?

The Rosebud Sioux tribe says that building the Keystone XL pipeline would be an act of war.

Yes, it would be — against the whole world, not just them.

Accusing Putin of waging an "information war" by supporting anyone that criticizes the west.

There is some truth in this; however, western governments deserve a lot of criticism, Putin or no Putin. Indeed, they do a substantial amount of the same things.

The polar bear population on Alaska's north coast has fallen 40% in 10 years. Few young bears have survived.

Rodney Reed is about to be executed for the murder of his lover, but she may really have been killed by her jealous thug fiance. The investigation did not consider the thug seriously as a suspect.

The St Louis thug chief accused all the protesters, journalists and bystanders teargassed and attacked in Ferguson of being "criminals".

Nurse Kaci Hickox condemns the politicians that want to impose unnecessary and harmful quarantines in order to look like they are protecting us.

Rich people think that the idea that geoengineering could make global heating go away is likely to encourage them to go on burning fossil fuels.

The fallacy is that geoengineering is just an idea, not a real solution.

Australia gave business representatives accreditation to the G20 but denied it to union representatives.

Documents show US drug companies wined and dined doctors to get them to prescribe narcotic painkillers more.

These painkillers certainly have their place. It has been a long time since I took one, but they are far better than pain. However, these sales tactics (for any drug) corrupt medicine and must not be tolerated.

In Venezuela, some people in the opposition are being prosecuted for expressing happiness about an assassination.

I managed to see some of Inés González Árraga's tweets; they were quite hostile to the government, but did not make threats or call for violence.

German Spy Agency Wants To Buy Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Order To Undermine SSL Security.

US citizens: urge your senators to vote for the USA Freedom Act

I suggest you add, as I did, that this is not enough to restore our privacy.

The IRA protected rapists within its ranks much like the Catholic Church and some sports teams.

Evidence that the gender pay gap can't be explained by anything other than bias.

US citizens: oppose rigging the electoral college.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

The thug that killed Michael Brown arrested a man for making a video of him, then lied about it (standard thug procedure).

US citizens: call on Obama to cancel spending a trillion dollars for replacing the US nuclear arsenal.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

The FBI used surveillance to try to pressure Martin Luther King Jr. commit suicide.

We know that the NSA now does surveillance to get data for blackmail.

The coal company government of Australia fought to the bitter end inside the G20 meeting to undermine actions against global heating.

A series of bank scandals, leading to large fines, are the predictable result of deregulation.

I suspect that the fines are not big enough to motivate the bank executives and shareholders to try to prevent more corruption. In the US, they aren't. The result of inadequate fines is that the executives would like another corrupt scheme to make a lot of money followed by an inadequate fine.

Complicated and changing banking systems will tend to offer new opportunities for corruption. Let's have a simple banking system that changes little.

Africans who recover from Ebola face ostracism by ignorant neighbors who don't understand they are not contagious any more.

Environmental groups are suing to deny Shell permission to harass, capture and kill walruses in drilling operations in the Chukchi sea.

Melting sea ice due to global heating is making it hard for walruses to find food. To have a chance to survive, they need what protection we can give them.

Palestinian rights activist Rasmea Odeh faces imprisonment and loss of US citizenship because she didn't mention a criminal conviction in Israel, which she says was a false confession that was beaten out of her.

I see the point that she ought to have mentioned the conviction and said it was false, rather than hiding the issue. Strictly speaking, what she did was wrong. However, it's also clear that she had reason to fear a second injustice would result from the first.

Since all she did was break a rule, not hurt anyone, the court ought to seek to remake the decision properly, as it should have been made given all the pertinent information.

Revealed: How [UK] Coalition Has Helped Rich by Hitting Poor.

US privacy and search law doesn't know how to cope with the indiscriminate surveillance of phony cell phone towers.

Surgeon Mads Gilbert, who treated the wounded of Gaza while Israel attacked, says he will not let Israel stop him from returning to Gaza.

Texas Oil Regulator Says It Will Not Honor Town's Vote To Ban Fracking.

It's Dangerous to Be So Cozy with the Gulf's Autocrats.

On the other hand, the forces opposing them may turn out to be PISSI.

A US woman who had a heart attack faces bankruptcy because the ambulance took her to "the wrong hospital" where her insurance did not cover the costs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Medical costs are a common cause of bankruptcy in the US, because the medical system is totally broken. We need a national health system.

Big US cable companies spent 8 million dollars to buy support in the last election.

The "Justice" department admitted that it misled an appeals court regarding secrecy of "national security" letter surveillance orders — once the EFF caught the fib.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Hong Kong protest leaders wanted to go to Beijing to try to talk with Chinese officials, but they were denied entry.

Thug departments make lists of what kinds of cars to seize from hapless members of the public.

Some states have tried to restrict civil forfeiture, or stop thug departments from keeping what they confiscate. The US government works with thug departments to circumvent those restrictions.

Forfeiture is punishment without trial. Many of the victims are never even charged. It ought to be considered unconstitutional.

Israel's "Minister of Home Security" publicly said thugs should to carry out summary executions.

Amazon and Hachette have resolved their dispute about ebook prices. This will please those who just want to "get a book right now" and don't care about anything deeper.

Using the Amazon Swindle makes you stop lending books to your friends — which means you're not their friend any more.

Wall Street likes Clinton better than it likes Obama!

Apparently he hasn't been a total pushover, and they think Clinton will be.

So many companies have dropped ALEC that it has lost 1/5 of its funding and is running at a deficit.

That means we should campaign even harder to convince more companies to drop ALEC.

US citizens: call on Obama to order federal contractors to pay workers a living wage.

Everyone: tell Walmart to pay workers $15 an hour.

Everyone: call on Luxembourg to stop facilitating tax-dodging.

US citizens: call on the FCC to instate true network neutrality.

Everyone: tell eBay to quit ALEC.

US citizens: call on Obama to block Keystone XL and apply global heating considerations to all federal projects.

The US government carries fake cell phone towers in planes to identify people on the ground.

In India, women are pressured or forced into sterilization, sometimes because they are poor or low-caste.

This practice is an injustice, but incentives for sterilization are not the same as compulsion. If people are so poor that they desperately jump at any incentives, that doesn't mean the incentives are wrong, but rather that society is too unequal.

A law such as China's one-child-per-family law would be fair and necessary in India.

Plans for recording all Australians' phone contacts are meeting opposition in parliament.

This is wise, given how the Obama regime used phone records to find a whistleblower in the US.

Will the UK government investigate the thugs' attack on striking miners, which was followed (as usual) by trying to frame them?

US citizens: call on Obama to respect journalists and journalism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

British spying on journalists and lawyers directly threatens Americans and people in other countries.

Conservatives have political control of the English-speaking world because the traditional left parties have lost the spirit to disagree with their assumptions.

In the US, rigging elections through voter-suppression and gerrymandering help them do it.

The morale problem with the US ICBM corps is not just a matter of details. It comes from the nature of its activity.

US citizens: call on Congress to reject plans to encourage export of fracked gas.

Journalist Rafael Marques de Morais: 'No politician, however strong, will stop me doing my job'. But they sure try hard.

Robot watchmen are in their infancy, but if they work well in 10 years, they could put a million Americans out of work.

They carry cameras that can be viewed over the internet. We know from experience that many users will not alter the default password, so anyone will be able to watch through their cameras. Quite a joke that will be on whoever uses them.

The latest bad idea: farm out servers to lots of buildings so that their waste heat can provide heat for the buildings.

That would be efficient in winter; not so much in summer. But what about the privacy implications?

The idea of "the cloud" means "Don't ask who stores your data (and can look at it); don't concern yourself with who does your computing (and controls how it is done). Put your blind faith in you-don't-know-who."

With this scheme, you put your faith in an unidentified homeowner as well as several unidentified companies.

Here's a better idea. Get your own servers to heat your water, and store your own data in them.

Berkeley California disregarded the drink companies' ad campaign and approved a tax on soda.

The tax should apply to all drinks that contain sugar. For instance, fruit juice as sold often includes a lot of added sugar; so it is not good for you. I have stopped drinking all drinks that have sugar, with occasional exceptions when there is something special available.

Australian thugs did not arrest protesters for carrying banners and wearing Anonymous masks, but did arrest someone for having a gas mask.

A gas mask is not an offensive weapon, so prohibiting them is inexcusable.

The US admitted torture practices to the UN. Next step: correct them, and hold the guilty accountable.

Dubya is still lying about Iraq.

US citizens: call for a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, which endanger the bees that pollinate crops and wildlife.

The executives of the company that made thalidomide used political pull to escape punishment.

Major UK ISPs have added political censorship to their sexual censorship.

The American Psychological Association will investigate how in 2002 it revised its code of ethics to permit its members to participate in Bush regime torture.

Bravo for James Risen, who is also standing up to a threat of imprisonment by the Obama regime for protecting his sources.

The US-China climate pledge will be harder for China than for the US.

Too bad that it isn't enough to avoid disaster. Both countries must do more.

To stop Britons from going to fight for PISSI, the UK government proposes punishment without trial, imposed arbitrarily by border control agents and airlines.

Boko Haram captured Chibok, the town where it kidnapped around 300 schoolgirls earlier this year.

US citizens: Thank Obama for making a climate deal with Russia.

US citizens: support Wall Street pay reform to end incentives for bad investments.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: call on Congress to resist bills to promote fracking or undermine food safety.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Where is the real excitement about Ms Clinton as president?

Relating devastation in the Philippines to corrupt debt, and the Ebola epidemic to economic colonization.

Walmart workers are holding a sit-down strike to protest repression against attempts to organize.

I am sad that this links to ustream.com, which can't be viewed without nonfree software. To develop a free front end for ustream would be a very useful project. In the mean time, please don't ustream, and please don't stream with ustream.

The mere presence of a cell phone tends to make discussions about meaningful issues shallow.

On the other hand, if you do have a meaningful discussion about an important issue, such as how to resist plutocracy, carrying cell phones will pre-alert the NSA about who you are talking with.

Using text messages for a dispute is a recipe for escalating them. (We old-timers discovered this fact about email back around 1980.)
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

A heatwave in Brisbane will give G20 delegates a hint of what the fossil fuel companies want to do to the world.

"Improved" lampposts do various kinds of spying.

Fining the unemployed in the UK is not pushing them to get jobs, only making them dependent on food banks.

Raising the minimum wage, and abolishing zero-hours contracts, would circulate more money among the poor and thus create more jobs. That would get these people working.

Arnold Abbott says he will continue feeding homeless people in Fort Lauderdale "as long as there is breath in my body."

France ordered Google to delete an article from search results world-wide.

This reminds us of the danger of services provided by multinational companies that operate in countries that limit what the companies can do. In other cases it goes beyond this fairly mild requirement (which applies only to searches for a person's name).

Australians buried their heads in the sand to show what Abbott is doing regarding global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

Documents show Shell disregarded safety in Nigeria and then tried to cover up the damage.

Australia has banned a peace activist from the G20 event area, and refused to say why.

Perhaps because he would do some sort of nonviolent protest.

EU bureaucrats have abolished the position of Chief Scientific Adviser.

1/3 of natural "world heritage" sites face environmental threats.

"Democratic" senator Landrieu is trying to win a runoff election by pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Elizabeth Warren states what the US government's agenda should be, and what it should not be.

A teacher in the UK is being prosecuted for having sex with a 16-year-old student, after he boasted of it to his friends.

He now says he feels "disgusted", but I think that is only what someone told him to say, or convinced him to feel.

Every secondary school should aim for all of its graduates to be fully capable in sexuality; none should be excluded from participation in sex due to lack of proper experience. Therefore, the school should have several sex teachers, adults with whom students can learn to be comfortable with sex and confident in pleasing their lovers. They would also learn good habits for avoidance of disease and pregnancy.

US citizens: tell your senators to vote against the Keystone XL pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: oppose "Republibama" government.

This page has been found to work with LibreJS enabled.

Artists protesting against surveillance still naively presume that it is possible to flood the NSA with so much data that it will not provide effective surveillance.

That would have been true 20 years ago. Nowadays the NSA can easily have computers find the interesting bits and discard the rest.

The UK government now demands that companies illegally spy on their customers.

Fascists and neo-Nazis are a significant force in Ukraine; it's not just a Putin fantasy.

On the good that unions do, and the bad that they don't do.

Peabody Energy (operator of the world's biggest coal mine) ran the "energy forum" at the corrupt G20 meeting. It took outside protesters to bring in even the slightest mention of global heating.

Uzbekistan Students Stage Rare Protest Against Forced Labour in Cotton Fields.

The US government investigation of CIA torture seems to have been a whitewash; many victims were never even interviewed.

The Neocon Plan for War and More War.

Where Obama's potential successors stand on global heating.

350.org comments on Obama's carbon deal with China.

The Islamist rebels in the Sinai have joined PISSI.

US employers are denying workers their rights by contracts that impose arbitration.

NATO says Russian tanks are invading Ukraine. Russia denies this, but that denial is worthless. Unfortunately, we can't assume NATO is telling the truth either. If it is true, they should appear in fighting soon enough.

Unidentified drone aircraft are flying around the US and often come close to airliners.

Sooner or later there will be a collision.

A Paraguayan writer faces imprisonment for supposed plagiarism.

Plagiarism is a form of dishonesty, so it is generally wrong; but except in cases where it has been the basis for fraud, it should not be a crime.

The US secretly pays compensation to the families of civilians killed by US drone attacks in Yemen.

Paying compensation for killings is considered appropriate in Yemen, so the US should do this openly and win respect. What is wrong is the refusal to admit that US attacks kill civilians.

Shi'ite militias in Iraq are applying PISSI's bloody practices towards Sunnis they conquer.

The consequence is that Sunnis must support PISSI or be massacred. This is the best news that PISSI could have hoped for.

Obama says that torture is banned for US personnel everywhere in the world.

The EU Needs to Crack Down on the Real Scroungers — Tax Avoiders.

The US-China deal about curbing greenhouse gas emissions is a milestone, but not enough to avoid disaster.

To do this, and increase energy provision as planned, China will have to develop enough renewable energy to power the whole US.

Even though the effort will be heroic, if it isn't enough to prevent disaster, China must do more (and so must the US, Europe, Australia, India, etc).

Republican denialists say they will sabotage the deal.

A movement for anti-privatization attempts to undo what was corruption in the first place.

I think that corrupt privatizations should be cancelled, pure and simple, so that the privatizers can't profit from it.

Thugs in Brazil kill six people per day.

Why Welfare Is Not About Them And Us.

If you want to buy that book, please support a local bookstore, and above all don't get it from Amazon.

Global heating will make ocean "dead zones" bigger in several ways.

Once human civilization crashes, however, we will stop dumping lots of fertilizer into the ocean. At that point, the dead zones may cease.

Fruit drinks for children are full of sugar.

I generally drink water or unsweetened tea. At least my beverages don't make me fat.

"Forfeiture", i.e. legalized robbery by thugs, is going strong in the US.

Forfeiture is an injustice because it is punishment without trial. Indeed, many of the victims are never charged with any crime.

Obama called for real network neutrality.

Will the FCC heed him?

Hong Kong is planning violence against the student protesters.

The UK is apparently investigating an anti-blacklisting group and its activists because they threaten to show how the state colluded in blacklisting workers.

Putin is pouring money into the Crimea to win the support of some; others face unemployment or confiscation. Those who disagree with the annexation of the Crimea face imprisonment.

The UK government spied on MPs' confidential phone calls with prisoners.

The UN will try to hold US officials accountable for US torture practices.

In the UK, obesity rates are linked to the number of of fast-food outlets in a neighborhood, and both tend to be high where poor people live.

This does not demonstrate what is the cause and what are its effects. For instance, it may be that poor people eat badly because they feel stressed, or that eating better requires time, money, kitchen equipment or access to broader range of ingredients, which they don't have.

Through sleight of hand, Australia's plutocratic government has eliminated the goal that economic growth should be fair.

G20 thugs will arrest protesters for wearing masks even though a judge says they can't.

Detroit's bankruptcy plan demands the highest sacrifice from workers and residents. Rich creditors had to do much less.

It is another example of the general practice of crushing the non-rich. When they become desperate and act accordingly, the rich can demonize them as "scroungers" so as to justify crushing them further.

Books that have been banned in the Guantanamo prison.

An outbreak of illness in an Indian sterilization clinic focused attention on India's gratis sterilization program.

India's population is still growing, which hampers efforts to reduce poverty and contributes to future global heating. Thus, sterilization programs are extremely important — but the job should be done with proper sanitation and technique.

US citizens: Thank Obama for calling for real network neutrality.

Australian thugs confiscated protesters' projectors that were meant to display images on walls at the G20 event.

If they say it was because they suspected these projectors were weapons, why don't they put the projectors back now that they know they are projectors? Obviously, this is just an excuse to silence protest, on behalf a government set on killing millions of people.

G20 countries are spending 88 billion dollars a year to find more fossil fuel reserves.

This is a total waste, since we already know of 5 times as much reserves as we can burn without causing global disaster.

In Vienna, a model shows what could have been built for the money spent to bail out a big bank.

I think bank bailouts should be done in return for equity in the bank. For big bailouts, the previous owners should surrender all their equity.

Since the US does not fund good solutions to social problems, it dumps those affected into prisons to make them disappear for a while.

Afterwards they typically return worse than before.

Israel is planning to change election rules to keep the Arab political parties from being represented in Parliament. As in the case of US Republicans, the aim is to be able to claim to have a democracy while not really having one.

I disagree with Ms Zoabi on one point: kidnapping (or killing) civilians for a political purposes is indeed terrorism. The forces of repression continually try to stretch that word to apply it to whatever displeases them, but it does have a valid meaning and that act fits it.

Which is not to say that that act justified Israel's repressive response which was apparently designed to provoke Hamas into giving an excuse to attack Gaza.

Anyway, Ms Zoabi's opinions are no excuse for legal discrimination. And prosecuting anyone for insulting thugs (or anyone else) is obvious injustice.

Stop Investing in Colombian Blood: Land Activists Appeal to the UK.

The UK has dropped its US-subservient objections to allowing Yunus Rahmatullah to sue over his torture.

Over a third of the species of freshwater fish are threatened.

The Italian scientists sentenced to prison for saying it was unlikely an earthquake would occur in L'Aquila have been exonerated on appeal.

What sorts of suffering global heating will cause in 30 or 40 years: it includes wars.

It is so warm in much of Alaska that bears have not hibernated.

The president of Mexico appears to have a corrupt relationship with a Chinese construction company.

Plutocratic control of American elections has been measured by a survey finding that 2/3 of Americans want to raise taxes on the rich, while hardly anyone in Congress proposes that.

A rich Tory MP bought some of the last low-rent apartments in London so as to quadruple the rent and make 93 families homeless.

That's plutocracy for you. Perhaps every plutocrat should be sentenced to 6 months' homelessness to see what it is like.

A study predicts 1/3 of the jobs in the UK will be eliminated during the next 20 years.

Either the unemployed must get decent support or they will be in penury.

US citizens: call for protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to fill all the empty judicial slots.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-22 because the old link was broken.]

I suggest mentioning that a few of Obama's nominees are famously right-wing "compromises" with the Republicans; they should not be confirmed now.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

The risks of global heating include irreversible consequences — problems that could not be corrected. The way to manage the risk is to reduce CO2 emissions.

US citizens: call on Obama to boost solar energy.

Obama took a stand in favor of full and true internet neutrality.

It is too bad he appointed an FCC commissioner who's against that. I can't believe he couldn't guess that someone from the ISPs would be against it.

Asylum-Seeker Conditions Inhuman And Unlawful, UN Committee Tells Australia.

Now that some of the murdered students corpse's have been identified by DNA, protests in Mexico have increased, so thugs are trying to discredit them by false-flag violence.

The Billion Dollar a Month Club: A Runaway Transfer of Wealth to the Super-Rich.

Median wealth has dropped by 43 percent since 2007.

US attacks against PISSI in Syria turned out to help Assad.

Alas, that is probably inevitable since PISSI and Assad are enemies and PISSI is worse than Assad. It is not obvious how to try to support the weak non-Islamist anti-Assad rebels in any meaningful way.