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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose deregulating banks. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Banks get away with too much already. Let's regulate banks so thoroughly that there will be no room for creativity or innovation in them.
US citizens: call on Ajit Pai to recuse himself from FCC decisions about Sinclair.
Come on, let's ajitate!
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank describe the violence of Israeli soldiers — which included sending dogs to bite them.
The Koch brothers have listed their successes in reshaping the US to serve the very rich.
It's not just Big Brother and gangsters that spy on people through their portable phones. Violent spouses do it, too.
Election Security Is a High Priority — Until It Comes to Paying for New Voting Machines.
It is hard to determine whether Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016 US election.
In today's climate, propaganda does not need to be sophisticated or nuanced to influence Americans.
Melting Arctic ice could expose toxic chemicals from the remains of Camp Century.
An experiment in using reason for debate on the internet.
Prominent right-wingers are joining in dustraction attacks on the students that survived the recent massacre. (By "dustraction" I mean throwing dust at people to distract from the real issue.)
250 or so PISSI fighters, and their families, were allowed to leave Raqqa in a truce deal. This was kept secret.
Excessive tourism is destroying coral reefs in Thailand and the Philippines.
There's a long history in the US of right-wing bigots saying that progressive protesters were paid actors.
Rich right-wingers have done this, so they accuse us of doing what they would do.
Poisonous toads from Asia are overrunning Madagascar. They will wipe out many native species if humans can't get rid of them.
Unsurprisingly, allowing company staff to do some of the inspection in pork plants makes inspection faster, cheaper, and less effective at preventing possible food poisoning.
US meat inspection is generally rushed and shoddy. That suits the meat processors, and they have lobbied hard for it.
Mattis said that the Department of Defense has no evidence proving that Assad dropped sarin gas bombs.
This confirms what Seymour Hersch said about the alleged attack in Khan Sheikhoun.
Oxfam has programs that teach girls how they can live without being prostitutes.
That's the only effective way to help them. As long as they need the money from prostitution, punishing them or their customers does not help them.
For the same reason, I think it is a mistake to fuss about whether Oxfam staff hire some of those prostitutes. It's a distraction from effective help, such as these programs.
Debt collectors regularly put unsuspecting debtors in jail, even for debts as little as two dollars.
Assad's forces are systematically bombing hospitals in Ghouta.
They have done this sort of thing before.
To use a gun against a killer, you need military training. The troll's absurd plan for school shootings is to train 20% of US teachers as soldiers.
To react quickly, you need frequent drill, too. If you train your response to that point, you might shoot someone rather than take time to think. Thugs do it, so why would teachers be immune?
An 11-point progressive agenda.
I support all these points.
What it took for independent journalist Iona Craig to find the truth of the effects of a raid in Yemen by Navy Seals.
Everyone: Call on companies to stop giving support to the NRA.
US citizens: Call on Mattis to free Toffiq al-Bihani, and to end imprisonment without trial.
Here's the message I put in.
Dear Secretary Mattis,I urge you to immediately transfer Toffiq al-Bihani, who has been imprisoned at Guantánamo without charge or fair trial since 2003. He faces no charges and the US already said there is no reason to keep him in prison.
Imprisonment without trial is vicious and the fact that the US practices this is a blot on our country. Secondarily, it inspires hatred which can express itself as terrorism. Justice and human rights demand that the US give each prisoner in Guantanamo a fair trial or release him. Those who are convicted should be treated according to the US constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
Those responsible for torture and enforced disappearance must be brought to justice in fair trial.
In the name of our country's honor, and the Constitution you have sworn to defend,
The bully's possible collusion with Russia could be criminal, but it is not as damaging as the wrongs we know he is doing.
A US company is already developing a robot to fight with humans.
Although China's social reliability score is set up by the state, a set of private businesses could do the same thing if we don't stop them.
Vote-counting machines that use a cellular modem to transmit results are connected by it to the internet, and therefore insecure.
People in Venezuela who have had organ transplants, if they are not rich, can't get the medicines necessary to protect the transplanted organs from their immune systems. People who need kidney dialysis are in trouble too, as many dialysis machines are broken.
Contrast this with the US where SCROTUS are trying to cut the funds to pay for these treatments for Americans that are not rich.
Security investigators and reporters in the US face lawsuits when they report flaws.
In the long term, the way to be safe is to insist on software that the users control — free software. This doesn't guarantee no bugs ever, but it means that the users can fix any bugs (and any malicious functionalities!) rather than being at the mercy of the one company that can do it.
Methane leaks from fracking in Pennsylvania have the same global heating effect as 11 coal-fired power plants. Much of this comes from abandoned wells, which no longer provide any fuel but still leak.
Most of the world won't mourn the end of the period of US hegemony, during which it has launched many wars and overthrown many governments to make the world safe for plutocracy.
I take exception to two of the points in the article. First, the "idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people" does not necessarily mean a communist dictatorship. It could refer to social democracy, such as the New Deal in the US.
Second, the brief US attack on Serbia was intended to stop violent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. I won't argue that this was the only or the best way to do it, but it wasn't bare-faced aggression and it did stop the attacks against Albanian Kosovars.
Reducing US world interventions won't necessarily mean peace. Chinese hegemony is not likely to care much about human rights either.
The resistance to gun control in the US fits in a broader tendency to cheapen human life.
Still we should keep in mind that only a powerful minority of Americans oppose stricter gun regulations.
The US hasn't got a lot of corruption in everyday life, but in bigger things it is as corrupt as can be.
The Burmese army is flattening all traces of Rohingya villages that it burned last year.
Republicans say we don't need gun regulations because dangerously insane people won't be able to buy guns, while opposing measures to block dangerously insane people from buying guns.
Disney's bogus bonus, which excludes the workers that are negotiating a contract.
The Stoneman Douglas had an armed thug for protection. While the shooting was going on, person took up a position at a door and did not go in.
I can't blame per much. To enter a building where someone else is shooting people is rather dangerous. Most likely the thug wasn't trained for that.
What this mainly proves is how foolish it is to expect some armed teacher to stop a massacre.
The Republican governor of Missouri faces charges for taking a nude photo of a lover without permission and then trying to blackmail her with it.
The aim of his blackmail attempt — not that it makes any ethical difference — was to enforce her silence about their affair.
The Democratic Party establishment is fighting hard for right-wing Democrat Fletcher against activist Moser.
I don't give to Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. I give to progressive candidates (as far as I can tell) and organizations that support them.
AMP is Google's plan to try to pressure web sites to become part of a single empire of the web.
Mobile operating systems that support cr…apps are similar in spirit — intended to lead people away from the interoperable web.
Javascript does it in another way.
A number of users are suing Microsoft for forcibly downgrading their computers from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
That's one way of protecting yourself from a universal back door. But it provides only a little protection. What you really need to do us switch to GNU/Linux.
Surveillance magnate Patrick Ryan wants to run for Congress as a Democrat.
With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?
Calling Russian manipulation "a new cold war" is somewhat of an exaggeration.
It is not necessary for the Russian troll system to be invincible for it to be important enough to condemn, or to prosecute US politicians that collaborated with it.
US citizens: Support commonsense gun control.
US citizens: Call on the Bureau of Land Management to protect California's deserts.
We Need Aid That Helps Locals, Not Multinationals and Bloated NGOs.
People that overtly call themselves fascists have started a political party in Italy.
"No ideology, only rhetoric" — sounds a bit like the troll.
A US appeals court ruled that government agencies can't fire employees over their private sex lives.
I hope that the Supreme Court eventually supports this decision, but I am not optimistic.
I refuse to criticize anyone for "adultery", because it consists of breaking a promise that many people find almost impossible to keep, and in many cases is bad for them. People make this promise because of social pressure that many do not see a way to resist. Under such circumstances, I refuse to criticize them for breaking it.
This is why I refuse to criticize the bully for having affairs with attractive celebrities.
The bully is doing tremendous harm to the US and the world. Let's not get distracted from this by peccadilloes.
Walmart's profits and stock price are rising, so it is eliminating some 10,000 management jobs.
I refuse to shop at Walmart in the US; I don't like the way it pays most of its employees so little that they need public assistance.
Measuring education in terms of increased income afterwards is missing the main point of education.
We used to acknowledge clearly that the purpose of education was to prepare people to be capable citizens of a democracy. The mere attempt to judge issues of education in narrow economic terms indicates a basic error.
The NAACP scores members of the US Congress on how they voted on civil rights issues in 2017.
Washington State is in the process of legislating a ban on fish farms that hold non-native fish, because if the fish escape it can cause permanent ecological damage. A Canadian company plans to sue using NAFTA.
This is possible due to the ISDS (I Sue Democratic States) provision of NAFTA.
Launching US indigenous tribes into a solar-powered economy.
Jonathan Smucker asked his congresscritter "how much the Koch brothers are getting in tax cuts and how much they're contributing to your campaign." The congresscritter had him thrown out.
Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts was a legal secretary in the Montana Department of Labor. When told he would have to work on subpoenas from the US immigration thugs, he immediately quit.
The UK government, as part of its policy of maximum cruelty to immigrants, is trying to squeeze out old people that are legally allowed to live there but haven't got documents to prove it.
The Concerted Attack On Public Sector Union Workers Is A Coordinated Effort Financed By Wealthy Donors.
Political attacks on immigrants can be a way to veil racism.
A Bahraini political prisoner has been sentenced to more years in prison for saying that Bahrain tortures political prisoners, and for insulting Salafi Arabia by criticizing its air campaign against Yemen.
He's surely right in criticizing that. As for the torture, if he says Bahrain uses torture he surely knows.
For either of those statements to be a crime is in itself sufficient to conclude that Bahrain is a repressive, evil state — if we didn't already know that.
Monsanto has given Avaaz a subpoena demanding the name and other info of everyone who signed a petition against glyphosate.
I used to sign Avaaz petitions, but they started using nonfree Javascript code, at which I decided not to sign or post them. But I have asked someone to check whether it is possible to sign them now.
International courts are taking small steps toward recognizing environmental degradation as a cause for compensation.
Compensation may be sufficient when the total damage is small compared to the wealth of humanity. However, the damage that global heating threatens to do will be so big that compensation is impossible. We must instead prevent it.
A Republican US senator told a security conference that the bully was planning to bomb North Korea to try to destroy its nuclear weapons capability.
Egypt is allowing selected people to leave Gaza during just four days.
Florida high school students went to the state capitol to demand gun control. Thousands of students left school to protest.
The school superintendent of Needville, Texas, declared he would suspend any students that walk out of school to protest.
I hope all the high school students in that district walk out to protest at his office, to show they are not going to be intimidated.
If he follows through with the threat to "suspend" them, they can organize a three-day teach-in, where they will learn things that are more important than what is normally taught in school.
Republican Pennsylvania state legislators are seriously planning to impeach most judges of the state's Supreme Court specifically for instating nonbiased legislative districts.
Can anything be done to stop them from seizing power?
US citizens: call on the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department to investigate the payment made to Stormy Daniels, which may have violated campaign finance laws.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on the state government to drop its support for the NRA.
Assad Regime Uses Barrel Bombs and Attacks Hospitals in Rebel-Held Eastern Ghouta.
Nestlé and Others Cashing in On U.S. Water Infrastructure Crisis.
Honduran thugs are raiding homes at night to arrest protesters against election fraud.
They have also shot and killed protesters on various occasions.
Republicans offer to exchange tiny steps towards gun control for passage of their bill to undermine all states' gun regulations.
I don't think it is sufficient to prohibit the sale of certain kinds of guns and accessories. We need to collect them and make them non-functional.
US gun owners overwhelmingly support some kinds of gun control regulations.
South Australia, a state in Australia, will aim to meet 25% of peak electric demand from storage — batteries and pumped hydro power. This goes with a target of 75% total electricity from renewable sources.
Global heating will expose cities to floods, droughts and heat waves, due to extreme weather. Most cities are not ready.
Precarious part-time employment is making children poor.
A Florida state representative's staffer promoted a conspiracy theory accusation against the activist students that survived the school shooting.
The UK sold surveillance equipment to the Philippines even as Do-dirty had set up death squads.
A defector reports that al-Shabaab imposes crushing taxes on the people it controls and conscripts 8-year-olds to train them as fanatical soldiers.
However, people still think that al-Shabaab courts are honest while government courts are corrupt.
Arizona Republicans have failed three times to defeat the state's independent election districting commission, and failed. Now they are trying again.
Since social isolation tends to make people sick, social help can keep people healthy.
On what is needed to put an end to sexual harassment by men that have power over women's careers.
Since the 1930s, the US has built racism into its infrastructure. Surely the bigot's infrastructure plan will do more of this.
An analyzed example of how the mainstream media legitimize US war crimes: the New York Times said that the US "stumbled into torture" and that drone attacks that kill civilians merely "go wrong".
Dubya pushed hard for use of torture, including finding subordinates to create legalistic excuses for it. As for the drone attacks, the US resists acknowledging that they kill civilians.
The US military's list of "global threats" doesn't change much: it's always calculated to appear to justify increased spending on every part of the military.
It's not clear that the "rogue states" are more rogue than the US, or that the US can't coexist peacefully with them.
The cheater openly endorsed rigging elections through gerrymandering.
The UK makes it a crime to say "move your fucking van".
I disapprove totally of what she said — she was talking to ambulance crew who had come to take a sick person to a hospital — but the state should not punish people for rude language.
A combination of two cheap drugs, important to avoid the dangerous mistake of taking one without the other, has been jacked up in price to the point that patients can't afford it.
US citizens: call on the Senate not to deregulate banks.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose budget bill amendments that would allow rich people to put even more money into political campaigns.
Arctic sea ice has reached a record low, less than ever in the past 12,000 years or more.
The school shooting in Florida was in a high school named after journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas because of her campaigns for women's rights, racial equality and preserving the Everglades.
An undercover thug in the UK infiltrated the animal rights group that released minks from cages where they were being bred, and participated in the action.
Releasing minks in Britain, where they are a harmful invasive species, was a significant act of ecological sabotage, comparable (though on a much smaller scale) to palm-oil plantations and oil pipelines. However, they were sure to escape some day, just as an oil pipeline is sure to leak from time to time. The root of the problem was breeding minks in a place where they would be dangerous. This should not be allowed.
For Republicans, the school shooting in Florida was a welcome distraction from condemnation for covering up the domestic violence of White House staff.
A new radio-tracking system for commercial drones would also potentially force them to land when they reach a prohibited area.
I don't know whether this includes a radio back door or not.
Israeli soldiers arrested Palestinian children because they were in the area where someone threw stones.
A book store in the US yielded to violent threats from supporters of Israel, by publishing a statement condemning the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Now students opposed to the occupation of Palestine have launched a nonviolent campaign calling on the bookstore to move back to a neutral stance.
I think it is wrong to accuse the bookstore of "suppression of literary freedom", but it is clear that that was the aim of those that made the threats.
UN Warns Australia Against Imposing "Draconian Penalties" on Journalists. This law could violate a treaty on human rights.
President Carter, a right-wing Democrat, began shifting US policies towards business and against democracy.
Carter has learned a lot since then, but he cannot undo what he did then.
Just 1 Degree C Changes Our Risk of Severe Weather.
E-books have hit a commercial setback.
However, not enough of a setback to make our freedom safe. Please help teach others to reject them.
The US immigration thugs are pushing for more and more spying on everyone.
Whatever they get, other agencies will get. Eventually the fourth amendment will be effectively a no-op.
Lawsuits are blocking Republican sabotage of environmental protection.
Restoration of electric power in Puerto Rico is held up because subcontractors fail to do their work.
I urge Puerto Ricans to do everything possible to convince potential buyers to refuse to buy its power grid. The less it is sold for, the less it will be necessary to pay to seize it back.
The UK government has banned protests in an ancient forest scheduled to be cut down to build a train line.
In general I support high-speed trains. They help replace air travel with something much more efficient (as well as pleasant). But the UK needs to get rid of the laws that make it so easy to destroy forests, and so easy to ban protests.
"Wage theft is the rule, not the exception, for low-wage workers." In the US, it adds up to 15 billion dollars per year, stolen from the people who can least afford to lose it.
The Trump Administration’s War on Workers.
If the UK leaves the EU, businesses and right-wing ideologues are organizing to take advantage of this by adopting the weaker food and drug safety standards of the US.
"After Florida, I see the NRA as nothing less than a terrorist organization."
But is that valid? Terrorism is a matter of intent: political influence through threats of violence. Does the NRA do that? Not directly. It doesn't threaten to shoot anyone.
However, in an indirect way, maybe it brings this about.
The NRA functions as a marketing arm for gun companies. Its program is to make Americans scared of gun crime, so that they will buy guns. Thus, it appears that a higher rate of gun crime is not merely a byproduct of the NRA's activity, but part of its plan.
Does that fit the definition of terrorism? I'd say it is on the borderline. In the end, I think it is better not to stretch the word this far. We can condemn an organization for wrongdoing without calling that wrongdoing "terrorism".
Cross-partisan discussion groups enable Americans to get to know people from the other side of politics.
Everyone: call on Los Angeles to fire the thug that shot a gun at a group of teenagers because they were crossing a lawn.
"Registered intermediaries" help young children testify about sexual abuse.
In the US, "recovered memory" therapists used to convince vulnerable people that they "remembered" being sexually abused while children — but the abuse had not really happened. Some people were imprisoned for years then exonerated.
It might be the case that these "intermediaries" are doing the same thing, some of the time. Or maybe they take care to avoid it. The article does not address the issue.
What is happening in Ethiopia?
This "state of emergency" shows something big is happening. What is it?
Oxfam faces an inexplicable climate of hostility, in which everything it says is taken as a sign of wrongdoing.
You can see this bias when people label this uproar with the terms "sex exploitation" and "sexual abuse". At that point enters the premise that doing business with a sex worker is a wrong that deserves condemnation. Then the attack typically condemns the organization because someone on its staff did this "wrong".
If an Oxfam staffer hires a country music band, a genre which I dislike rather strongly, should I say Oxfam has a music exploitation scandal?
Campaigning for the International Criminal Court to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan, and target the highest leaders responsible — starting with Dubya.
Australia has laws for protection of endangered species, but usually it only goes through the motions of trying, or not even that.
The Syrian Kurds in Afrin have asked Assad to defend them from Turkey. Erdoğan warned Assad that Turkey would attack Assad. And Assad's Russian backers, too?
It is very strange for a breakaway part of Syria to ally in effect with Syria (and thus maybe Russia). Even stranger to ally with Syria and the US at the same time. I don't know what to make of this.
How the UK told Qadhafi where to find exiled dissidents so he could kidnap them.
A study measured temperatures for the past 11,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. It has never been as hot as it is now.
Global heating effects are causing problems for aviation.
Look at the propaganda designed to dishearten people about the privacy of cash.
It takes a gently derisive tone towards some minor practical inconveniences of tracked digital payments, while suggesting they will soon be solved. The result is to disparage the idea that there is something serious at stake.
If you live in Sweden — or any other country — plan in advance to carry cash, and only pay cash in stores. If a store won't take cash, say "I'm going to another store that will."
You can easily think of bogus objections, if you are willing to exaggerate — so ignore them instead.
If you find yourself without cash one day, don't give up — just do better the next day.
And don't use a pay toilet no matter how they want you to pay. It is vicious and cruel to make people pay to use a toilet. I have money, and I could afford to pay, but some people can't. I have boycotted pay toilets for 10 years.
Texas has a new privatized prison, which pretends to be a "treatment program" for ex-cons, except that there is no treatment and prisoners are never released except to die.
The time to talk about preventing more massacres is March 24. (And before, and after.)
The rulers that lied to go to war with Iraq have not faced justice, but they still deserve it.
An undercover thug, sent to infiltrate dissidents that opposed fox hunting by pretending to love one of them, fell in love for real and resigned.
If the bully's wall is built, it would put bison and jaguars in danger in Mexico and the US.
180 already-endangered species would be harmed.
Is it possible to make openings that these animals could get through, and watch them closely enough that humans could not get through? Is it possible to make small holes for smaller animals to get through?
If this could be done, the wall would be a foolish expenditure but not a cause of extinction.
US citizens: tell Congress to reject the bully's privatization of infrastructure plan.
The UK eagerly sells arms to many tyrannical regimes, and the Tory plan for exiting the EU is to sell even more.
Provoking violent opposition won the Nazi Party more support, which enabled it to take over Germany. This is because the establishment, and the principal media, always gave the left more of its share of the blame. Even if the left did not engage in violence, it was blamed for any real or imaginary violence.
The bully's advisors appear to be following the same approach.
The article recommends expressing disagreement with Nazis by holding an event far enough away that it will avoid direct confrontation.
The Burmese government is reportedly bulldozing mass graves of Rohingya to cover up the massacres.
The question of the opaque accusation of "inappropriate" has reach a court. The lawyer of the person thus criticized, Mr Rush, asks how one can defend oneself from such an accusation. Do you say, "I don’t know what it was, but I didn't do it"?
Or do you say, "I don’t know what it was, but it wasn't wrong"?
This case illustrates the point that it is never legitimate to punish or rebuke someone on the grounds of "inappropriateness". For an accusation to be valid, it has to be concrete.
If we knew what Mr Rush was accused of doing, we might say it was wrong. Or we might not. At least we would have a question to think about.
But when the accusation says only "inappropriate", we have to reject it.
Here is the letter from the Taliban to the American people, calling for peace negotiations.
As you would expect, the letter contains exaggerations and false points that put the Taliban in a better light than it deserves.
However, the US had not exhausted peaceful ways to deal with that issue. The Taliban had expressed a willingness to discuss expelling al Qa'ida, not long before.
I hope the US has the decency to make peace.
US High school students are mobilizing for gun control, led by those whose friends were shot last week.
Gambia's president is moving to abolish the death penalty.
The plutocratist government of Tasmania pledges to enact a new law to repress protests, after the old one was overturned as unconstitutional.
Protests are a transient inconvenience. Extinction is forever.
Women who stand for something more important than fashion should not face arguments about the way they dress.
How foolish it is to judge a politician by per looks. I didn't refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because of her appearance. I didn't vote for Jill Stein because of her appearance. I chose based on their political stands.
This applies to male politicians, too. Americans have tended for a long time to elect for the (male) presidential candidate that has better looks. How foolish.
The neofascist right-wing in Italy is using hatred of immigrants.
Oxfam staff in Haiti are accused of threatening a witness to demand silence about their activities with prostitutes.
Hiring sex workers is not wrong; it is one of those things that prudes condemn for no good reason, and then try to drag everyone else into condemning too.
The danger of retribution by prudes is real and substantial, so the fear of retribution is rational. Sad to say, that fear leads some people to commit real wrongs, such as threatening violence.
To illustrate the general point, this used to be the case for homosexuals. It is not wrong to be homosexual or to have homosexual sex, but prudes condemned that for no good reason, and manage to drag society along with that prudery. To be a closeted homosexual was truly dangerous, and they were vulnerable to being blackmailed and coerced into doing real wrongs.
That is mostly no longer a problem for homosexuals in liberal countries today, because prudish prejudice against homosexuals no longer receives much open support. Instead we see the new prudish campaign against sex workers and their customers. That too can coerce people into doing real wrongs. You can see the campaign here.
The article is incoherent — argument from juxtaposition with derision. The closest it comes to validity is when it points out that Haitians may do sex work because they live in desperate circumstances.
It draws the wrong conclusion from that. The problem those Haitians suffer is not sex work as such, it is their desperate poverty. Sex work is one of the ways they cope with it. To help them would mean giving them improved circumstances in which they could easily avoid sex work, if they wish to.
The poverty of Haitians was not caused by Oxfam. Rather, it is the result of centuries of oppression: first slavery, then decades of war for independence, then the huge indemnity that France demanded in exchange for Haiti's independence, followed for many decades by tyranny supported or imposed by the US, from the Duvalier family to the presidents that the US selected after the US kicked out Aristide for the second time.
To get out of this desperate situation, Haitians need humanitarian aid, such as Oxfam provides, but above all they need self-government that is honest.
The prudish article does identify one practice of Oxfam which will tend to cause problems: giving its foreign staff a luxurious villa to live in, and more generally a life of luxury compared with the local people.
The problem is not a matter of any specific luxury they might pay for. It is that their lifestyle tends to distance them from the people they have come to serve. That can lead them to look down at the local people and consider their work nothing more than a career to make money from. In effect, they forget the point of their being there. That doesn't automatically cause them to act badly, but tends to lead them in that direction.
When Facebook sought advice about how to offer its dis-service to children, it consulted the experts that it funded, while giving independent analysts too little time to respond to the plan.
New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions.
Reverse-engineers defeated a Microsoft system of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) for Windows applications.
I would cheer for them, except that even once these applications' DRM is removed, they remain proprietary software — you use them at the cost of your freedom. An unauthorized copy of a proprietary program is a rather bad thing, almost as bad as an authorized copy of the same program.
To protect your freedom, you need to refuse to run the program. And refuse to run Windows, too.
Please don't refer to unauthorized sharing as "piracy". It is propaganda for the enemy.
Arguing for the precautionary principle: evaluating projects and plans by numerical risk assessment is unscientific, and systematically leads to too much risk.
The precautionary principle is easy to apply when "do nothing" is a fine alternative to the project being evaluated. Often that is the case, but it gets more difficult when inaction is dangerous too. Also, it has to be applied with a sense of proportion. Walking downstairs might result in a fall, but it would be absurd to reject a project because implementing it would require someone to walk downstairs.
"Throw Them Out": Plans to Eject Politicians "Beholden to the Gun Lobby".
The plan to give poor people one-size-fits-all imposed food packages will be bad for nutrition, inefficient for the government, and a give-away to big food companies.
There is no need to worry that Americans receiving food assistance money are splurging it on luxuries. Benefits for the poor in the US have been gradually cut, over the past 20 years, to the point where they can barely get by. Thus they are compelled to find the most inexpensive food.
US courts treat thugs as perfect sources of authority when they testify for the prosecution, but when they are sued for violence, they can always get off by pleading ignorance of the law.
"Peace Through Strength" Is a Racket — an excuse for letting military spending gobble more and more of the US budget.
It's not just a theoretical possibility that the Peace Through Strength Doctrine, or PTSD as the article abbreviates it, can encourage real war. Look at how many countries the US is fighting in.
That leads to ever more veterans with PTSD from the PTSD.
The cheater started diverting funds to his family friends even before being inaugurated.
Everyone: call on First Quantum not to invest in Pebble Mine.
US citizens: Call on the Senate to protect Mueller's investigation.
US citizens: call on politicians to stop taking money from the NRA.
In the long term, the biggest danger to children is global heating. Instead of obsessing about rare dangers, adults should focus on this one.
Oklahoma has cut taxes so much that it can't run schools any more. Teachers have to moonlight at Walmart.
Republicans have made it almost impossible to repeal the tax cuts, so the state is trapped on the road to disaster.
Sabotage that will bite Americans later: denying people the right to sue to protect their rights from businesses.
It was accepted constitutional law that the second amendment did conflict with gun control. Right-wing extremists campaigned for decades to gain enough power to change that.
Eliminating gun control, like eliminating abortion and birth control, are not really important to right-wing supporters. Rather, their leaders are expert at using these issues to build communities of supporters who are fanatical about them, and can then be led through them to support right-wing candidates in spite of all other issues and all their real interests.
For manipulating Americans, Facebook is the platform of choice.
Don't be so easy to manipulate — stop being a used of Facebook!
A Florida agency investigated the recent school killer, and concluded he wasn't likely to commit an actual crime.
Such estimates are inherently fallible. At least they looked at the situation.
The governor of Kentucky is so hot to deny medical care to poor people that he's willing to spend millions for the decrease in aid.
Someone warned the FBI about the Florida shooter, but the Miami office never received the message so it did not investigate him.
That appears to have been a mistake. Surely the system can be improved, but there is no way to eliminate mistakes. The FBI may able to prevent some such killings, but it could never prevent them all.
A bigger obstacle is that lots of people show the general signs of being possibly murderous, and only a few of them go on to try to kill anyone. So it would take quite a few investigations to prevent one crime. That gets to the point of oppressing lots of people who have not and will not do anything criminal.
On the other hand, if we got rid of large magazines, those who decide to kill won't be able to kill so many people.
We should also consider following Canada's gun regulations. According to Bowling for Columbine, Canadians can own guns, but there are strict regulations about how to store and carry them, which reduce the use of guns to shoot at people.
The bully's "infrastructure" plan proposes to make it hard for people to oppose leaky pipelines that can poison their water supplies.
Ajit Pai is under investigation for a conflict of interest for his elimination of the limits on media concentration, apparently intended to allow the right-wing propaganda broadcaster Sinclair to take over many more TV stations.
Uber is losing a lot of money every year, but we cannot tell how much because it releases only vaguely defined accounting information, insufficient to tell its real losses.
This is crucial because it can't keep this up indefinitely. Some day it will have to raise its prices quite a bit. If Uber customers patronize Uber so much now that its competitors disappear before that day, they will regret their actions when the price goes up.
An interview with the Zapatistas of Chiapas.
The Balearic Islands want to move fast to renewable energy, but the Spanish state demands to upgrade coal-burning plants instead of shutting them.
Some US states are moving toward voting systems that are less vulnerable to digital fraud.
What I fear most, in the area of centralized digital election fraud, is not that Russia will do it (though it might try to), but that US politicians will do it.
President Clinton was almost removed from office for having sex with Monica Lewinsky. How is it that the bully more or less gets away with it?
The article gives good reasons, but I'd like to add one more. Recall that the hardest charge against Bill Clinton was that he lied when he denied having sex with her. Republicans claimed to hold him to a standard of total honesty (which, of course, they did not meet). And he claimed to meet that standard.
The bully shows blatant contempt for the truth. As a result, to make a big deal about any one lie of his seems like missing the point.
My view is different. I did not criticize Bill Clinton for sex with Lewinsky — I considered it unimportant. I don't believe non-monogamy is wrong. As for lying about extramarital sex, I forgive that because I blame the unjustified pressure society puts on people to be or appear monogamous.
I criticized Bill Clinton for things that hurt or endangered millions of Americans, such as "welfare reform."
Likewise, I don't care if the bully had sex with models, porn stars, or accountants. I don't care if he paid them not to talk about it, or paid them to talk about it. Those things are unimportant. I condemn the bully for the gross wrongs he commits every day. There is no excuse for those.
American theocratic right-wing Christians have got rid of most of the principles that their Christianity used to mean to them.
However, a minor correction is called for. Roy Moore did not date children. He dated teenagers.
Facebook has imposed political censorship on Instagram, bowing to Russia.
Profiling the companies and people that fund the global heating denial campaign.
The flood of plastics that endangers animals in the sea is tied up with fracking.
California plans to eliminate fees for public colleges with an estate tax.
I am in favor, but this is just a small step towards taxing the rich properly.
A million Afghans have reported war crimes to the International Criminal Court.
Pity the poor sad criminal banksters at Wells Fargo — regulators should ease up on them, says the a big investor in the bank.
What about the Americans that are needy, like the 50% that are broke? When will you let up on them, rich guy?
A teacher in the US faces charges for violently dragging a student out of class for not standing up for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Students have the right to abstain from the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the US Constitution, which is what Americans' allegiance really ought to be directed towards.
Immigrants' representatives are suing the immigration thug agency, accusing it of selecting people to deport based on their political views, and planning to grab them at times no one will notice.
Salon magazine offers users two options: view surveillance ads, or mine bitcoin for the magazine.
In principle, I do not object to this, provided the implementation respects my privacy and my freedom. But I suspect that the implementation uses nonfree Javascript code. Can someone check that for me?
"Smart" cities are an excuse to replace participatory government with massive surveillance. Big Brother "knows" what you need.
US citizens: call for banning assault weapons and large capacity magazines.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose amendments that would open more channels for the rich to pay for political campaigning.
The Johnson Amendment is the law that prohibits churches from campaigning for or against candidates.
US citizens: call on Congress to keep guns away from those who commit domestic violence.
A federal court's surprise ruling threatens the right to make links.
Iceland proposes to ban circumcision of baby boys, treating it the same as female genital mutilation.
From what I have read, the two practices are not comparable in practice. Female genital mutilation systematically prevents women's sexual pleasure and can lead to life-long medical problems. Circumcision for males is not like that.
But there is an argument for allowing boys to make their own decision about circumcision, when they are old enough to decide.
15% of the world's land area is protected for wildlife, but that's not enough. To preserve most of the species, we should protect something like 50%.
First step: stop increasing the human population.
Facebook has a VPN service, which doesn't respect privacy the way most VPN services do.
Racism is spreading in Italy, where it wasn't traditional before.
A conservative gun owner advocates strict investigations before someone is allowed to own a gun.
He turned in his assault rifle to the thugs because he did not want it to be available to anyone. That was well-intentioned, but does that thug department destroy the weapons that people hand in? Or does it sell them? Some US thug departments sell weapons under those circumstances.
UK jobcenters view disabled people with a "culture of disbelief", treating them all as cheaters to be guarded against.
Right-wing regimes squeeze poor and disabled people by (1) cutting their support so much that they practically have to cheat to survive, then (2) demonizing them for cheating.
Britons who return home from fighting against PISSI, for the Syrian Kurds, are prosecuted for "terrorism".
This is to placate the dictator of Turkey, the same one that is imprisoning journalists and political opposition. Recall that the Turkish state had a truce with the Kurds of Turkey for many years; Erdoğan broke it by starting a civil war, so he could rerun the election and get a majority, which put him in position to eliminate human rights in Turkey.
Cambodia's dictator has crushed all the independent news media.
Listing the NRA's ten most highly paid members of Congress.
The Florida school murderer trained with a white-supremacist paramilitary group, said the group's leader.
Later he said that his first statement was a mistake, that he had been tricked by right-wing trolls.
Who were these trolls, and what was their motive? Were the pranksters opposed to neo-Nazis?
Were they neo-Nazis trying to cause trouble for a rival group?
Were they neo-Nazis who calculated they would win support for their cause by associating themselves with murder? It worked for PISSI, so maybe they think it will work for them.
Turkey has arrested the leaders of the Green Left Party.
Turkish journalists have been sentenced to 30 years in prison, in cruel conditions reminiscent of US "Supermax" prisons.
(Satire) "The Laureate-IV military robot pens haunting verse describing death, grief, and senseless violence to capture the grisly realities of war."
Belgium has ruled that some aspects of Facebook data collection are illegal, and ordered Facebook to delete the data or face a large fine.
While this is firm compared with the usual levels of regulation of companies nowadays, it is inadequate in recompense because it assumes that deleting the data will entirely undo the wrong to the users. There are two reasons that is not so:
The British housing crisis is the consequence of Tory ideology and goals. Kicking out the Tories is the first step to taking all the necessary measures to end the problem.
Britons, hiss at the Tory government when you vote and you can make it hiss-tory.
The US border patrol has cut down border visits between US citizens and their relatives who can't enter the US.
I share the suspicion that "This has to do with the message of hate that Trump screams out."
Poverty Is Now So Visible That Even the Richest Can See It.
I recall a cartoon from the 1980s showing rich people wearing "stealth hats", in the shape of the "stealth bomber", so that they would not see the poverty around them.
The saboteur-in-chief wants to eliminiate the Energy Star efficiency program, which saves energy for a small price.
Is this because it gives his hotels a low rating for energy efficiency? Or because he hates the idea of encouraging people to think about saving energy?
The saboteur-in-chief regrets having appointed David Shulgin to head the Veterans' Administration. It seems that Shulgin is qualified, capable, and wants to do a good job.
Does this sound like The Onion? Alas, it's true.
Saboteur Pruitt has isolated himself inside the EPA office, with personal security guards (several on duty at every moment). He has given people reason to hate him and he knows it.
He said he flies first class because fewer people there disapprove of his sabotage to the environment and the ecosphere.
By his lights, though, the side effects of his security are all to the good. A whole floor of the EPA offices for him? With all the staff he has dismissed, there is surely plenty of extra space, and if not, it is an excuse to dismiss more staff. Paying his guards? Use the funds saved by not paying scientists and investigators.
US citizens: phone senators to oppose the nomination of a coal lobbyist as the second in command of the EPA.
US citizens: tell SCROTUS to ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
Mueller has indicted 13 Russians and some Russian companies for meddling in the US election.
They started doing this in 2014, which is when the troll started praising Putin. It is possible the two had a deal starting then.
But this is not yet proven.
Rich people are "less likely than poorer people to exhibit flexibility, empathy, and all the other traits: that lead to healthy, long-term relationships."
(Satire) New School Shooter Drill Includes Practicing Pleas To Lawmakers To Do Something About This.
Students at a Houston high school went on strike after thugs arrested one who is an unauthorized immigrant and handed him over for deportation.
(Satire) John Kelly Apologizes For Assuming Everyone Would Ignore Abuse Allegations Like They Do In Military.
War and Poverty: A Compromise With Hell.
There were 10,000 civilian war casualties in Afghanistan in 2017.
Is it worth continuing the war at that cost, to keep the Taliban from winning? No one has an idea for how to really defeat them.
80% of the tax attacks' (temporary) individual tax cuts go to the richest 1% of Americans.
A court stopped the deportation of Syed Ahmed Jamal at the very last minute, but instead of freeing him, the immigration thugs put him in jail.
Japan has almost completely shut the door on political asylum.
It is fishy that investigating Kushner and other cronies of the bully for security clearances has taken a whole year. The delays are probably not the fault of the investigators.
What should museums do about the wings and rooms named after the Sackler family?
It is not entirely fair to compare the Sacklers to drug pushers. Drug pushers know, when they start, what harm they are sure to do. The harm oxycontin has caused was just a possibility when the Sacklers started selling it.
Of course, as evidence of harm accumulated, they resisted the conclusion that they were doing something wrong. I suppose they are still resisting it.
This is not limited to pharmaceuticals. Think of the Gates Foundation (funded by subjugating people in their computing) and the MIT-Lemelson program (funded by a bequest from a blatant patent troll).
The Netherlands has so many cows that they can't dispose of the manure safely.
Brazil's president Temer got donations from companies "linked to slavery". So did many other Brazilian politicians.
Some of them actively oppose efforts to stamp out slavery.
Ernest Moniz, former Secretary of Energy, warns that the danger of accidental nuclear war is increasing.
The bully wants to spend billions of dollars to upgrade B61 nuclear bombs which are kept in Europe, even though it is dangerous to have them there.
A South Korean presidential candidate campaigns to end the burning of coal world-wide.
The African National Congress is still full of corruption even though President Zuma is gone.
The saboteur's "infrastructure" plan is designed to make toll roads in places where well-off people are likely to pay the tolls.
The formerly repressive prime minister of Ethiopia has resigned. Something complicated seems to be going on there.
US citizens: protect wildlife by opposing the bully's infrastructure and budget plans.
US citizens: Call on Congress to support the Child Care for Working Families Act.
The latest school shooter was a right-wing extremist. This killing could be an act of right-wing terrorism.
After a school shooting killed 17 people, Russian bots are supporting the NRA against gun control, and claiming that the killer is associated with Antifa.
"Smart cities" use tech that resembles military, for systematic reasons.
The intelligence agencies' inspector general investigated 190 cases in which internal whistleblowers complained of retaliation. Only once did it rule in favor of the whistleblower.
Meanwhile, whatever wrongdoing or corruption they reported has probably been ignored.
The whistleblowers such as Snowden that tell the public know that reporting the matter internally would be useless and would result in their punishment.
A tanker is sailing from Korea to France along the Arctic coast of Russia.
If this were the principal effect of global heating, we could well celebrate. In fact, though, it warns we are approaching a turning point at which the lack of ice greatly increases the absorption of sunlight in the Arctic.
Fallacious arguments often supplied against allowing immigration into the US.
Sessions, as part of the War on Pain Sufferers, said they should take an aspirin and suffer — no matter how bad the pain. Restrictions on opioids are making it difficult for some people to get treatment for their pain.
Before crushing people with pain, let's see if the recent diminution in prescribing oxycontin reduces the number of people that get addicted to opioids.
I expect to have an operation in a few months. I am terrified of what will happen after I leave the hospital.
A professor at Princeton started a discussion in class about racism and racist insults. Students reported him for quoting a racist insult.
We can't discuss and think about the issue of racism if we don't dare quote racist statements.
I am disappointed that the professor cancelled the course in response to this criticism.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, prisoner in Iran, is now a pawn in the hands of the foreign ministry.
Administration Moves To Trample Taxpayers, Public Health, And Climate Via Methane Waste Rule Rollback.
Google wants to put surveillance ads into email, as well as other things that will depend on nonfree software.
You can protect yourself with free email readers, because many of them will refuse to run the "dynamic" (i.e., dangerous) material in email messages.
Republicans know that making life difficult for poor people can result in an irrational reaction where they give up on political activity (which lets the Republicans win).
Results of the Westminster God Show.
Exxon discovered decades ago that fossil fuels were going to cause global heating, and kept it secret. Several states and cities are suing Exxon for this. Now Exxon is suing them, trying to present itself as the poor little rich kid that merely wanted to get richer.
"Baltimore cops so corrupt two of them actually got convicted of something."
The US is number 2 in the world as a tax-dodging host.
All The White Supremacists Running For Office In 2018.
Iran's equivalent of Pizzagate: environmentalists studying rare cheetahs have been accused of spying. One of them recently was killed in prison.
With a scandal in the news about some humanitarian aid groups, right-wingers are inventing lots more fake scandals.
Why? I think they hate the idea that suffering people deserve some help and that governments can fund it.
South Africa's super-corrupt president Zuma has resigned.
US immigration prison thugs, working for a private company, put an asylum seeker in solitary to punish her for reporting other acts of harassment. They said they would not release her unless she retracted her complaints.
US citizens: Tell Texas Republicans to back off their bogus lawsuit which aims to exclude black Democratic candidates.
US citizens: support Senator Warren's bills to protect the public from credit bureaus.
The one and only crime that can get a person fired by the White House is having tried marijuana.
The bully's budget proposal takes away funds allotted for victims of crime. The bully thinks they should sign nondisclosure agreements and get their funds from him (or from his lawyer).
A homeless man died next to Parliament in London, effectively a reproach to the Tories that created most of the homelessness in Britain.
Canada's national medical system covers medical care but not medicines. A million Canadians skipped food or heating to pay for medicine last year, and a larger number skipped medicine because they could not afford it.
Still, it's a lot better than the US.
(Satire) White House Now Just Holding Continuous Going-Away Party For Departing Staffers.
An immigration thug lawyer is charged with using the credit cards of people who were being deported, to defraud them and others.
Instead of forgiving Americans' unpayable student loans, Republicans want to take the money out of their social security.
Israel has dozens of ways to try to chase Palestinians out of their villages in the West Bank. It fabricates excuses to create artificial bureaucratic obstacles to normal life.
Mass Protests Force Ethiopia to Free Opposition Leader.
Ethiopia is ruled by a rather nasty dictatorship.
German Cities to Trial [Gratis] Public Transport to Cut Pollution.
The candidate from one Mexico's main right-wing political party says that the state is spying on him. The candidate of the left-wing PRD says the same.
I am not surprised. 20 years ago, Mexican elections were being rigged by altering the final results — maybe they still are.
Teamsters' union solidarity includes protecting members from deportation.
Global heating effects, together with fishing for krill, have knocked the krill population down by 80%. Many other animals are impacted, including penguins and whales.
Why can't the Tories make their system for cutting support for the disabled work without errors? Because errors contribute to the intended effect of cutting aid to the disabled.
I suspect, however, that spending less to help the disabled is a means to another end: demonizing the disabled. Tories don't want the non-disabled people who are likewise suffering to recognize whose fault it is: the Tories and the rich people they serve.
The Taliban publicly invited the US to start negotiating ending the war in Afghanistan.
As long as the situation remains basically unchanged, the US cannot win the war in Afghanistan, any more than the Soviet Union could. It would be better to acknowledge this and stop the useless bloodshed. Much as I condemn the Taliban's Islamist repression, perpetual war is worse.
US immigration thugs put phony imitation arrest warrants in people's files to trick local thugs into handing them over for deportation.
SCROTUS and the bully say they won't renew DACA unless the law contains their four anti-immigration demands.
Now we know that the reason the bully cancelled DACA in the first place was to use those immigrants as hostages to gain these demands.
As President Reagan showed us, giving hostage-takers what they want encourages them to take more hostages. Republicans are no less clever than Islamist kidnapers, and no less cruel. To enable their cruelty because they have hostages would surely make things worse. We should not do that.
Meanwhile, there is a chance of preserving DACA through court actions.
The Department of Energy predicts that fracking will extract increasing amounts of oil and gas for decades.
They might be able to keep increasing this for a few decades, but if they do, there will be no avoiding global heating disaster.
The EPA carelessly approved use of the toxic pesticide dicamba on additional crops. It produced blowing clouds of pesticides that damaged other crops, as well as wildlife.
Apple devices lock users in solely to Apple services by being incompatible with all other options, ethical or unethical.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to reject HR 620, which would weaken efforts to make life easier for people with disabilities.
The saboteur's budget proposal would transfer billions of dollars from education and health to even more armaments.
The suicide rate in Puerto Rico increased 50% after last year's hurricane.
It would be interesting to study precisely what motivates these people to commit suicide. It could be the difficulty of coping with life with many systems not functioning, penury due to the lack of income, death of friends and relatives, the dread of losing your land and house to banks, or maybe something else I have not thought of.
The saboteur's budget could cause millions of preventable deaths over the next decade.
That's not counting the hundreds of millions of deaths that would be likely later in the century.
An estimate suggests that endocrine disrupting chemicals cause $170 billion damage per year in Europe, considering just the effect on human beings.
These chemicals harm wildlife, too.
One additional reason the UK to beware a new business-supremacy treaty with the US: the US will insist on exporting meat that brings antibiotic resistance.
The US may demand the usual ISDS (I Sue Democratic States) provision too.
Canada's easy attitude towards companies whose owners are secret makes it a prime transit site for hiding profits.
PFAS chemicals in food packaging and no-stick pans may cause obesity.
They are also found in firefighting foam, whose use puts them indirectly into water supplies.
US immigration thugs have doubled their rate of arresting (and deporting) immigrants without criminal convictions.
Some of those people face charges, of which they might be found guilty or innocent. If they are found guilty, they could be deported for that. If they are found innocent, there will be no particular reason for deporting them. So what's the rush?
Two more corruption cases against Netanyahu.
Makes one think of President Temer.
How Trump's Budget Would Cut the Safety Net for the Poorest Americans.
It's designed to subjugate the poor and strengthen the rich: blatant dooH niboR.
California legislators propose to allow tall buildings with dense housing near all major bus lines and train stations.
I am completely in favor of this, because overall it will mean cheaper housing and less homelessness.
However, it should be joined with stiff taxes on dwellings that are not anyone's primary residence or are the primary residence of considerably fewer people than would normally live there.
The US Defense Logistics Agency spent almost a billion dollars which it can't document. What to do? Spend even more.
New software will enable people to avoid pressure to stay in touch with other people by having Eliza-like programs do it for them.
The humans will be effectively isolated from other humans while their social stand-ins leak their personal data autonomously.
The saboteur's budget proposal would cut research for clean energy and better agriculture, as well as monitoring the environment.
It attacks the environment and public health.
The judge that insists on arresting Assange refused to consider the possible plot to deliver him to the US.
We know the UK was lying when it claimed publicly to be pursuing Assange on behalf of Sweden while privately telling Sweden not to stop providing the excuse for this.
President Do-dirty of the Philippines is using misogynist sadism to motivate his base. He called for soldiers to shoot women in the genitals so as to leave them alive but mutilated.
In effect, he is training Filipinos to be sadist monsters, much as the bully is doing in the US.
Education in the US normally teaches students almost nothing about all the democratic governments that the US overthrew and replaced with repressive regimes.
Many of those countries are repressive today. I doubt there would be a jihadi movement if the US had not overthrown Mossadegh.
Corbyn plans to nationalize the UK electric grid.
Meanwhile, the US wants to sell off Puerto Rico's electric grid.
Republicans want to replace part of food assistance with a fixed box of groceries.
If this were an option, and provided more food, I think many people would take it. However, treating poor people like dirt is the purpose of this policy. It is meant to intimidate them so that they don't fight for their rights.
US citizens: Reject the idea of taking parental leave funds out of future Social Security payments.
Making people go hungry when they are old is not an effective or just way of discouraging reproduction.
Faux News spread faux claims that a border thug was killed, and that the alleged killers were Mexicans.
There is no evidence that the agent was killed at all.
A US appeals court ruled that governments can't fire employees for private sexual activities in the absence of a work-related reason.
I hope the Supreme Court agrees with this.
The bully's "infrastructure plan" includes privatizing water supplies, so companies can raise the rates and bankrupt non-rich homeowners.
Whistleblowers in the department that handles asylum claims for the UK say they that some agents hate immigrants and only want to say no.
Even those that want to judge cases honestly can't because they are too overworked,
Does anyone know how the US compares with this?
Even among progressives, racism and sexism are still present.
Federal regulations make it difficult for banks to serve marijuana businesses, but one bank has found a way.
Phony abortion advice organizations (whose advice is always "don't") gave Google Maps so as to fool women that want an abortion.
Rule by oligarchs (i.e., plutocracy) explains why so many US government policy make life worse for the non-plutocrats.
The saboteur-in-chief's infrastructure plan would make development more "efficient" by ignoring the harm a project will do to everyone else.
Egypt's Allies Urged to Denounce 'Farcical' Presidential Election.
It resembles Putin's farcical election.
Israel considers Ahed Tamimi so dangerous that reporters have been banned from her trial. Chinese style.
The melting of ice on Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating, so sea-level rise in this century is sure to be more than two feet.
People who pay attention to the annual cycle in nature can see global heating advance.
Agro-forestry is being used in many countries to restore forests.
The real scandal of aid organizations in Haiti is, why did so little of the aid money donated to them for Haiti get spent to help Haiti? I do not think it is wrong to hire sex workers (or to be a sex worker), so I won't criticize the staff of these organizations for hiring them. Hiring a prostitute is not "sexual abuse".
However, if the staff spent a lot of money on sex workers, that could be a sign they were diverting the aid money to themselves. That would be part of the real scandal. Whether this was done by stealing, or "only" by arranging terms of employment that put too much of the organization's money into enriching the staff, is just a detail. It's corruption either way.
Russia is likely to manipulate the 2018 US election, and might improve its approach compared with its successful 2016 effort.
US gun sales have dropped so much that gun manufacturers are in trouble.
The NRA functions as a marketing and lobbying arm for the gun manufacturers. If they don't have money to give it, the NRA may get much weaker.
Indonesia is about to criminalize all sexual acts outside of heterosexual marriage.
A UK court insisted that the UK would arrest Assange if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy.
Even if the judge made this decision "on the merits" of that narrow aspect of the case, due to the context it would be a continuation of the scheme, punishing Assange for the UK government's dishonesty. However, given all the secret machinations, and given that UK judges often uphold such machinations, I so not believe that this ruling was independent. I think the judge is complicit in the same scheme.
If that is not true, let him prove it.
The troll is a master of making racist statements, then semi-covering them with "figleaves" to help his supporters pretend they were not racist.
Computational extrapolation, used to predict success or failure in work, turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
A major newspaper in Brazil has stopped publishing via Facebook.
The major newspapers of Brazil are right-wing and sometimes publish fake news. My Brazilian friend told me, tongue in cheek, that he thought this decision was because the owners were concerned their articles would be tagged as fake on Facebook.
However, Facebook itself is so dangerous that any movement by the media towards rejecting it is cause for applause.
Thugs in Baltimore were convicted of stealing money and drugs (to resell), plus lots and lots of lies. They carried BB guns to plant on people to frame them or make excuses for killing them.
None of this was part of their job, which was to seize illegal guns.
It is so gratifying to see some thugs get the punishment they deserve. Perhaps most thugs are not as thoroughly corrupt as these.
Facebook took down a negative movie review because the movie company claimed the review was copyright infringement.
Instead of hammering specifically on the bully and his scandals, Americans should group the bully with his followers, the Republican Party, and focus on the harm they have done and are trying to do.
Everyone: Support Aceh's Green Vision.
Everyone: support abortion rights in Poland.
Embracing Bold Platforms, Progressives Working to Unseat Corporate Dems Nationwide.
Ricardo Querales faces death by deportation. The antiviral drugs, without which he will die, are not available in Venezuela.
It is fundamentally wrong to make it a crime to possess drugs for one's own use. Such charges don't justify deporting someone, let alone jailing someone.
Australia's disregard is allowing species to go extinct.
The disregard is so big that the government is allowing businesses to cut down large areas of wild forest.
Police officer Mader treated an armed and suicidal black man the way thugs typically treat only whites. But this was no use — some thugs arrived as "backup" and shot that man immediately. Then thug department fired him for not acting like a thug.
Mader sued the thug department and won.
I hope he finds a job as a police officer again.
A campaign of protests targets Apple in France for tax-dodging. Apple is seeking to ban the protests and fine the protesters.
It is Apple that deserves to be fined — or rather, taxed.
Making fibre for clothing from food waste, to avoid using petroleum and polluting the ocean with plastic.
A US school district removed To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn from the high school curriculum because they portray racism in its rawness.
I don't think anyone is going to find tolerance for racism in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is too long since I read Huckleberry Finn, so I don't have an opinion about it.
However, American racists are now so blatant that we may not need books from 50 to 60 years ago to show how ugly racism is.
Lissa Lucas came to the West Virginia legislative hearing and was permitted to testify. When she started saying how much money the legislators in the committee had received from fossil fuel interests, they told her to shut up, and dragged her away.
Bravo Ms Lucas!
Several prisoners have died recently in Iran, supposedly from suicide, but their families don't believe it was suicide.
Suicide can be the best choice for a sane prisoner under certain circumstances, but we cannot assume that Iranian thugs are telling the truth about how those prisoners died, any more than we can trust what US thugs say about how prisoners die.
Legalized medical marijuana reduces deaths from opioid overdose. The easier the access to marijuana, the bigger the effect.
Even remote areas of the ocean have a substantial presence of plastic microparticles.
The tourists jailed in Cambodia for dancing "pornographically" were dancing at a party in a house, nowhere near temples.
South Korea and North Korea are rapidly improving their relationship.
This is a very good thing. It will reduce the danger of renewed war (which could now be a nuclear war), and it might eventually lead North Korea to become less of a dictatorship. It could conceivably even lead to reunification of a democratic Korea.
Modest increases in the minimum wage generally cause no loss in jobs.
A big increase in the minimum wage can cause a small loss of jobs, but as long as the total wages of all workers increases, a system of tax and redistribution among workers could make up for that. Of course, it would be better to tax the rich as well for this.
FBI Warns Of ‘American Dream’ Scam. Millions have been bilked by this.
Congress Puts Aside Partisan Differences For Good Of Military Contractors.
Why Companies like Disney Are Willing to Give Out Temporary Bonuses.
Sweden's prosecutors wanted to drop the arrest warrant against Julian Assange in 2013, but UK officials persuaded them to keep it going.
In 2011, the Swedish prosecutors were ready to interview Assange in London, but the UK pressured them to hold out for demanding Assange go there.
This is two smoking guns — proof that the arrest warrant was part of a political plot.
Crude bigotry against blacks never ended in many small towns in the US, and Republican officials are actively stimulating it and supporting it.
UK schools are short 30,000 teachers. Since their wages are capped and inflation has eaten into it, people don't want the job.
US citizens: call for dropping all charges against inauguration protesters.
US citizens: call on the Forest Service to stop Nestle from taking water from public forests.
Nestle never got a permit and is defying California water regulations.
Republicans always look at a poor person as a potential cheater, but they trust corporations blindly.
Why the minor changes made in FISA section 702 do nothing to protect even US citizens from US government warrantless wiretaps.
The governor of Kentucky is trying to kick 35,000 people in that state off Medicaid.
Kentuckians are suing to block this, so to make them look bad, he calls it out-of-state meddling. Even if that were true, it would be irrelevant — a distraction from the wrong he is doing to them.
Republicans constantly manipulate people with distractive non-issues. Sometimes Democrats do it too.
A Republican legislator in Pennsylvania proposes to impeach the majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. This is a scheme to reverse its decision that the Republican gerrymander violates the state constitution.
There is nothing Republicans respect enough that they won't crush it to get more power.
"Leaked Equifax documents provided to US Senate reveal that they dumped all our drivers' licenses, too."
China's President Xi announced a grand vision of an ecological society, and is leading mighty efforts to implement it.
Despite my condemnation for China's repression, I have to admire this. Contrast it with the bully that has seized power in the US, who does his best to increase both repression and environmental destruction.
China is now using face recognition camera eyeglasses to identify people that are not supposed to be allowed on trains.
How some secret Apple source code was released that may (we can hope) facilitate jailbreaking.
I do not encourage leaking proprietary source code because that would fail to make the source code free software. However, I do not criticize people for doing it. The wrong here was when Apple made that software nonfree — and, even worse, made it a jail.
Nonfree programs in general do injustice to their users. By making this software nonfree, Apple got power over users. Apple employs that power to commit further injustice against users, including censorship, DRM, and putting users in jail.
Ohio's reform plan, supposedly meant to eliminate the Republican gerrymander, perpetuates Republican control but disguises it better.
Russian trolls operated on Tumblr to attack Clinton and support Sanders.
I object to Russian manipulations of our elections even when they operate in favor of the best candidate and criticize an inferior candidate.
Watch out for proposals to cure "fake news" through censorship by the powerful (states, or companies). We've seen those before.
Charles II was overthrown by a revolution with strong public support in 1678, 3 years after the censorship scheme mentioned in the article. That revolution also ended the book censorship system that was the origin of today's copyright.
The Polish law banning discussion of antisemitism of Poles during World War II may unleash a wave of antisemitism there.
Fascist terrorism aimed at immigrants has appeared in Italy.
The Italian economic suffering is due to the Euro-zone rules applied by banksters. It's awfully convenient for them when Italians blame it instead on powerless immigrants.
Yashpal Saxena, whose son was murdered out of religious prejudice, has launched a campaign against religious prejudice.
Brazil's corrupt president has escaped all prosecution due to support from other corrupt politicians.
The FBI can do an "assessment" on anyone for the vaguest of reasons, or even on everyone who lives in a certain area, correlating many kinds of data bases including their phone calls and travel.
The fashionable thing to put on your skin for carnival in Brazil is … microplastics that will get into the ocean and poison sea animals.
The philosophy of the Enlightenment, centered around 1800, survives in today's humanist values.
I agree with Pinker that life is better — for most people — in the modern age than it was in past ages. I disagree with his conclusion that bleak expectations are irrational defeatism. Our progress has been going backward in recent decades.
This article suggests (I have not read his book) that Pinker does not recognize the harm that plutocracy has done globally since the 1990. Although material progress, in the sense of material riches, continues, the richest few are grabbing nearly all of it. In the US, the poor are worse off and have shorter life expectancy. "Free trade" has put the world's low-paid workers into direct competition, which the rich use against all of them. The rich now control many governments, including the US government.
He also does not recognize how increased inequality makes life worse for people, even aside from possible decrease in their own income.
Even if we were not undoing our achievements, we could not maintain them for long by continuing our current practices. Global heating, topsoil exhaustion, and population growth ensure that. The issue of sustainability is a rational one.
It sounds fine to cite past situations where civilizations invented solutions to their problems, but there were other past situations where they failed and the people died. Future progress may do great things, but it is foolhardy to suppose problems will be corrected. Especially when rich people who don't want them to be corrected dominate the state.
Female prisoners in Arizona don't receive enough menstrual pads, and if they use up the insufficient number, they bleed on their clothing and get punished for that.
The legislature is considering a bill to give them the supplies they need, but some male legislators are so patriarchal that they resent even hearing about the subject.
Republicans that control US state governments are systematically reducing the power of city governments to go against plutocratist state policies.
US citizens: call on John Kelly to resign.
The US census counts prisoners for the places they are imprisoned, rather than where they live. The effect is to transfer political power from cities to the rural areas where prisons are found.
The more prisoners, the more power the Republicans gain from this.
The troll's saboteurs have found sneaky way to harm authorized immigrants: denying them visa extensions and changes if they use the government benefits they are entitled to, even for their US-citizen children.
A Republican senator proposes to allow logging and mining in wild "wilderness study areas", untouched regions under consideration for being made national parks.
More than half of all Americans live in the "boundary zone" where immigration thugs can stop any person and demand to see per papers.
This is oppressive to US citizens, not only to immigrants.
Big Business Is Hijacking Our Radical Past. We Must Stop It.
The article also reminds us that we must defend the right of violent opposition to violent and unjust authority. We must reject the unfair standard which allows uniformed thugs to crush protesters for even the slightest deviation from politeness.
The troll is now trying to put protesters in prison for many years for planning a protest at which others committed minor property damage. In effect, that starts from the assumption that protesting is a crime.
It isn't a new thing either. They did it in Chicago in 1886.
Public defenders in Brooklyn went on strike after immigration thugs grabbed a defendant as he left the courtroom.
Trials could not proceed without counsel, so their strike had a powerful effect.
The US military is replacing toxic fire-extinguishing foam with a slightly different, slightly less toxic fire-extinguishing foam.
Non-toxic foams are available, and airports in other countries already use them.
To fight sexual bullying among coworkers, how about focusing on the bullying aspect, rather than banning sexual relationships entirely?
Black Lives Matter is stimulating US blacks to form and join unions.
The US has allocated billions more in aid for Puerto Rico and other places affected by recent local disasters.
I would like to believe that this is a good thing, but I have to be skeptical given that Republicans had to approve it. Is the aid for Puerto Rico's power grid simply a handout to the private companies that it will be sold to?
Pence said that President Kim's latest military parade was a "provocation", but the bully's military parade would be a "celebration".
I would guess Kim says the reverse.
To stop insurance companies from finding loopholes to drive people into poverty, let's get rid of them and set up a single-player scheme.
I wonder why anyone gets medical coverage through Anthem? I suspect that mostly they don't have a choice — that mostly companies choose Anthem for their employees. Under that system, Anthem has no incentive to do a good job for its non-customers.
Right now, we have a government agency that makes regulations for insurance companies, which seek clever ways to shaft people through loopholes in those regulations. Having the government agency set the rules directly will give us more accountability over the rules.
Democrats can't win in November just by pointing at the bully. They have to stand for something much better than moving back to the older form of plutocracy.
The low wages paid by Uber and Lyft have driven some cab and limo drivers to suicide.
They blame state governments for eliminating cities' power to regulate those companies.
The bully refused to allow publication of the Democrats' rebuttal to the Republicans' dishonest memo attacking the Mueller investigation.
The Republicans on that committee, headed by Rep. Nunes himself, consult closely with the bully. When they voted to approve release of the Democrats' counter-memo, they surely knew that the bully would block it.
I suppose the Democrats anticipated this too. Now they can say, "We can show that's not true, but the bully forbids us to tell you."
Unfortunately, that won't influence the bully's supporters much. They don't care that the Nunes memo is dishonest, even incoherent; they believe the conclusion anyway.
In effect, the Democrats are helpless against the height of Republican dishonesty and manipulation.
Since successful companies owe a lot of their success to public activities such as infrastructure, education, and research, they should have to contribute a substantial part of their income to the public.
The Environmental Protection Agency has cut its enforcement actions to about 1/4 the previous rate, and fines are less too.
We could call it the Environmental Pushover agency, but I fear the whole truth is even worse than that.
Sacramento thugs protected violent Nazis and tried to prosecute anti-fascist counterprotesters that the Nazis stabbed.
Cheating, in the sense of breaking rules, seems to be becoming more common in the US these days.
When a rule benefits society, cheating against it hurts society, but we should not assume that all rules are just and beneficial. When a rule is unjust, disobeying it is virtuous. This includes rules against sharing copies of published works. We should not call that "cheating".
We do not want to be treated by doctors that cheated on their exams or in their practice. We do want to live among neighbors that will share with us.
There is no reason to wait for a red light to change if you can see that no other cars are moving for a few blocks away. To wait uselessly is a loss for you and benefits nobody; to stop, then proceed with caution, is virtuous under those circumstances.
The UK investigation of the underground infiltration of dissident movements seems to be a pretense intended as a coverup.
Everyone: call on the football team Liverpool FC to reject the sponsorship of Chinese company Tibet Water Resources Limited, which is an example of China's exploitation of Tibet.
US citizens: call on District Attorney Faith Johnson to return campaign donations from bail bond companies.
They are a form of corruption because they give her an incentive to demand higher bail for the sake of the companies.
It's time for a replay of the triennial farce where the US copyright office invites people to petition for narrow, temporary half-exceptions to the injustice of DMCA section 1201.
Granting one of these half-exceptions is always better than not granting it, but every campaign for an exception ought to campaign also for repealing DMCA section 1201.
EFF: Newly Released Surveillance Orders Show That Even with Individualized Court Oversight, Spying Powers Are Misused.
Republicans have stopped saying they object to deficits and debt.
They never really did care, it was just an excuse to stop Democrats from helping the non-rich. Now that Republicans can run deficits to feed the rich, they love deficits.
A Danish court says it is a crime to tell people how to use file-sharing software.
The companies behind the War on Sharing will stop at nothing to impose their divide-and-rule strategy — until we decisively defeat them. We must legalize sharing of copies of any published work, and we must block their legal (EULAs) and technical (DRM) methods for denying people that right.
It is too late to fart around with half measures for protecting the climate; to save the ecosphere from global heating disaster we need to proceed with all due speed.
The bully's renewed global gag rule has undermined women's health care in many poor countries.
US prison conditions are so cruel that a UK court refused to extradite a UK citizen to the US on that account.
Please do not use the word "hacking" to refer to what Lauri Love was accused of doing — that gives us "hackers" a bad name.
A substantial group of people have rejected "smart" phones.
Alas, even a non-"smart" phone tracks the user's location — with the phone company and Big Brother, though not directly with other companies — and can be remotely converted into a listening device. That's why I refuse to carry any kind of portable phone.
If you own a car, watch out: it may contain a built-in cellular modem that makes it the equivalent of a "smart" phone. Nowadays it may even have a microphone to listen to conversations in the car. But you can probably disconnect it. Wrapping it in aluminum foil may be enough to make it cease to communicate.
Al-Hudood is the Middle East counterpart of The Onion.
Let's not allow one case of cruelty to interfere with homeschooling.
It is usually a good practice, as long as it doesn't cut off the children from other sources of ideas and knowledge.
Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing Venezuela because they can't get food.
If Venezuela collapses, I fear that the international plutocratic order will be imposed there. It won't be as bad as the current collapse, but it will be as bad as the plutocratic regime that Chavez replaced.
The planet-roaster government of Canada cheered the election of the bully because it knew he would support fossil fuels and pipelines.
Life expectancy in the US is falling, slowly but steadily, due to increasing discouragement with harder life.
Students at 65 US universities are campaigning for them to move to 100% renewable electricity, and succeeding with some.
This many universities are a drop in the bucket, but when they lead, they may lead many more to follow.
ACLU: 6 ways the US is attacking environmental activists to crush their protests.
Bangladesh is persistently convicting the leaders of the main opposition party for various acts of corruption.
I won't claim these convictions are false. Bangladesh is probably very corrupt. It could be that every politician there is corrupt, but these particular politicians are prosecuted for political motives while other equally corrupt politicians are left alone.
Two New York City thugs forced a woman into their van, handcuffed her, and raped her. They claim she consented to sex.
Republicans continue planning new forms of voter suppression.
This goes with the nationwide gerrymander to implement their policy of "power by hook or by crook."
The bully wants to offer Americans paid parental leave, at the expense of their own future retirement benefits.
Having children is not a necessity of life; it is a luxury. I support efforts to help, encourage and lead people to reproduce less. I do not support this plan.
For those who do have children, parental leave is not a luxury — it is a necessity for the good of those children.
Pence completely rejected the idea of negotiation with North Korea.
I don't think the troll cares what actually happens with North Korea. Everything he says and does in regard to North Korea is meant to keep his supporters deluded.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban the practice of killing sharks and taking only their fins.
This is not only wasteful, it also endangers the sharks. If fishermen had to land the whole shark, they couldn't kill so many sharks and the species could recover.
The US is doing so little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that they are now predicted to increase, for a few decades.
A few decades from now, the effects of global heating will make emissions decrease, but that will be because disaster is already advanced.
The planet roasters believe they can give their descendants an escape from the disaster they are bringing on the rest of the world. The rest of humanity needs to show them that they can't do that; that the only way their descendants can survive is if the rest of humanity does too.
It is 16 years since Dubya made the United States officially a torture state.
Stanford University has done nothing to defend a professor from false accusations of terrorism, published by a magazine hosted at Stanford and funded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.
I wonder, does he give money to Stanford University? Does anyone know?
Spirit airlines told a passenger she could bring her miniature hamster on board — then when she arrived, told her no, so she had to kill it in order to get home.
The airline spokesjerk expressed shock that she killed her hamster, pretending that this wasn't compelled by the airline's decision. What else was she supposed to do — remain indefinitely at the airport, effectively homeless? Spend a week going home by bus and miss classes?
The airline should have cages for use to keep small animals in the hold, if it doesn't want to carry them in the cabin.
The death of John Perry Barlow is a reminder of the time when we thought the internet could bring people freedom.
The good that the internet can do is being blocked by censorship and drowned out by intentional lies, while the bad (total surveillance and the War on Sharing) is growing without restraint.
If you want freedom, the first step is to build the strength to say "no thanks" when someone offers you convenience in exchange.
The US immigration thug agency has asked for access to all the government's secret surveillance data, which supposedly is collected to "protect" us from "terrorists".
If we tolerate government collection of data about Americans in general, the government will use it against us in ever increasing ways. We must put an end to this data collection.
The Federal Reserve has started to raise interest rates, mainly with the purpose of stopping workers from getting raises.
The US says that Russian agents "penetrated" some states' election agencies.
This is a bad thing, but I'm far more worried about the penetration by Republicans.
The UK state is using local governments as "human shields" to pass budget cuts on to the people.
It is natural that local governments will raise taxes to fund the activities they must do. This solves the immediate problem, but it is not a fair solution.
Local governments can only tax the local inhabitants and local businesses. However, wealthy people and big, profitable businesses are not evenly distributed. In an area where most people are poor, this puts a heavy burden on them. That's why the national government needs to do the taxing, and distribute the money to all the local governments.
Coal ash dumps near power plants are poisoning the local water.
The UK minister called the death of an "independent contractor" a "tragedy".
That death was the predictable result of allowing unjust business practices, for which the minister is directly responsible. That is no tragedy, it is an injustice.
The bully wants to limit Medicaid benefits for people with incurable diseases. That means that they will get treatment only until they reach the arbitrary limit; then, I suppose, they will be put out on the street.
With global heating bringing frequent deep droughts in many regions, how could they think of using fossil fuels in ways that also need lots of fresh water? I refer to coal seam gas production.
It must take a lot of money to convince enough people not to do the right thing by insisting on renewable energy instead.
Truly long-term defense against running out of water requires defending against population increase. We must ask for everyone's cooperation in this.
The "president" of the Maldive Islands arrested judges to stop the Supreme Court from freeing imprisoned legislators.
The elected president Masheed campaigned globally to curb global heating. I suspect that oil interests helped arrange the coup against him.
If global heating goes far enough, the questions of democracy and human rights in the Maldives will cease to matter. Long before they are entirely inundated, they will be unable to support their population. The rulers, however, will probably get the chance to move elsewhere.
When drive-through cafes employ women wearing only underclothes, is that a form of exploitation that they should be protected from?
I don't object to these businesses. What I object to is a society that pays millions of workers so little that some might feel they have no choice but to work in these jobs. People who feel uncomfortable doing them should not have to do them.
UK "national security" agencies in the 1920s treated all unionism as Communism, and sabotaged the Labour government with a falsified leak.
Andrew Wheeler, hoping for Senate confirmation as deputy saboteur of the EPA, smoothed the path to committee approval by corrupting two Republican senators.
Any two adults should be allowed to make a legal commitment to each other. It should not have to be marriage. It should not have to imply a romantic relationship or a sexual relationship.
Kenya has forcibly exiled an opposition leader.
The accusations that the election was falsified seemed plausible at the time, and these actions make that more likely. They are the actions of someone that wants to be a tyrant.
Proposing that the EU should become a European Republic, rather than a "United States of Europe".
How about taking the Swiss Confederation as a model, with its referendums for important issues?
The bully wants to be seen as resembling despots that hold military parades.
I think the way to oppose this is with a celebration of the peaceful and truly great achievements of the US, such as the Bill of Rights, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Endangered Species Act. Let's oppose cruel and twisted patriotism with benevolent patriotism.
China's total surveillance system will be used for imposing regimentation on any and all aspects of life.
The US is also moving toward a system of total regimentation, in its usual sloppy commercially dominated way, that the state piggybacks on. If you want to resist this, stop using digital payments — pay cash!
US citizens: call on all state governors not to help the bully destroy Medicaid.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate NRA for funneling Russian money to political campaigns.
US citizens: call on the Senate to support the Antiquities Act to protect national monuments.
It is hard to find aspect in the governance of the Maldives that isn't crooked.
This is what I fear the Republicans will do to the US.
SCROTUS threaten to cut off funding for WHO because it reported that Glyphosate is probably carcinogenic.
The Republican Party considered a sort of group madness that, in advanced stages, disconnects people totally from their loyalty to anything bigger — such as their country or the truth.
Former high officials urge Putin and the bully to back off from the new cold war.
The US Federal Reserve has imposes punitive limits on Wells Fargo for swindling customers in several ways.
I fear that as soon as the the bully's saboteur replaces Janet Yellen, which may be soon, that saboteur will cancel these measures.
The family of Andrew Finch, killed by a SWAT thug, is suing the city and the thugs.
Sad to say, even if they win, the thug will probably lose nothing since the city will pay the damages. This system protects thugs so thoroughly from accountability that it will hardly ever get them to do anything better.
A new EU data privacy directive will limit certain ways that companies intentionally abuse people's data.
Companies will still be able to misuse people's data, just not in all of the same ways. For instance, Facebook will still be able to sell targeted advertising aimed at its useds. That doesn't violate these new rules.
Also, this directive does nothing to protect people from Big Brother. The directive has no effect on how states in the EU forcibly take the data once companies have collected. The only benefit for dissidents will be if the directive convinces some companies to hold less data about people.
The self-checkout machines that replace human sales clerks also encourage shoplifting.
Shoplifting in a supermarket is not uniformly wrong. Poor people are morally entitled to steal food to eat, if they can't afford to buy it, and the suffering imposed by the plutocratic state often puts them in that situation.
But I hope this convinces the stores to get rid of those machines and hire more human beings.
You can join me in helping to make that happen. When I enter the store I pass by those machines and tell the people using them, "If you use those machines, you are putting other Americans out of work. When I realized that I decided to go always to the human sales clerks so that they can stay employed." I do the same thing when I leave.
You can do it too.
Many university libraries are purging books — they will be available only digitally.
Since ebooks are typically distributed in an unjust way, I'm afraid some of those injustices will apply to these books.
Requiring participants to lock their portable phones temporarily in bags improves the quality of interaction at gatherings and events, and helps education.
It's a step forward, but people should not think this prevents all the harm and wrong portable phones do.
Cancelling Americans' student debt is morally imperative to relieve the impossible burden, but there is a secondary reason: it will boost the economy in a way that doesn't push the non-rich down.
School teachers in the US have a campaign to teach students about racism: the Black Lives Matter at School campaign.
"Valve turner" protester Michael Foster has been imprisoned after being convicted because the judge refused to let him present necessity defense.
Foster courageously puts the emphasis on the giant crime he campaigns to stop.
The willful blindness and pro-business bias of some judges is a large obstacle to efforts to keep civilization going past this century.
Supporters of the occupation of Palestine must oppose measures for the general defense of human rights, unless they make an exception to the general standards for Israel.
Ireland is considering sanctions against products made by Israelis in colonies in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
Amnesty International reports an apparent chlorine gas attack by Assad's forces in Syria.
The UK sold surveillance equipment to the tyrannical Honduran state, shortly before last year's stolen election.
As Vladimir Putin Steals the Russian Election, Our Leaders Are Shamefully Silent.
San Diego trash collectors put a homeless man's tent into a compactor, and discovered just before it was too late that he was inside it.
If his tent had been empty of human beings at that moment, would that have excused the city for destroying it and leaving its owner with no shelter? Of course not!
This is an example of routine intentional cruelty, aimed (naturally) at those who are down and out, which almost this time did more damage than it was supposed to.
The troll's proposed military parade carries the US further down into militarism, but it didn't start just now.
The media have plenty of practice calling militarism "presidential".
70-year-old Ian Bone holds clever and funny nonviolent protests against squeezing non-rich people out of housing.
His protests embarrass billionaires from Qatar, so the UK government has used an injunction to ban them. Injunctions are the standard UK method of ordering poor people to obey rich people.
US citizens: stand by the workers that Matchbox Food Group fired.
Everyone: thank athletes from the Super Bowl that refuse to visit the bully at the White House.
The students of "Trump University" finally have a settlement to get back most of the money that the cheater cheated them out of.
Even if you suppose the Nunes memo is honest and accurate, its assertions don't support the conclusions.
A sheriff in Tennessee ordered thugs to shoot an unarmed man rather than risk damage to thug cars.
A lawsuit is too good for him. He should spend decades in prison.
Vietnam Jails Activist for 14 Years for Livestreaming Pollution March.
Repression of protests is despicable. It's even more despicable when the US does it.
Denmark is proposing to prohibit people from covering their faces in public.
Unless the law also ban face recognition systems pointed at public places, in an effective way that can't easily be bypassed, this would attack everyone's rights.
If you live in Denmark, please talk with your legislators!
More about bullying a journalist to change a story about the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The Journalism Protection Act would, if enacted, prohibit attacking and intimidating journalists.
A campaign for divestment from arms manufacturers.
The State Department has not issued the climate report required by a UN treaty. Sabotage, I expect.
New Jersey has joined the states that demand ISPs respect network neutrality for all customers in order to sell service to the state government.
The war on sharing scientific knowledge has attacked Sci-Hub by making Cloudflare stop serving it.
Paradoxically this may improve the accessibility of Sci-Hub to people who, as I do, refuse to run nonfree Javascript code and go through Tor.
A detailed breakdown of the lies that Colin Powell told the UN and the public to give Dubya an excuse to invade Iraq.
Powell, and Dubya, must bear some of the guilt for the subsequent suffering in Iraq, including the existence of PISSI.
Edinburgh University Divests from All Fossil Fuels.
Hong Kong has reduced the sentences for some protest leaders, "this time only".
I suppose this is a plan to avoid creating martyrs while still repressing future protests. It doesn't reduce the injustice of criminalizing dissent.
Focus groups give powerless non-elite people a feeling of participation in decision-making — for minor marketing decisions only.
This feeling of participation is meant to substitute for real participation in important decisions.
Decrying 'Dog-Eat-Dog System,' #PoorPeoplesCampaign Kicks Off 40 Days of 'Moral Action'.
Proposed US laws would limit how Facebook collects and uses personal data, but just a little.
I conjecture that the reason these laws don't doesn't go far enough is that they were written based on the unstated premise that we cannot greatly reduce the profits of Facebook and other surveillance companies.
In my view, ending massive data-collection must take priority over their profits. It would be no loss to society if we drove them out of business as a side effect of protecting ourselves from them. Indeed, by refusing to give Facebook any data, I am taking a personal step to that end. I set up my page about Facebook hoping to convince you to join me.
We should not limit ourselves to acting individually.
Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has halted an investigation of Equifax, apparently because of all the campaign contributions it sent his way.
Corruption is the Republican Way.
Our democracy and our ecosphere are under attack, as well as the very idea of honesty. Movements to overcome these attacks are growing, however.
The attacks of famous male artists against their female "muses" are not limited to forced sex. Sometimes they do simple physical violence.
How interesting it is that Tarantino violently attacked the star of a film he was making. I saw one Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction, and was disgusted by the violence portrayed, to the point that I avoided seeing any more of his films. (I cite that movie as an example of why we should not advocate censorship of art merely because we find it disgusting.)
But I never expected his treatment of the cast to resemble the stories he portrays in the films. I would have considered that sort of inference naive. And yet in this case it would have been valid. Hmm.
A courier company in the UK doesn't allow its workers (all "independent contractors") a day off to see a doctor. The result: one of them died from diabetes after skipping medical appointments.
We have to put an end to this "independent contractor" bullshit.
A company that pays people to do more than 1000 hours per week of a certain kind of work should be required to hire full-time employees to do at least 80% of that work. If the work amounts to more than 10,000 hours per week, the company should have hire full-times to do 90% of it. At more than 30,000 hours of work per week, there must be enough full-timers to do 95% of it.
Work farmed out to contractor companies should count towards the total just as if there were no middleman, and that slight differences in the details of the work should not divide it legally into separate pools.
US citizens: call for firing Scott Lloyd as head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, run by a saboteur, demanded that a reporter change his story or the company he works for would be excluded from future discussions with the press.
So far the company has stood firm, but that's not enough. The other news organizations should agree to provide their material to that one.
Deaths due to malnutrition are increasing in England, as welfare often provides too little money for poor people to pay for housing, medical care and food, for themselves or for their children.
Many US college students skip food because they are broke. At MIT, 10% of the students each week skipped a meal due to lack of funds. This is not yet malnutrition, but it can retard their studies, and it would never happen if the educational system worked.
Ozone depletion in the stratosphere is getting worse, in the latitudes where people mainly live.
This despite the fact that the depletion over Antarctica is gradually decreasing.
US citizens: call on Congress not to fund the bully's wall.
You need to use the Salsalabs workaround to sign this without running the nonfree Javascript code.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to close the Guantanamo prison.
I suggest explicitly saying also that each prisoner should get a fair trial or be released. Otherwise your congresscritter might think you want imprisonment without trial extended from a foreign naval base to the US itself.
US citizens: call on Paul Ryan to remove Nunes from the intelligence committee.
People are upset that dentistry students and their professor had themselves photographed with heads of deceased people that had willed their bodies to science.
I have to ask, who did they hurt by making the photos? I cannot see how this matters at all.
Russia and Assad retaliated for the downing of a Russian plane by bombing civilians in Syria.
Men accused of rape or sexual harassment are not the only Americans in danger of being punished without a trial.
Human rights are for everyone, not just wealthy and powerful men.
The myth of "facilitated communication", which when investigated proves to be pure pseudoscience, continues to take in the loved ones of people who cannot communicate. They desperately wish for it to be true, for themselves to have communication with that person. But that doesn't imply it is true.
I don't believe it is a kindness to tell someone a comforting lie. To get someone accustomed to a false view of the world is an injury to per.
How race bias interacts with class bias in determining who will be imprisoned in the US.
Direct racial bias affects mainly the jailing of poor people, but many other kinds of bias tend to make blacks poor.
Governments are pressuring Syrian refugees to return home even though the war continues.
There are some places in Syria that some refugees could safely return to. But we can be sure that deportation-mad officials will underestimate the danger so they can force more refugees back to Syria even where it isn't safe.
Neighborhoods that invite walking around seem to make people more healthy.
Religious fanatics in Kenya oppose national sex education. Apparently their religion adores ignorance and avoidable distress.
Saboteur of Transportation Chao's family shipping business dodges taxes by being incorporated in a tax shelter country.
The UK plans to facilitate collecting and maintaining inaccurate data about immigrants and would-be immigrants.
Universities often exaggerate the importance of their research results, as a PR practice.
Businesses that distribute plastic to the public should pay for the harm it does, and will do.
This damage could include extinction of filter-feeding whales.
The two major uses of petroleum are to burn, and to make plastic. Since both of them cause great damage, we have got to end petroleum extraction.
I've coined the term "spontaneous moral symmetry breaking" to describe situations where there is a valid moral imperative to do something the same way others mostly do it. For instance, driving on whichever side of the road is generally driven on where you are is right because it tends to avoid collisions.
This is to be distinguished from peer pressure to conform; that is not a valid moral imperative.
People need attention, and paradoxically lack of attention makes people act in ways that repel attention, driving them into a pit of loneliness that digs itself deeper despite their best efforts.
A tiny fraction may be driven by this to commit various crimes, but the number of people that suffer without committing crimes is enormous.
I wonder if humans have a systematic tendency to reject any behaviors that are often signs of loneliness precisely because they may indicate loneliness. We might feel we dislike them for various unrelated reasons, all stand-ins for the fact that they suggest loneliness.
Tying the support for Boko Haram to desertification caused by global heating effects.
The article also says that Algeria has boosted al Qa'ida in the region, with tacit US backing.
Protecting heavily addictive OxyContin was a bipartisan effort.
War is mutating into an urban guerrilla in which there is no one with the authority to make peace.
Privatizing the agencies that find foster parents made the job cost a lot more. A little of that increased cost provided a raise for the foster parents, but most of it went to the business owners, through a tax-dodging scheme.
Privatizing the supervision of convicts on probation was supposedly going to do a better job of keeping them out of crime, and more efficiently. It didn't work. This is what I would have expected, for two reasons — one specific, and one general.
The general reason is that privatizing government services usually does a bad job. It has to cut corners in order to squeeze out profit. It has to pay people less, so it gets workers who are less capable and has them spend less time on each job (convict).
The specific reason is that human contact helps guide people away from crime. The way these companies increase "efficiency" means less human contact.
The Chinese government has set up numerous organizations in Australia to suppress criticism of China, especially by Chinese students, but also targeting universities, businesses, publishers and so on.
Surveillance advertising is making the internet like an airport.
You can prevent this, personally, by refusing to run nonfree software (which includes nearly all mobile apps), and refusing to talk to surveillance web sites. If stopping them feels like a sacrifice, think about how they mistreat you, and you'll realize that the real sacrifice was using them.
Everyone: tell US Bank to stop funding oil and gas pipelines, as it said it would.
US citizens: call for removing Rep. Nunes as head of the Trump-Russia investigation.
He doesn't want answers, only to cover them up with lies.
The UN demands that all countries set up databases for personal information about air travelers, including biometrics.
It doesn't require all countries to collect any particular kind of biometric, but that injustice is likely to follow.
Modern patterns of living push old people into lives of total solitude. Cohousing could help people avoid this fate.
Automated and internet sales are part of the problem. How about discouraging those?
To cope with the future droughts that global heating will cause requires changes in both physical systems and legal systems.
One thing it may require is to give people water priority over agriculture. Those who try growing water-intensive crops that take water from people must be shown they are asking to lose.
Indonesia expelled a BBC reporter for an erroneous tweet that criticized the quality of food sent for malnourished children in Papua.
Her error was to confuse food imported for sale in stores with food aid. She corrected the error later.
Errors are to be avoided. However, to interrogate and expel journalists for what they publish — even for errors — is much worse than an error.
Mexico Protesters Fear US-Owned Brewery Will Drain Their Land Dry.
In effect, beer is an excuse to transfer water from Mexican farmers to US big business.
Hong Kong Democracy Activists Urge UK to Release Unseen Files.
Some of the information might put China under pressure to respect human rights in Hong Kong today.
Paul Ryan’s Push for Workforce Development Is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.
The idea that training programs could correct for the harm done by eliminating jobs is fundamentally mistaken. Here are many reasons why.
Student loans today are dangerous. If you don't get the degree (maybe you're not among the brightest students), or of you don't get the job afterward (maybe previous graduates filled the demand), you're left with the student loans on your back for the rest of your life.
Refuting some specific lies in the Nunes memo.
Alas, the memo seems to be having its intended effect of convincing Republicans to distrust Mueller's investigation, which is meant to give the bully political cover for shutting the investigation down.
Consequences of global heating are visibly causing polar bears to starve. Now we know more about why.
Big and well-known US companies use subterfuges to pay workers less than minimum wage.
Fundamental human rights are suffering a setback in most of the countries covered by the global survey.
Detroit thugs want businesses to give them direct access to watch through the cameras in the business. At any and all times.
Indeed, they could record all the video from these businesses' surveillance cameras, all the time.
These setups should be illegal except when a court order gives permission to hook them up in a particular place.
The racist has ordered the US government to stop enforcing the laws against discrimination by banks. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had the responsibility to do this, but the racist has told it to stop.
China's face-recognition tracking system has been set up in Ecuador.
Many congresscritters want to deal with the opioid problem by being "tough" on everyone except drug companies.
Laws to restrict "overprescribing" end up being tough on people that suffer from pain. There is no cut-and-dried way to distinguish between feeding a habit and treating pain; to cut down on the former tends to cut down on the latter.
Israel arrested a Palestinian teenager who lives near Jerusalem, and dumped her in Gaza where she had never been. There is no way to get from Gaza to the West Bank, because Israel never fulfilled its commitment to the PLO to set one up.
Of course, there was a bureaucratic excuse for this. So what? States are supposed to treat people humanely, not screw them just because they can.
Sequencing people's whole genomes is enabling progress at understanding and curing rare diseases caused by unusual or mutant genes.
We cannot pass up this benefit, but at the same time it leads to danger. The direct danger that people will be denied medical insurance is prevented in the US, for the time being, by Obama's insurance law which Republicans are trying to repeal.
To make use of the genetic danger requires correlating it with lots other personal data, and that's what opens up more danger. The state, and companies, can cause people lots of trouble using knowledge of that personal data.
The UK government is facing a legal crisis about using drones to kill people in areas which are not battlefields.
I wish the US valued human rights enough to find the practice disturbing. Once Obama endorsed the practice, most Democrats went along with him.
EFF: Keep Border Spy Tech Out of [immigrant] Protection Bills
I object to the hokey term "dreamers". This is one of the words that people use to show their membership in a political tribe, and I don't want to do that. I agree politically with some people on various issues, and I am often glad to support their efforts to achieve it, but I won't treat it like membership in a tribe.
It is no accident that the right-wing government of Australia set up an automated debt collection system that bullied thousands of people about nonexistent debts for nonexistent welfare fraud, and wouldn't listen to their counterevidence.
Part of the reason is that right-wingers demonize anyone that needs help. Another part is they followed the typical right-wing practice of privatizing the debt collection. Naturally the system didn't want to hear when the debt wasn't real.
California is about to join Montana in refusing to buy from ISPs that disrespect network neutrality for customers. That seems to mean any customers, not just for the state itself as customer.
The proposed law also directly prohibits ISPs from violating network neutrality, but the FCC's new rules may prohibit this. and it is not clear which side federal courts will take.
US citizens: call on senators to reject the "concealed carry reciprocity" law that would let every state authorize people to carry guns in other states.
US citizens: Tell the Senate: Don’t confirm Eric Dreiband as director of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
Want to Get Your Kids into College [and have them do well there]? Let Them Play.
Kenya's supreme court is trying to protect the freedom of dissent by releasing a lawyer that the president arrested.
A brief explanation of the issue of "the memo" that Republicans want to release.
That article doesn't mention that Nunes has secretly edited the memo since the committee looked at it.
If the FBI says, "keep it secret", I am opposed to that. Keeping us in the dark will not serve the cause of justice.
Releasing the full information, to show what Nunes cherry-picked from, is what we should do.
Remote control is being designed into many companies' driverless cars. Naturally that includes remote viewing, which could be used all the time.
California is considering setting up a state-owned bank, specifically because marijuana businesses need it, but others would use it too.
I hope it has physical branches, because I don't trust internet banking.
Although pot is now legal for adults in Colorado, ever more minors from minority groups are being arrested for possession of marijuana.
Possession of marijuana should be like possession of tobacco or alcohol: people should not be prosecuted, let alone jailed, for that.
As driverless cars travel, they will take lots of pictures, and thugs will be allowed to collect all that data.
When it is data about how a collision occurred, there is a valid reason to collect that data. But their collection won't be limited to that case.
The Pentagon's review of nuclear weapons policy proposes using nuclear weapons first, in response to a non-nuclear attack.
One detail in the notorious Nunes memo shows the real grounds for FBI surveillance of Carter Page.
I condemn broad surveillance of masses of people, in the absence of specific grounds. I support investigation of specific people based on specific suspicion, which this was.
The US is the only country in the UN that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The US's reasons for refusing are quite strained.
It ought to be called the "Rights of Minors", since it applies to everyone under 18 and it is wrong to call adolescents "children." However the substance of it is good, and the US ought to sign.
7 of the 9 top posts at the US State Department will soon be empty.
"To remove art because it is tainted by the sins of its maker sets an impossible standard for art institutions. Yet that is what is happening."
200,000 Americans have pledged to respond immediately if the bully fires investigator Mueller.
If we automate more activities, such as driving, we could also isolate people more.
This is in addition to the near-certainty that driverless cars will record video showing everyone that passes on the street, and have a remote control facility.
There will be a temptation to put AI in charge of launching nuclear weapons, to try to distinguish a real attack from a false alarm. That would be very dangerous.
In every false alarm so far, some human decided, "Never mind what this looks like — let's not destroy humanity on the supposition it is a real attack. How would we feel on finding out it wasn't one?"
An AI system would not reason this way, if it weren't programmed to.
Georgia is considering a bill to explicitly make it a crime to violate a web site's terms of service.
Is anyone investigating which companies fund the legislators that support this bill?
Playboy is suing to establish that posting a link to copyright-infringing material to illustrate a point is copyright infringement.
When a major league sports team talks about moving to a different city, the public generally gets gouged in one city or the other.
The plutocrats' plan for Puerto Rico: shut schools, shut government offices, privatize all infrastructure, and cut jobs. This will cause a depression that will be the excuse for their next stroke.
The coming depression might leave a million Puerto Ricans unable to pay the tax on their land. Then the parasites will have an excuse to take that too. The "government" will take the land, and the parasites will order the "government" to sell it to the parasites.
The bully's infrastructure infraplan aims to take the whole US in the same direction.
Ukraine bans history books for even a shadow or a shade of an appearance of criticizing Ukraine's past.
Gender equality at work: it's not just about equal pay for comparable work, it's also equal respect for comparable work.
While this principle applies to all kinds of work, I think that, in regard to practical campaigning, equality for the many who work in low-paid jobs deserves higher priority than equality for the few who are stars.
Guillaume Chaslot, who formerly worked on YouTube's secret recommendation algorithm, developed software to empirically study YouTube's patterns of recommendations. What he discovered is that YouTube tended to recommend right-wing videos that supported the troll.
Why that occurred is not clear.
Ai Weiwei: to cure the refugee crisis, the west must recognize how its imposed globalization causes disasters that force people to become refugees.
I disagree partially. It was not "the west" that has done this; rather it was the western banksters and plutocrats that control western countries, pretending that their benefit is our benefit too.
The same banksters and plutocrats are spreading poverty in the west, just not as fast. Being part of the lower 50% of Americans today is not as bad as living in a refugee camp, but give the Republicans a few more years and the difference will get smaller. What is a Hooverville, after all, but a refugee camp?
A medical charity aimed at curing diseases made a partnership with Heineken, thus legitimizing a major cause of non-infectious maladies.
Poland Can't Lay Its Holocaust Ghosts to Rest by Censoring Free Speech. Although Poles were not responsible for the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, many Poles willingly killed Jews — 200,000 Jews in all.
Does this amount to responsibility on the part of the "Polish nation"? I don't think either "yes" or "no" is a valid answer. It has to be "somewhat".
I agree with Friedland in condemning laws that prohibit statements of views about history. Whether it is the genocide of the Jews, or the genocide of the Armenians, or any other, forbidding disagreement about history is itself tyranny.
Republicans in several states want to put people in prison for many years for turning off a pipeline, or even entering the land around one. They want to interfere with journalism, too.
Don't trust supposed anonymization of your data!
If a company says it will distribute your data in "anonymized" form, assume that means it will give the data to data brokers with your name and address right on it. And don't give the company your name!
Fast food workers will protest to demand $15 an hour.
Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person.
LA is making big efforts to provide more housing for poor people, but it isn't anywhere near enough to shelter the growing numbers of homeless people.
The Koch brothers's next target is the public schools of the US.
They want to replace these with private schools that take public voucher money for profit, and do a bad job for students.
A US court ruled that Florida's scheme for disenfranchising ex-cons is unconstitutional.
Berlin made 8000 more apartments available by restricting Airbnb usage and discouraging speculation.
Other cities plagued by speculation in housing should do likewise.
The MPEG patent-rent standard organization seems to think its days are doomed. Video compression formats that are protected by patent pacts are replacing MPEG standards.
US school departments' web sites not only fail to have the most basic protection outside against snooping on the visitors, they even host surveillance advertising themselves.
However, the recommendations would eliminate only the most gross violations of students' privacy, which would continue to be threatened by the schools' own data collection.
When algorithms are used to rate people for good or bad treatment, they are often designed in ways that push the bad treatment onto the ones that have the least influence to push it away.
The basis for this is that the US systematically deprives poor people of the possibility of making enough money to cope with the needs of life. Whether the money comes from work or from the state, there isn't enough of it. Inevitably, some people will get squeezed out the bottom.
Precisely who gets squeezed out first depends on lots of details, but those specifics are less important than the general situation that ensures someone will suffer.
"The Nunes memo shows Republicans buy their own conspiracy theories."
The bully plans to conduct nuclear weapons tests as a show of belligerence.
This is just the sort of thing that the mainstream media love to call "presidential".
We should not rush to judgment about Woody Allen.
Cape Town has a plan to provide rationed water to all inhabitants if drought compels turning off the piped water supply.
This is a short-term plan; it won't work for decades if the rainy season of the past no longer occurs in the future. People may have to move.
As global heating hits increasing numbers of millions, they will find there is nowhere to move to.
US citizens: oppose imposition of a national ID card.
The US review of nuclear weapons policy proposes new tactical nuclear weapons, ostensibly to deter Russia from using tactical nuclear weapons.
It is not outrageous, but I think it is superfluous because I think there is no chance Russia would start a major war in Europe. Putin is unscrupulous and aggressive, but careful and subtle.
SCROTUS have allowed some Medicare benefits to lapse.
The bully wants to eliminate the Chemical Safety Board, whose job is to investigate and avoid major chemical accidents such as the oil platform explosion that polluted much of the Gulf Coast.
The EPA department that checks the safety of chemicals faces elimination.
Republicans think it is better for companies to poison their employees or blow them up, than to let regulations prevent this.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject heating-denier Bridenstine as head of NASA.
Measuring the climate is part of NASA's mission, and a global-heating denialist is likely to seek to stop that.
US citizens: to protect wildlife, oppose the bully's border wall.
Paul Ryan Wants to Rebrand Making Kids Go Hungry As 'Closing the Skills Gap'.
Uri Avnery describes the paradoxical alternation of friendship and hatred between Jews and Poles.
How the Nunes memo's distortions relate to the troll's legal predicament.
Advertisers and stores now try to track things whatever people betray an interest in, even if they don't buy or say they like those things.
However, it is false to say that "we" are subject to this. Maybe you allow it to be done to you. I don't allow it to be done to me. I don't connect to those web sites; the nonfree Javascript code used to track what people pay attention to will be blocked in my browser by LibreJS.
Anthem medical insurance refuses to pay for emergency room treatment if the problem was not really urgent. Since patients have no way to know that on their own, this means they risk bankruptcy every time they go.
Attractive-looking people tend to be more right-wing, because they don't understand the struggles others tend to face.
The fanatical natalist running the Office of Refugee Resettlement attempted to stop an imprisoned pregnant refugee from completing an abortion she had already started.
The Paris climate agreement's emissions limit target may be exceeded within 5 years.
Huge Military Budgets Make Us Broke, Not Safe.
The US military budget is so much more than any other countries that it should be reduced.
State of the Union Response: Disaster Capitalism Cloaked as Progress.
The bully ordered the Guantanamo prison kept open, apparently because he looks forward to the opportunity to torture prisoners.
Just as he hates anything Obama did, or tried to do, he may feel unsatisfied if he has not matched every evil act of Dubya.
The Koch brothers now aim to cripple public schools.
There could very well be better alternatives to US public schools, but the Koch brothers are not going to aim to make them better for most Americans.
Evidence in a lawsuit against Aflac insurance shows the company signed people up to insurance policies without telling them, falsified records, and cheated the sales agents too.
The EU is considering a weak measure to promote use of tap water instead of bottled water.
Why not require (as France requires) restaurants to offer tap water? Why not label every plastic bottle — of water, of other beverages — with "Buying plastic bottles like this degrades the environment?"
We need politicians who don't hesitate to displease businesses.
We cannot expect to be able to remove CO2 from the air in the quantities needed to compensate for our excessive emissions now.
The proposed methods are either very expensive, very challenging, or very damaging to the environment.
Right-wing cuts in welfare benefits generally come with demonization of anyone who "cheats". The result is that everyone is likely to be suspected of "cheating" — most of them falsely.
What about the few who really do lie? After all these cuts, it is quite plausible they wouldn't get money for food and medicine if they didn't lie. Maybe they could not care for their children if they told the truth.
I think those circumstances justify lying to a bureaucracy.
If the state wants to deserve to be told the truth, it should give decent treatment to those who do so.
Professional US football systematically causes brain injuries, and players typically get many of them. The resulting damage often makes victims irrational and violent. A study of deceased former players' brains found signs of injury in nearly all of them.
I don't think it should be illegal to play football, but society should change the institutions that systematically attract people to the game — such as the NFL.
We don't have to allow streets and air to be clogged with multiple delivery vans. We do not have to let rapid delivery be society's priority.
Scotland is considering making emotional domestic abuse a crime.
In principle I agree, but it may be very difficult to prove such crimes based on objective evidence judged by objective standards.
Israel is setting up tourist attractions in occupied territory to make annexation appear legitimate.
This reminds me of when I visited Tibet unknowingly — my Chinese hosts told me "Tibetans have lived here for hundreds of years" but didn't say that's because China had annexed part of Tibet.
Legalization of marijuana has done a lot of good and no real harm, but it is incomplete. Homeless people and people in federally-subsidized housing have nowhere they can lawfully use marijuana. And lots of minority group people are still arrested for the remaining crimes such as using marijuana in public.
The article uses the absurd word "latinx." Please don't write that unless you are prepared to say it out loud. Using the convention I proposed for gender-neutrality in Spanish, the word would be "latinis", but that proposal has not been adopted.
As the Taliban slowly advance in Afghanistan, the US is covering this up by not publishing status information.
Nine US states are working together to put a price on carbon emissions.
Emissions-trading schemes can be effective, but it is hard to prevent companies from gaming the system. The EU's system was designed wrong, leading to a price so low that it doesn't reduce emissions. The problems have never been corrected, due I expect to fossil fuel lobbyists.
If these states want the system to function, they should adopt an emissions tax rather than emissions trading.
"Unless we rewrite NAFTA, the trade pact will keep giving the green light to corporations to outsource American jobs, pushing down wages for everyone."
I agree, but don't forget the worst thing in NAFTA, the ISDS provision ("I Sue Democratic States") whereby each country gives foreign businesses legal priority over its own citizens and effectively a veto over laws.
The Green Party responds to the Mistake of the Union speech.
Saboteur Pruitt has delayed the Clean Water Plan till 2020 as a first step towards changing it to say "Polluters welcome!"
Exxon's new investment is a continuation of its previous policy and has nothing much to do with the Republican tax cut for corporations.
The latest systematic Republican attack on representative democracy is to keep elected offices vacant, or occupied by appointed substitutes, for years rather than let the people vote and perhaps elect a Democrat.
Republican politicians don't want to win fairly, they aim to subjugate America by hook or by crook. Patriotic Americans who used to support the Republican Party must recognize this, and join in defending the Constitution against today's un-American Republicans.
Polar bears need more food than was previously thought, meaning they could be extinct sooner than was thought.
Australia spends twice as much on subsidizing mines as on protecting the environment.
Amazon warehouses do not result in increased employment locally.
So don't anyone offer them a tax break, hear?
Sanders urges Americans to knock on doors to call for action to curb global heating.
One in Three People with Legal Problems Develop Health Issues. This is true in the US, Canada, and the UK.
When PISSI captured Mosul, the first thing it did was suppress the mafias and make city services run smoothly. It took a couple of months to institute murderous repression.
A patent application suggests that Amazon plans to track the position of warehouse workers' hands.
Perhaps it will use this only to give workers feedback when they are trying to pick something up. Or perhaps it will use it to oppress them — if it doesn't already saturate the scale of repression. Let's not let Amazon decide.
The US legal system denies justice to poor people in lawsuits, because they usually have no lawyer at all.
Boston Resists Surveillance and Learns About Programs Targeting [minority ethnic groups].
US Bank promised to stop funding oil pipelines, but didn't do that. Protesters will visit offices of US Bank to protest its duplicity.
Don’t Equate Trump’s Linguistic Mistakes With Stupidity.
Lots of people don't speak English with educated correctitude, and they aren't necessarily stupid either. Many of them support the bully, and when he gets insulted for his speech style, they feel it too.
Old marijuana convictions will be wiped out automatically in San Francisco, so that the victims of that unjust law won't have to ask one by one.
The practice of excluding people from work, school, housing and welfare because of a past conviction keeps millions of Americans trapped in poverty (and crime, in many cases). The practice has been constructed in the past 50 years — before that, it wasn't so. The practice is possible only because we have come to accept a large permanent underclass. We must not have an underclass, so we must stop punishing people with life in poverty.
The coal mining company Adani appears to have altered an environmental modeling study before submitting it to a regulatory hearing.
Adani wants to open a giant coal mine in Australia, and is undermining governments there by pushing for subsidies and for looking the other way as it pollutes. After this, it ought to be banned entirely from operating there.
Nestle is once again using sleazy methods to lead mothers to believe that its milk substitutes are as good for babies as human milk.
The Department of Labor claimed it couldn't forecast how much the tip-theft rule would hurt waiters, but that's false: it had done the forecast and didn't want to show the public the results.
It would cost the waiters billions of dollars.
Sanders and 350.org call for candidates to refuse fossil fuel campaign funds.
This will be a way to separate real environmental defenders from those ready to be corrupted, in the Democratic primaries.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the troll's infrastructure infraplan.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass legislation to protect the Robert Mueller investigation.
Theresa May, PM of Britain, won praise from China for avoiding the inconvenient topic of China's repression and sticking to capitalism.
Since it was obvious to the Chinese state mouthpieces that this would insult her, perhaps this was meant to demonstrate publicly how subservient she is to China.
Wood-burning stoves produce lots of dangerous particulate pollution.
The Maldive Islands supreme court has ordered the release of the main political prisoners, and restored 12 opposition members of parliament.
Every director of the FBI has been a Republican. Democratic presidents cave in to pressure to show "bipartisanship" by appointing Republicans; apparently Republican presidents are not expected to be "bipartisan." This may relate to the general right-wing attitude of the FBI.
The FBI investigated and harassed dissidents in the 60s and 70s.
The NHS is not being given enough money to both carry out today's medical care and compensate victims of past neglect.
I'm sure a large fraction of the past neglect was due to insufficient funding in the past. Sufficient funding would cure the present and future problems.
The head of US immigration thugs says he enjoys his job, which he interprets as terrorizing people and deporting them.
He now plans an explicit policy of haunting courthouses to grab any unauthorized immigrants that are defendants … or witnesses.
Imagine if you are violently robbed, and the robber can't be tried because the witnesses don't dare show up in court. Now imagine that Republicans are chuckling.
The bully's saboteurs plan to kick lots of Americans out of public housing. Especially the unemployed.
Burmese soldiers carefully planned to massacre Rohingya, then covered up the results in mass graves.
25 policies that the US needs in order to improve non-rich people's lives.
They do not include the deeper political changes needed to restore democracy, but if we don't do that, we will have trouble adopting those policies.
A court released the head of Amnesty International Turkey until his trial for "terrorism", but he was arrested again a little while after.
When dissidents and human rights defenders face trumped-up charges from an oppressive state, charges that ought to be dropped right away, I normally don't post about changes in details, such as whether the "suspect" is held in jail meanwhile. I mention this instance because it is particularly nasty.
Let's not use the bland and bureaucratic word "detention" to describe imprisonment of any kind.
US citizens: phone your Republican congresscritters and senators to demand restored funding for community health centers.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on the Museum of Natural History to remove climate-denialist Rebekah Mercer from its board.
Almost half of all US military bases are threatened by the effects of global heating.
The new prudery campaign casts its shadow over art.
Using anti-malarial mosquito nets as fishing nets endangers fish.
A court overturned the Kansas law that denied state contracts to anyone that participates in a boycott of products from Israel.
The First Amendment covers the right to boycott, and governments may not condition unrelated dealings with people on their nonparticipation in certain boycotts.
Palestinians and Palestine are not threatening the human rights of Americans. Israel and its agents are an immediate threat.
The sleaze has sabotaged the Federal Trade Commission so much that it hardly cares about monopolies in internet search and advertising.
Other presidents starting with Reagan have been gradually undermining antimonopoly law in the US.
Instead of sending staff to mindfulness courses to cope with the stress of work, businesses should put less stress on them.
A raise is a good way to reduce the stress generated by the employees' lives.
The bully is repeating, in regard to North Korea, the position that Dubya took before he launched the war with Iraq.
In one regard, the current push for war is not quite as dishonest. North Korea really does have weapons of mass destruction, whereas that claim against Iraq in 2003 was an engineered system of lies.
But that is no reason for launching a war which, in this case, could easily escalate to nuclear weapons.
The right to "insult a nation" is a vital part of human rights and must be protected.
This applies to all nations.
Australian spy agencies want to prosecute journalists for leaks to protect against "Chinese influence".
That seems like a nonsequitur to me. If Chinese influence is exerted through libel lawsuits, perhaps Australia ought to protect journalism from libel lawsuits rather than add its own threat.
Maintaining areas of wild plants around and within a farm can reduce the need for pesticides.
Nigeria does have bookstores, but most children there can't afford to buy books. They depend on the public libraries, which are collapsing from lack of funding.
Donald Savastano couldn't afford to see a doctor until he won a million dollars in the lottery. The delay was too long — he had untreatable, advanced cancer.
If he had been able to afford the visit when he first noticed symptoms, he might have caught it in time.
The troll's saboteur appointed to head the Centers for Disease Control has resigned because of investments in a tobacco company.
Young Russians, at least some of them, learn to recognize and resist propaganda.
There is still the problem of how to figure out what the truth is when every side engages in propaganda more or less.
Israeli expansionists are suing two New Zealand activists for persuading a singer to cancel a planned concert in Israel.
They are using a law that was designed to bully Gush Shalom into dropping its campaign to boycott products of the Israeli colonies in occupied territory. It exposes boycott advocates to unlimited financial "damages" based on intentionally weak criteria.
Uri Avnery wrote that some leaders of Gush Shalom were willing to go to jail for peace, but didn't dare risk the punishment of imposed penury for the rest of their lives. Nowadays Gush Shalom does not advocate a boycott. It does still maintain a list of companies that operate in the colonies in Palestinian territory.
These expansionists are trying to extend that bullying internationally. We will see if Israeli courts dare to attempt world-wide repression of foreign criticism of Israel's policy.
A former Facebook executive attributes Facebook's usefulness for fake news to its dependence on digital advertising. This leads Facebook to do whatever suits the advertisers best.
The Grace/Ansari bad date is a lesson about the difference between a kind, caring dating man and a selfish, uncaring one.
It makes no sense to legislate kindness, but men should all try to learn it.
Purchases made with Bitcoin can be traced to you, even years later, unless you are very careful.
This is one of the ways GNU Taler would have an advantage. With Taler, your purchases are truly anonymous, unless you reveal your identity in some other way.
Merchants that don't accept Taler payments are intalerable.
I have a conjecture about how the troll got to be what he is. When he was a teenager he must have read a logic puzzle about truthtellers that always tell the truth, and liars that always lie. And since everyone said that people should tell the truth, his rebellious streak led him to try to become a logic-puzzle liar, or as close as humanly possible.
Most large US companies have done nothing to share the big tax cuts with their employees.
I would bet that none of them has shared any with the "independent contractors" of contracting companies that have mostly replaced employees.
US citizens: call on the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the appointees that Sessions wants to attack state-legal marijuana.
US citizens: reject the troll's inferiastructure program.
The US is trying out a "more efficient" system of inspecting butchery of chickens. It's more efficient because it's mostly done by employees of the company itself. The result is, more salmonella.
The billionaire's "disruptive" insurance company is no substitute for Medicare for All, but the danger is people will mistake it for one.
ACLU: We can't assume the FBI is honest, but we shouldn't judge it by the slanted selection of facts SCROTUS publish. The Democrats should release the rest of the facts so we can judge properly.
The US can protect the Syrian Kurds from Assad, and keep PISSI from coming back, by joining Russia to press for a peace deal which gives the Kurds autonomy.
The prosecution of Reality Winner disregards both facts and laws, and disguises this behind secrecy.
A UK appeals court ruled that the state must get something like a court order before accessing someone's internet traffic.
The bully's saboteurs of banking boast about letting them get away with whatever they like.
The US is the world's second-largest tax-dodging destination.
The troll converted the State of the Union speech into a fund-raising scheme by advertising the names of donors.
"Opportunity zones" offer companies the chance of reduced taxes if they do business in depressed areas. They don't seem to achieve much for those areas, but they do reduce the total tax collected from businesses.
Instead of looking for excuses to let some companies pay less tax if they treat the public better, how about if we charge more tax to the companies that don't.
Ireland will hold a referendum to legalize abortion, because leading politicians have come to support abortion rights.
It is fallacious to argue to prohibit any action on the grounds that "If X and Y had done that, Z would not have been born." There all sorts of things X and Y have a right to do, which would have avoided the birth of Z.
If X and Y had never had sex, Z would not have been born. If X and Y had been in different cities at that time, Z would not have been born. Should they have been compelled to have sex every night until pregnancy resulted?
People in Turkey that criticize Turkey's attack on the Syrian Kurds are prosecuted for "supporting terrorism."
Tyrant Erdoğan has already imprisoned the leaders of political opposition; now he goes after anyone that disagrees.
Poverty is booming in the "booming" US economy.
Raising questions about proper regulation of how and where marijuana is sold and advertised.
An immigrant facing deportation won in court the right to say goodbye to his family.
There are vacant seats in the Wisconsin legislature. Now that Governor Walker has seen that people are likely to elect Democrats, he has decided not to hold the required special elections to fill those seats.
Walker's career has been marked with cheating and the Republicans are heavily involved in voter-suppression.
Shrinking the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument would threaten fields of dinosaur fossils.
These fields could be strip-mined if the saboteur-in-chief gets his way.
Two Labour MPs argue that progressives in Britain should support accepting EU trade rules.
Their arguments make sense, but there's another issue they did not raise: these trade rules act as business-supremacy treaties. They go further than the World Trade Organization, which in itself is so harmful to democracy that we should aim to abolish it.
It is insufficient for states to demand ISPs respect net neutrality only for the state as customer. They must deal only with ISPs that do this for all customers.
Labour supporters try to demonstrate that the UK can stay in the EU's single market and still deprivatize industries.
US citizens: call on the FBI to forget the fictitious "Black Identity Extremist" terror movement.
US citizens: call on the Democratic Party to adopt the Unity Commission's reforms.
To sign without running their nonfree Javascript, use the Salsalabs workaround. You could also contact Salsalabs and ask them to fix this problem. More complaints could convince them to do it.
An Australian minister told immigration to stonewall refugees — to refuse to carry out the investigations to determine whether they were entitled to asylum.
Pompeo says he expects Russian manipulation of the US 2018 election.
The UK's policy towards China is a desperate "Buy something from us!"
California now requires sex education classes to teach something about how to have good and healthy relationships.
This is a big step forward. But I think there also need to be practical lessons about the emotional aspects of sex — how to be kind to, listen to, and please your lover. To learn this — to some extent — by flailing around unaided has cost me decades. I wish someone had taught me when I was a teenager.
North Carolina's supreme court overturned a law designed to create programmed deadlock on all practical questions about early voting — as a system of voter suppression.
A study of the techniques used for digital manipulation via platforms.
Whether the purpose is seizing political power, or selling a product, there is no reason to permit these activities. I think we can make laws that will spike them, without censoring anyone from saying any particular thing.
An experiment found that people tend to trust strangers who look like those that have treated them well, and distrust strangers who look like those that have treated them badly.
If this is a real tendency (one experiment isn't enough to show that), this pattern could tend to encourage bigotry.
The bully's man abruptly forced out deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.
He was going to retire with full pension in two months. It must have taken some big threat to stop him from holding out for that time.
Why take the trouble, since he was going to leave so soon? This could be merely an example of the bully's habitual cruelty, but I expect it is meant somehow as an attack on Mueller's investigation.
The African Union court ordered Mauritania to compensate teenagers enslaved because they were born into a family considered slaves.
Don't let the media lead you to focus on the troll's trolling! It's meant for distraction — so don't let it succeed.
US generals have been fighting for 50 years for the claim that the US could have won the Vietnam War with a different military approach — so don't hesitate to intervene in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and…
How Dubya's invasion of Iraq paved the way for PISSI.
I think it is too strong to say that the US "created" PISSI. There were several steps from the Iraqi resistance of 10 years ago to PISSI, so the claim that PISSI was inevitable is going too far.
For instance, without the Tunisian revolution in 2011, and the famine in Syria in the preceding years, Syria might still be firmly under the rule of Assad.
Organizing Americans with inherited wealth to work to reduce inequality.
The Koch brothers reportedly think the troll will hurt the whole Republican Party in the coming elections.
Will they force SCROTUS to impeach him?
US national parks' facilities are crumbling. Due to insufficient taxation on businesses and rich people, there are no funds to maintain them.
Natural gas has replaced half the coal burning in the US, but that doesn't reduce global heating very much.
Turkey is retracting the punishments imposed without trial on some 11,000 people who were mistakenly considered users of the communications app Bylock.
The people taken to be users of Bylock, whether correctly so or incorrectly, were all punished without trial. Erdoğan has shown no evidence to connect the users of Bylock with Gülen, or to connect Gülen with the coup attempt.
Thugs' unions across the US have won various special privileges for thugs limiting how they can be interrogated.
In many areas, their arrest records are automatically erased.
The Koch brothers will spend 400 million dollars to keep Republicans in power in state legislatures.
The US farmed out collection of unpaid taxes to private companies. These companies operated inefficiently, so in order to make a profit they charged the US more than the value of the taxes they collected. They also harassed people who didn't owe any taxes. So the US cancelled the program.
Proposed cuts to the IRS budget could be meant as an excuse to start this up again.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on the state of Massachusetts to boycott ISPs that don't respect network neutrality.
To sign without running their nonfree Javascript, use the Salsalabs workaround.
You could also contact Salsalabs and ask them to fix this problem. More complaints could convince them to do it.
US citizens: tell the Bureau of Land Management not to allow oil drilling near Chaco Canyon.
The region is full of remains of ancient towns and dwellings, going far beyond the area designated as a park.
US citizens: demand an end to forced labor in US immigration prisons.
US citizens: Tell the Senate you oppose SCROTUS's planned 20-week abortion ban.
This would imprison doctors that do abortions after that point.
Abortions done that late are done for medical reasons, or because the pregnancy was due to rape. Thus, in each case where this ban stops a woman from getting an abortion, it would either put her in specific danger, require her to carry and give birth to a handicapped baby or one that will die soon, or compound the injustice she suffered.
Geoengineering to cool the Earth would be like those drugs that treat a disease but are dangerous to stop taking.
Aside from that, heating isn't the only harm done by CO2 in the air. It makes the oceans more acidic, and that is going to be fatal to coral in a few decades.
New York State will now boycott ISPs that don't respect network neutrality.
A court has ruled that the song "We Shall Overcome" is not copyrighted.
A thug chief in Pakistan is suspected of murdering 250 people that he assumed were guilty of something.
11 countries including Australia, Japan and Canada have agreed to the TPP, which I think means they have subjected themselves to the ISDS clause ("I Sue Democratic States"). I presume it is still included, because I'd expect I would have heard if it were removed.
I am sorry for those countries.
Puerto Rico's governor is using the hurricane as an excuse to privatize the electric grid.
Privatization sales often bring in far less than what the sold asset is worth. I suspect this is because the officials who favor privatization are happy to enrich plutocrats an the expense of the public — in other words, that they want the state to give the plutocrats a good deal, rather than to get a good deal for itself.
The global economy has been directed towards enriching plutocrats. Someone becomes a new billionaire every other day, while the poorer half of humanity have gained no wealth in a year.
Giving tenants lawyers for eviction hearings helps them tremendously because landlords' lawyers can no longer deny them their rights.
Some restaurants are functioning profitably on a "pay what you wish" basis.
It may work better in a place where people are not poor. Plutocratist politicians should be ashamed of how much they have made people poor in the US.
US Military Fails to Tackle Sexual Abuse of Children by Afghan Allies.
I suspect that the US military doesn't have enough leverage over Afghan troops to make them change this, and still have them fight.
A Spaniard called thugs "slackers", a rather mild criticism, and is now being prosecuted for showing thugs "disrespect".
Laws against "hate speech" are threats to human rights.
Poland is considering a law to ban use of the term "Polish death camps".
The Nazi extermination camps in Poland were set up and controlled by Germans, not by Poles. Thus, the term "Polish death camps" is indeed somewhat misleading.
According to the Polish emissary's report, published as Story of a Secret State by Jan Karsky, not many Poles collaborated actively with the Nazis. It was severely punished by the underground Polish state.
Nonetheless, antisemitism was traditional and widespread in Poland. Many Poles didn't particularly mind that Jews were forced into ghettos and then systematically killed.
The book describes, among many other things, how Karsky snuck into an extermination camp by mingling with the guards, and what he saw there.
Once in the US, he reported it to US officials, but they refused to believe it. After the war, they found out it was true.
Although the term "Polish death camps" is misleading (so I wouldn't use it myself), to prohibit the term by law is censorship, an injustice. This law should be rejected.
Antisemitism is a very bad thing, and at its worst is as horrible as anything humans have done. Please do not conflate it with condemnation of Israel's occupation of Palestine.
Navalni has called for massive protests against Putin's rigged election.
Right-wing billionaire Berlusconi is aiming to rule Italy again. I referred to him as "il ducino" because of his past statements of admiration for the fascist dictator Mussolini that lead Italy into World War II as an ally of Germany.
Let's ban the sale of bottled water in countries where the tap water is potable.
I do ask restaurants and bars to refill my multi-use water bottle, when there is no other place to fill it. You can, too.
Now that Erdoğan is fighting the Syrian Kurds openly, that could cause drastic changes in the Middle East.
There is opportunity here as well as danger. Erdoğan might destroy the Syrian Kurds. But if he gets a bloody nose, he might lose control of Turkey, and that could open the way to restore secular democracy there.
I fear that the former is more likely. The Kurds are doughty but Turkey has tremendous advantages in the size of their forces and in armaments.
A Desire for Vengeance Is Human But Checks the Pursuit of Proper Justice.
The troll launched a smear campaign against FBI officials who could corroborate Flynn's testimony against him.
The Maine legislature repealed two ballot initiatives that the public voted for, and left another one unimplemented. Perhaps not by coincidence, they are all progressive.
I am skeptical of the claim that these initiatives violate Maine's constitution. Firstly, because initiative campaigns generally have lawyers check their wording. Secondly, because the legislature could have fixed the problems in a way consistent with the goals, if it were not aiming to thwart those goals.
The one-year delay on legalizing marijuana is not a disaster in itself. As long as they don't do something else worse.
Designing algorithms to find tax and benefits cheaters could be acceptable in some cases. Treating a positive result as proof, never. And designing notices so that replying requires admitting fraud is even worse.
The troll said he might put the US back into the Paris climate agreement if it were made into a "better deal."
I think that means, "If it were weakened even further and thus rendered totally null."
Chicago thugs and immigration thugs broke into Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez's home in Chicago without a warrant, then disregarded his warning that he had broken bones already, broke his other shoulder with their brutal treatment.
"Will tech giants move on from the internet, now we've all been harvested?"
The title is a pernicious exaggeration. They have not got data about all of us; for instance, outside of a few areas, the databases have little information about me. And I hope you too have resisted.
But that doesn't invalidate the idea of the article.
I am skeptical that there will cease to be companies with a hunger for data. There will occasionally be new competitors that want the data that other companies already have. There are fields in which they don't have enough data. Beyond that, they would like to understand every individual, and individuals change.
Notwithstanding that, the projected change may happen to some extent.
Corbyn: Labour will empower city governments to seize "properties" intentionally left vacant.
This can make a big difference, depending on the precise meanings of the words. Would it include apartments owned by speculators in which nobody resides? Would it include unsold condos in a building of condos?
SCROTUS want to reduce food stamps for children.
"Microschools" try to break the rigidity of standardized education.
US citizens: tell SCROTUS to stop deflecting congressional investigations of the bully.
US citizens: call on your senators to protect Mueller from being fired.
Murray Energy, a coal company, paid the saboteur-in-chief to sabotage the EPA and environmental protection, and that's exactly what he is doing.
The saboteur of the Office of Refugee Resettlement tries to forcibly block female refugees from getting abortions. Often they don't find out they are pregnant until they are already imprisoned. One of them was pregnant from rape, which may have been part of the reason she fled to the US in the first place.
Australia's right-wing government has almost finished eliminating the right to strike.
I agree with the union official that rejected any moral obligation to obey unjust laws created for the purpose of oppression. Even when plutocratic wreckers have power, they are not legitimate.
Here's How to Turn Back the Doomsday Clock: recognize that the dictator of North Korea is rational and can be deterred from attacking.
The danger of a digital dystopia is becoming visible and hard to deny.
Proprietary software is one of the principal causes, though not the only cause. Disservices that track people are a separate problem.
US immigration thugs are now tracking people through thousands of license plate recognition cameras around the country.
It is no longer mere speculation that massive digital surveillance will be used for repression. It is fact. Will Americans wake up to the danger and put an end to this repression?
Hong Kong has blocked another pro-democracy candidate from running.
In the UK, 50% of workers are normally broke.
In the US it is almost 80%. And over 70% are constantly in debt.
We have seen that no form of scandal and no form of opposition will convince Republicans to swerve, we see that the hard way is the only way. This means we have to fight their specific acts of sabotage, until we can get rid of the Republican rulers.
Rationally, this news shows we ought to be trying even harder, but we have to watch out for struggle fatigue and defeatism.
The Taliban put explosives in an ambulance and blew it up.
It was wrong for the US to disguise the hunt for Osama bin Laden behind a polio vaccination campaign, but this is far worse. However, I doubt that many Afghans will hate the Taliban for this the way they hate the US for the civilians it kills.
Islam creates many blind supporters just the way evangelical Christianity and the bully create many blind supporters. Both groups refuse to turn against their militants no matter what depravity those commit.
Tracing the closed-minded political "tribes" in the US to plutocratic domination since Bill Clinton's day. The article says that the plutocratists squeezed all the non-rich and concentrated the media to suggest that the non-rich blame other non-rich for this.
It also says that the elimination of network neutrality is the continuation of that attack.
A 3-year-old in Texas was apparently murdered by her father, and now there is a proposed law to jail parents that leave children home alone.
It's not just excessive and unjust, it's a non-sequitur.
Thousands of expensive luxury apartments, built in London to sell to foreigners as a speculation, find no buyers.
London should tax unoccupied apartments enough to make the builders sell them for whatever price they can get from someone who will really live there.
The bully will launch a new lie campaign with the State of the Union speech.
Businesses can buy favors from the US government by supporting the bully's rhetoric.
A transgender woman prisoner in the UK, jailed in a men's prison, says she will fast to death demanding to be moved to a women's prison.
Three others killed themselves already.
Automating public services meant to help people makes them rigid, impersonal, unhelpful, and inaccessible.
That makes it harder for people to get help, so they give up, and the state saves money by not doing its job.
Uri Avnery: The Israeli Knesset (parliament) allowed Jewish MPs to break the rules noisily by applauding Pence. When the Arab MPs broke the rules silently by holding up signs, they were physically kicked out.
However, Avnery is cheered by the many Israelis that refuse to transport African refugees being deported.
Israeli Holocaust survivors implored Netanyahu to let the Africans remain in Israel.
A US air strike in 2013 attacked a truck and killed 14 people from a family. The one survivor was a 4-year-old girl, who was left blind, one-handed, and orphaned. The US insisted on the claim that there were Taliban soldiers in the truck, counter to all the available facts.
For the press to cover the bully clearly in a way that supports the truth, it should not take his bizarre denials and excuses seriously. They are meant to distract, so don't be distracted by them.
A proposed campaign to eliminate car crashes due to alcohol threatens to be repressive and impractical.
I don't have any data, but I would guess that most of the time when people drive dangerously drunk, it is not due to the precise details of the current laws, but rather due to people who don't make any attempt to follow them. Thus, changes such as setting a lower legal limit will not work unless they terrify people. Besides which, you'd need to carry your own breath tester to follow such a law carefully.
Some of the proposals are harmless and might be useful. For instance, to regulate marketing of alcohol more carefully — if that will help, by all means do it. Preventing sales to people who are drunk is legitimate, but it is easier said than done.
A simple game can test for the mental and physical acuity necessary to drive safely. Putting one in the car would make it possible to detect when the driver is too impaired to drive safely, regardless of the cause. When your reflexes are marginal, the law could say you can drive to a place where you can safely rest for a while, but only with your emergency blinkers on — or whatever rules would promote safety for that shorter trip.
Don't fall for AT&T's inadequate "Internet Bill of Rights", designed to permanently deny the rights that are now endangered.
True network neutrality would mean that the ISPs may not take note in any way of what a user's network traffic consists of, except pursuant to a search warrant.
How can we protect free speech from rampant harassment speech that has an effect comparable to censorship?
The bully spoke on the phone with Erdoğan, and they give conflicting reports of what the bully said.
Which one is the truth — if either of them? We can't tell, since we can't trust either the bully or Erdoğan about the question.
It may not matter anyway. The range of possible deals they might make that would actually be carried out is rather limited, since Erdoğan can't trust the bully's word any more than you or I can. And his own word can't be trusted much either.
Formerly landless Brazilians have made a success of agroforestry on degraded land that the state gave them.
Dubya was not as bad as the troll, but he did great harm to the US and to other countries.
Honduran activists say thugs are making death threats as well as crushing protests violently.
Over 70% of refugees that returned to Afghanistan were forced to flee again.
Since the Taliban is growing in power, and PISSI is also operating there, both fighting and terrorism in Afghanistan are getting worse. Thus, I can't see how anyone can claim it is safe there, except someone whose orders say to lie about this.
A US radio station claims that China has put some 120,000 Uighurs into prisons for "re-education".
The US is not always truthful, but this is plausible for China.
When enslaved people in the UK testify against traffickers, the UK makes them live on the street and beg for food.
The troll's practice of calling all news he doesn't like "fake" has been imitated by repressive rulers around the world.
In the case of Catalonia, I read claims that some specific photos posted around the time of the quashed referendum were fake. But there was plenty of evidence of the repression.
The ideology of "free trade" pressures all countries to compete to bow down and serve China's tyranny.
This is especially sad now that the "economic growth" that they say requires this goes mainly to make the rich richer — which is hardly a worthy goal.
This is not a natural state of affairs. It results from the business-supremacy treaties.
The right kind of trade treaty, one intended to strengthen democracy, would punish countries with trade sanctions for any acts of tyranny, such as bogus punishment of dissidents.
The citizens of Oregon voted to raise their taxes so as to support medical care.
Australia plans to criminalize reporting on leaked secrets.
Puerto Rico's governor, and its nonelected government, say they want to use the hurricane's damage as an opportunity to privatize its electric system.
The new owner could squeeze out short-term profits.
Kimberly-Clark is using its new tax cut to facilitate cutting jobs.
Julian Assange is ill, and needs an MRI. But he does not dare go to a hospital for one, because he could be arrested and sent to the US.
The US common core standardized tests are too strict, compared with real children in many countries.
Washington Post blames the "Lack of US Leadership" for the famine in Yemen, which in fact was caused by US leadership.
Many Americans are compelled to work long hours on Amazon Mechanical Turk, getting paid a few dollars an hour.
The EU has fined Qualcomm over a billion dollars for paying Apple to reject its competitors' chips.
An indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon has been hit with mercury poisoning contamination. The only plausible source is a nearby natural gas complex.
George Monbiot: "In the nominally democratic era, the complex state is now, for all its flaws, all that stands between us and disaster." Now, however, states are turning against the cause of survival.
The Tunisian government doesn't seem to really want to prosecute the state officials that killed protesters in the 2011 revolution.
The UK is once again trying to oppose EU environmental protection. Previous such action.
Herbal remedies can sap the effect of prescription medicines.
Driverless cars work just well enough to lull people into trusting them but not well enough to be trustworthy.
I don't call them "autonomous" because that is not necessarily true. If they are "connected" then they are not autonomous.
The NSA has deleted "honesty" from its statement of values.
Ironically, that might make it more honest.
The troll may have violated campaign finance laws when paying money to porn stars not to talk about their visit to his hotel room — for the sake of his campaign.
Aside from this, I don't think there was anything wrong in that one activity of his. I condemn him for the many truly bad things he does; but if paying for silence about sex were the worst thing he had done in the past two years, he would be a great president.
It is a mistake to attack evil political figures over minor side issues. Here are the general reasons:
It reinforces the scorn attached to those minor side issues, which may be entirely mistaken.
In this case, it builds up the condemnation of anyone who is not monogamous — to say they are "cheating". Society pressures people to say they will be monogamous, and a large fraction of humans can't live that way, so they are sure to be condemned. This pressure drives people into a trap.
The bully really does cheat people, and he's been doing so for years in ways that have has nothing to do with sex.
Bank of America just added to the ways that things are more expensive for the poor.
US citizens: Call on some Senate Democrats to drop their plan to help SCROTUS eliminate the last shreds of protection against banksters.
Here's more information on the Democrats that plan to do this. One of them was Tim Kaine, who was Clinton's running mate. Looks like he's just as much of a bankster-lover as Clinton is.
Everyone: Call on China to free Tashi Wangchuk, imprisoned for teaching Tibetan in Tibet.
The bully's frontier wall through the Santa Ana refuge would kill the wildlife that it protects.
Scientists have called on the Museum of Natural History to kick global-heating denialist Rebekah Mercer off its board of trustees.
She and her father Robert Mercer gave 2 million dollars to denialist campaigns last year. I would expect that they offered to help the museum raise funds — and that the rest of the museum's leaders could not help being aware what the price would be.
One of the Koch brothers did the same thing to WBUR. There was a campaign to pressure WBUR to kick him off. Since WGBH produces the science program NOVA, his influence on it is dangerous. However, the campaign failed.
The Syrian Kurds have asked for support from Assad against the attack by Turkey.
Even in states that have legalized or decriminalized possession of marijuana, thousands of people (mainly blacks) are still arrested for just that.
Missing from the article is an explanation of what makes this possible. Why are the charges not immediately dismissed? If there is something in the law that permits it, what is that something?
Use of living quarters for speculation, often keeping them empty, is a big contributor to the high cost of housing.
Perhaps in Britain eliminating the speculation would be sufficient remedy, but I don't think that is true in the Boston area.
Aung San Suu Kyi Lives in 'Bubble', Says US Diplomat in Row with Myanmar.
Republicans agreed to restart funds for CHIP, but not funds for the community health centers that serve 27 million Americans, which they also cut.
Cypriots of Turkish descent feel threatened by the murderous Islamists that tried to attack a newspaper that dared criticize Erdoğan.
If the Cypriots can unite, those of Greek descent with those of Turkish descent, they could set an example of reconciliation and put Erdoğan's tyranny to shame.
The New Orleans resolution I reported on previously did not single out Israel's occupation of Palestine. Rather, it called for boycott of companies profiting from human rights abuses anywhere in the world.
But it was clear that this would include companies profiting from Israel's occupation of Palestine. Supporters of the occupation attacked fiercely and pressured the city council to repeal it.
In effect, they condemn any measure to protect human rights if that might apply to Israel.
I agree that the resolution should have been considered over more time. It is not a good idea to rush any sort of law.
2017 was the hottest year in the ocean since records began.
The last five years were the five hottest years ever recorded, in the ocean.
The Delaware thug department signed a nondisclosure agreement about the "stingray" cell-tower mimic that it bought, then lied about it.
An Israeli reporter writes about Israel's repeated plans and attempts to assassinate Yasir Arafat, along with dozens or hundreds of bystanders.
One plan involved shooting down an airliner with civilians in it. Officers in Israeli airforce refused to do this and fabricated excuses.
Lyft employees frequently look at the movements of various customers.
Uber was caught doing this, a couple of years ago.
I suspect any non-anonymous transport service will lead to this.
The Arab Syrian rebels are now basically allied with Turkey and fighting Erdoğan's battle against the Syrian Kurds.
These are the groups that the US tried to support, but tried doing so at arm's length, which failed entirely.
There were good reasons for the US not to attack with its own army, as Turkey is now doing.
The last slave ship reached the US illegally in 1860. The descendants of those slaves live in Africatown in Alabama, where their lives are shortened systematically by toxic pollution from heavy industry.
It's unfair that industrial pollution is dumped mainly near poor people and minorities. But I see that as a secondary issue resulting from the basic wrong: releasing these toxins at all. Distributing them more equally would still mean people are exposed to them; that is not a good solution.
The solution we need, and that we could have if our government were good, is to stop releasing them and clean up what has been already released.
Children Are Tech Addicts — And Schools Are the Pushers.
The fact that the programs used are nonfree is pertinent indirectly. For instance, developers make software and services addictive, and make them surveil users. With free software we could try to reduce the addictiveness and the surveillance.
Humanitarian charities are considering ceasing operations in Afghanistan after PISSI attacked Save the Children.
This would be a big victory for PISSI against the people of Afghanistan. It shows what PISSI stands for: primarily to force its rigid and cruel form of Islam on Muslims, and only secondarily to defeat non-Muslims.
Some 50,000 people protested against Australia Day, which celebrates the start of the British colonization of Australia.
The Royal Society for Public Health calls for health warnings on containers of alcoholic drinks.
An appeals court ruled that the Demaree parents are allowed to sue the social workers who took away their children and put them on the "sex offender" list. They had taken photos of their daughter nude in the bathtub, and the social workers jumped to the conclusion this proved some sort of sexual abuse.
US citizens: call on the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate charges that the NRA funneled Russian money into the US election campaign.
Idaho Republicans have decided to baldly disregard the federal medical insurance law, to cut medical care for poor people.
The bully tried to fire Mueller in June. He abandoned the idea because his lawyer said he would quit rather than implement that command.
London will push back against the use of bottled water by providing water fountains and bottle-filling points. Also, city hall will not sell bottled water.
US national parks did this, but the saboteurs made them start selling bottled water again.
President Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is using force against protests that call for him to abdicate.
He inherited the presidential throne from his father, the former president. Clearly not a legitimate government.
The bully has made US bombardment campaigns more secretive, as well as more deadly. Apparently he thinks the US will escape blame if the public can't tell what is going on.
Raqqa and Mosul really were war zones, and many soldiers might have been killed in battle if the US had not given them close air support. It was impossible to do this without killing civilians sometimes. However, was it possible to do this while killing fewer civilians? Denied information, we have no way of knowing. We know only that we can't rely on the bully to lead the US military to care.
Under Dubya and Obama, the US generally denied causing civilian casualties, sometimes persisting in the denial despite incontestable proof. You could even say that they blazed the trail for the bully's persistent lies.
The collapse of a giant conglomerate for privatized government services sheds light on the many other cases where outsourcing services has been a disaster.
If companies think they can hold agencies hostage by signing long-term contracts, they will look for every opportunity to corrupt politicians into signing them. This crime against the nation must not pay!
States can eliminate the threat, and make the crime not pay, by changing their constitutions to declare long-duration privatization contracts invalid.
Eight members of No More Deaths were charged with the crime of "abandoning property" — that is, leaving water bottles near the Mexican border so that border-crossers would not die of thirst.
With this action, the US government declares its direct intention to criminalize leaving water for them, as well as ancillary actions required in order to do so.
Senator Doug Jones shockingly voted to confirm Alex Azar as saboteur of Health and Human Services. Apparently he is a right-wing Democrat.
What I saw from his web site made him look progressive to me. I now wonder how I can tell which candidates are really progressive.
I also wonder when will he face reelection? That will be time to fight him in the primary.
Meanwhile, Alabama's Republicans have voted to stop holding special elections to replace senators that die or step down.
Their aim is to seize and hold power by doing whatever it takes.
Chinese refugee Wang Yam was convicted of murdering Allan Chappelow based on no pertinent evidence, in a trial that was unfair because his defense was kept secret by the court.
When more evidence came up to exculpate Wang, the appeals court charged with reconsidering the verdict didn't even ask one witness to say what he had seen.
In some parts of the US, getting a search warrant is usually quick and easy. Sometimes so easy that it proves judges didn't exercise enough care before issuing them. And it is rarely so long that waiting for it is a problem.
Plastic debris is making coral reefs sick.
The ACLU is suing Pennsylvania for keeping all prisoners on death row in solitary confinement, in some cases for decades as they appeal.
The death penalty is an injustice, and this is a separate injustice.
The ACLU explains when an NDA to cover up some sort of sexual crime could be legally invalid.
This situation is too complex and uncertain. I think we should legislate to make it completely clear that an NDA has no legal force to block someone from reporting a felony.
To reduce agricultural greenhouse emissions enough, we need to reduce wastage of food and change our diet to eat less beef, as well as changing farming practices to use less fertilizer.
For each of these changes, there are other reasons to do it.
Students and Puerto Ricans are pressuring US universities to divest from the vulture funds that profit from Puerto Rico's suffering.
Cape Town is at most 3 months away from strict water rationing as its water is almost exhausted. This is the result of global heating.
60% of Americans now call for legalization of growing and using marijuana.
SCROTUS plan to vote on a sick version of the DREAM act, according to which it would be a crime for one of the supposed beneficiaries to earn less than a certain amount per year. Also, it would put all immigrants in danger of criminal conviction.
I have not supported petitions for including the DREAM Act in the spending authorization bill because I don't think it is right to demand changes in law that way. That tactic tends to put a monkey wrench into democracy. I think it should be limited to preserving the status quo.
Thus, I support demanding extension of DACA as it was in the spending authorization bill.
Congo 'State Agents' Murdered Hundreds in 2017, Says UN Report.
If outrage becomes too cheap, it loses impact.
So it is important to support human rights causes persistently. Don't expect to win quickly, and be prepared to take action again, and again, and again.
US citizens: oppose the saboteurs' plan to authorize oil drilling on US coast lines.
Global heating denialists are using phony scientific journals to create an appearance of denial from climate scientists.
The central principle of right-wingers is that no lie is too vile.
Chile's new right-wing president seems to be more right-wing than his campaign indicated.
US citizens have been imprisoned in Egypt for years, just for being at the wrong time and place during the coup. Pence has taken up their cause, and maybe it will do some good.
Even a lunatic religious fanatic will occasionally do something good. It doesn't change my opinion of Pence, but I hope those prisoners are freed.
Republicans are gerrymandering the election of judges in North Carolina.
The Democratic Party establishment is organizing to protect the plutocratist Democrats (that lost to Republicans) against progressives that might win.
Prioritizing economic growth over equality tends to lead to increased inequality, and increased poverty.
I think that's because the methods to achieve economic growth involve a lot of dooH niboR, which is designed to boost inequality.
I suspect that this is part of why the plutocrats put the focus on economic growth — it provides an excuse for dooH niboR.
The spending bill to keep the government operating for 3 weeks also eliminates Congress's control over what the CIA spends money for.
I can't tell whether this is a permanent change, or only for the three weeks.
A former thug chief in Kentucky told a recruit, "If black shoot them."
Thus, it's not only unconscious racism to blame when thugs kill blacks.
Mohammed Al-Mustafa is stateless, but the UK demands proof he can't supply before it will recognize that. In the mean time it does every imaginable cruelty to him hoping to pressure him to do the impossible: go to some other country.
Facebook Helped Consolidate Power for Cambodia's Dictator and His Attack-Dog Media, Then Killed the Independent Press's Platform.
To some extent the Cambodian government figured out how to use the policies that Facebook had anyway. However, some of the methods described in the article show that Facebook went out of its way to cooperate.
Plutocrats should be afraid of tiny killer drones, and so should the rest of us.
I wonder if it is possible to design headgear that would keep the killer drones a few inches away, if that would prevent grave damage.
Ideas for replacing some uses of plastic.
Gorsuch discussed the DACA case with politicians. By Supreme Court rules, this means he must recuse himself from that case.
Everyone: call on the media not to be fooled by the troll's sane-sounding reading from a teleprompter.
The saboteurs are arranging to build a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which would lead to despoiling its particular ecosystems.
If we succeed in taking power away from the saboteurs, we will need to eliminate that road.
Meanwhile, Peru authorized building roads through the Amazon forest, which will pave the way to cutting it down.
Many US states are looking for more excuses and ways to block citizens from voting.
Immigration thugs boarded a bus in Florida and demanded that all passengers show them proof of citizenship.
Even US citizens should be afraid of random checks, of being denied the freedom to move around without being identified.
The Satanic Temple is suing to overturn a Missouri law that requires abortion clinics to make their clients read a presentation of the doctrine of some Christian sects. A woman who went through this asserts that it constitutes discrimination against her religion.
New York City thugs are angry that their official right to give or sell favoritism cards to other people has been reduced.
The depressive effect of being used by Facebook is directly traceable to its "real name" requirement and stopping people from having multiple accounts.
The executives of Sears Canada have been cheating the employee's pension fund for years. Will they get away with this?
Executives should be required to get permission from the staff to underfund their pension fund. If the staff are the ones who will take the risk, they should decide whether to take it.
A modern car is Big Brother on wheels. It transmits lots of data to the manufacturer, including where the car goes.
In some cases — perhaps all — it transmits the data by cellular modem. I don't know of any other way it could be done. On some cars — perhaps most — it is possible to unscrew the modem, thus blocking all transmission. If the car is under warranty, maybe that voids the warranty. Or maybe it doesn't. Would someone like to check this and tell me?
However, it is also possible that something in the car computers makes a log of all this data, which the warranty service can read out. Would someone like to research this question?
New York City thugs used to randomly stop and search people on the street for no reason that they would admit. In 2011, they did this almost 2000 times a day. They claimed this was reducing street crime.
A court said this was an injustice and made the thugs stop. Street crime has gone down ever since.
However, crimes by banks have shot up since 2000 and have not gone down. Should New York City start a program where it offers randomly chosen customers an audit of the bank's dealings with them, with a view towards prosecuting any crimes by the bank?
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now run by a saboteur, is taking the side of payday loan companies rather than their customers.
Why do three-year-old children attack themselves?
Has this been happening all along?
The US does a bad job of protecting children's lives, compared with other developed countries. On the average, 10,000 more American children have died each year (over 50 years) than would have died if the US did a comparably good job.
Young Tunisians know that freedom and democracy require more than replacing their former corrupt dictator with an elected agent of the foreign banks.
Ten ways that the saboteur-in-chief has sabotaged the US's already-insufficient efforts to avoid global climate mayhem.
Unauthorized immigrants in the US are now dropping their medical insurance and their childrens', from fear that they will be deported.
Israel does not want Hezbollah or Assad's forces coming near the Golan heights, so it is giving lots of money to the local militias that control that part of Syria and to the local inhabitants.
Iran recently endorsed the two-states Arab peace plan, so in principle there is no need for Iran and Israel to remain enemies.
A new world-wide list of invasive species should help efforts to curb some of them.
Barbudans are campaigning to block the plan to privatize land on Barbuda so that rich foreigners can buy it.
One of the rich foreigners is Robert de Niro, and this provides an opportunity for pressure.
In Egypt, running for president is considered a crime.
Remember how people used to call someone a "Neanderthal" meaning "brutish and subhuman"? And white supremacists used to claim that blacks were "more like apes"?
Now some white supremacists say their proclaimed superiority is the result of Neanderthal genes.
I find this ironically amusing. They will argue from any invented premises as long as it reaches their desired conclusion.
US citizens: Call on Bill Nye not to attend State of Union speech as a guest of climate-denier Bridenstine.
US citizens: Tell Health and Human Services not to allow doctors and hospitals to refuse treatment based on their religious prejudices.
Some new cars will be pre-equipped with biometric scanners for use by the TSA.
India's minister of education is a creationist and denies that evolution ever occurs.
His statements indicate a general idiotic preference for ignorance over knowledge.
The saboteur-in-chief will stop at nothing to block installation of solar electric generation. His latest method: a 30% tariff on imported Chinese solar panels.
If the goal were to boost US production without reducing use, it would make more sense to start the tariff smaller and raise it each year. That would give domestic production a chance to ramp up.
The article uses the confused term "intellectual property", which gives people a totally misguided idea of what current laws say and do.
Japan plans to build a faster ship for its "scientific" whaling, so it can speed away from whale defenders.
Slavery is rife in the Thai fishing industry.
A lunatic proposal that might tempt fools: to let people get multiple votes in public elections by having babies.
This would be a strong incentive to increase population growth, and thus would threaten global disaster.
The US and its allies have stepped up air attacks against al-Shabaab, resulting in plenty of civilian casualties. It is hard to tell how many civilian casualties there are, or how many air attacks there are.
The ally mentioned in the article is Kenya, but I would expect Ethiopia is involved also, since it was Ethiopia's intervention that destabilized Somalia and brought about the creation of al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab is not just an underground terrorist gang. It is also an army that controls territory. I don't think that fighting that army with air power is wrong in principle, but there are moral requirements (also supported by international law), and I wouldn't trust the US, let alone Kenya and Ethiopia, to try to follow them.
The US is morally responsible for air attacks by its allies, whether or not it specifically arranged all or any of their attacks, since it arranged for the allies to carry out air attacks in Somalia.
The US might abandon the Syrian Kurds to conquest by Turkey to stop Turkey from allying with Russia.
It is sad for Russia and Turkey that Putin and Erdoğan are made for each other.
Sweden is rebuking China very strongly for the arbitrary arrest of Gui Minhai.
China's government seems to think it can get away with anything, much like the US government — much like the bully.
Some of Australia's prisoners on Manus Island are going to the US, which has accepted them as refugees.
The now-cancelled national voter-suppression commission asked for voter data from all states. With Texas, it asked for one more step: to indicate which family names were Hispanic.
Canada has terminated its main climate research program.
Canada's national thug force has secretly endorsed global heating denialism and calls the "anti-petroleum movement" a threat to national security. This in a briefing memo aimed at proposals for new "anti-terror" legislation.
In the long term, "anti-terror" laws are a bigger threat to national security than the few terrorists they claim to protect us from.
Corrupt Republican congresscritters accuse the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of "lobbying" because she published editorials about the danger of chemicals whose suspected toxicity has not been studied.
Amazon is starting a long term attack against the option of buying groceries anonymously, by opening stores that accept only electronic payment.
States should pass laws requiring stores to accept cash payment without hassles.
Unauthorized immigrants enable companies to drive wages down precisely because they are unauthorized. One way to stop this would be to authorize them.
The flaw in that solution is that it would encourage tremendous numbers of people to try to enter the US expecting to be authorized later. US population growth is due to immigration; more immigration would mean rapid population increase, and rapid increase in ecological footprint.
Maybe someone can find a way to modify the proposal to avoid this flaw while still serving the purpose.
US immigration thugs want to deport Lukasz Niec, M.D., who has lived in the US for 40 years since arriving at age 5, over misdemeanors he committed as a teenager.
Their motto is, "When in doubt, hurt people."
Bangladeshi unions have used a new arbitration process to force a multinational clothing front company to pay for having failed to fix safety hazards in a factory producing goods for it to sell.
A system that protects women in tomato farms from sexual harassment might work for Hollywood as well.
Several US states are passing laws to strengthen abortion rights and insurance coverage for abortion rights.
Violent actions by the US, for decades, have repeatedly led to blowback in the form of hostility and violence towards the US.
Citizens of Massachusetts: Support the Mass Environmental Justice Act.
Some progressive elected officials are calling for cities to use collective bargaining in dealing with Amazon's plan to make them bid against each other.
I proposed something like that in 2003.
As wolves spread into depopulated rural areas of Europe, they are starting to hunt farmers' sheep.
It might be desirable to tolerate a certain population of wolves in each area, but not more. We don't need to protect a species to the utmost if it is pushing against the land's carrying capacity.
Amnesty International declined to hold a debate between supporters and opponents of Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory.
I think this is valid. Amnesty supports the boycott of products made those colonies, and therefore does not want to appear neutral.
Amnesty International campaigns against censorship, but that doesn't mean it is obligated to offer a platform to those who disagree with it.
I hope the hosts of the debate find a different place to hold it.
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court invalidated the Republican gerrymander.
Distrust of fake news and social networks is leading many people to disregard the events around them.
You can't resist injustice by tuning it out.
Arab members of Israel's parliament held signs to protest a speech by Pence. They were forcibly expelled from parliament.
The UK has been paralyzed from replacing unsafe cladding in public housing apartments, because the government won't pay for it and nobody else can.
The US is reducing carbon emissions from electric generation. Now it needs to do that for transportation. Promoting electric cars would help.
Even better would be mass transit, which with a large ridership is more efficient than any single-passenger vehicle.
To make mass transit popular, we should build higher and increase the density of housing. Building dense housing will also help end the housing shortage that raises rents and makes people homeless.
China is putting political agents in charge of Hong Kong universities, to impose censorship on students and fire noncompliant professors.
Gui Minhai, the Hong Kong publisher that was kidnaped by China and then prevented from leaving China, was arrested to stop him from reaching Beijing for a medical exam at the Swedish embassy. (He is a Swedish citizen.)
It is almost impossible to travel between cities in China without being tracked. Passengers must show identification to take a train, and I think that applies also to buses. In the US, Amtrak checks the identity of passengers, which is why I refuse to use it.
Conditions in British prisons are like those in old insane asylums: bad enough to drive people mad, if they aren't mad already.
"Billionaire Boom": While World's Richest 1% Took 82% of All New Wealth in 2017, the Bottom Half Got Zero.
A few billionaires gave the Rep. Ryan's Republican campaign committee a million dollars as a reward for the tax attacks.
Russian Twitter-bots are supporting Republican efforts to blame Democrats for the shutdown of the government.
This does not necessarily prove collusion. Putin can see for himself how to weaken the US, and would do this even without a quid pro quo.
On the other hand, that doesn't prove there is no collusion.
Old people in the UK are in danger of death from malnutrition. If they have money to buy food, they have no way to reach a place to buy it.
Australia will work to reduce the fertilizer runoff that damages the Great Barrier Reef.
It is important for various reasons to reduce fertilizer runoff, but this won't protect the coral for very long. We need to stop putting more CO2 into the air (and therefore also the ocean).
The UN special rapporteur on adequate housing interviewed homeless people in California, and saw the beginning of the shantytowns that poor Americans will soon be made to live in.
Denver started a program to hire homeless people temporarily, and many of them found permanent jobs.
Alas, nowadays just having a job doesn't mean you can afford to live anywhere but the street.
Many species of seabirds have had big population decreases — overall 70% decline since the 1950s.
The US Coast Guard captures alleged smugglers on the ocean, then keeps them chained to the deck of a ship for weeks, even months, before handing them over to a court for trial. In many cases the ship sails into a US port and then out again with the prisoners still on board.
They are accused of crimes, and surely some are guilty, but even convicts should not be treated like this.
To make things even nastier, the Coast Guard finds twisted excuses to disregard laws intended to protect the rights of the accused. This is part of a general US government attitude of contempt for laws that get in its way.
Women's marches around the US have drawn more than a million participants.
I wanted to post an urgent note to suggest that people participate, but the site for finding events demanded too much information about participants and I didn't think I should send people there.
A study rejected the good and bad extremes of likely global heating in this century if we fail to cut back greenhouse gas emissions.
However, this assumes that we don't hit a tipping point. We know of several possible tipping points, and we don't know whether they can happen, or at what temperature. The methane tipping point seems to be starting to move.
Some citizens of North Carolina are investigating a company that flew prisoners for the Bush regime to other countries that would torture them.
Food shortage in Venezuela is driving people to loot stores, even steal race horses and eat them.
How Democracies Die — sometimes in a sudden coup, sometimes gradually as the institutions of democracy are subverted by a minority.
The rich minority in the US have been working for decades to destroy our democracy, and it hasn't functioned as a democracy since 20 years ago under President Clinton. Now that people are awakening to this, we will see if there is anyway to take our country back from the plutocrats.
China is setting up total face-recognition in Xinjiang. The rest of China will surely follow.
In India, every classroom will have a video camera, so that each child can be watched by the parents of the other children. And by who-knows-who-else.
I wish we were safe from this in the US.
Leading Marxist Scholar David Harvey on Trump, Wall Street, and Debt Peonage.
Harvey talks about problems caused by the internet, but (like most people) he doesn't see how a large part of that stems from from nonfree software. It's funny how people that criticize the power of business in other fields have a blind spot here.
Rich people in Montana are enclosing public lands with private property so that other people can't get to them.
I think the private landowners adjoining public lands should be legally required to provide adequate access to them, and that access must not impose a long detour on anyone.
What unions need to do to advance workers' organizational rights.
Tickets for some large concerts are now being sold through a system of surveillance. It demands a Facebook account. In some cases, it does extortion as well.
Don't surrender to this pressure to let Facebook use you! You don't need to be a Verified Fan of a musician that is a Verified Fad. There are plenty of good musicians that you can enjoy, that are not so famous and could really use your support, and will respect your freedom.
In addition, every time you see or hear a discussion of the musicians that act unjustly, it is an opportunity to say that they organize snooping on their fans, so you have decided not to be one of those fans. You don't need to have an argument, just to say it. In under a minute you can take a small easy step to promote surveillance awareness.
The IMF Has Choked Tunisia. No Wonder the People Are Rioting.
In 2011, the US used a polio vaccination campaign as cover for finding Osama bin Laden. The terrorist blowback from this is blocking the eradication of polio.
The killing of bin Laden was not very effective at damping down Islamist movements and terrorism. In general, the leaders of guerrilla rebellions are not essential, and killing or capturing them does not defeat the rebellion.
What conclusions should we draw about Grace's painful date with Aziz Ansari?
We cannot take for granted that one participant's account of a stressful situation is factually accurate. However, we can take Grace's account as accurate, since Ansari does not contest it. What can we conclude from these events?
She went to his apartment expecting and intending some sort of sexual encounter, but as the encounter proceeded, she began to feel uncomfortable with it. After some time, she realized that she did not want to continue.
That is not unusual. When you "have a bad feeling about this", it often takes time for that to crystalize into "I'm not going there."
Grace first made gestures to hint at her unwillingness, which Ansari did not seem to recognize. Later she rebuked him for that.
It is not valid to rebuke someone for "misreading" hints. A hint is a veiled form of communication. It is unfair to intentionally obscure a message and then rebuke someone for not understanding it. If you want someone to understand "no", say "no". (Eventually she did.)
On the other hand, he might have figured out her feelings if he had tried to. It is clear in many ways that he didn't care much about them. Ansari was selfish and inconsiderate throughout the date.
He pressured her persistently for penetration. Apparently that particular act was more important to him than her pleasure, or even her contentment. He acknowledged that they could only continue in sex if she too were "having fun", but it seems that her desire and enjoyment mattered to him only as a requirement he had to satisfy to get the pleasure he sought. They were not, in themselves, important to him.
Neither of them was a monster, but they both have things to learn. I hope Grace learns how to better recognize her wants and then express them clearly. I hope Aziz learns to care about what his lovers feel.
Methods for reducing bullying in school other than by slapping down the bullies.
Turkey is attacking the Kurdish enclave of Afrin with planes as well as artillery.
I doubt that the Kurds of that small enclave can hold out for long. After that, the Turkish army could move on to the main Kurdish region.
The US talking about building up the Kurds' strength, but if it doesn't act fast, those words will be meaningless.
A coal mine owner who killed miners by violating safety standards now wants to run for the senate.
I think Republicans are expecting to rig the election.
US immigration thugs jailed Adi Othman by surprise for no reason when he came for a scheduled appointment. Not long before, they told him they had backed off the intention to deport him.
Amnesty International rebuked Venezuela for a police operation that used lethal weapons and killed 9 people.
If Labour adopts the policy of remaining in the EU's single market, as most supporters wish, will it be blocked from deprivatization as Corbyn warns?
"If Trump is an authoritarian, why don’t Democrats treat him like one?"
How medieval trial by ordeal managed to give correct results, most of the time: it was rigged based on the assumption that only innocent accused would submit to the ordeal.
US citizens: phone the White House at 202-456-1414 and urge the bully to veto the massive surveillance bill. He was against it before — he might perhaps veto it now.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the DREAM Act, thus offering child-immigrants a path towards US citizenship.
Large companies tend to be nastier than individuals as rental landlords. When they send your rent sky high, there isn't even anyone to negotiate with.
One of the roots of the housing shortage is in the zoning laws that limit how much housing can be built on a plot of land. We can't make housing inexpensive while keeping it low density.
Another root is the death of small towns and rural America. There are few jobs now outside cities. Retired people may remain but sometimes find it hard to get to a place to buy food. Younger people have to move to where work is, and there isn't enough housing there.
Making agriculture less efficient would make for more jobs in rural places. Many Americans would like to live in them. Making cattle ranching less efficient could also help Americans eat less meat, which they need to do, for their own health and for the health of the ecosphere.
Talking about other countries as "shitholes" can facilitate violence against them.
This is not limited to the military interventions described in the article. Economic aggression can be facilitated too.
If you think of a country as covered with shit, you shouldn't neglect to ask whose shit it is. Don't assume the local people produced it, though some of them probably helped. In many cases, it's the shit of former colonial powers at the bottom layers, with US shit piled on top of that.
In some countries, Chinese shit is now being packed on top.
Students in the US learn almost nothing about the Vietnam War, and the series of lies that the US government used as excuses, which makes them susceptible to lies when used to push them into another war.
The bully's saboteurs are working to serve companies by crushing the rights of students — apparently due to corruption in several departments.
The saboteur-in-chief is trying to sneak a partisan gerrymanderer into control of the 2020 census.
Republicans will stop at nothing to manipulate the census, because that will help them rig subsequent elections.
Many people nowadays work at jobs they know contribute nothing to society.
Why are there so many bullshit jobs? I think it is partly because people push to get those jobs rather than suffer the disaster of unemployment. Partly, governments allow this to happen so as to avoid the unrest that the unemployment would cause. The problem of unemployment, under today's economic system, is real, and this is an attempt to solve it. But it has very bad side effects, and is greatly inferior to the solution of increasing everyone's non-work time.
How Martin Luther King Jr criticized capitalism.
Over 60 companies and interest groups buy the bully's favor by paying dearly to hold events at sites he owns. They include unsavory foreign governments.
Prohibition of drugs continues corrupting thugs in the US.
Heating up the War on Drugs reduces the supply and causes the price to go up. This increases the temptation, which brings more thugs, airport employees, and whatever, into the business. That is a poor return for the price society pays, in the form casualties from the war.
There are some things that we have to fight, such as wildlife poaching and deforestation. That's because they threaten to do harm that goes beyond making some people addicted. We can't protect elephants or rhinoceroses from extinction by legalizing the hunting of them. But not for drugs.
Research suggests that psilocybin is a good treatment for depression.
The EFF rebukes the members of Congress that voted to continue and increase massive surveillance, and vows the fight is not over.
Several US hospital chains are joining forces to make generic drugs which have become outrageously expensive, or scarce.
It is not clear in the article whether they will sell to the general public as well. If they don't, the problem will get even worse for everyone else.
I suspect that the problem is the result of the many mergers in the pharma industry. Idealized economics says we can count on competition to do certain jobs, but that doesn't work when companies can merge instead of competing.
The EU and Greenpeace are pushing for a very large protected area of ocean near the Antarctic Peninsula.
This will be a significant step, but we need many more such steps. Overall, we should protect around 30% of the ocean.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to protect US coasts from oil drilling — and protect the ecosphere too.
Here's the message I attached:
Please block plans to allow oil drilling off US coasts. In addition to the risk this will cause a local disaster, damaging seafood and tourism for years, there is the certainty it will contribute to global heating and harm everyone. The world needs less oil extraction, not more.
US citizens: call on senators to reject Thomas Farr, voter-suppression lawyer, as a judge.
Outsourcing forensic analyses leads to miscarriages of justice.
The companies that do the job will not try to hire the best people. They will hire the least qualified people they can get away with and tell us to have faith in the results.
Prosecutors dropped charges against 129 inauguration protesters, but still want to imprison 59 others for years for being present when some others committed minor crimes.
The Republican tax attacks will also cut the construction of affordable housing.
Some Americans that don't like abortion are starting to recognize that the best way to avoid abortion is to give Americans reliable birth control.
Please don't refer to those opposed to abortion rights as "pro-life". They are not defenders of the life of real human beings, only the life of fetuses, which aren't human yet.
A windfarm in Australia has invited the surrounding community to invest.
Apple Avoided $40 Billion in Taxes (by lobbying for a tax cut). Now It Wants a Gold Star?
Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling has been released from prison.
The US government, indeed any government, is supposed to work for the people. We the people are supposed to be the government's boss.
Government staff should not be punished for reporting on the government to its boss.
Trump Jr is selling condos with a side of political influence.
The Church of England is concerned that if Down's syndrome is completely eliminated, existing people with Down's syndrome might feel hurt that no more people will be like them.
This made me aware that the polio eradication campaign threatens a similar problem. If we complete the campaign, people with polio will eventually disappear. Good heavens! Should we stop the campaign?
There are people with congenital deafness that object to the idea of preventing or curing congenital deafness. Their culture, which they have developed to cope with deafness, would be lost of it nobody needed to cope with deafness any more.
If you want to be deaf, I think you should have that right. (We should not allow you the right to have a polio infection, because that would expose others to the risk of contagion.) But you are not entitled to impose deafness, or polio, or Down's syndrome, on anyone else.
How could it make sense to require people to graduate high school to go to barbering school?
How could it make sense not to offer a shortcut for someone who already knows how to do the job to skip most of the schooling?
How could it be just to impose a heavy fine for barbering without a license, on the first complaint?
How could it be just for a court to issue a fine and not appoint a lawyer to represent the person that might be fined?
My friend Paul sent me this:
It might help understand this if you know that an amazingly high proportion of cosmetology school students are older black guys who have gotten out of prison. Opening a barber shop is one of their few avenues to owning a business and making a living, given that their criminal record makes it almost impossible to get a regular job. So it sounds like Tennessee is trying to put more obstacles in their path.
Special advertising agents pay journalists and bloggers to mention specific products and companies.
For me, product placement in movies is a form of corruption. It is equally corrupt in print.
I will never do this in my writing, but I can't tell whether it has happened in the articles I link to.
The exclusion of masses of poor from making a living by working is leading to reconsideration of the role of work in life.
In a world with too many children, taking care of them is a lot of effort — it is work. The (mainly) women who do this feel their work is undervalued, since they are either unpaid (for caring for their own children) or badly paid (when it is child-care business). The reason it is so much effort is partly due to the high birth rate and the large existing population.
If there were fewer children, so the total effort needed were much less, maybe plenty of people would be glad for the chance to play with children, show children how to do things, even take care of some children for a few hours once a week. Maybe it would be fun rather than work.
The Senate approved the bill to continue and increase warrantless surveillance of everyone.
Israel will keep Ahed Tamimi and her mother in jail until her trial. They are considered "dangerous".
The CO2 output of Bitcoin is prodigious, as it makes miners compete for who can use the most electricity.
AI stands for "Automated Inequality" when it makes decisions to prefer one person to another.
Hamza bin Walayat, a Pakistani, announced he was a humanist and not a Muslim. Later he asked for asylum in the UK. The officials rejected the claim based on misunderstanding what it means to be a humanist.
Republican rule favors big agribusiness companies over the small farms that have to sell to them.
Rep. Keith Ellison: Instead of worrying about whether the bully said "shithole" or "shithouse," let's focus on "What are we going to do about it?"
Twelve charged for defying California city's ban on feeding homeless (or giving socks to them) in the park.
The thugs say this is to prevent the spread of disease, but they didn't object to eating together at picnics in the park.
A right-wing lone wolf terrorist in the UK received only a short jail sentence. Apparently the double standard extends there, too.
The bully's "fake news awards" are a clever psychological strategy, and threaten to be an effective platform for attacking journalism in general. If the press covers them following its usual practices, it could magnify their effect.
It is ironic that the article promotes another conceptual confusion by referring to its readers, people such as me and perhaps you, as "consumers" of articles. For why this is harmful, see this.
3/4 of the US National Park Advisory Board members resigned, recognizing that Saboteur Zinke was ignoring them completely.
The governor of Kentucky imposed a work requirement on Medicaid. The governor of Kentucky imposed a work requirement on Medicaid. Then he threatened to reject federal support for Medicaid entirely if any court overturns his work requirement.
People should sue anyway to overturn this, because we must never give in to the demands of hostage-takers. If the governor harms Kentuckians who are ill, the wrong and its punishment will be his.
The troll is making America hated again — more than ever before.
Many Rohingya refugees, living in refugee camps in Bangladesh, don't want to go back to Burma to live in refugee camps there (and maybe get murdered). They say that living in Burma won't be safe unless they are recognized as citizens of Burma.
A protester that died in Iranian prison was forced to take pills that made him sick, according to his family.
Right-wing sexists are suing to put male-to-female transgender prisoners in with male prisoners.
The lawsuit alleges practical (but apparently fictitious) problems, but they are not the motive for the lawsuit. The right-wingers are suing because they have taken up sexism as a religious principle.
Global [heating] Made Hurricane Harvey's Deadly Rains Three Times More Likely.
In other words, global heating was 3/4 of the cause of the high level of damage. The other 1/4 was chance, as far as we know.
The nationwide focus on encouraging students to have more "grit" focuses on a secondary factor, and this focus pushes aside the giant handicap imposed on poor people's children by poverty and by their underfunded schools.
Publicly-supported private schools invite asset-stripping.
Right-wingers who condemn "chain migration" turn out to be products of it.
Any babies can become good members of our society. Human babies are flexible, and can pick up whatever culture they are brought up in. They can do this more completely if the state provides them with good schools to help.
We only need to avoid letting the total population increase very much.
Amazon is run so as to undercut the competition and never make a profit, thus never pay much taxes. Instead, its aim is to make its stock value go up.
Perhaps a corporation should pay taxes on increase in its stock price.
Some of Tillerson's stated goals for Syria are impossible or incompatible. The US cannot come close to achieving them all.
I think the principal valid goals are (1) peace for Syria and (2) protecting the Kurdish enclave of secularism and comparative liberty, ideally through an autonomy and peace deal. As well as crushing PISSI, but that's not going to be difficult — all the other regional powers want it too.
Coverage of Ahed Tamimi Obscures Israeli Violence And Occupation.
The violence of the Israeli Army is something we must not forget. However, Ms Tamimi's case illustrates the implacable cruelty of the occupation towards all that resist. They are both worth covering.
An erroneous report of a nuclear attack could trigger a real one, with the infant in charge.
Apple wants Americans to be grateful it is paying some income tax, even thought the amount is under half what it should have been.
So why does the US allow them? Because of the lobbying of big companies (including Apple).
Manhattan billionaires object to setting up a homeless shelter on the next street from their skyscraper.
Boo hoo for them.
The FBI is investigating accusations that the NRA accepted funds from a Russian that was working for Putin, for the cheater's campaign.
FEMA and US Treasury decide to 'help' Puerto Rico by withholding a billion-dollar emergency loan, claiming that Puerto Rico is not really broke.
What Puerto Rico needs is a grant instead of a loan. But that wouldn't serve the purposes of disaster capitalism.
The troll has set up an office to provide legal defense for religious doctors and nurses that want to deny treatment to patients out of prejudice based on religion.
Corbyn says that Labour will make outsourcing government services to businesses a last resort.
Outsourcing cut the workers' pay. Reversing this will enable them to get a raise.
The newly appointed president of Zimbabwe says he will run democratic elections.
Some details need correcting. For instance, I don't think Putin or Xi play any role in continuing the bombardment and blockade of Yemen; that's down to the US and Salafi Arabia.
How privatization reduces the monetary cost of public services: reducing the number of workers by 1/3, and paying each of them 1/3 less.
The workers do not magically become more efficient by being paid less. When their numbers are insufficient, they fall behind on the work. The outsourced work is "more efficient" only in the sense that it costs less per worker, and that's due to the reduced pay.
I didn't know, before reading this article, about how outsourcing part of the work in an organization can cause discoordination and rigidity.
To kill dooH niboR, we should restore the workers' old salaries and the rich people's old tax rates.
US deportation thugs are specifically targeting unauthorized immigrants that organize for immigrants' rights, and deporting them very fast before courts have ruled on their cases.
I can't reach any conclusion about whether those specific people ought to be allowed to remain in the US, but US citizens' rights are at stake here too. When the state acts to harm a person without waiting for the court to decide about the matter, it expresses contempt for the idea of legal rights — for anyone whatsoever.
Moving possible deportees in places far away from their homes, without demonstrating a need, is an act of gratuitous cruelty.
Coral Reefs "At Make Or Break Point",
US citizens: support the Marijuana Justice Act.
If one of these Democratic senators who voted to increase warrantless surveillance, and allow its use for prosecution, is from your state, call to state your disapproval.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The proprietary program used to estimate a convict's chance of recidivism proves to be a little less accurate in its forecasts than averaging people found through Mechanical Turk.
I wonder, are human experts any better at it?
The Republicans have presented a report that purports to show most terrorists in the US were immigrants. The data were selected support the intended conclusion — the report omits domestic terrorists.
The majority of terrorist killings in 2017 in the US were committed by right-wing extremists.
After Chechnya arrested the leader of a human rights group, on apparently false charges, someone burned the group's office.
The bully's right-wing and (in many cases) untrained judges will threaten women's rights for decades.
The UK has numeric targets for jailing people to deport them, and hopes that it can get away with disregarding their legal rights long enough to put them where it is not feasible for them to appeal.
The US does similar things.
Fighting the zombie elite that impose dooH niboR and say they have no choice.
Cambodia is prosecuting an Australian journalist for "spying."
Maybe Cambodia was inspired by attempts at similar repression by and in the US and encourage by Australia's own repression of journalism.
Humanitarian volunteer organizations say that US border thugs routinely destroy the water containers that the volunteers leave to save the lives of people crossing the Mexican border.
Apparently the thugs would rather kill foreigners than to let them get into the US.
I do not advocate unrestricted immigration into the US or any other country. However, there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to stop unauthorized immigrants from entering. Making border-crossers die of thirst is not acceptable.
What's the best surface temperature for the Earth's ecosystems?
The one they are used to.
The root causes of enslavement and forced labor.
Although some unauthorized child immigrants are protected by DACA, it doesn't cover all of them, and the US is aggressively deporting the others.
A US appeals court has ruled that simply violating a web site's terms of service is not a crime.
US citizens: Tell Congress to extend CHIP.
US citizens: call on the EPA to block Syngenta's application to spray thiamethoxam, a bee-killing neonicotinoid, on wide areas of crops in the US.
No thanks, Winfrey — one billionaire president is enough. Or, rather, too many.
A prisoner in Arizona has been denied painkillers for a long time. He chewed off some of his fingers because he couldn't bear the pain in them.
The troll can't get most officials appointed to the Office of National Drug Control Policy to stick around, so it is being run by a graduate student who can't get his resume straight.
Since the War on Drugs is basically harmful, it is hard to tell whether coordinating it better would make things better or make things worse.
China is bullying multinational companies into pretending that Taiwan is not a country.
Most countries face shortages of fresh water, and a billion people have no easy access to water to drink. It is going to get much worse.
You'd think we would learn to stop making more humans.
The Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Quality, where Jews and Arabs can meet for nonpolitical activities, is being shut down because Israel is becoming too repressive to allow such a thing.
Potato farms in Jersey are having trouble hiring workers from Poland.
Maybe these farms need to (shudder!) pay a higher wage to attract some Britons off their zero-hours contracts.
What Happens When the Jobs Dry Up in the New World? The Left Must Have an Answer.
Part of the answer, in the short term, is banning technology that eliminates lots of jobs. We don't have to allow driverless taxis. We don't have to allow automated sales counters in stores. We can permit them when and if people don't need employment.
We must stop equating progress with technical advance.
Computerized face recognition threatens to leave us with not a smithering of human rights.
The rest of the article is so sadly shallow. It's as if the author felt ashamed of having said something serious and important, and felt obliged to cancel it out. I wish I could link to the first part only.
A Tory politician called, 5-6 years ago, for pressuring unemployed males to get vasectomies by denying welfare for their "excess" children.
By calling the unemployed people "wasters", he asserted the standard right-wing claim that if you're poor, it's your own fault.
The children of the unemployed are likely to be unemployed, due to forces beyond their control:
It is both cruel and futile to try to reduce people's birth rate by imposing poverty on their children. But there are legitimate methods, not cruel, for encouraging people not to have children, and we should use them.
Having a baby in the US costs over 30 thousand dollars (average) — if nothing goes wrong. When there is a problem, it often costs hundreds of thousands.
For one family, care for their premature twins cost millions of dollars, and did bankrupt them. They lost all their possessions. At least 50,000 US families a year go bankrupt this way.
This is what Republicanism stands for.
Poor people get deeper and deeper in debt because the system gives them no other way to survive.
The ones at fault are the plutocratists who set up the system this way.
Tories have driven down UK investment in renewable energy by more than half in 2017.
Fossil fuel companies will be grateful. Future generations will be dead.
The EU voted to ban electric pulse fishing, but rejected other measures such as limiting the catch of immature fish.
The parliament does not have the final say; other EU institutions are likely now to make the law even worse.
A monitoring group says that a Chinese factory for Apple products exposed workers to toxic vapors and they needed hospitalization. Meanwhile, it makes people work very long hours, breaking even China's laws.
3 million Americans lost their medical insurance in 2017, due to Republican attacks on medical care.
Everyone: call on MSNBC to start reporting on bombardment, famine and disease in Yemen.
US citizens: Tell Congress to legislate that the president must get the approval of Congress before launching a nuclear first strike.
The latest changes in Facebook's newsfeed reduce access to publishers but boost fake news.
It seems many people have got out of the habit of looking for interesting publications in any way other than through Facebook.
This bodes very ill.
A fictional (as yet) movement calls for independence of "Tabarnia" — the coast of Catalonia from Tarragona to Barcelona — from Catalonia.
The people in that region of Catalonia do not want to separate from Spain.
The EU will aim to eliminate single-use plastics packaging.
Just making packaging recyclable will not cause it all to be recycled. Something more is needed to achieve that.
The UK kicked the Chagossians out of their homes, and now makes it prohibitively expensive for younger Chagossians in the UK to become UK citizens. They face deportation to the Seychelles, where they are second-class citizens.
Jeanette evidently has many children. It would have been wiser and more socially responsible for Jeanette to use birth control and abortion to avoid some of those births. Whether that's her responsibility depends on the circumstances. Perhaps others blocked her from doing the right thing.
Pakistan has released an aged and ill former Taliban leader.
Normally, people that old are no danger to anyone, and releasing them from compassion is good. This one may not be incompetent.
In 1920, Jews, Italians, Irish and Greeks were the People from "Shithole" Countries.
The US is planning to build a substantial military force with the Syrian Kurds of Rojava as its center. This would protect Rojava from Turkey, Syria and Russia that aim to destroy them.
I have no reason to take a side between Turks, Kurds and Arabs, considered as ethnic groups. However, I support Rojava against Turkey and Syria because Rojava is a secular state that endorses human rights, whereas Turkey is becoming a religious dictatorship and Syria is already a dictatorship.
CODEPINK's staff have been banned from Israel for supporting boycott of companies that do business in Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory. These include RE/MAX and Airbnb.
This is an additional reason to refuse to use Airbnb, besides the two obvious ones: it requires use of nonfree software, and it puts you in a database.
Four courageous Pakistani women published about their own experience of being sexually abused when they were children.
Tax-dodging financial schemes are now packaged retail sale.
A Tory minister admitted that they may deny some human rights in the process of removing Britain from the EU.
London thugs have failed until the last minute to give two men accused of rape the evidence that would exonerate them. Budget cuts may have played a role in this.
In general, I expect most accusations of rape are true. However, some fraction of the men accused are innocent. I agree with Margaret Atwood: every accused person is entitled to due process.
US citizens: call on Congress to repair the Voting Rights Act.
US citizens: call on the FCC to preserve the Lifeline program, which subsidizes telephones for poor people.
Refugees fleeing various places increased greatly when the places experienced unusual heat.
If Martin Luther King Jr Were Alive Today, Politicians Would Denounce Him.
At least, those who admit a plutocratist stance would do so.
Facebook's News Feed Change Won't Help Social Media Addiction.
If it reduces publishers' Facebook dependence, that could be good for freedom of speech. Whether the change will reduce that dependence, I don't know, but I expect to see reports over coming months.
Medea Benjamin says that being banned from Israel for her political views makes her both sad and determined.
The troll made lots of money by selling condos to money launderers.
Global heating has caused a lot more snow in Alaska, but the glaciers are not safe, because the heat makes them melt much more too.
The loud music in a bar or restaurant may be calculated to make people drink or eat faster. However, it works by eliminating the possibility of a good conversation.
Republicans are planning to change the Community Reinvestment Act so that banks can extract more from communities around the US and give them less.
Why So Little Empathy and Compassion Within American Culture? The plutocrats, with their systems and their media, systematically deaden those feelings; many of the non-elite internalize specific aspects of this.
I can see some ways in which I have done so.
Iran is no longer an implacable enemy of Israel. It has endorsed the Arab peace plan for two states.
Israel has used a series of bogus legal excuses to confiscate Palestinians' land. A Palestinian lawyer explains them carefully.
Tunisia has announced significant increases in support for the poor, as a response to mass protests.
Bernie Sanders: Let's wrench power back from the billionaires.
Cornel West: America is spiritually bankrupt. We must fight back together.
A prosecutor in Washington State wants to jail pipeline protesters for walking on a highway. The troll's agents showed him how to make Facebook give up lots of information about the protester group, effectively crushing it.
The US government is moving towards total repression of protests that might resist the dominion of the plutocrats, and therefore towards a total loss of legitimacy.
Turkey plans to start attacking Syrian Kurds.
The first target is Afrin, a small region disconnected from the main Kurdish area. But if Turkey conquers or destroys that, it will be encouraged to conquer the whole of the Kurdish state, Rojava. All of Rojava is close to the Turkish border.
Florida prisoners are going on strike, demanding a fair wage for their work, protection for their lives, and the possibility of parole.
Citizens of Massachusetts: Support passing the Safe Communities Act.
US citizens: Tell Congress to have experts decide whether presidents are physically and mentally fit for the job.
When Australia found that Said Imasi was not a citizen of any country, and couldn't go anywhere let alone be deported to anywhere, it put him in prison without trial — for life, apparently.
Industrial agriculture generates increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. If we don't stop the increase, it will guarantee global heating disaster.
It exhausts aquifers, topsoil, and deposits of fertilizer. Meanwhile, the fertilizer runoff is turning increasing regions of the sea into "dead zones".
It also concentrates wealth, which keeps most of humanity in deepening poverty.
So we need to replace it.
The theocratic Polish state intends to ban aborting a defective fetus. Their religion puts human suffering second to a hypothetical sadistic god.
Belize has banned all oil activity from its territorial waters.
It is hard to demonstrate clearly that nuclear deterrence is actually effective.
The sabotage administration is systematically rejecting applications to protect endangered species, and trying to unprotect some so they will go extinct.
Next target: migratory birds.
Republicans have privately admitted that they are holding the CHIP medical funding hostage.
They are also blocking DACA told hold some immigrants hostage, the ones who are more American than anything else.
That's the spirit of the Republican Party today — take vulnerable people hostage. They will take any hostages they can grab.
Legalizing marijuana in the US cuts violent crime, because it destroys the drug gangs' business model.
Republicans continue to systematically attack voting rights in the US on many fronts.
Assad is now attacking rebel-held Idlib province, and threatens to send up to 2 million people fleeing into Turkey.
The troll is actively seeking new opportunities to start the use of nuclear weapons.
Beyond the intentional cuts in corporation income tax, the tax attacks include a loophole that lets businesses cut the tax even more.
Cypriote independence guerrillas are suing the UK for torturing them in the 1950s.
The bully is a racist from way back, and we have seen it plenty.
The cheater's "deal" with Carrier air conditioning, to keep some jobs in the US, was bogus. Carrier is moving the jobs to Mexico now.
Israel has ordered unauthorized African migrants to leave or be jailed. Some are so afraid to go home that they have chosen jail.
Shouldn't they be entitled to political asylum?
If the bully does cut funding for the UN to support Palestinians, it is likely to be a big bonus for Islamists.
"India has 600 million young people — and they're set to change our world."
Half of the population under 25 indicates rapid population growth. If these youths continue reproducing at the same rate, the change they cause will be disaster, first for India and then for the world.
Regarding the boundary between an overture and an invasion: "Has #MeToo gone too far, or not far enough? The answer is both."
Iran is restricting the internet in many of the same ways as China, though not as strictly.
Many countries do this, and it's unjust anywhere.
Elif Shafak describes how Turkey has become more repressive on every dimension, in the years since she was put on trial for "insulting Turkishness."
More about the issue represented by that prosecution.
A Rohingya refugee on Nauru badly needs medical care in Australia, but Australia won't bring him there, since he probably wouldn't get well enough to be returned to Nauru safely.
In other words, Australia would rather kill him than let him get to Australia and remain there in a hospital.
Nauru's press exclusion is very strict, so Australia can get away with almost any sort of dirty work there.
US nuclear weapons systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. If the troll wanted to do something useful with funds for nuclear weapons systems, he could take them off the internet.
Republican saboteurs are covering up global heating in many different US government web sites.
The cheater has reduced the fines for five banks that were convicted of cheating.
Does he think that the US government does not have enough national debt?
When Will [Leading] Democrats Start #Resisting GOP Voter Suppression?
Walmart announced a small raise for employees, amounting to 2% of the tax cut that it just got.
But it turns out this is only for the small fraction that are full-time employees.
US citizens: call on Democrats to skip the bully's State of the Union address.
US immigration thugs regularly ignore the law of political asylum, and lie, to send people from Mexico and Central America summarily back to where they say they will be murdered. Lo and behold, quite a few of them really are murdered after that.
Many women were deported to El Salvador even though gangs were looking for them to kill them.
Increased online sales are causing many low-paid working women to become unpaid unemployed women.
We are not obligated to allow online sales that drive so many Americans into poverty. We are not obligated to prefer increased efficiency and convenience for some, at the cost of great suffering for others.
New York state prisons plan to ban most gifts to prisoners, including nearly all books. Only a small list of books will be permitted to them.
Aside from causing tremendous bitterness for very little reason, this will make it difficult for prisoners to find a way of life other than crime after they are released. It is an example of a tag wagging a dog.
Everyone: call on the US to free torture victim Toffiq al-Bihani, to shut down the Guantanamo prison, and to end imprisonment without trial no matter where.
US citizens: object to adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
Ajit Pai's next blow: wiping out small ISPs.
Reportedly Russia is setting up a militia in the Serb part of Bosnia to destabilize Bosnia.
I can't be sure whether this report is true. I don't see what Russia has to gain through this.
If Oprah Winfrey ran against the troll, the ultimate winner would be the idea of electing celebrities instead of people you can count on.
The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep Nunes, is going all out to prevent the investigation from advancing.
A US hospital faces shame for carrying a sick patient out to the street after denying her care.
The hospital staff surely did this because they were under pressure from management. The hospital's apology is bogus as long as management continues the pressure. But I doubt they do this out of sadism. They are surely responding to pressure from funding institutions. We need to change those too.
Medicare for All is a good way to do it, but one way or another we have to put more money into medical care — and less into the military, into massive surveillance, and into wasteful and polluting fossil fuels.
The Interior Department will henceforth offer grants only to science projects that promise to advance Republican sabotage goals.
When funders specify the desired result in advance, that is corrupt science.
Puerto Rico is still wrecked, and not being repaired fast.
Amazon cheats the public by paying workers so little that they need public assistance.
Right-wing extremists continue killing in the US.
Most did not make the news, because only one person was killed.
Putting a work requirement on Medicaid would result in an increasing number of people who need treatment and have trouble working until they get it. Whoever judges whether someone is disabled would probably be under pressure to bias the decisions, as happens in the UK.
Preparing in advance to handle local disasters is a very good investment — it returns 500%.
Changing the practices that cause increasing numbers of "natural" disasters might be an even better investment.
Kathleen Hartnett White, the troll's nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality, falsified measurements of radioactive material in drinking water in Texas.
A saboteur after the troll's own heart.
Democrats should be ready to shut down the government to block some very bad Republican changes.
I personally don't think that DACA rises to that level. I support continuing DACA but I would not shut the government down for that alone.
On the other hand, blocking the automatic cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which would otherwise be imposed because of the deficits that the tax attacks will create, is a justification for shutting down the government.
UK thugs were told to look for a white suspect, but when they saw a black man nearby they couldn't resist the urge to arrest him.
At least the unarmed UK thugs couldn't shoot him dead on the spot the way they would have done in the US.
The US ambassador to Panama has quit, saying he cannot honorably serve under the troll.
Nowadays few wish to join the US Foreign Service; most people cannot reconcile obeying the troll with the idea of serving their country.
A large protest has been announced in Tunisia for Sunday.
Deandre Harris, who was attacked by white supremacists during their rally in Charleston, has been charged with carrying a loaded rifle in his car when he was stopped for driving too fast.
This stinks. Do the thugs present any proof that the rifle was in Harris's car before they stopped it? I wouldn't take a thug's word for that, or even 10 thugs' word.
Democrats that voted for continued warrantless spying on Americans made the difference; if they had not, we would have defeated it.
The US owes its importance to the slave revolt in Haiti.
Iranian thugs torture and kill protesters they have arrested.
This is wrong no matter which country does it. I feel especially pained when US thugs do it.
Pakistani Journalist Who Criticised Military Tells of Attempted Abduction.
This was apparently done by the military. I suspect it was intended as a warning to make him shut up.
A new wrinkle in Google search pressures web sites to talk with users via Google, in a way that tends to keep users inside Google.
It seems to me that it should be illegal for one company to own a search engine and a publishing platform.
In November, thugs associated with the UN in Haiti raided a violent area, captured some people, then killed them on the spot. The UN says they did this without orders. The state will not explain what happened.
Terrorists in Egypt are persecuting Christians.
Brazil has used the real danger of fake news as an excuse to allow officials censorship power over political discussion on the internet.
The government of Brazil is so corrupt that we can be certain this will be misused.
Americans, don't need an operation now! US hospitals are short of intravenous bags because many were made in Puerto Rico. Due to the inadequate US help to putting Puerto Rico back on its feet, the factory there is not producing very many.
If this causes a problem for you or your loved ones, comfort yourself with the thought that you are the price to be paid to help the plutocrats grab Puerto Rico's wealth.
A relaxation in Iran's drug laws could prevent 5000 executions.
The "war on drugs" approach won't work in Iran any more than it does in the US.
I am curious what fraction of those facing execution for drugs charges in Iran those 5000 amount to.
George Monbiot: "The establishment voices who vilify student 'snowflakes' are routinely excluding political ideas they don’t like. Socialism or environmentalism, for instance."
As he says, the latter doesn't excuse the former, but we should focus on the latter because it is a bigger problem.
It appears two thirds of people who tried one cigarette subsequently became smokers. This suggests it is very important to discourage young people from trying a cigarette.
The study methodology leaves lots of room for error, but even if really only half became smokers, that still supports the same conclusion.
The revocation of DACA permissions has been temporarily blocked pending resolution of lawsuits about it.
Muslim women in Greece will no longer be compelled to follow Shari'a law for family disputes.
North Carolina's Republican gerrymander of Congress has been rejected by a US appeals court.
Since the current governor is a Democrat, maybe the state won't appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.
Louisiana teacher Deyshia Hargrave was attacked by a thug while asking questions at a school board meeting, then arrested by the same thug.
Apple faces an investigation in France for building iPhones for planned obsolescence.
The issue is not the battery slowdown software as such. If the slowdown was needed to keep the product functioning at all, it was better than no slowdown.
Rather, the issue is designing the hardware so that it would be expected to stop functioning normally.
To thwart Republican's selective leaks and threats, Senator Feinstein published the whole testimony of Fusion GPS.
Why has Israel Banned Jewish Leftists But Not Members of Nazi-Linked Groups?
My theory: since Israel's leaders have redefined "antisemitism" to mean opposition to Israel's occupation policy, they no longer recognize real antisemites as such.
Israeli soldiers shot 10 Palestinian protesters dead recently.
The soldiers were in no danger that could justify shooting. Some of the protesters were throwing stones, but the soldiers were too far away for them to hit.
In one case, the soldiers fired at people who tried to bring a dying protester to an ambulance.
New STABLE GENIUS Act Would Mandate Mental Fitness Exams for Presidential Candidates.
An unusually intelligent jackass could be called a stable genius. Maybe that's what the bully meant when he described himself as one.
Saboteur Pruitt is still working on cutting the EPA staff by 50%.
Pesticides chlorpyrifos, malathion, and diazinon, even at low concentrations, harm salmon. Their presence in a river can wipe salmon out there.
MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic US-Backed War in Yemen.
Two Burmese Reuters reporters are being prosecuted for "possession of state secrets" under a law that was imposed by the British empire.
According to their story, it looks like thugs set a trap for them.
The inadequate funding of the NHS is forcing even cancer surgery to be delayed.
Delays in cancer surgery can be fatal.
US citizens: call on the senate to oppose Howard Nielson for US judge.
US citizens: Tell US Bank to keep its promise to stop funding oil and gas pipelines.
US immigration agents is pushing to deport 92 Somalis before they can have a court hearing which might grant them asylum.
When a government agency intentionally defies the law to trample someone's rights, it proclaims contempt for the idea that people have rights.
"Think of the ocean as a trust fund. If you want to rely on that fund for the rest of your days, you can only use the interest."
New Orleans adopted a law to judge companies based on human rights and how they treat workers.
The protests in Iran are often about the draft budget, which gives lots of money to the religious thugs and to proselytizing, at the expense of the people.
In the US we give too much to the military and the business owners, at the expense of the people.
On the arms race between addictive technology and people's resistance to it.
I've done even better than become immune to many different attention-suckers. I've learned to recognize the influence of an attention-sucker, and decide to stop paying attention to it. Even things that are not exploitative for anyone else's benefit, such as a puzzle, I consciously walk away from, and I have taught myself to do this quickly.
So stop playing those video games and campaign for free software!
Forcing workers that can't afford living to save money for retirement hurts them, because they have to borrow more money to live on.
The only way to make them better off is to increase their pay. The reason their pay is too low is — plutocracy.
It Took Only Three Days For Germany's New Hate Speech Law To Cause Collateral Damage — censoring a post meant to mock real words of hatred.
The ACLU, which I support, campaigns for even Nazis to have the freedom to speak and to protest. Not because of any love for Nazis, but because censorship is akin to Nazism.
It looks like Disney is not going to try to buy another 20-year copyright extension.
The US doesn't have a medical system. It has many systems that can't figure out how to deal with each other.
Sanders' Medicare for All would fix this.
Utah is considering a bill to protect parents that let their children play outside or walk to school.
The "Goldwater" rule should be altered somehow to allow diagnosis of certain untreatable mental illnesses in political candidates.
Saboteur Verma is arranging for states to kick people off Medicaid for not having jobs.
What about disabled people that can't work? What about students?
US citizens: if you vote in one of the states below, call on the senators listed to prevent the massive surveillance provisions in S.139 from passing, no matter what it takes.
The issue concerns section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. It supposedly authorizes massive surveillance of non-Americans' communications, but in fact it is used to spy on Americans, too. See this.
US citizens: call on the FCC inspector general to investigate Ajit Pai for corruption.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for protecting Mueller's investigation.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject the mad deporter, Thomas Homan, for head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Assange is now an Ecuadorian citizen, but the UK will arrest him if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy.
US citizens are now advised to avoid 5 Mexican states as if they were war zones.
Nevada killed off the solar power industry to please the electric utility. The same decision screwed all the people that invested in solar power for their homes.
It is entirely legitimate for employers, as well as you or me, to shun people for promoting right-wing bigotry at work. Damore has no valid complaint about being fired by Google for that.
Damore also claims that Google discriminates against men — citing various sorts of efforts to find more women to hire. Since men are overrepresented among Google employees, this is an issue about the proper bounds of affirmative action.
That's an issue I don't have a position about, but I won't make Damore my guide on the issue.
Patients are dying in UK hospitals because there are not enough doctors to treat them.
I hope they have the courage to tell the relatives, "your mother died from underfunding; Parliament is directly responsible."
The bully has made Guantanamo prison a faith-based initiative, defining "dangerous" to mean "Muslim".
Some of the prisoners are suing, claiming that this bias invalidates his decision to keep them there.
There is no excuse for imprisonment without trial. Every prisoner deserves a real, fair trial, or else to be released.
Hollywood history is full of deliberately inserted falsehoods.
Some of these falsehoods may not specifically matter much. For instance, the fact that Churchill didn't sample public opinion in the London tube doesn't seem to me to make a significant difference for thinking about Churchill and World War II. Nor does the fact that the Germans had not yet rigged Pegasus Bridge for demolition (according to Pegasus Bridge by Stephen E Ambrose), contrary to what is shown in The Longest Day, make much difference to my understanding of the Normandy landings or the war.
However, the acceptance of small changes in history just for the sake of drama paves the way for larger changes that alter the history drastically. I've read accusations of drastic changes in movies that are "based on a true story", to the point where that phrase has come to mean "bullshit" to me.
If you want to tell a story that isn't accurate, call it "fiction".
Giving quotations of gossip, and presenting them as such, is a different matter. It isn't direct falsification, but it can mislead people if they take it as certain. Steele, in his dossier, carefully indicated what was unconfirmed hearsay. I don't know how Fire and Fury does on that scale.
Even moderate levels of agricultural runoff are enough to kill mayfly eggs. The disappearance of mayflies deprives other wildlife of food.
Large power-grid storage batteries are proliferating.
Reportedly the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were published in this 2015 thesis.
I don't have the expertise or time to study it. Can someone tell me whether it really shows the same vulnerabilities, and whether it makes clear what they are?
"The Tories’ obscene joke: shred the safety net, then toss people into it."
US plutocratists have gone even further: homeless Americans appear to number in the millions, though I can't find a figure now.
Protests in Tunisia, against the poverty imposed by foreign banks, turned into riots.
In one city, protesters chased the thugs out of town and burned down their building.
I hope Tunisia can democratically choose a government firm enough to defy the banks. That's what it would need to do, to represent the people.
Parts of New York City will end the jailing of people accused of misdemeanors.
This is not a law, just a policy decision by two current district attorneys.
Catherine Deneuve and other women condemn the current sexual "witch hunt", saying that people should not be punished for overtures such as tentatively putting a hand on someone's knee or stealing a kiss.
In other words, sexual invitation should not be automatically defined as sexual coercion.
Critics immediately condemned the signatories as "apologists for rape", but this misrepresents them totally.
An overture has to cross the line of usual behavior, or it doesn't function as an overture. But that is no excuse for going far beyond the line.
If you hope your overture will be accepted, you will try to make it in a way that will inspire "yes" rather than provoke "no". However, few are such masters of human relationships that they never mess up an overture; every overture is risky. The resulting anxiety can itself make you mess up. Thus, there has to be slack for people who go a little too far — a way to teach them more finesse and gentleness, rather than ruin their lives.
Some men try to stretch the concept of "overtures" to cover unlimited nuisance, but that is erroneous. It does not stretch very far.
Overtures cannot go way beyond the line. This is not a matter of intentions, it's a matter of actions. A stolen kiss, to be an acceptable overture, must not be pushy — meaning no pushing the tongue into someone's mouth. Calling groping an overture doesn't make it a legitimate overture — groping is an attack. As for masturbating in front of someone, that might be an acceptable overture in an orgy. But not anywhere else.
If you've made one overture and did not get a positive reaction, you mustn't do them repeatedly, because that is being a nuisance. Every woman recognizes an overture, and if she doesn't respond, it's not a sign that she didn't get the message, but rather a sign of "no".
Pakistani human rights activist Aasim Saeed was kidnaped and tortured by state savagery forces.
New York City Plans to Divest $5bn from Fossil Fuels And Sue Oil Companies.
The divestment is aimed at specific large fossil fuel companies.
Over 100 Democratic congressional candidates support the OFF Fossil Fuels Act. For the rest of them, the question is, "Why not you?"
The UK has privatized housing for asylum seekers, with the results you would expect if you read my political notes: broken shower, broken heating, broken furniture, mold, mice, run by a company that manages to hear complaints and forget them.
How could you expect the company to do its job? Profits are its first priority.
Saboteur Zinke has given Florida an exception from the policy of drilling for oil on all coasts. This is an explicit act of favoritism.
Witchcraft accusations in Papua New Guinea are going out of control and spreading feuds.
Helena Maleno informs authorities (the Spanish coast guard, I think) of border-crossers in danger of drowning in the Mediterranean. Spain determined that this is not illegal, so it asked Morocco to prosecute her.
US citizens: call for removing Scott Lloyd as head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, for using force and threats to stop imprisoned refugees from having abortions.
In the mean time, these women might ask Scott Lloyd if he will agree to adopt the baby. He might conceivably adopt one or two, but he couldn't adopt 10, 50 or 100 babies.
South Korea and North Korea have begun peace talks.
North Korea will not give up its nuclear arms, but might agree to treat them as a deterrent only.
South Korea's president thanked the bully for this, saying that the new sanctions helped bring it about.
That may be true, but the bully is nonetheless considering launching a nuclear war with a "limited" nuclear attack on North Korea. This would be a gratuitous bet that Kim would not dare to respond militarily.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected Saboteur Perry's plan to subsidize uneconomical nuclear and coal-powered electric generators.
I find this surprising because the FERC tends to do whatever energy companies want.
The bully wants to redesign US nuclear weapons to encourage actually using them.
This is supposedly intended to deter a Russian attack scenario that is completely implausible.
Art teacher Mateo Rueda was fired in Utah for showing his class reproductions of famous art, because some of them included nudes.
The UK has banned cosmetics, toothpaste, etc. from using plastic microbeads.
The US is unable to defeat the Taliban because opium funds the Taliban.
The UK has plenty of buildings that have been unused for many years. People should squat in them.
Facebook's business model and algorithms inherently favor campaigns that are wildly irrational and dishonest.
The proposed remedies are generally steps in the right direction but mostly don't go far enough. "Owning the data about you" is not enough to prevent its misuse. We need to replace systems that identify and track users with systems that don't know who the user is.
The idea that watching porn while at work is some sort of evil and deserves reproof is becoming an article of the modern sexual counterrevolution.
People who want to condemn porn have redefined the word to mean only sexual stimulation that is repellent in some way — for instance, it has no plot, no feelings, treats women only as sex objects, etc. (The other porn, they call "erotica".)
I appreciate the distinction, and I like the erotica much more. But I object to redefining "porn" to mean only crappy porn. It makes "porn" a weasel-word. If people reprimand you or punish you for watching "porn", they will use the word in its broader meaning. They won't pay attention if you claim it was really erotica.
Kushner "advises" the bully's officials about mid-east policy while taking a 30-million-dollar bribe from Israel.
When a government sees the harmful results of privatization and refuses to recognize them, its support for privatization can no longer be called merely "misguided". It has to be a scheme to cheat the public.
Assad continues bombing medical clinics in Syria, but the bully sees no evil except in Iran.
US federal thugs practice dishonest tricks to hide their illegal searches.
This shows an additional reason why laws limiting use of surveillance data are bogus: the state will break those laws and cover it up.
"Zero Tolerance" and "No Excuses" are Counterproductive (in a school).
Yanto Awerkion, one organizer of a petition for a referendum on independence for West Papua, is being tried for treason.
Hasn't Indonesia learned anything from East Timor?
Some Venezuelan opposition leaders say they wish the military would launch a coup to remove Maduro.
It is not impossible for a military coup to pave the way for democracy — that's basic what Chavez did. But only a few generals will sincerely try to establish democracy and help the poor, as Chavez did. A coup is much more likely to lead to a military regime such as Latin America 40 years ago was full of.
Starstruck Democrats support Oprah Winfrey for president — never mind that she has no political experience, no voting record, and little in the way of publicly stated political positions.
Chances are Winfrey would be better than the bully. You could say as much for any Democrat chosen at random. Obama was better than the bully. Clinton would have been better than the bully.
Obama and Clinton served the plutocrats. Winfrey, a billionaire, is pretty close to being a plutocrat. That doesn't absolutely prove she will be a plutocratist like Obama and Clinton: FDR came from a rich background and gave us the New Deal. Americans could count on him to do this because he had made his views, and his determination, very clear.
Winfrey grew up in poverty; perhaps she will champion the poor. But she has not committed to do this, let alone say how.
Why settle for less than Bernie Sanders?
The "Imminent Mini Ice Age" Myth Is Back.
A weak solar cycle would cool the Earth just a little, and only temporarily.
The heat around Sydney killed most of a colony of fruit-eating bats.
In a few decades, the species will no longer be found in that region. Many kinds of trees might disappear as a result, though individual trees will live on for a while.
The governor of Chihuahua accused the Mexican federal government of attacking the state's finances in retaliation for Chihuahua's investigation of corruption in the 2016 election.
We Americans used to laugh at countries where corruption went so deep. Now we are in no position to laugh.
New Jersey prison guards promised not to stop prisoners from reading The New Jim Crow.
2017 set a US record for damage due to "natural" disasters, almost 50% more than the previous record.
This is partly caused by the fact that these disasters are not "natural" any more. Human activity causes them to happen more.
Calling on homeless British people to occupy vacant housing.
Inmates of immigration prisons are suing the private prison company for making them work at tiny wages so they can buy soap.
US banks are turning student loans into a fraud scheme the way they did with mortgages in the 2000s.
Fussing about how often people in the UK Parliament tried to access porn through the Parliament's LAN is nothing but a way to boost the foolish prudery that considers this question important.
Tories' plan to negotiate secret trade treaties without involving Parliament means danger without limits.
Thousands of employed people in California now live in cars or RVs. They can't afford a room in an apartment.
This is not necessarily good for the environment. They may be forced to drive the RV every day from night parking to day (work) parking and back. What if a person gets too sick to leave the night parking area? And since parking lots are usually one-storey except in very dense areas, RVs could even take up more land area than multistorey residences.
Leaving food for stray cats makes hedgehogs dangerously obese.
If you leave food out for stray cats, the result will be to increase the number of stray cats. That is not particularly desirable.
New low-price ecological funeral options.
Do you heirs a favor, and arrange your own funeral while you're alive. That way, funeral directors won't be able to exploit your family.
Global heating is wiping out green sea turtles in some areas because they are all born female.
Many species of reptile determine gender this way, and they could all be wiped out similarly. We might be able to protect sea turtles, which are wildlife "stars". But we can't protect all the species that are endangered.
"The ubiquitous, unspoken business model of AI-induced mental illness."
The richest humans are directing the world towards being unable to sustain the lives of the rest of us. And perhaps not even their own lives.
The troll's partial ban on Muslims is blocking some US citizens from bringing their children to join them.
Others may die because they can't visit the US for surgery.
The girls who were kidnaped and conscripted into the Lord's Resistance Army face continuing scorn in Uganda.
The troll has one special talent — as a conman.
Reducing sulphur emissions avoids a lot of deaths.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 202-224-3121 to oppose the "backdoor search" loophole in Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.
US citizens: call on Senators to reject Alex Azar to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
US citizens: call on Sessions to reverse the decision to attack state-legalized marijuana.
US citizens: Call on Congress to protect state-legal marijuana sales and use.
If you don't see the Submit button, try narrowing the browser window to under 1000 pixels to make it use the "mobile" format.
US states convict people of driving while under the influence of marijuana for levels of marijuana too low to influence their driving.
Gaza's hospitals are on the verge of running out of fuel for electricity.
Israel is making it even harder to get permission to leave Gaza for medical treatment, and denying permission amounts in many cases to murder. A siege is an act of war, and Gaza is no exception.
Exit from the EU could offer Britain the opportunity to stop subsidies for land owners and instead subsidize wildlife-friendly farming.
It would be a good thing to do, but it is hard to trust Tories to do it in an honest way.
Israel has banned the staff of Jewish Voice for Peace and American Friends Service Committee from entering Israel, even to visit their Israeli relatives.
Israel is becoming increasingly repressive towards those who criticize the occupation of Palestine in any way.
Iran has arrested around a hundred protesters.
Aggressive Israeli radicals are trying to take over and encroach on the Christian quarter of Jerusalem.
Palestinians now hate the US so much that they want to reject US-funded projects, even humanitarian projects.
How to prevent gentrification by changing street names.
China is forcibly moving millions of rural people to different homes, in the name of "reducing poverty".
China has reduced poverty quite a lot, and I salute that. But there is no justification for forcibly moving people so that they will be less poor. If they agree that the offered new home provides a better life, they will gratefully accept it. So if they say "No, thanks", they probably have a reason, and China should let them.
Republican senators' response to the accusations against the bully in the Steel report: prosecute the messenger.
US citizens: call on Democrats to commit to repealing and replacing the Republicans' tax attacks.
In 1819, the British government massacred and imprisoned the unarmed, peaceful protesters that wanted only the right to vote.
Many garment workers in India are imprisoned in their factories.
The World Trade Organization treaty, one of the business-supremacy treaties, is responsible for this. As explained in No Logo, the WTO made countries desperate to compete with other countries for abusive employment, wiping out their labor movements which could have protected workers from various abuses.
Javascript code sent by web sites can exploit the recently discovered CPU bugs.
Is it possible to analyze Javascript code to see whether it tries? Please email me if you know.
Ralph Nader calls for defending cash payment.
As immigrants already fear to answer the US census at all, Sessions wants to add the question, "Are you a US citizen?"
Leftist Coalition in Honduras Calls for Uprising Ahead of Presidential Inauguration.
Fire and Fury Confirms Our Worst Fears — About the Republicans.
Rep. Joaquin Castro says the congressional investigation has already seen evidence of crimes committed by the bully and his officials.
Treating addiction as a moral failing is an excuse for denying the help that will enable a good fraction of addicts to quit.
In the case of obesity, part of the problem is that poverty, exacerbated by food deserts where poor people live, force them to eat badly. Is this their fault?
To a contemptuous right-winger, I suppose it seems that way.
Facebook compiles extensive profiles about people that are not its useds.
If you resist other forms of profiling, such as carrying tracking devices, identifying yourself to web sites, and paying other than with cash, you will deny lots of data to Facebook as well as to the others that accumulate that data. What data nobody collects, nobody can get.
The protest movement in Iran consists mainly of adults under 25, and they demand better pay and working conditions. Organizers are trying to convert this into a union movement.
Early in 2016, North Korea offered Obama a deal: it would stop nuclear tests if the US stopped joint military exercises with South Korea. Obama rejected the deal.
Naturally, Obama was not as bad as the bully, but it now appears he made quite a mistake here.
The chlorofluorocarbon treaty is working: ozone depletion in the atmosphere has reduced by 20% since 12 years ago.
The Department of Homeland Suppression seems to be the next Republican tool for voter suppression. Perhaps using a data base that is full of errors as an excuse to claim some Americans are not citizens.
US citizens: support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act.
US citizens: call on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management not to reopen offshore oil drilling.
US citizens: call on Congress to release Fusion GPS's testimony about Russia and the troll's campaign.
AT&T just received a big boost from Republican legal changes. To share this with its employees, it is dismissing them and replacing them with subcontractors.
Outsourcing is a scheme to reduce workers' pay and working conditions, so we need to thwart that scheme. One way would be to require any company's agreement with its employees to apply to subcontracted workers as well.
The Overton Window and Trump's Judges.
We can resist the right-wing shift of the overton window by denying the moral legitimacy of the Republican judges.
Competition for CEOs cannot explain why US companies pay their CEOs 4 times as much as successful companies in other countries.
The best way to deal with the high pay given to CEOs is to raise the income tax on very high incomes. Under President Eisenhower, the tax rate for the last bracket was around 95%.
Saboteur Zinke's plan for drilling in all seas illegally disregards what state governors have to say about it.
US organizations use the protests in Iran to call for regime change, mainly to bring Iran under US hegemony.
I think Iran deserves democracy, and if Iranians were rallying for democracy, I would support them. However, plutocratist or right-wing US organizations would not.
Dr. Ambedkar rejected nonviolence as a moral principle in resistance against violent oppression.
A bipartisan bill proposes to require all computerized voting machines in the US to produce paper ballots, and provides for statistical auditing of the vote-counting.
Detroit, not known for treating human beings with respect, is proposing to require all businesses open at night to set up cameras for the thugs to watch people through.
If the state watches everyone and everything, it can reduce street crime, but it reduces everyone's freedom too.
Someone posted a 10-hour video of white noise on YouTube. YouTube has automatically recognized 5 supposed copyright infringements in it.
Please don't use the term "monetize" to mean "make money from" or "charge rents for".
A Nebraska Republican legislator has proposed feudalism for companies: companies would buy "sovereignty" over rural parts of the state.
Nominally this fiefdom is supposed to be temporary. However, just as in medieval times, it would tend to become permanent. The pressure against stripping a corporation of "sovereignty" over "its" lands would be enormous, as all the other corporations would oppose any attempt by the state to "tell them what to do". Plutocratist politicians such as Schumacher would surely find an excuse to keep the fiefdom in being.
Studies show that most Americans are not in a partisan news bubble, and nearly all are aware of basic political facts that the right-wing tries to deny.
However, for those that are in the right-wing bubble, fact-checking does no good because they don't look at fact-checking articles about the fake news they read. On the contrary, fact-checking articles can backfire by transferring the right-wing terminology, with the biases it carries, into other media, which magnifies their effect.
I don't let that happen in stallman.org; I reject the right-wing propaganda terminology.
It is unfortunate that the article's author uses the term "consume" to refer to reading articles, because the word denigrates all articles including that one.
The city of Elgin (near Chicago) protects homeless people from the possible dangers of sleeping in Greg Schiller's basement by making them risk freezing to death outside. To make damned sure they have no place to stay warm, the city threatened to force Schiller out as well.
Limiting the use of a basement as a shelter would be acceptable if there were enough other shelters for all the homeless people there.
Prosecution of "witches" in Europe was most common when and where different variants of Christianity were in intense competition.
Beware the Illiberal Alliance of Poland And Hungary, a Grave Threat to the EU. (And also to justice and freedom in those two countries.)
The bully's mental health is visibly deteriorating, and this danger should be investigated.
The four factors of the apocalypse.
Everyone: Call on the Uzbek Government to drop the charges against Malokhat.
US citizens: call on Congress to end federal prohibition of marijuana.
Tina Johnson accused Roy Moore of grabbing her 25 years ago. Now her home has been burned completely in an arson attack.
I don't blame Moore personally (I doubt he arranged the attack). Rather, I blame Republicans in general (Moore and the rest) for encouraging repressive reprisal against whoever dares to stand up against them.
An appeals court rejected parts of one state's ag-gag law, saying it was designed to restrict journalism.
Israel is preparing to annex large areas of Palestinian territory which have been colonized with Israelis.
The bill would declare those areas to be part of Jerusalem, which implies taking them away from Palestine.
Of course, many of us figured this was the intended final step, the reason for establishing the colonies in the first place.
Since such annexation violates international law, many countries will refuse to recognize it. Nonetheless, some important countries ruled by corrupt nincompoops might recognize it, which would advance the process of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Israel will surely accuse those who criticize this land grab as "antisemitic", but that is calumny. The issue has nothing to do with whether anyone is or isn't Jewish.
Republicans cancelled the special tax on oil companies to raise funds for cleaning up oil spills.
New Hampshire Republicans are trying to enact a voter-ID law and ban students at school there.
Republicans in Indiana have seized permanent control despite the voters through gerrymandering.
Republicans have made rigging elections their standard method.
A Christian rebuke to the Christians that support the bully.
Not being a Christian, I don't recognize the biblical citations, and I don't need to find a basis in Christianity for my judgment of them, or him.
However, there is a substantial commonality between my Secular Humanist morality and Christian morality. The main difference is that Christians treat sex differently from everything else, whereas I apply to sex the same moral ideas I apply to the rest of life.
Twitter will allow the bully to do bullying on Twitter no matter how vicious it gets.
Facebook Declines to Say Why It Deletes Certain Political Accounts, But Not Others.
Asking companies to censor based on some criterion is inherently problematical.
That the troll hypocritically supports Iranian protesters should not mean we cannot support them honestly.
However, support for a protest means support for its demands. What do they demand?
When they demand higher wages, I support that in a general way, though really it depends on what changes they demand so as to make wages higher.
When they demand continued subsidies for fossil fuels, I can't agree.
If they demanded a secular state with human rights, I would support that demand, but they don't.
Texas Police Chief Hands Over Undocumented Smuggling Victims to Local Organizations, Shunning ICE.
Obama cut military funding to Pakistan in 2011, then found that the US needed Pakistan so much it had to restore the funds.
The troll threatened to cut funds for Palestinians, but there are two ways that could be done.
Cutting US funds for the Palestinian Authority would hamper it from helping to maintain Israel's dominion over the West Bank. Cutting US funds for UNRWA would starve Palestinians both inside and outside of Palestine.
A gene therapy treatment, which we can call parzyl, costs almost a million dollars.
There is something sleazy going on with the generic name, "voretigene neparvovec-rzyl". Even to write it is a pain, and as for pronouncing it, should we treat it as English or as Polish? I don't know of any language other than Polish in which "rz" has a meaning.
In effect, the drug theoretically has a generic name, but not in practice. So I suggest calling it "parzyl".
The Republicans have a new plan to abolish parts of Indian reservations. First, designate parcels of land as private property of some Indians. Then make them sell it. Hell, it worked before!
Some Motel 6 motels betrayed lots of customers by giving information about them to immigration agents.
I don't think we should have to trust a company with knowing who we are. I am not in danger of being deported from the US, but I could face other forms of danger and mistreatment, just as you could.
California is considering getting rid of the bail system, which tends to impoverish poor people, but the bail bonds industry lobbies against that.
Saboteur Zinke plans to allow oil drilling off nearly all US coasts.
Even many Republican politicians are against this.
Why is Facebook selectively blocking the accounts of some repressive rulers and not others?
The eastern US has been very cold recently, but global heating been undone. The Earth's surface overall is currently hot compared with what used to be typical for January.
US citizens: call for investigating all the rape and groping accusations against the bully.
I signed this despite the use of the harmfully vague term "sexual assault".
US citizens: Call on Congress to stop the president from pardoning per family members, cabinet members, or former advisors.
I think a better criterion would be: pardoning acts done for the president, in association with the president, or at the orders of the president.
When fracking started, North Texas hadn't had an earthquake for 300 million years. Now it has many of them.
The Republicans control the Virginia lower house after a random selection in a tied election chose the Republican for one seat.
Macron wants to give the French state blanket censorship power in the name of stopping "fake news".
That's as absurd as giving the state broad surveillance power in the name of stopping "terrorism". Oh, right, France has already done that.
California has shut the door to applications for new or increased use of neonicotinoid pesticides.
That is a positive step, but they are already used at a dangerous level, and they remain in the soil for years.
After three years of partial ban, still 1/4 of the honey samples in the UK contain neonicotinoids. Before, half of them did.
The US establishment reacts vigorously when Iran kills protesters. When US allies such as Salafi Arabia, Bahrain and Honduras kill protesters, the establishment does not react.
The cheater urged Sessions not to recuse himself from authority over Mueller's investigation.
1/3 of the money given to Sierra Leone to cope with Ebola seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Survivors who did not receive promised help are suing to find it.
On the use of words of endearment for treating someone with disrespect.
This article shows with calm firmness how the problem is not in the specific words, but rather in the disrespect they are used to express. Females often find themselves on the receiving end of this, but even if on occasion it is directed against a male, it is nasty then too.
Pennsylvania has suspended construction of the Mariner East 2 oil pipeline because of "egregious and willful violations" of environmental law.
Ethiopia's dictator announced a plan to free all political prisoners and shut down the torture center.
If Ethiopia can do it, the US can do it.
The troll's asinine statements of support for protests in Iran boost support for the ayatollahs.
I used to suspect (only half seriously) that President Bush II and Osama bin Laden were working together secretly to make public statements to boost each other's support.
I don't suspect the troll of doing something like that, because he knows it would be neither necessary nor useful. His supporters are so disconnected from rationality that nothing the Iranian ayatollahs might say or do would make any difference to their support for the troll.
Tories' loathing and contempt for the homeless shows clearly in the plans to kick homeless people out of a part of London just to make things nicer for people coming to a wedding.
US citizens: Tell Congress: Expose destructive corporate mergers.
Norway will stop selling ammunition to the UAE because it is being used for killing civilians in Yemen.
Yemen Is Today's Guernica.
"Equality of opportunity" is a mockery when inequality of conditions makes many poor people grow up stunted and unable to take advantage of opportunity.
Bolivia's Lake Poopó, which used to be 400 square miles, has dried up into a salt flat, probably permanently.
The lake was crushed between irrigation on one side and global heating effects on the other.
The bully threatened to sue Bannon for saying nasty things about him.
Alas, the pleasure of this can hardly compensate for the harm that Republicans are doing to the world.
The troll has abolished his "election integrity" commission that was intended to prepare for disenfranchisement of non-Republican demographic groups.
Its abolition is a good thing, since the word "integrity" risks being tarnished when associated with a person who can't imagine what it means. But that doesn't mean the integrity of US elections is safe. Republicans have been scheming to bias elections for decades, and when one new attack is thwarted, their old methods don't stop.
Patent applications show that Google and Amazon are interested in making "digital assistants" study people's activities to learn all about them.
AI programs would understand what people say to each other, observe what they wear including slogans on t-shirts, and track people's movements around the house including to the toilet or to bed.
It should be illegal to have such a device in your apartment without getting signed consent from the people that live in the other apartments in the building.
Historians should investigate the actions and effects of the British Empire, not set out to whitewash them.
300,000 Dalits rallied to celebrate a battle where Dalits helped the British defeat an army of higher-caste Hindus, in 1817. Hindu-nationalists attacked the rally, after which Dalits protested in many cities. Thugs attacked some of the protests.
We all hate "red tape" until we see that the neglect of safety regulations can kill more people than a terrorist attack.
Syrian rebel groups refused to participate in Russian-sponsored peace talks.
Russia is no more an honest broker in Syria than the US is in Israel/Palestine.
For the moment, the troll favors negotiations with North Korea.
Ordinarily I would say this is an encouraging sign, but you can't expect the troll to go for weeks or months without reversing himself.
Saboteur Sessions will restart prosecution of state-legalized marijuana sellers, maybe even customers.
The decision leaves it up to US attorneys whether to prosecute. But there's a good chance they won't succeed in convicting people for these "crimes". Let's do our best to spread the word to resist while in a jury.
However, if agents go around confiscating the marijuana and the money of sellers, the sellers will have to shut down. People will be limited to what they and their friends can grow.
The Indian government's massive biometric ID system has led to a massive data breach.
The government claims, absurdly, that the breach is harmless because it didn't include the people's fingerprints and retina scans.
The Tories want to replace the EU with the much worse TPP. So much for their bullshit about "taking back control".
Coral reef bleaching is so frequent now that the reefs can't fully recover before the next bleaching event.
Oceans Suffocating as Huge Dead Zones Quadruple Since 1950, Scientists Warn.
People in Papua New Guinea still believe in witchcraft, and recently burned two women to death for supposedly magically killing someone that died from malaria.
Thugs in North Georgia are blatantly and cruelly racist.
Kabul has become dangerous for civilians, as the Taliban and PISSI both carry out attacks.
Meanwhile, European countries are sending Afghan refugees there because it is "safe".
Intel's CEO sold lots of Intel stock while he knew about the chip vulnerabilities.
I don't know whether this is legally criminal insider trading, but that's what it is in spirit.
The US has suspended over 250 million dollars in military aid to Pakistan.
Morally, I can't criticize this. Pakistan has been playing a double game for at least 10 years, unofficially supporting the Afghan Taliban while only sometimes fighting the Pakistani Taliban.
However, whether will turn out to be advantageous in practice, I can't begin to guess.
The US has begun to try ideological rehabilitation on convicted supporters of PISSI. It sometimes works.
The NHS has been knocked down so much by insufficient funds that it has cancelled all non-urgent surgery.
I expect the NHS will resume non-urgent surgery when Labour is elected and gives it more funds.
Finally a program for piecing together shreds of paper really exists.
In the 1970s, the CIA had an office in 545 Tech Sq right across from the Logo Lab (Logo was a programming system for children). Every day, the CIA set out some bags of shredded paper to be collected as trash. Many MIT people in the building had a very negative attitude towards the CIA.
One day, as a CIA person went to the toilet, two MIT people went there after him and and had a conversation between toilet stalls. One said, "How is that shredded paper vision system coming?" The other replied, "It's starting to work. We put the shreds in front of the camera and the robot arm can line them up."
The next day, the CIA did not put out its usual trash bag of shredded paper. A few days later, the bags resumed, but the paper had been shredded twice.
Of course, there was no such vision system in the 1970s. It was far beyond the technology of the day. The two MIT hackers had made it up as a hoax to hack the CIA.
Or at least, this is what people in that group said had been done. If there was any documentary record of this, I suppose the CIA shredded it long ago.
The bully's threat to cut UN funding for the refugee camps in Palestine threatens to loose the violent groups to take over or displace the Palestinian Authority.
Negotiation with the bullshitter is worthless since he famously does not keep the deals he makes.
Certain bird-friendly farming practices can bring back some species of birds that have been harmed by intensive farming.
Businesses do many kinds of harm to people. Why, then, the reflex of offering to subsidize businesses that make an effort to do less harm? Could this reflect a mental habit of genuflecting to business?
Perhaps that mental habit is why the solution offered for every problem takes the form of reducing taxes on business.
Since we need business to pay more taxes, how about if we instead fine farms for doing harm to birds, and reduce the fines for those that do less harm?
One province of Argentina will send hunters to protect whales from seagulls that have learned to attack whales.
It appears that the motive for caring about the whales is that whale watching is a big business there.
The province says that this is temporary and that it will implement the right solution, which is to deny gulls access to garbage.
One interesting point is that keas in New Zealand attack sheep in the same way. Keas are not closely related to gulls, so it seems that this kind of behavior is a potential for many kinds of birds.
Iceland will now require companies (other than small ones) to prove they are giving men and women equal pay.
Previously, the law required companies to do this, but the bosses didn't comply with that law. No surprise there — businesses that want to increase profits by exploiting someone tend to be persistent about it.
When other countries relax regulations or do favors for the sake of the cheater's businesses, that is a "foreign emolument" such as the US Constitution prohibits the president to receive.
Israel has jailed several Palestinian elected officials without trial or charges.
US citizens: call on Congress to support the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act, which would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with drug companies.
Sheikh Sayah's great grandfather bought land near Beersheva in 1905. Since 1952, Israel has been making excuses to confiscate that land.
If Israel were willing to pay what the land is worth, I suppose it could take the land through eminent domain, without violating anyone's human rights.
63 Israeli high school students committed themselves to refuse to be drafted into maintaining the occupation of Palestine.
The troll is on track to make 2000 public lies per year.
We don't know how many additional lies he makes in private.
To free writers and publishers from the power of Facebook, don't let Facebook direct what you read or watch.
You will do this automatically if you refuse to be a used of Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account, so Facebook doesn't know what I read, and has no direct influence on my choices.
Growing up as a plutocrat tends to shape people to treat the rest of society with contempt.
This suggests that we should make sure no one grows up very rich, just as we should make sure no one grows up poor.
The media give plentiful and interesting coverage to die-hard low-wage white supporters of the bully, but much less to other demographic groups.
One of the few progressive changes in the Republican tax attacks was to cap the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal tax. People that pay more than $10,000 a year in state and local taxes will have to pay more federal tax because of this change.
Perversely, there is a proposal for the states to cancel the effect of this change by replacing the income tax with a payroll tax.
This change would have a bad long-term side effect that the article does not mention. Payroll taxes encourage businesses to cut they payroll expenses by replacing workers with automation.
I think we should eliminate all payroll taxes, and compensate by raising the income tax, and by taxing fossil fuels more.
The new US newspaper chains buy lots of local newspapers, fire most of the staff, and make them part of a centralized business that treats local news reporting as the lowest priority. With this cost cutting, they extract profit for some years until people catch on that the newspaper is no longer worth looking at.
The person who made the hoax call that sent the SWAT team that killed Andrew Finch is morally responsible for the killing.
The thug that shot him is likewise morally responsible for the killing. Don't let the thugs evade their responsibility by dumping it all on the false report!
Global heating denialists advertise on Google, becoming more visible than real scientific conclusions.
I presume that the money to pay for these ads comes through a secret channel from the Koch brothers or fossil fuel companies.
In 1971, a group of experts concluded that a digital payment system that tracks people would be the most effective but unobtrusive system they could imagine for a dictatorship. ( pages 10-11 of this pdf , or search for "Electronic Funds Transfer Systems" in this plaintext version )
Now that exists, we see it is indeed ideal for that purpose. So join me in promoting the use of cash — by insisting on paying cash, and telling businesses "No cash? No sale."
The bully's UN ambassador is trying to spoil possible peace negotiations between South Korea and North Korea.
It looks like the bully really doesn't want a peace deal. So what does he want? A chance to use nuclear weapons?
Food companies' advertising is aimed at convincing people to eat larger portions of candy.
Removing parts of current protected maritime national monuments would endanger ecosystems.
For the planet plunderers, every species wiped out is one less potential obstacle to their plunder.
The US-trained and US-backed military thugs of Honduras have killed 31 unarmed protesters so far, but the people have not stopped protesting.
When one protester was dying in the hospital, the thugs kept the man's family away for days, until he was dead.
Keep Global [heating] Under 1.5C Or "Quarter of Planet Could Become Arid."
This will cut into global food production.
2017 was the hottest ever non-el-Niño year.
The US mainstream media are a spectrum from center-right to extreme-right-wing. Right-wing extremists call it "Liberal" as a lie campaign.
The aim is to persuade naive people that "Liberal" is what they see in the right-wing mainstream media, therefore the "center" must be somewhere to the right of that.
A New Year’s Resolution for the Media: Do Not Let Republicans Get Away With Saying "Reforms" When They Mean "Cuts".
10% of US young adults were homeless or forced to crash at friends' houses in the past year.
UK thugs are flying drones 24 hours a day to watch people in public.
If all they do is notice violent crime and disasters, I think it is fine. However, these drones, like body cameras, threaten to impose tyranny if their use is not carefully limited.
Behind a Corporate Monster: How Monsanto Pushes Agricultural Domination.
The FBI has arrested around a thousand prostitutes, as part of an annual operation supposedly intended to "recover children" from trafficking, except that it hardly ever finds any children. Not even many adolescent minors. It finds prostitutes and arrests them.
Palestinian Girl Filmed Slapping Israeli Soldier Is Charged with Assault.
Her mother has been charged with "incitement". Apparently reporting on slapping a soldier is now "incitement".
Government agencies in the US sometimes sue people for making FOIA requests. It is completely bogus, but if you are not in a position to deal with being sued, it is very intimidating.
As environmentalists try to reduce plastic pollution that is choking the oceans, Big Oil is investing in increasing production.
Republican saboteurs will do anything to boost fossil fuel extraction, even letting the drillers endanger their workers' lives.
One of the dangers of the "internet of stings" is that if you lose your internet service you also lose control of your house and appliances.
It is a shame that the article refers to people accused of forbidden sharing as "pirates", as if sharing copies were somehow wrong.
It is well known that designing an appliance so that the owner needs to connect to it through the internet, rather than locally and directly, makes it insecure in many ways. To that list we must add the danger of being disconnected from it.
Those insecurities are in addition to the malicious things that the appliance could be built to do you.
For your safety, don't use any appliance with a connected to the real internet.
WTO negotiations to extend a business-supremacy treaty, GATS, aim to impose privatization on public medical systems such as the NHS.
Privatizing any government service leads to low wages, bad service, and lack of accountability. If the private implementers are "more efficient" that's because they pay workers less or cut corners.
Israel bullied Facebook into imposing tight censorship on criticism of the occupation of Palestine.
USDA regulations, necessary for and designed for large food-processing companies, can put an end to the small companies that don't need them.
Bruce Schneier: Personal data is a toxic asset.
Just as in the case of toxic chemicals, we need laws to make the cost of the toxicity fall on the companies or government agencies that collect or accumulate the data. But that's not enough in the case of toxic chemicals, and it's not enough for toxic personal data either. We need to prohibit building systems such that they collect or save more that the smallest amount of data that they could collect or save.
Body cameras won't be effective to protect people from thugs if the rules for using them are set up to protect the thugs instead.
Marijuana is now legal in California. There are even some businesses licensed to sell it.
The thugs oppose this; they refuse to admit that the biggest danger of using marijuana was the danger from them.
"Trumpwashing": implicitly denying injustices of the US before 2017 by presenting all wrongs as having been started by the bully.
Some protesters in Iran are raising political issues, including freeing political prisoners, ending foreign interventions. Just the sort of things that Americans used to protest, 15 years ago, but have mostly forgotten about.
The bully is undermining the protesters with hypocritical claims to support them. The only effect such "support" could have in Iran is to inspire a reaction against the protests. I hope Iranians have the good sense to resist this.
What Bitcoin and Amazon Are Doing to the Middle Class.
US thugs have been given power to brutalize people on their own authority based on the most meager excuses.
Funding for charters schools in California turned out to be a big spigot for wasteful failures.
The IRS intentionally sought to prosecute businesses that made cash deposits close to but under $10,000 but were getting the money legitimately. It seized lots of money from them.
President Kabila of the DR Congo has reached the end of his term but refuses to hold an election to choose his successor. Citizens are protesting, and the state suppression forces are trying to prevent the protests. Now they have killed two protesters.
The suppression forces have cut off communications for the people.
There are protests all across Iran about low wages.
The protests are very visible but it is not so clear what they mean.
Iranians may dislike the elimination of subsidies for gasoline, but subsidies on fossil fuels endanger the whole world. The way to help non-rich people to accept this is to give that money to the non-rich in another way that isn't limited to those that use gasoline.
When large organizations seek to control costs, Institutional dynamics pressure them to make rigid rules, enforce them with cruelty, and punish whistleblowers that report problems internally to anyone but their immediate supervisor — while pretending to be small, local, and friendly.
Have you ever bought "extra strength" antacids?
One "extra strength" tablet is equivalent to two "regular strength" tablets. It cost as much as two "regular strength" tablets. It weighs as much as two "regular strength" tablets. Taking it is equivalent to taking two "regular strength" tablets.
The only difference it makes to get the "extra strength" tablets is to make it difficult to take the equivalent of just one "regular strength" tablet. It is possible to break the "extra strength" tablet in half, but it's hard to do so with the unaided fingers. So you might take more than you really want to take.
In other words, "extra strength" gives the purchaser no benefit, only inconvenience. True, it is not a big deal, but why give in to a minor swindle if you don't have to?
Next time you buy some antacid, insist on "regular strength". If the store doesn't have any, or not in a flavor you can stand, complain to the manager.
Taser offers to provide thugs with gratis body cameras in exchange for control over everything they see.
Popular Indian Parody Site Closes after Death Threats from [theocratist Hindus].
The government doesn't directly organize violence, but it directly encourages and facilitates those that do.
Some Javascript malware swipes usernames from browser-based password managers.
Why we need to increase the inheritance tax — and why that won't do the harm that the myths pretend.
US citizens: tell Congress not to allow the TSA to do face recognition on US citizens at airports.
Growing wood to burn it is an inefficient process that will increase global heating.
Global heating is eliminating the regularity of the seasons in Britain (and, I'm sure, many other places). The immediate effects of this are good in some ways and bad in others, but over time it will cause the extinction of many species.
The loss of one species can easily cause further change that will wipe out other species.
Thugs went to the house of Andrew Finch (whom they killed without thinking twice) because of a malicious hoax call.
I forecast that the thugs will try to take the blame off themselves by blaming the hoaxer instead. Making such a hoax call is very wrong, but that doesn't excuse the thugs for shooting first and asking questions later. Don't let the thugs off the hook!
For three years running, US thugs have killed more than a thousand people per year.
Before that, there weren't any complete lists or counts of people killed by thugs.
Taser collects data from thugs' body cameras, then makes defense attorneys sign nondisclosure agreements to see the video.
All state agencies and all thug departments should be prohibited by law from using body cameras that do this. The law must be written so that it can be enforced in court at any time — citizens must not have to wait until they need footage and encounter this requirement so as to challenge it retroactively.
There are estimated to be around 100,000 undercover informants in the US, most of whom were effectively blackmailed into being informants by mandatory minimum sentences.
Here's what the FBI did to make one person work as an informant.
Poverty causes stress, which makes people grow up biologically damaged. Poverty makes ordinary cheap goods expensive, so it is a real trap. To get out requires luck, so it teaches people to take mad-seeming risks, without which they have no chance to get out. And they have to run these risks with poverty's damage tying one hand behind their backs.
When they do escape and become well-off, they can't trust it, because poverty taught them to be anxious all the time that something is about to kick them back into the gutter.
We should never allow our society to subject someone to growing up in poverty.
The UK is privatizing the NHS even more.
Homeless people in Houston are fined $500 if they put a tent under a viaduct. The city calls them "obstructions".
Thugs came to Andrew Finch's house because someone told them there was a hostage situation. He came to the door, unarmed of course, and they shot him immediately.
Kirsten Lobato's murder conviction was overturned after many years of struggle. She was convicted after a biased investigation — not mere mistakes. Why do we not punish the thugs that act in such biased ways? That would do a lot to make this happen less often.
Former Egyptian president Morsi has been given an additional prison sentence, this time for "insulting the judiciary".
With this sentence, the Egyptian judiciary has just insulted itself. Morsi's policies as president did not respect freedom very much, but jailing people for "insulting" is never excusable.
English volunteers help the asylum seekers that are legally left destitute.
Some of the members of the HIV/AIDS Advisory Council resigned to protest the saboteur's lack of concern for the issue. He just fired all the rest, confirming their accusation.
Solidarity protests in Chicago for Hondurans fighting their stolen election.
The US Constitution is a skeleton that depends on joints, muscles and tendons to make the government move in the right ways. Now that Republicans have torn those up, we see that a Constitution interpreted by machines or unscrupulous lawyers fails to do its job.
"The people who understand corruption best are very poor people and very rich people. The stronger the middle class, the less powerful corruption is."
It follows that plutocracy makes for more corruption.
The state-supported "loyalist" assassins in Northern Ireland warned the prime minister of Ireland that officials had asked them to kill him and to spread diseases in Ireland.
They refused to kill him, and presumably refused to spread the diseases either.
Peruvians Protest Against Pardon For Jailed (murderous) Ex-President Fujimori.
A wave of fraudulent comments support the saboteur's move to cancel the regulation that says retirement advisors must not cheat their clients with intentional bad advice.
Fraudulent comments seem to be the new tactic of choice for the people of the lie.
US citizens: tell Senator Grassley to stop rubber-stamping the saboteur's nominees for judges.
The men video'd beating up unarmed protester DeAndre Harris have been charged.
Farmers in Colombia are rapidly cutting down the forest for farms that wear out the land quickly. Some are trying to teach them to plant fruit trees and hardwood tree plantations.
The other half of the solution for preserving the forest is to limit the numbers of human beings that try to make a living in it.
Both democracy and human rights in the US were sick before the bully was elected, and just replacing him won't fix that.
I asked a volunteer to check the points in the article about US prisons and he found references to support all of them.
The bully's saboteurs are attacking both human rights and democracy; even to undo this damage may be difficult. And if they get enough control over the courts, they will never allow opposition to win elections.
Still, we have to try — because giving up guarantees the worst possible outcome.
Taser wants to sign up the public to send video evidence of crimes to the local thug department.
Fat lot of good that will do when thugs commit crimes.
"Microsoft loves Linux the way a python likes sheep." Microsoft uses software patent threats to bully Android phone makers to include Microsoft's proprietary software, which may be malware too.
Cars track lots of data about drivers, and one way or another companies get it.
"Who is the ‘internet of things’ good for?"
Since it puts the users further under the power of Big Data, it's ultimately bad for the users. I call it the "internet of stings".
Israel develops its "security" technology, more properly described as repression technology, by practicing on Palestinians. Israel now exports this to US thug departments so they can learn the "best practices" for repressing Americans that protest.
New York State spent lots of money on zero-tax "start up" zones.
Subsidizing business to do business tends to become nothing but a giveaway to businesses. It is self-defeating when it "succeeds".
Businesses in the US pay too little tax overall. Therefore, we have to stop thinking of reducing taxes for "better" businesses and instead raise them on "worse" business.
Hondurans continue protesting massively against the theft of their presidential election.
US neo-Nazis are pretending to support progressive criticism of the political power of business, hoping they can substitute "Jews" for "business" and convert progressives to antisemitism.
Uri Avnery: Ben-Gurion told God, I wish that Israel will be a Jewish state, that it will encompass all the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and that it be a just state. "That is too much even for me," God said.
Fungicides are very dangerous to some species of bumblebees.
Studies show that vaping is far less dangerous than smoking tobacco, provided one stops smoking entirely.
Israel bullied the National Basketball Association to deny that Palestine is occupied territory.
Right-wing politicians frequently demonize "coastal elites". Many of the bully's cronies are part of the coastal elite.
Seymour Hersh: US intelligence chiefs knew Syria did not drop sarin on Khan Sheikhoun, but they couldn't convince the bully of this, so he fired missiles at Syria anyway.
They succeeded in convincing him to arrange the attack in a way that would not do much damage — it would only make him look tough.
Although antisocialists take many stands that progressives can agree with, we can never expect real support from antisocialists, because their highest priority is always laissez-faire: to make the government stop doing good for people in general.
In other words, they are far more against what they call "socialism" (which is what they call any policy that isn't total laissez-faire) than they are for liberty.
This helps explain how the term "libertarian" misrepresents their views. It highlights their attractive secondary stand (for civil liberties), while claiming falsely that their repellent primary position (for laissez-faire) has something to do with civil liberties.
Idiots such as the president think a few cold days in winter imply that more global heating would be good, or else that there isn't any.
Native idiocy isn't enough to believe things like this. They have to work at it.
When you experience a cold day in winter, remember that the cold is killing tropical diseases and parasites. As global heating makes winter gradually less cold, they spread further north.
Carrying newly hatched salmon to the sea by truck appears at first to be effective. But when the salmon are ready to go upstream to spawn, they don't know which way to go up the river, since they never went down the river.
US nursing homes asked the government to please stop fining them for mistreating patients. The saboteurs granted their wish.
For millions of working women to push away sexual pressure from their bosses, they need to form activist unions.
Facebook now asks users in India to give their official biometric ID linkage.
Being used by Facebook was harmful already. This makes it more harmful because it enables Facebook's data about people to be linked easily with many other databases also indexed by national ID numbers.
This is an example of why a national ID number is harmful. Once everyone has that number, it becomes natural for every business or organization which has a database of people to index it by national ID number — and presto! they are all cross-linked.
The FBI, advised by Ayn Rand, denounced films such as It's A Wonderful Life as Communist propaganda.
The acting head of the official internal whistleblowing office for US intelligence agents was transferred to a no-op job for no stated reasons.
Perhaps he tried to actually do his job? As has been reported, that office has generally operated as a mousetrap to catch whistleblowers.
Fossil fools have funded fake news and fake science since the 1990s, but they needed to present it with a serious front. Now the Heatland Institute has decided, based on the strength of the US anti-rationality movement, to dispense with that and spew evident nonsense.
The organization calls itself "Heartland", but the name "Heatland" describes it more accurately.
Twitter banned a bot that was very effective at identifying impersonator trolls (who make false-flag racist verbal attacks), because the right-wing lie movement started reporting it for "abuse."
Any sort of crowdsourcing of information or judgment is vulnerable to manipulation by a sufficiently large dishonest movement.
Saboteur Pruitt has redefined environmentalism to mean extracting as much as possible and ignoring effects on the environment.
The cancer drug Lomustine costs 15 times as much as it did 4 years ago.
UK pro-fracking politicians go to great lengths to sabotage protests.
A Mexican reporter, afraid of being shot by gangsters, tried to ask for asylum in the US. He was imprisoned for 100 days and treated like a criminal. Told he'd probably be held in prison for a year, he went back to Mexico even though he still feared being shot.
A general pattern of obsession with identity may be the reason that angry young Muslims today become Islamists rather than anti-racism campaigners for social equality.
In Xinjiang, China tracks every move that people make.
Coming soon to a country near you.
Proof that the NSA-designed back door in RSA's TLS library was operational in a commercial product.
The Republican bigotry movement is deeply ingrained, and the bully is just a representative of it. He can use it, but he can't control it.
Josh Walker was acquitted of charges of possessing a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook. The unofficial reason for prosecuting him is that he helped the Syrian Kurds fight against PISSI.
The white supremacists that attacked unarmed DeAndre Harris have been charged. Unfortunately, Harris still faces charges too.
Salafi Arabia's US-backed bombardment of Yemen killed 68 civilians on Dec 26. No one has ever presented a rational motive for this war, let alone a valid justification.
Tom Hughes is about to become homeless, and considers committing a harmless crime so as to get into prison instead.
The Real Costs of Cheap Surveillance.
I have presented solutions here.
Roy Moore will go to any lengths of absurdity to prevent Doug Jones from being seated in the senate.
This accusation is absurd because of the facts. I won't claim that Democrats are so moral that they couldn't conceivably try to rig an election. But the ones that are in the habit of doing so are Republicans. Alabama's government is dominated by Republicans. Democrats would not be able to rig an election there if they tried.
Privacy.com offers the service of a VPN for credit cards.
Aside from the question of whether you can trust privacy.com with your data, I wonder also about what happens if you need to cancel a payment.
Rather than use workarounds like these, I'd rather go to a store, offer cash, refuse to give my name or zipcode, and see if they are willing to refuse to sell me something.
To return society to rationality, we must stop preferring powerful authentic emotions to dull authentic facts and reasoning.
"Ice will return but extinctions can't be reversed. We must act now."
China's "sponge cities" help direct rain underground, to reduce flooding.
Extremists in the US killed 372 people in the 10-year period, 2007-2016. About 3/4 of the killings were done by right-wing extremists.
Israeli troops fired at medics and journalists that moved towards a wounded Palestinian protester.
An Israeli official made a vague threat of violence against nonviolent protesters in Germany.
Men now face being fired for vaguely sexual conversations that were not sexual harassment and that no one complained about.
Naturally, the announcement of dismissal used the vaguest possible word: "inappropriate". That word means "not correct in my judgment." Such a vague criticism can never justify the conclusion that someone has done wrong. Any act might be frowned upon by someone.
If you want to demand that someone be fired or prosecuted for some action, or justify firing the person for some action, it behooves you to make an accusation that is concrete, not vague like "inappropriate". You need to say what the action was, so we can judge how wrong it was. If you can't or won't describe it with something more concrete than "inappropriate", we must presume it wasn't bad enough to punish.
This note is not meant to defend conduct that merits some concrete criticism. Once there is a concrete criticism, we have a concrete issue to consider.
The troll is not the only one in America trying to restrict what people can say. Many universities do it, too.
Most of Labour's supporters want Britain to stay in the EU. The party is vulnerable to competition from a party that would support this.
UK exit from the EU is a paradoxical issue. The EU requires every country to be part of several business-supremacy treaties, each of which cements the nondemocratic and therefore unjust power of business. The EU has plutocratic policies of its own in several areas including copyright, agriculture, and inequality of wealth. In principle, returning to freedom and democracy requires escaping from the EU.
However, the EU also regulates businesses and protects some human rights. Therefore, exit from the EU does not necessarily imply things will get better.
If the plan for Britain's economic policy after leaving the EU is to sign a bunch of business-supremacy treaties, the effect will be to make things even worse.
Oil drilling in the Peruvian Amazon has poisoned land and rivers. The indigenous people sometimes occupy and shut down oil facilities for days or months.
The local oil pollution might degrade or wash away in a couple of centuries, but the damage done by global heating is forever. The most important fight in the Peruvian Amazon is to prevent construction of new wells.
Poverty Is Both a Political and a Moral Choice Made By the Powerful.
Decades of planning enabled right-wing plutocrats to take power in the US, so they could let most Americans "fall by the wayside".
As a result of their success, poor people in the US today have discarded the American Dream. They have learned that hard work won't get them a decent life in the US. Especially poor whites have given in to despair.
At the economic level, they are right. Hard work to make money won't get most poor Americans a decent life, because the rich take most of the value of their work.
However, there is another kind of hard work which could enable everyone to have a decent life: work to elect progressive leaders that will make the rich give back what they took.
Concern about how the bully deals with Putin should not lead us to take speculation for fact.
Visa plans to pay US businesses to stop accepting cash.
Before I supported the Doug Jones campaign, I had a volunteer show me his positions and found things that sounded progressive to me. It looks like I missed some things that are not very progressive.
Too bad. We need senators about whom one can say something more than, "Better than Roy Moore."
A second disaster for Barbuda: now that the houses have been destroyed, the communal lands will be privatized.
The land will then be sold to rich foreigners for funds for rebuilding. This will probably include much of the wild areas, which will then be bulldozed.
This issue may not matter for long if global heating and sea-level rise combine to make Barbuda uninhabitable.
The effectiveness of Russian troll ads in Facebook demonstrate something bad about the American people, but also about Facebook.
It may be true that Facebook is "a mirror" for its useds, but that does not mean it is safe. The useds are also a mirror for what Facebook says to them. Two mirrors facing each other, with something in between that resonates with a certain kind of energy, make up a laser, and a laser can be very dangerous if it is powerful.
I am puzzled by the article's presupposition that "Democrats" adore Facebook unquestioningly. Does that really happen?
Venezuela's all-powerful "constitutional assembly" has arbitrarily banned the three main opposition parties from the next national election for the "crime" of boycotting the recent local elections.
The "constitutional assembly" is really the "constitution override", since it serves to enable Maduro to set the constitution aside arbitrarily. The government obeys the constitution except when it doesn't.
The criticism from the US is ironic since the cheater is setting the US constitution aside simply by ignoring it.
UK ministries conceal supposedly public government files by "borrowing" them permanently from the archives, then saying they "can't find" the files.
In the US, the government says the files are secret, or denies they ever existed.
Cats in Australia kill a million birds of native species per day, and may be a crucial factor in wiping them out.
I seem to recall having read about an effort to eradicate cats from some island. Might it be possible to sterilize the feral cats of Australia, and keep all non-neutered cats indoors, for the birds' sake?
EFF: Protect the Privacy of Cross-Border Data: Stop the DOJ Bill.
Chinese economists advocate total surveillance in the name of making a planned economy work.
Total surveillance means total tyranny, so even if it does function in some economic sense, it is a bad system.
Various levels of global heating, and the global damage they would do.
In the Cretaceous period, mammals could only come out at night — because daytime was so hot it would kill them. We could get there again.
If a university has many Chinese students, it had better take care to prevent them from intimidating others from condemning China's tyranny.
We might help Chinese students understand that they should not identify themselves with Chinese repression by showing that we criticize our own countries' repression, too. We are not against China, rather we support all peoples (including the Chinese people) against the injustice of whatever state.
Turkey is fortunate to have a decreasing birth rate that will help end poverty there. However, some fools believe that this is a problem.
The local inconveniences of a decreasing population are nothing compared with the global disaster of population pushing up greenhouse emissions and overusing every limited renewable resource.
We need laws to stop drug companies from raising the price of a drug to an unconscionable level.
Wu Gan, Chinese human rights activist, has been sentenced to 8 years in prison for holding a protest at a courthouse.
China never ceased to be a vicious tyranny. The Panchen Lama was disappeared in 1995 and has not been seen or heard from since. But China did these sort of things only rarely, until a few years ago.
The axolotl appears to be extinct in the wild, apparently due to pollution from humans that have invaded its habitat.
Japan has declared approaching a whaling ship to be "terrorism".
The UK and US have declared releasing animals from a farm to be "terrorism".
The US refers to protests as "low-level terrorism".
The UK designates protesters as "terrorists" as well as people involved in publishing the Snowden leaks.
Lying laws such as these are a form of tyranny. The dishonesty also undermines efforts against real terrorism.
Wages in the US are depressed substantially because many Americans have few potential employers to choose from.
This is another reason why we need to break up the large companies.
Body cameras had a big influence on the behavior of thugs in LA.
Putin has officially banned the only real opposition candidate from running against him.
Reality Winner published the secret intelligence about Russian phishing at a US "election services" company because everyone knew that the the official internal whistleblower system is just a mousetrap to catch anyone that would even think of trying.
She will have an unfair trial, demonstrating why it is absurd to claim Snowden should return and face a similarly unfair trial.
Meanwhile, use of private companies for "election services" makes me worry on principle. How can we trust a company for that?
Washington State has sued Comcast for tricking hundreds of thousands of customers into paying for nothing.
"Innovation" in the area of how to charge for services is something we should discourage, or even criminalize.
Sessions lied to Congress about the troll campaign's plans for contact with Russia.
Senator Warren explains how Equifax is making lots of money from "helping" people protect themselves from the consequences of its data breach.
The data breach resulted from the carelessness of Equifax's security department.
The welfare programs of the welfare state are a triumph of organized human decency. We should champion them with pride.
Want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness: banished by the welfare state, imposed once again by the plutocratic state.
National Security Agencies Are [still] Evading Congressional Oversight.
Many congresscritters accept the agencies' claims without question, or allow themselves to be brushed off with "it's a secret".
It's Not Just Niger — U.S. Military Activity Is a "Recruiting Tool" for Terror Groups Across West Africa.
Boko Haram is a vicious gang, and I don't have any objection in principle to helping to defeat it provided the means are legitimate and the effort makes things better, not worse. But we can't judge those questions if we don't know what the efforts are.
"The lie that poverty is a moral failing was buried a century ago. Now it’s back."
People who attributed poverty to bad luck are not entirely wrong. The reason why x% of the population are poor is bad social policies. The reason why person A is part of that x% rather than person B is chance.
At least 73% of the Fortune 500 companies used tax havens to dodge taxes, in 2016.
The "paradise papers" might demonstrate that the percentage is even higher.
Brazil's president Temer weakened the law against slavery to buy support from agribusiness, so that it would vote its congresscritters to protect him from trial for some of his corruption.
His maneuver succeeded; Brazil remains ruled by corruption.
We should not use the word "reforms" when referring to his plans. The only thing Temer wants to do is dooH niboR.
The EU has a big plan to make more biofuel for airplanes, and it would cause big harm.
Biofuels produced by growing crops for fuel already cause harm; they drive up the price of food, and they increase carbon emissions.
Right-wingers are suing pipeline protesters, calling them a terrorist conspiracy.
"The darkest dream of totalitarianism is now our daily life, carried in our purse and pocket... Every first person feels ever more alone and lost... What if truth is the precarious hinge that holds freedom and progress together?"
Interviews with Taliban, which have been growing stronger for years. One says that many former prisoners of the Afghan state forces are so ashamed of the way they were tortured that they volunteer to be suicide bombers.
Fake news in Facebook has been used to stir up violence in several countries.
Fossil fuel use and global heating effects are injuring, even killing, millions of people.
The Tories' welfare system is so determined to cut the funds for disabled people that the assessors lie to fabricate an excuse.
The job of assessor would naturally attract people who enjoy callously saying no to someone in need, but that alone can't account for 250 reports that an assessor lied. Clearly the cause is pressure from the bosses of the companies that the assessors work for.
Privatizing a public activity is an invitation for a company to cut corners and do a bad job.
The Tories are making disabled people come in for interviews about putting them to work, even if they are too sick to get out of bed.
Many Iraqi children will find it hard to grow up as healthy and capable adults. Their bodies have been poisoned by chemicals and Dirty Uranium from US weapons, while their brains are poisoned by PTSD from the violence they have witnessed.
American Airlines Gave Its Workers a Raise. Wall Street Freaked Out.
The tendency for US companies to focus on short-term changes in stock price is harmful in many ways. It encourages short-term thinking which implies long-term loss. This is one more way it is harmful.
Products being sold to US thugs include new systems for watching everyone, listening to everyone, identifying everyone, and integrating the data about everyone.
The bully could save the US 7 trillion dollars by not pushing the US into a pointless (and unjustified) war with Iran.
Journalists Who Relayed GOP's Deficit Moaning Owe Us Apologies.
Google is trying out teaching based on pervasive surveillance and data collection, in the expensive context of a class with two teachers for 24 students from wealthy and well-educated, which will surely make it look effective.
Building a data model of a student's state of knowledge, and abilities, could be a useful method. In order for it to be ethical, only rough summaries (comparable to grades) should ever leave the school in any form.
However, I doubt a good teaching method can overcome the detrimental effects on learning and ability caused by growing up in the stress of poverty. Personal attention from teachers could help, some.
To protect freedom of the press nowadays requires protecting real discussion somehow from troll armies and threats of violence.
But how?
The Thomas fire in California is now the largest in the state's history. It has burned over 400 square miles.
It started in December, in what used to be California's rainy season, but due to global heating there hasn't been much rain near LA.
Suggesting that financial bubbles will burst in 2020.
Several of the genes that make human skin darker or lighter existed before Homo sapiens evolved. They were inherited from an ancestral species.
Someone pushed some pork through the mail slot of the Belfast Islamic Center.
This gesture of bigotry was nasty and I disapprove of it, but the word "attack" is not justified. To qualify as an attack, it would have to cause damage or harm, not mere offense. A dirty spot in a door, and on the nearby floor, are not harm.
How the occupation of Palestine damages democracy and human rights within Israel, in addition to the already reported injustice to Palestinians.
Complex regulations are pressuring small US banks to merge with big ones. A publicly owned bank, in North Dakota, helps the local banks there to survive.
The idea that it is easier to enforce regulations on a few large banks than on small ones is backwards. On the contrary, very big banks can cheat with impunity, as Wells Fargo has shown. To make banks obey the law, we need to get big banks to split up.
My progressive business tax proposal could help do that.
US Nuclear Arsenal to Cost $1.2tn Over Next 30 Years.
It is part of a broad military spending program that might cost even more, and is totally unnecessary since the US military could easily defeat any three other nation's militaries.
What fraction of world greenhouse gas emissions could we eliminate with that much money?
Someone mailed a well-deserved gift to Saboteur of the Treasury Mnuchin: a gift-wrapped box of horse shit. More scary: the Secret Service is "investigating" this. On what grounds?
Horse manure is not a bomb, it is a political statement and nothing more. To treat this is a crime is an attack on American's political freedom — like treating protests at the bully's inauguration as a crime.
The falling price of renewable electricity and batteries may enable India to provide electricity to everyone using renewable energy instead of coal.
India should decide now to reject coal. It will do little good for millions of poor Indians if they get electricity in the next 20 years, only to die from global heating effects in another 20 years.
In the long term, for India to reduce the number of poor people it must stop making more of them by means of birth control. Without that, it's a Red Queen's race.
Save Israel, Stop the Occupation — an organization that asks Jews outside Israel to support Israeli opposition to continued occupation of Palestine.
Israel confiscates Palestinians' water pipes and tanks so its colonies can grow bananas.
Six crimes by the bully and his officials that ought to be prosecuted.
The Tory "reform" of welfare payments in the UK tends to make recipients fall behind on rent. Now many landlords won't rent to welfare recipients at all.
Sanders Slams Trump for 'Bragging' About Millions of Americans Losing Healthcare.
This as the cheater congratulated his rich friends for the big gains they will get from the tax attacks.
Nothing is too cruel for the bully's repression of immigrants. The newest plan is to systematically take children away from their unauthorized immigrant parents.
Ahed Tamimi slapped and kicked some Israeli soldiers who was standing unwelcome in her family's yard. The soldiers forbore to retaliate, so right-wing Israeli haters began demanding some harshness. Soldiers returned in the middle of the night and arrested her.
Her parents have led weekly protests for many years against Israel's theft of their land through the annexation wall.
European organizations that rescue drowning would-be immigrants are being prosecuted for facilitating illegal immigration.
Similar things have happened in the US near the Mexican border.
Defending college teachers' rights to protest at the rallies students hold on campus. Both have the right to express their views.
Workplace surveillance systems track everything staff do online through company-provided computers.
I wouldn't use them if I were you.
Guatemalans hope a return to regenerative farming could enable the country to support all its people.
The article doesn't explain why investment money is needed for this. I can guess at various possibilities, but we need to know the actual answer.
If they can make their economy more sustainable this way, and they want the improvement last, they must not squander the gains on increased population. Thus, reducing population growth needs to be part of the plan.
Offshoring as shown in the "paradise" papers encourages corruption of public officials, as well as tax-dodging and corruption.
Investments in companies which exercise power, such as Twitter and Facebook, have the potential to influence their use of that power.
Maybe this was just an investment for profit. But then why hide it?
Even if Twitter and Facebook didn't know that they had Russian state institutions as investors, those investors had ways to push for developments that suited them, without revealing who they were.
Will AI dolls for young children interfere with their understanding of the difference between people and things?
I am not convinced, a priori, that this will do harm. Perhaps it will have a subtle effect that is only statistically detectable.
However, the crucial question is not whether AI dolls, inherently, are likely confuse children. It is, rather, whether AI dolls could be designed to manipulate children in a particular way: to make them more susceptible to addictive technology.
Because, if there is a way to do that, companies will find it.
Companies such as Facebook are searching madly for ways to make their technology more addictive. They have lots of money to invest in research. If a certain kind of robot doll could predispose people to be more addicted to Facebook, Facebook is likely to discover that. Then it might push those dolls on children under some pretext — perhaps "They are educational", perhaps, or "They make up for the lack of teachers in our austerity-hit schools". Facebook-funded research could substantiate these claims.
Perhaps some other kind of AI doll might be entirely harmless, or even beneficial, but that's not the direction that Facebook et al. would find profitable to promote.
Russians have met to nominate Alexei Navalny to run for president. They will have to overcome the criminal convictions that Putin has engineered as an excuse to stop him from running.
In a previous election, Putin arranged to prevent the nomination process for Garry Kasparov by making all the large rooms in Moscow unavailable.
Putin would probably win a free and fair election, and surely knows this, but he still won't allow one in Russia.
UK law particularly favors companies against journalists that publish about leaks. And the Tories plan to make it even worse.
Privacy needs more protection, but data brokers, data thieves, and repressive states will not be deterred by laws about the use of personal data. (The data brokers are experts at achieving want they want through loopholes in data protection laws.) The effective way to protect privacy is to limit the accumulation of data.
Exploring the world of do-it-yourself gene therapy.
I think people should be free to make and try untested genetic modifications on themselves. But the risk scares me; I would never do it except as a last resort.
Acts of hatred against Indian Christians hit a peak at Christmas.
The bigoted ruling party has inspired Hindus' violence against many other religious groups.
Some of the world's best soccer clubs belong to Arab despots, and the money that buys their players comes from oppression.
Other clubs have been bought by Russian oligarchs, who certainly didn't get so much of Russia with clean hands.
A fire in a shopping mall at night seems to have killed 37 people working in a call center.
It's a shame that 37 people got killed, perhaps painfully, but that's life. I hope Filipinos do get worked up enough about this to bring about improvement in fire code enforcement.
Now, imagine that 37 people got killed by a terrorist. Fools around the world would demand, "Tear up our freedom at once!", stirred up by would-be authoritarian politicians.
The bully and his agents are attacking science in every part of the US government.
If the Republicans don't cancel democracy in the US the way Hernández just did in Honduras, we may have them out of power in 3 years. But it won't be easy to repair the damage they are doing now. All staff who remain in these agencies are either struggling desperately to maintain their integrity despite being forbidden to show it, or becoming cynical and thus useless as a support for integrity. In effect, we will have to replace them and start over.
That effect is not limited to agencies that are involved with science.
Twitter accounts suspected of being Russian trolls were used to stir up conflict after terrorist attacks in the UK.
Associating the Twitter accounts with Russia may admit of uncertainty, but there's no uncertainty that the system is susceptible to being used this way. Individuals and right-wing extremist organizations do it, too.
What's not clear is how to fix the Twitter system to make it less susceptible to this sort of instability, without censorship that would threaten our freedom also.
If we can believe the CIA that it briefed the bully on Jan 6 about Russia's election meddling, that implies he has been lying about it ever since.
Courts and scientists are trying to clarify the boundary between firm opinions and incitement to violence.
Saboteur of Justice Sessions cancelled the federal guidelines that restrained some cites from fining poor people for being poor.
This may be the most damaging thing yet that the Republicans have done. Millions of Americans who were being rescued from the repression of perpetual debt will now have no hope of escape.
American children have had almost all their freedom taken away in the past 40 years.
The Election Fraud in Honduras Follows Decades of Corruption Funded By the U.S. War on Drugs.
Everyone: Call on Ecuador's President Moreno to pardon the indigenous mining protesters.
You can sign this without running nonfree Javascript code by using Lynx.
Saboteur DeVos has revoked the plan to cancel the student debt for some students of fraudulent Corinthian Colleges.
After the artificial disaster of the hurricane in Puerto Rico comes another artificial disaster: a wave of foreclosures imposed through legal trickery. 1/3 of the homeowners in Puerto Rico are currently vulnerable, but the number could increase.
Massive inequality in the US, in 12 charts.
Europe Sends People 'Home' to Afghanistan, Where They Have Never Been.
Scientists are working on genetically engineering corals and their symbiotic bacteria to help them survive the heating of the ocean.
This approach is better than nothing, but I see two shortcomings:
The real purpose of the Republican tax attacks is to eliminate the welfare programs that enable many poor Americans to survive.
The case against Cliven Bundy collapsed because prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense. It was evidence of misconduct in investigating him.
Bundy was fighting for a cause — the same twisted cause that the Koch brothers fight for. They demand the right to wear out the Earth through unsustainable practices, leaving nothing for the future. These practices won't continue indefinitely, because the damage they do will eventually stop them. But things will go hard with humanity and wildlife if we don't stop them before that.
Protecting our forests by preventing overgrazing is one of the jobs we need the state for. But the US went about this in a way that started stupid and finished unjust.
It should have been easy to deal with Bundy's protest-by-overgrazing. Cancel his license to graze cattle on national forest, for violating the rules of so doing; fine him or sue him; seize some of his cattle; sell it to collect from him. There would have been no violence unless he started it himself, and he could not have got away with that. (I think he is smart enough he would not have tried it.)
Instead, the US government handled Bundy the way it handled the inauguration protesters, twisting the law in a dangerous way. Thugs shot one of the protesters, who was not violent, then covered it up with lies, much as they normally lie about killing blacks.
The US congratulated its protégé, Hernández, for his "victory" in stealing the election in Honduras. That was after weeks of pressuring the opposition to "calm down" and stop protesting the theft.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, permitted the military coup that ran the enabled Hernández to get "elected" president the first time. The coup overthrew President Zelaya, who had the temerity to propose a non-binding referendum (after he left office) on whether to allow a president to run for reelection.
Hernández didn't bother with a referendum. He simply ran for reelection.
The Security Council approved tighter sanctions on North Korea.
This is pointless. Sanctions, in themselves, will not stop North Korea's nuclear development, or lead to a peace agreement. Only negotiations can achieve anything.
North Korea is already eager to negotiate (though it covers this with bluster). Now we need the US to be ready to negotiate.
A million Yemenis had caught cholera as a result of the bombardment and siege.
Salafi Arabia is doing the bombardment with support from the US.
Many Americans' homes will be abandoned to the sea within 10 to 15 years.
Calling on prosecutors to investigate executives of the bully's business organization, including the bully, for crimes such as money laundering.
Interviews with former white-supremacist bigots that rejected hate.
74% of the terrorist killings in the US in the past 10 years were carried out by right-wing extremists. They are much more of a danger than Islamist extremists.
However, neither group is so dangerous that we should give up our freedom and privacy to catch a few more of them.
The biggest danger of right-wing extremists is not their individual violence. Rather, it is the danger of their alliance with the plutocratist extremists behind the Republican Party.
Uri Avnery: "The executed rebel becomes a national hero, for every rebel executed, dozens of others join the fight." So when the Israeli army protects the soldier that murdered a disabled Palestinian protester, while punishing soldiers that refused to kill teenage girls, it is a crazy policy.
Daniel Barenboim: "After Trump’s Jerusalem gambit, the world must recognise a Palestinian state."
Mahmoud Abbas has acknowledged what we have long known, that the US is no "honest broker" for Palestine and Israel. He asked France to try.
US citizens: tell Congress that the big tax cuts for rich people are no excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
New Guinea is being deforested rapidly. Indonesia may fail to meet its Paris (i.e., weak and insufficient) greenhouse emissions commitments because of the deforestation in the part of Papua ruled by Indonesia.
But it seems Indonesia's colonial rule is no worse at protecting forests than the government of independent Papua New Guinea.
New Highways in Remote Amazon Risk "ethnocide", say Peruvians.
The UN will start drawing up a treaty to protect international waters from overfishing and pollution.
Lobbyists, acting through plutocratist states, will do their damnedest to make the treaty so weak that it is effectively useless.
Europe Rebuked for Removing Afghans to One of World's Most Dangerous Countries.
Apple is being sued for programming some iPhones to slow down when the battery gets discharged or gets old.
Ethically, this situation is complicated. Apple says it slows the phones so that they won't shut down unexpectedly. That, in and of itself, does not seem wrong to me.
However, the real fix for the problem of failing batteries is to replace them. It could be that Apple chose to slow down the phones so as to cover up the problem and avoid replacing them. That would be wrong.
There is also the ethical question of whether it is legitimate to build phones with batteries that can't be replaced — or removed, for privacy.
A dream wedding is not a good start for a real-life marriage.
If you are thinking of marrying a woman, and she is lost in a dream of a wedding, best wake her up first and see if you really get along together and then have a non-dream wedding.
The wedding dream may explain what seems so surreal to me in many Hollywood romcoms. All the characters are caught in the wedding dream/trance and nobody ever asks "why?"
Transplant Patient's … Plea: Talk to Your Family about Organ Donation.
I won't make a plea for anything in the name of Christmas, which means nothing to me, but any time is the right time to think about saving other people's lives with your organs.
I don't think relatives of the deceased should be consulted about organ transplantation. Corpse fetishism is not a valid reason to deny other people life-saving medical treatment.
However, if the laws where you live give your relatives authority, it is important to make sure that they won't block your last contribution to other people's well-being.
China: five years in prison for running a VPN.
Giving to Those in Need [at any time] Is Noble, But a Living Wage Would Be Better.
Senate Democrats voted for a temporary spending bill without DACA.
Catalan separatist parties won a narrow majority in the election for the Catalan parliament.
Since the turnout was very high, I think this election is a valid indicator of what the people want, and what it shows is that they are split. I don't think such a fundamental change should be made based on support from 52%, while 48% oppose it.
Global heating could result in a million climate refugees a year trying to enter Europe.
After the IRS profiled right-wing tax-exempt organizations for investigation, right-wing pressure weakened IRS enforcement to the point that it effectively gave up on policing political activity by tax-exempt organizations.
Naturally, right-wing corruption finds that useful.
The EU is almost powerless against national governments that seize nondemocratic power.
Facebook facilitates age-discrimination in employment ads.
After the bully threatened countries that vote to rebuke the US for moving the embassy in Israel, the UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to rebuke the US.
The first six inauguration protesters, put on trial for "rioting", have been acquitted.
The repressors are nothing if not persistent. They seem to be planning to change their arguments somewhat for the next batch of protesters on trial.
Canada's "national security" surveillance is totally out of control, much like that of the US.
The bully's bullshit needs to be measured in "lies per minute".
A special unit in Facebook actively aids political campaigns in the US and other countries. These politicians are likely subsequently to protect Facebook from regulation afterwards.
We should not allow any company to be as powerful as Facebook.
The debt and deficit dance of plutocratist politicians.
A movie present a picture of the Washington Post's involvement in publishing the Pentagon Papers. It presents the publisher as heroic, omitting the union-busting and the previous support for the Vietnam War.
Running against the Republican tax attacks will give Democrats a great opportunity, if they dare to take it.
They need to lead the non-rich people's side of the class war that the rich have been fighting and winning.
New York City and New York State have decided to divest their pension funds from fossil fuels.
Actual divestment will take considerable time, and there is a lot of leeway to undermine the new policy with excuses.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to say, "Don't renew section 702, which authorizes massive surveillance of Americans. Stop using 'security' as an excuse for making our privacy insecure."
Michigan thugs filed away 11,000 rape test kits without examining them. After they were rediscovered in 2009, the state began examining them and has discovered 800 repeat rapists.
Some of the rapists have been identified and prosecuted.
Tech entrepreneurs fear out-of-control AI because they assume it will be a psychopath, like their corporations.
It would be foolish to assume that it won't be a psychopath. If a psychopathic, unrestrained corporation develops an AI, why wouldn't it make that AI a psychopath?
The final tax attacks bill is even more skewed to benefit the rich than the earlier versions.
China will require companies making driverless cars for use in China to work with a Chinese company.
China's policy goes in the right direction, but doesn't go all the way. To defend privacy rights, we should ban driverless cars no matter which companies make them, unless they are built so that they don't track people's movements.
The article uses the bogus term "intellectual property". It's always a mistake to use that term because it lumps together various laws that are so different that generalizing about them is misguided.
Everyone: call on Governor Brown of California to pay prisoners for fighting fires the same wage that non-prisoners get.
The UK subsidizes arms exports so much that they can't even be much of a profit. What rational reason could there be?
Israeli soldiers killed several protesters in Gaza, including Ibrahim Abu Thurayeh, who was disabled and sitting in his wheelchair.
The army says he "was not targeted". Apparently they were shooting wild.
China is imposing a greenhouse gas emissions-trading scheme on power plants, and plans to extend it later to other heavy industry.
This has the potential to drive emissions down rapidly, if China manages it carefully. The EU's greenhouse gas emissions-trading scheme was mismanaged, and efforts to correct the scheme's rules have been blocked. By planet-roasters' political influence, presumably.
I expect China will do a better job of resisting the fossil fuel industry's power.
"Non-lethal" bullets often cause injuries, including loss of an eye, even death.
If the shooter is close to the protesters, the bullet can easily kill. If the shooter is not close, these bullets can't be aimed carefully.
Austerity has brought millions to the edge of bankruptcy; now the bankruptcies are happening in the UK.
In the US, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures happened almost a decade ago.
Spikes attached to a tree branch, meant to keep pigeons from perching there and dropping shit on a car, are a minor issue that illustrates a dangerous general attitude towards nature.
If we recognize only the costs of nature, and only the benefits of cars, we will continue destroying the ecosphere we depend on.
The author made an unfortunate choice to use the term "anthropocene" to describe what humanity is doing to the Earth's geology.
Democrats have won enough seats in the Virginia legislature to block new plutocratist laws, if they are united in doing so.
But they don't have the majority that would be needed to pass laws to correct existing plutocratic injustices.
A new Swedish law would define millions of men and women as "rapists".
Republicans now regard all rules, and all democratic norms, as obstacles to converting the state into a mechanism for the dominion of the rich. But this is not new. Many of them thought the same in the 1970s, when the vote to impeach Nixon barely succeeded.
The bully threatened to punish the countries that voted in the UN to rebuke the US for moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
This will build up hatred for the US across the world.
Facebook increased its visible use of face recognition.
Nothing stopped, or stops, Facebook from privately recognizing all the faces in photos, and selling that data as part of "anonymizied" records to other companies that can reidentify them.
Legal and political challenges still prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from going forward.
US citizens: call on the US Senate to end Yemen intervention.
US citizens: phone your senators and tell them, "Keep warrantless mass surveillance out of the budget".
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
227 congresscritters voted for the tax attacks. Each one deserves your firm opposition.
Australia is protecting fossil fuel electricity even harder, so that its supposed carbon emissions targets will be impossible to meet.
Many renewable energy projects face cancellation as a result.
The right-wing government of Australia has been blatantly protecting fossil fuel use ever since it got in office.
Humans have eliminated 10% of Earth's wilderness in the past 25 years. The remaining wilderness is likely to be destroyed soon if we don't stop it.
Salafi Arabia says it will allow relief supplies into Yemen for 30 days.
The plan to resume the blockade in such a short time shows that Salafi Arabia is still as cruel as ever, and that the US is still backing that cruelty.
The UK backed itself into a commitment to build an incredibly expensive nuclear power plant, and paying extra for power from it, apparently so as to be able to maintain an industry capable of building and operating nuclear submarines.
I wonder whether nuclear power plants built by French and Chinese engineers will have the intended effect. Maybe it will help only France and China build and operate nuclear submarines.
If they can't get the plant running by the current deadline of 2025, will that be a better outcome for Britain?
Neoliberal states operate by crushing the solidarity that enables individuals to thrive. Europeans see the need for more solidarity, and the way to get that is from democratic socialism.
The European Union stands in the way of implementing it, though, because it is undemocratic and its rules give business more power. People in Europe will need to make the EU democratic, and change those rules.
Then comes the WTO, which doesn't even pretend to be democratic and its rules give business more power. World-wide, we need to weaken it or eliminate it.
The Tories plan to try a voter-ID system, supposedly to prevent fraudulent voting. Surely it is a coincidence that such systems block legitimate voters that are not likely to support the Tories.
Is there convincing evidence that fraudulent voting happens enough to be worth paying a price to stop it?
Facebook faces the possibility of punishment in Germany for merging data from its WhatsApp tentacle into the Facebook tentacle.
The FBI Routinely Abuses Its Powers but the Trump Investigation Has Been By the Book.
We no longer have an Environmental Protection Agency; the bully has converted it into the Environmental Poisoning Agency.
The EPA tried to support the coal industry with a program to encourage disposal of coal ash as dirt wherever dirt was needed. It had not checked whether coal ask pollution would do damage, and was made to stop.
Now that coal ash has been verified to have poisoned land and drinking water, Saboteur Pruitt wants to start spreading it again.
Saboteur Pruitt is also replacing the Clean Power Plan with a scheme designed not to change much.
He has put the brakes on a plan to ban three toxic solvents.
The EPA is considering an application for spraying a neonicotinoid pesticide. Merely soaking seeds in it is poisoning bees and birds; spraying it could wipe them out.
Joinul Islam, refugee on Manus Island, was attacked with a machete for the second time by someone unknown.
It is not safe for the refugees to be in the town of Lorengau where they have all been forced to go.
The supermarket Marks & Spencer now publishes information about use of antibiotics in raising the meat it sells.
This is important as a nucleus for public pressure to eliminate the practice of regularly giving antibiotics to farm animals.
Even in Britain, drug companies sometimes demand prices so high that the medical system refuses to buy them.
It's much worse in the US where Congress, corrupted by the drug companies, tied the government's hands about negotiating prices with the drug companies.
The main reason drugs are so expensive is patent law, imposed by the WTO. This is one of many reasons we need to make big changes in the WTO or else get rid of it. However, the concentration of the drug industry, through many mergers, has given the drug companies greater clout (as has occurred in many other areas of business), and this contributes to the problem. We need to make big companies split up. My tax proposal would be one way to do that.
George Monbiot: "Each generation is normalising the erosion of our environment, and the devastating losses to fragile ecosystems mount up."
The speculation about bats and the evolution of moths has erroneous dates. According to Wikipedia, the oldest known fossil bat lived 52 million years ago, and wasn't capable of echolocation. Meanwhile, the oldest butterfly fossil dates from 56 million years ago. So it is possible that bats did affect the success of butterflies, albeit more recently than the article says.
An illuminating analysis of sexism, and misogyny, and how the two relate to each other.
The statement at the end about Clinton is ironically sad: she "won over" the bankers and the generals by surrendering to them, and that's why millions of us refused to vote for her.
The bully's UN ambassador threatened to punish countries that voted for the resolution to rebuke the US's move of its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. In response, all the other countries voted for the resolution.
The European Court of Justice ruled that each EU country can regulate Uber and other such companies.
In principle, this means a country can require such companies to offer an anonymous option. People will have to work hard to campaign for this.
An Australian was prosecuted for refusing to vote, but the judge accepted his reasons of principle as valid justification.
Australia's laws not only require each eligible voter to cast a ballot, they also require a valid ballot to list every party. (The voter's choice consists of assigning a numerical order to the parties.) As a result, it is not easy to vote for the minor party you support, without your vote's subsequently being counted for one of the major parties that you detest.
Albert Langer recommended a hack for voters to get that result, and was imprisoned for it.
Israeli soldiers frequently violently attack Palestinian journalists who are covering protests.
Does glyphosate cause cancer in humans? This has not been clearly established, but the EPA decided to let Monsanto be the judge.
Loneliness is a plague of modern life, and every change in technology and social institutions seems to make it worse.
The elimination of libraries makes it worse. Housing the disabled in rooms they are physically unable to leave makes it worse.
Making people take "Uber-like" rides instead of buses will make them more isolated, as well as tracked everywhere.
Salafi Arabia bombards Yemen regularly. On rare occasions, the Houthis fire a missile at Salafi Arabia, and Salafi Arabia screams bloody murder. "How dare they bombard us?"
I am disappointed with the Guardian for publishing an article that takes this one-sided stance seriously.
Neo-Nazis intentionally confuse their serious message of hate with humor as a shield against serious criticism.
Knowing this, we should regard their humor as serious hatred in disguise.
The US government aims to crush press coverage of protests by prosecuting journalists for "conspiracy" if anyone commits an act of violence.
Even if they don't apply this to journalists, applying it to protesters alone is un-American tyranny.
Some global heating denialists dared to make predictions about future temperatures, and facts have not been kind to them.
Senator Corker seems to have given his vote to the SCROTUS tax attacks in exchange for adding a provision that would save him a lot of money in taxes.
Senator Cornyn admitted that the purpose of that special tax cut was to win support from senators who would personally benefit.
14 Republican senators will get lots of money from this change.
As SCROTUS finish passing a tax cut for corporations, supposedly so they will have more money to invest in the US, some big corporations are already starting to use it for stock buybacks.
We knew they were not going to invest it, because big companies in the US mostly have lots of money on hand, but see no useful investment opportunities. The SCROTUS plan was bogus from the start.
We need taxes to take that money away from them.
Fatal overdoses on opioids don't usually happen to sick people taking them on prescription. They happen mainly to people who get them on the black market.
Some US politicians are eager to use Russian election-meddling as an excuse for censorship. Or even for the War on Sharing.
Big digital companies are pushing the WTO to give them dominance over digital life in all the signatory countries.
Crowd-control weapons, often used against protesters, are less likely than guns to kill, but they do kill, and they cause permanent injury too.
The Palestinian Authority Is Using a New Cyber-Crimes Law to Crack Down on Dissent.
In effect, Israel and Palestine are working arm in arm for this one unjust goal.
Burma's violent expulsion of Rohingyas has continued into December.
Farms for Christmas trees spray toxic pesticides while workers are planting trees nearby. The Republicans want to help them keep it that way.
Workers are also required to work 12 hours a day without access to drinking water. No wonder the only people they can hire are Mexicans, probably undocumented.
If they treated the workers decently and payed more, they could find US citizens to hire. The trees would cost more. Good! Let's make them do this, let's make all the employers in the US do this. Let's buy products that cost more because they aren't based on endangering workers.
Perhaps we won't buy quite so much goods — we could instead give the Earth a bit of a rest.
The SCROTUS tax attacks will put medical insurance out of reach for millions of non-rich Americans as well as transferring billions to the richest.
The PR campaign to smear the White Helmets illustrates how Russian propaganda professionals collaborate with credulous people and those who would like to see everything the US does as an evil scheme.
The US does participate in evil schemes, just as Russia does.
US gun nuts tell Mr Pring, "How dare you give up your guns? We will shoot you to teach you a lesson."
This raving evil shows up in all right-wing causes. People like that are the last ones we should allow to have guns.
Pring sought to reduce the number of guns in the US, but he chose an ineffective method to achieve it. It is pointless to surrender your guns to someone that will resell them. You need to destroy them instead.
More broadly, it is not very effective to eliminate a handful of guns while new guns of similar models are being sold every day.
A deranged congresscritter from Arizona claims that the right-wing violence at Charlottesville was a false-flag operation funded by George Soros.
US citizens: tell the DEA not to ban kratom.
US citizens: file a comment to oppose the Republican change in regulations for tipping that would give restaurants a legal excuse to steal part of waiters' tips.
Various studies show that clouds do not reduce global heating.
Reagan started the practice of letting businesses eat US government agencies from within. The Republicans now want to eliminate the Civil Service so they can fire any US government employee for any reason.
If they do that, they will be able to coerce the staff to act illegally on threat of firing them.
"Drug-free school zones" are excuses to make the war on drugs more harsh, in a semi-random way. In some cities, most of the land is part of some "drug-free" extra punishment zone.
Warsaw is "returning" public housing buildings to heirs of people that formerly owned part of the land they were built on, or claim to be heirs. They couldn't have inherited the buildings, though, because those were built later by the state.
The lucky new owners force the tenants out using cruel dirty tricks.
Even if one adopts a heartless 100% capitalist point of view, giving the buildings to them is unwarranted and unnecessary. All they are entitled to is the value of the land they have a claim to.
The former president of Honduras has finished stealing the election in which he was not supposed to be allowed to run at all.
Plantwatch: Wildflowers Lose Out Twice from Nitrogen (fertilizer) Pollution.
The article is unclear on one point: when it says "nitrogen", it evidently refers to nitrogen in compounds that plants can use. The air is full of nitrogen molecules, but those don't count, because plants can't use nitrogen in that form.
A hoax restaurant got first place in Tripadvisor on the strength of its hoax reviews. Real would-be customers went into a frenzy because they could never get a reservation.
Republicans are pushing a bill to put students that can't repay student loans at a further disadvantage.
Fast food workers that had won cases against companies such as McDonalds will immediately lose again under the rule change that the troll's saboteur in the NLRB plans to make.
The FBI sent an undercover agent to infiltrate protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, who seduced one of the protesters and gave her a gun. She now faces charges of firing the gun.
I suppose that's what the infiltrator wanted — to act as a provocateur.
Republicans have been working for decades to eliminate US laws that gave most people a decent life. If they pass the tax attacks, they will have totally wrecked them.
People who get seriously ill and are not rich will not be able to afford treatment. If they do get treated, they will starve after.
Black Americans are in danger of being convicted of crimes based on flawed face-recognition software that says they resemble a photo of the suspect.
What Public Libraries Will Lose Without Net Neutrality.
Cornel West says that Ta-Nehisi Coates' intense attachment to Obama has clouded his understanding of politics as it affects American blacks, blocking him from relating racism to militarism and plutocracy.
Obama showed that racism in the US has decreased to the point that a black can be elected president. Obama also showed that you can't assume a candidate is progressive just because person is black.
Saboteur Pruitt has given US mines the right to shut down and dump cleanup costs on the public.
Chicago thugs have a special system for appealing against any sort of punishment they get for treating the public badly, and it reduces or eliminates the vast majority of punishments.
Philip Morris is indirectly offering money to people involved in efforts to reduce tobacco smoking, including many officials.
The only plausible motive for offering this money is as a scheme to undermine those efforts.
Archivists are preserving the digital publications of the US government so that we can see what the bully's saboteurs do to them.
Liu Xia, in effect imprisoned for 7 years without trial, is depressed from isolation.
What Do You Give to the Person Who Has Everything? How about Nothing?
I opted out of the practice of birthday and holiday gifts when I was around 14. I had outgrown the childish desire to receive gifts, and I couldn't think of anything to give to anyone else in my family. Then I recognized that the customs that pressure people to give gifts on certain occasions are really commercial schemes to convert people's money into waste.
If there is someone you feel a real wish to give something to, and person is short of money and has a pressing practical need, give per the thing person needs.
If person is not short of money, how about writing per a letter on paper? Nowadays, receiving a personal letter from someone you know is a rare and special experience. Don't even think of substituting a commercial card for the letter!
The scientist who proved that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer was subsequently paid by Monsanto and other chemical companies for 20 years, even being paid by them to investigate a specific chemical; he concluded that vinyl chloride did not cause cancer, a conclusion that was subsequently rejected. Was his conclusion influenced by his conflict of interest?
It is true that, when that was published, there was no rule about stating conflicts of interest. The rule was made in response to awareness that conflicts of interest such as these were undermining the integrity of research.
If the scientist did give all consulting fees to an academic organization that he founded, that doesn't mean he wasn't avid for more fees to make the organization bigger, or that he could not possibly have biased his research to get them.
Biasing research does not always mean lying. There are more subtle ways that involve fooling oneself. If he was convinced that the main causes of cancer were things that the victim had consumed, that too could have been a motive for bias in the same direction.
Wikipedia's article on vinyl chloride, as of 23 Feb 2017, footnotes a printed article from the Houston Chronicle that says chemical companies tried to manipulate research about the medical effects of vinyl chloride. When companies do this, they typically try many avenues of influence.
A scenario of a hurricane hitting Miami in 2037 illustrates the world-wide effects of sea level rise to come.
This is just one of the disasters that global heating will cause.
Mueller got the troll's transition team's emails from the federal agency that handled them. The troll's men are trying to pretend that this was somehow improper.
The San Francisco SPCA has discontinued use of a security patrol robot.
Homeless people, and anyone walking in the area, are right to be suspicious that it is making and transmitting videos. If it wasn't actually doing that at the time, it could have been reprogrammed to start doing so at any moment. We must judge these systems by the worst they could do, and ignore the side issue of what they are doing today.
As for recording car license plates, it should be illegal for an automated system to take notice of them, except when it comes across a license plate that is sought by court order or else invalid.
ALEC is now promoting state laws to imprison pipeline protesters.
US citizens: tell your congresscritter and senators to vote to override the FCC and preserve network neutrality.
Everyone: Call on MGM to release the tapes of the bully's sexual harassment.
US citizens: call on the Democratic National Committee to adopt the Unity Reform Commission recommendations.
Australia is considering a law to imprison journalists for 20 years for publishing what whistleblowers tell them.
A list of 84 Republican congresscritters that were paid by telecommunications companies and then encouraged the FCC to abolish network neutrality.
There were 23 others, but their signatures on the letter were not clear.
Saboteur of Education DeVos has completely stopped the practice of cancelling the debts of students defrauded by private colleges.
Do not under any circumstances enroll in a private college!
Roy Moore advocated repeal of all the US constitutional amendments after the first 10. This would mean bringing back slavery and racist/sexist voting criteria.
It would also mean that the people would no longer vote on senators. I am sure Roy Moore would have preferred to let the Alabama state legislature choose him.
Insurance companies in Britain that monitor how a person drives also keep track of where.
I don't see any harm in monitoring a person's style of driving. However, any system that tracks where people go is a threat to democracy.
The fact that the UK tracks all car travel, through cameras on the street, does not make this new injustice any less grave. Britons must someday demand elimination of massive surveillance; the cameras should be modified so that they don't take notice of most cars, only those being sought for specific valid reasons. The existence of two independent systems for tracking people could be used to argue against any campaign to abolish either one of them.
If we want to end massive surveillance, we must fight against new system of surveillance.
In general, laws should prohibit the operation of systems that collect too much data about people.
People being deported by the US were kept shackled for 46 hours, in painful heat, and not allowed to use a toilet.
How can it be legitimate to deport people to Mogadishu anyway? It is a war zone.
Thugs looking to arrest a middle-aged white woman encountered an 11-year-old black child, so they handcuffed her just in case she was the white woman in disguise.
The modern Republican "no bullshit is too absurd" approach applied to prosecution of protesters.
Harvey Weinstein punished actresses who wouldn't have sex with him by badmouthing them so they wouldn't get work elsewhere.
The blacks that gave Doug Jones the victory last week overcame powerful Republican voter-suppression efforts.
The Moral And Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
France's law making it a crime to read "terrorist" web sites "regularly" has been overturned as unconstitutional.
Any law prohibiting people from reading something, or having a copy of something, is an offense against human rights.
The UN special rapporteur says that the US is becoming the "world champion of extreme inequality".
It's not just the saboteur who is doing this. SCROTUS are hard at work at making it worse, with the tax attacks bill they are about to pass.
Genetically modified bananas could protect crops from the spreading bacterial infection, but they threaten farmers with patent pollution.
Australian charities don't dare advocate for the rights of the poor or homeless people they serve.
The saboteur's nominee for a federal judgeship had a Senate hearing and proved ignorant about the basics of the law.
I suppose the saboteur figures this judge will simply decide the way Republicans and companies tell him to.
It will be interesting to see whether SCROTUS rejects him for this, or confirms him anyway.
The UK decided that the European Convention on Human Rights would no longer apply to what its soldiers do in wartime, to protect soldiers from charges that they violated prisoner's human rights.
The change turned out to be futile, because a British court ruled that the soldiers violated the Geneva Conventions as well.
Poverty in America Is a Moral Outrage. The new Poor People's Campaign has to confront the evangelical "Christians" for whom "Christianity" is another name for a hard heart.
Representative Schiff says that SCROTUS are planning to shut down the House of Representatives investigation into the cheater's relationship with Russia and that they also want to end the criminal investigation.
The president of Peru is likely to be impeached for corruption.
Uri Avnery explains the feelings of Palestinian teenagers who "uselessly" throw stones at Israeli occupation soldiers, with the example of his own protest at age 15 against the British occupation soldiers.
Paul Ryan has done plenty to make most American families poorer. Now he asks them to finish the job by having more children.
To reduce the extent of global disaster requires having even less children.
Salma Hayek: after she refused to have sex with Harvey Weinstein, he took revenge by repeatedly trying to sabotage the film "Frida".
Unions in Alabama see Doug Jones as a pillar of their campaign to increase union membership there.
Global heating effects and overfishing are putting some seabird species in danger.
US citizens: call on senators to stop considering judge appointments until Doug Scott is seated.
US citizens: call on the immigration thugs to stop taking babies away from from parents that bring them and ask for asylum.
The EU will make companies publish their true owners, but trusts will only have to provide the data to the state.
I am in favor of regulations like these. At the same time, I am against tracking what products people purchase. The two issues are similar in structure, but very different in practical consequences. Tracking people enables profiling them and denies their human rights. Tracking companies helps stop tax-dodging and other forms of massive cheating, and companies are not entitled to human rights.
However, the restrictions on buying using anonymous prepaid debit cards are an injustice.
NATO gave Gorbachev clear promises not to extend further towards the Soviet Union, over and over.
"Connected" driverless cars will report where they see a pothole.
This suggests they will also report where they take you.
The dishonesty of "crisis pregnancy centers" is revealed by a documentary. Even knowing that they are dishonest, I would never have imagined how far their dishonesty goes. The basis of it all is the idea that most people shouldn't have sex.
This is not the only campaign that demonizes sex. Plenty of prudes set a blanket cut-off age — perhaps 16, or 17, or even 18, depending on nothing but where you are located — and act as if even being attracted to someone under that age were a perversion.
The normal occupation of human adolescents is sex. People are ready for sex when they decide they are ready.
A digital attack defeated security computers used in many power plants, meaning that many power plants could be at risk of a cyber-attack.
State Attorneys General Line Up to Sue FCC over Net Neutrality Repeal.
New York AG Schneiderman shows the sort of frauds that the FCC is protecting from prosecution.
One of the victims of the fraud is Senator Leahy.
This didn't faze Pai. For Republicans, to lie with impunity about a Democrat is something to boast about.
The ACLU is campaigning for Congress to override the FCC's decision.
Upper-caste Indians have been convicted of murdering a Dalit man for daring to marry their relative.
I oppose the death penalty under all circumstances, but I applaud their conviction.
A Journey Through a Land of Extreme Poverty: Welcome to America.
Teaching people to make better sales pitches is a distraction from real issues.
Sales pitches presume there is a competition and only a few pitches will win. Basically, competition implies that some competitors lose. In many situations, it means that most competitors lose.
If we wish to make most people's lives better, we can't achieve that by teaching everyone to compete better. Rather, we must make it less bad to lose the competition.
Cryin'air has agreed to recognize its pilots' union.
What about other employees?
UK sex workers will hold a vigil to demand decriminalization of working in safe conditions.
Palau has created an enormous marine sanctuary zone. Such protected areas give fish a place to reproduce, and once they are well-established, they can refill surrounding non-protected areas with fish that people can catch.
However, if we continue acidifying and heating the ocean, the effect will wipe this out.
Even workers with stable jobs are likely to end up homeless in the UK.
Three tyrants that imprison lots of journalists are getting full support from the bully.
A campaign calls for replacing NAFTA to eliminate incentives for outsourcing and protect workers' rights and the environment.
I am in favor of this, but I am worried that this campaign does not mention the worst part of NAFTA: the ISDS or "I Sue Democratic States" provision.
US citizens: Tell Mitch McConnell: Seat Senator-elect Doug Jones Now.
Everyone: call on JP Morgan Chase and BlackRock to stop funding deforestation in the Amazon.
Security robots are being used in San Francisco to drive away homeless people.
Aside from the cruelty of driving them away without making a place for them to go, these robots will make more homeless people by replacing human security guards.
Providing services that have to be done in a particular locality is the last source of employment for most Americans, so if we allow these jobs to be automated, we will predictably get a lot more homeless people. We need laws to limit the robots' use so as to protect the jobs.
Most Muslim countries have officially recognized East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.
Kelvin Fawaz was brought to the UK at age 14, where he was enslaved. The UK is so determined to deport him that it has imprisoned him. But this is impossible as no other country that will acknowledge him as a citizen. Given the UK's avid cruelty to immigrants, it could keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
CO2 emissions from US airlines grew by 7% from 2014 to 2016.
The EU tried to put a tax on aircraft emissions, but the US fought against it.
The US major media consistently spread the idea that poor = black and welfare-recipient = black.
The SCROTUS tax attacks would encourage businesses to replace human workers with machines.
Burma has arrested two Reuters journalists, part of its general efforts to suppress journalism and dissent.
After Tillerson called for direct talks with North Korea, the bully rejected talks.
I can't see any way this could make sense as foreign policy. I think the troll regards North Korea as an opportunity to look tough to American supporters, and likes it so much he won't give it up.
The EU plans to surrender to the movie companies by requiring all communication networks to impose an automatic copyright censorship system.
DooH niboR forces 100 million people each year to choose between food and medical care.
The fossil fuel interests have been very successful at subverting governments to protect carbon emissions and a future of global heating. What is less well known is that they are doing the same thing to protect toxic air pollution.
Leftist parties are going down to defeat in Europe because they failed to challenge the supranational structures that impose plutocratic policies on them: namely, those of the EU.
This opens the door to triumph by right-wing parties whose platform is cruelty to some scapegoat. They don't really make things better for the non-rich; all they offer is a chance to feel better by beating down someone weaker.
Limiting freedom of speech on the internet is the wrong way to address the harmful general practices that Russia took advantage of.
Russia was able to use Facebook and Twitter for influence because they were designed to magnify the influence of anyone with money. Big "American" businesses, and "American" pressure campaigns they fund, do even more damage with those sites, and the fact that this is supposedly "not foreign" does not make it less harmful.
Médecins Sans Frontières says that at least 6700 Rohingya were killed by attackers driving them out of Burma.
EU Must Not Burn the World's Forests for "Renewable" Energy.
When Guantanamo prisoners go on hunger strike to protest their imprisonment without trial, the guards punish them with solitary confinement and refusal of medical care.
Imprisonment without trial is a terrible injustice, but the US government is not satisfied with committing that. It adds insult to injury, by demanding that the prisoners legitimize the injustice by not protesting it.
The US must free every one of these prisoners, or give him a fair trial.
US citizens: Call your members of the Senate or the House at (202) 224-3121, and tell them NO TAX VOTE UNTIL JONES IS SEATED!
The UK is building new nuclear power plants, which are needed because the Tories have put an end to solar and land-based wind power development.
Chinese thugs beat up a South Korean press photographer who was trying to follow the president of South Korea in his visit to China.
Extreme income inequality in the US results from bad policies. The Republicans' plan for even worse policies is the wild extension of what plutocratist politicians have been doing for 40 years.
Adopting good policies now can still reduce the problem.
We have only a rough idea of how many species of insects exist on Earth — perhaps tens of millions — but we are wiping them out faster than we can discover them.
A right-wing US propaganda company stirred up hatred of immigrants to influence the election in Kenya with a phony grass-roots campaign.
That was the election that was rigged by the incumbent.
I wonder what result the intervention aimed for. Did it benefit the incumbent? The opposition candidate? Neither?
Congolese Fighters Convicted of Raping Young Girls in Landmark Case.
Spies-for-hire that work for businesses to hamper organized criticism go beyond just snooping. Sometimes they try to stir up disputes within the organizations.
"While rightwing papers call for better regulation of social media, history shows us that when such crackdowns happen it is often the left that suffers the most."
American Petroleum Institute asked the EPA for a list of favors, and Saboteur Pruitt gave it almost all of them.
Other agencies are giving the oil companies plenty of other gifts. This is the culmination of a decades-long lobbying campaign which includes government agencies set up specifically for the oil lobby.
If you are young, the goal they are working for will probably result in killing you. And they have reason to know this.
A zip code, a birth date, and a sex are enough to uniquely identify most people in the US. This defeats most data anonymization schemes. Many other collections of data also permit deanonymization.
I think there is a way to do crowdsourcing of recommendations without enabling any person to be identified. The trick is not to save a long list of things that one contributor liked.
Suppose each person anonymously contributes many separate triples of things which person liked. "I liked A, B, and C." "I liked A, B, and D." "I liked A, C, and D." (The software wouldn't have to submit all the n!/(3! * (n-3)!) combinations of three of the n things you liked.) This may be enough to make somewhat useful recommendations; but if the system does not know when various triples are from the same person, its data are not enough to identify any person.
I would rather have privacy than personalized recommendations. I reject Netflix entirely for several reasons, but preserving my privacy would be enough reason by itself.
There may be strong psychological reasons to forbid children and teenagers from using smartphones.
The article says "children", but clearly intends teenagers as well; the French prohibition on using smartphones in school includes high school. If we want teenagers to become capable people, we should not infantilize them by calling them "children".
I think the same kind of argument applies to portable phones. They may not be designed to be so addictive, but we should not get our children in the habit of letting Big Brother track them. We hope they will grow up to be activists for good causes, which means they will have something to hide, though not a shameful something.
The fire that burned some rich people's mansions in Los Angeles was started accidentally by a homeless person's cooking fire. Is this a reason to repress the homeless, or is it poetic justice?
Paleontologists are suing to prevent irreplaceable fossils of Mesozoic life in Utah from being destroyed for coal mining.
Juries must stop excusing murder by thugs just because a thug says, "I felt scared." We should demand that thugs take at least as much care before shooting as we expect anyone else to take.
The Fight to Control the CFPB Isn’t Over Yet.
Global [heating] Made Hurricane Harvey's Deadly Rains Three Times More Likely.
In other words, global heating gets 3/4 of the blame.
Just as global heating effects are causing more damage, Republican saboteur politicians want to cut funds for climate research.
Faux News is running a distortion/pressure campaign demanding the arrest of some of Mueller's team.
A US diplomat resigned from the State Department, saying that Tillerson and the bully are driving it into the ground.
Governments talk about protecting the climate while they continue subsidizing fossil fuels. This charade must end.
Poland fined a TV station for broadcasting images of protests against Polish government policies.
Ironically, the protest was against a measure to interfere with journalism.
This is a step down the path to Turkish-style repression of the media.
Big public investment organizations are putting lots of money into building obstacles to decarbonization.
Note that the World Bank Group is not the same as the World Bank. I wonder if that name was chosen for its confusing nature, so as to obstruct public attention.
More heinous activity by LinkedIn.
Arctic Permafrost Thawing Faster Than Ever, US Climate Study Finds.
In addition to the dangers mentioned in the building, this can lead to large leaks of frozen methane into the air, which would increase global heating for decades.
Egypt has imprisoned the makers of a music video for "depravity". From the description, it would not seem unusual in the US.
The Democratic National Committee has a policy of supporting incumbents against primary challengers, by making its voter data base available only to the incumbents.
I wouldn't say that the Democratic Party fails to support progressive values, because it doesn't claim to do so, but this is certainly an obstacle to making the Democratic Party worth supporting.
When I support political campaigns, I make sure to support progressives only. Most of them are in fact Democrats, but I don't give to organizations that support them just because they are Democrats.
Some Airbnb hosts, like some hotels, put hidden cameras in bedrooms.
The "public choice theory" philosophy espoused by antisocialists to justify a state that lets the rich rule recapitulates the political philosophy of the famous defender of slavery, Senator Calhoun.
The purpose of Democracy is to give the many non-rich a way we can unite and prevent the rich from dominating us. It is supposed to discriminate — against those who are so powerful that they are likely to take even more power.
Why Americans, in general, save so little money.
The World Bank says it will no longer fund searching for more oil and gas deposits. Since using them would cause global disaster, there is no point in searching for them.
Of course, oil is not used only for burning. Some of it is used to make plastics, which are causing a different kind of global disaster.
The related World Bank Group continues to fund fossil fuel "development" projects.
If we can convince big banks and investors to stop funding fossil fuels, that could avoid global disaster. But it is a shame that banks and investors dominate such decisions. A good political system would have the strength to save the world from disaster despite corrupt wreckers that would profit from the disaster.
Doug Jones won the senate election in Alabama. What does this imply for the Republican Party?
Whatever the voters' reasons for voting for him, we are well off that a progressive Democrat was elected, instead of theocratist bigot Moore.
However, the demonization of Moore as a "pedophile" makes it harder to draw conclusions about future races. If Moore had had the same bigoted, theocratist views, but had not dated teenage women, would he have won?
On the other hand, will the Republican Party's support for Moore work against future candidates whose positions are comparably cruel and unjust, but don't have personal scandals against their name?
Moore has refused to concede and demanded a recount. Perhaps he hopes to give someone else a chance to cheat. But perhaps this is a play to delay seating Jones in the senate. His presence there would make it substantially easier to block unpopular Republican bills, and Republicans may have asked Moore to please delay until they get the tax attacks through.
Massive waste: people buy "Christmas" clothing and wear it just once.
This is an additional reason to celebrate Grav-Mass instead — Grav-Mass is not associated with the idea that you're supposed to buy things for the sake of buying things.
Tests of rivers in Britain found that most of them are polluted with neonicotinoids — in some cases, at dangerous levels. These toxins can harm various kinds of wildlife.
Maya women in Guatemala have organized to sue a mining company for the pattern of repeated crimes carried out by miners.
If evictions for the sake of the mine were approved and carried out by the Guatemalan state, I don't think that lessens the moral responsibility of the mining company. That the mine was sold to a different company changes nothing at all.
The president of Tanzania wants to arrest pregnant teenagers to force them to testify about the men who raped them.
I am sure that other, kinder methods could achieve that goal.
Australia says that the refugees it has imprisoned in Papua New Guinea are its own property, to oppress as Australia sees fit. Therefore, when New Zealand offers to receive some as immigrants, that's blatant meddling in Australia's internal affairs.
This reminds me of what China says when its human rights violations are criticized. ISTR there has been criticism in Australia of the threat of Chinese influence. Is this an example of the danger of Chinese cultural influence?
Chinese Authorities Collecting DNA (and iris scans) from All Residents of Xinjiang (except children and old people).
I expect this is a pilot project, and they will extend it to everyone in China in a few years.
We must all fight against biometric identification in our countries. If you are in India, please campaign against Aadhar and for payment in cash.
Forget Mark Zuckerberg's charity -– We Need Corporate Tax Reform.
There is a plan to spend $17 billion to restore Puerto Rico's electric grid and make it more resilient.
What the article does not say is whether this would add $17 billion to the debt that Puerto Rico is unable to pay, and whether this would be used as a level for privatization — of the electric grid and other systems too.
The Grand Canyon and the Havasupai tribe that lives in it are still threatened by uranium mining nearby.
The fact that mining is even being considered for that area illustrates the plutocratic tendencies of our government.
US Ready for Talks with North Korea "Without Preconditions", Tillerson Says.
At last, a bit of sense. But it reaching an agreement depends on mutual trust, and if there is any government on Earth that is harder to trust than North Korea under Kim Jong-un, it is the US under the bully.
Bannon and Yiannopoulos organized a campaign to attack Twitter, through public condemnation, lawsuits, and driving down its stock price.
The saboteur running the National Labor Relations Board is canceling a reform that made union organizing less complex.
Republicans have been trying to handicap unions in the US for decades.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to impeach the cheater for collusion with a foreign country, specifically Israel.
It hasn't been proved (as of now) that the cheater colluded with Russia, but it has been proved that he colluded with Israel to interfere with US foreign policy (before he was president).
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International jurists say that North Korean leaders should be prosecuted for holding tens of thousands of political prisoners and committing various crimes against them, including rape and murder.
A man who asked Starbucks for a discount, claiming to be a detective, was charged with "impersonating an officer".
More of concern to me, did he have any reason to think that a detective would get a discount from Starbucks? Does Starbucks give thugs special favors?
India's Hindu-theocratic government banned condom ads on TV during the day and evening. It's higher priority to protect "children" from sexual ideas than to protect them from disease and pregnancy.
A legal dilemma: to fire a star or executive for groping or harassment, and not pay millions for the length of the person's contract, requires the company to claim it has no prior complaints about the practice.
Over a quarter of the people in Silicon Valley have trouble paying for food.
The so-called "paradox" mentioned in the article is based on a misguided idea of what it means for the economy to get "better" — judging it by what things are like for the top 10%, or by totals.
Robert Mueller Is Closing in on [the cheater]. Congress Must Protect His Investigation.
Wildcats, Butterflies, Tortoises: all are endangered by the destroyer's border wall. Humans will find it far easier to climb over it.
The UK is bringing beavers to some areas as a flood control measure.
China is reportedly preparing to receive lots of refugees from North Korea.
The insurance company Axa will divest from coal and tar sands, and stop insuring oil pipelines in the US.
As investors realize that they can't make money from fossil fuel investments without destroying the society in which their profit would do them any good, they will stop investing in fossil fuels. The question is, can we enlighten them fast enough to avoid disaster? And what about the other sources of funds for fossil fuels, such as government subsidies and the "development" organizations that are corrupted by plutocratists.
The strange story of Shen Yun, a dance troupe that presents valid propaganda against the tyranny of the Chinese state.
I went to a Shen Yun performance once, and had a peculiar reaction: the propaganda annoyed me even though I agreed with its point of view. I told this to the friend who saw it with me, who said, "Yes, it preaches too much."
US jurors often won't convict people for possessing small amounts of marijuana, to the point where some thugs have decided to stop prosecuting it.
Salafi Arabia is systematically attacking Yemeni fishing boats. It seems to consider the existing famine insufficient.
Which country supplied the helicopters and the ammunition? Either the US or the UK, I would guess. But it would be useful to know for certain.
A former vice president at Facebook says that the site's addictive "social-validation feedback loop" is "ripping apart the social fabric of how society works".
EFF to Court: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime.
A number of studies of the causes of childhood obesity were supported by Coca Cola Company and covered that up.
The studies pointed the finger at lack of physical activity and not at sugar. I am ready to believe that lack of physical activity (caused by computers?) was a big factor, but sugar surely was too.
ACLU Announces Nationwide Campaign to Support Movement to End Money Bail.
"America's super-rich are taking not only from their own nation, but also from the rest of the world." They took 70% of the world's growth in wealth since 2012.
The Democratic National Committee is using dirty tricks to obstruct progressive pressure for reforming its structure.
I look forward to publicizing grass-roots pressure for this.
Macron Awards US Scientists Grants to Move to France in Defiance of Trump.
This is just the beginning of what other countries must do to protect themselves from global heating disaster.
Everyone: phone JP Morgan Chase and say not to fund the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
While you are at it, you may as well say that funding any fossil fuel projects means pushing humanity and thousands of species to destruction, so the bank should stop doing so.
US citizens: tell your congresscritter, no uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.
New Yorkers have learned not to be terrorized by a small explosion from a terrorist's bomb, but right-wing extremists are trying to magnify the terror.
Even when a terrorist attack causes substantial casualties, we face the choice of aggravating the harm or not. Aggravating it may serve the interest of some political or commercial group. Not aggravating it serves the interests of Americans in general, and America. Whatever the problem is, dealing with calmly will help us avoid doing something stupid and destructive, such as occupying Iraq.
One tweet cited in the article used the contraction "who's" incorrectly. The contraction "who's" is short for "who is" or "who has", and neither of them fits grammatically there. The word that belongs there is "whose", the possessive of "who". Like all the other possessive forms of pronouns, it has no apostrophe.
Arguably, the failure of recent terrorists suggests that PISSI no longer has the capacity to help terrorists, so they are not able to procure dangerous weapons.
They can still get cars and trucks, so there will still be some deadly attacks. Since the plans for such attacks take place within the attacker's mind, even total surveillance couldn't stop them. So enough with the plans to snoop on us all.
Mobile computers and data centers could cause 14% of global carbon emissions by 2040.
If all our electric generation is renewable by then, it won't be a problem — but we will have trouble achieving that if we allow unlimited computers.
Women that the bully groped or harassed call on Congress to pay the same attention to their accusations as it paid to Al Franken.
"Inappropriate behavior" is not a valid accusation against anyone, not even the bully, because it is too vague and weasely. If you can't spell out what you're criticizing someone for, and why it was wrong, then your criticism is not valid.
Argentina barred 60 civil society delegates from the WTO meeting for bogus reasons. It relented on five of the delegates after ministries from their countries went to bat for them.
Columbia Sportswear threatens to move its headquarters out of Portland unless the city kicks homeless people out of the neighborhood.
The company could easily donate to support a project to give them better alternatives to their annoying behaviors, perhaps inviting other businesses in the neighborhood to join forces. That would be solving the businesses' problem by helping poor people rather than by harming them.
The US is not training enough doctors to perform abortions. This is partly a result of pressure by theocratist Christians.
A German court rejected collective responsibility for ISP services: the official subscriber cannot be required to snoop on other residents and family members to see which one did forbidden sharing.
Nuclear war is "one tantrum away".
In Turkey, signers of a petition calling for an end to Erdoğan's civil war against the Kurds are on trial for "propaganda for terrorism".
Many of them have been punished already in various ways.
When your country proposes measures that would endanger human rights in the name of "fighting terrorism", remember that "terrorism" will mean whatever a future government says it means.
In the US and Europe, "anti-terrorism" measures have already gone much too far. Government attacks on human rights are potentially far more deadly than underground terrorism, because governments are stronger than underground terror groups. We need to make them strong so they can do their job, so we must keep them in check by defending human rights from them.
Maduro said he would ban three opposition parties from future elections because they boycotted the mayoral elections yesterday.
Since Maduro has effectively suspended the constitution of Venezuela, he can do this arbitrarily.
Harvard says it can't afford to subscribe to the paywalled journals any more, and urges its faculty to resign from their editorial boards.
Sad to say, professional organizations as journal publishers are little different from the commercial publishers. Consider, for instance, the American Chemical Society which is trying to force ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub.
The Department of Injustice plans to carry on the Senate investigation of Planned Parenthood, which found that the accusations were spurious.
After food prices rose, partly due to extreme weather that destroyed crops, the US changed its farming laws to subsidize production instead of non-production. Now the US is dumping cheap food around the world. That is good for some of the world's poor, since they can afford food, but bad for those who are farmers.
With a large harvest, farmers suffer from low prices. With a small harvest, prices go up and poor people go hungry. A good economic system for farming would need to avoid both problems. Meanwhile, we are using up topsoil around the world so a good economic system for farming needs to protect the soil. I fear that putting marginal land into agricultural use seems likely to damage it.
In the medium term, a few decades, agriculture faces many threats.
We will need a tax on meat to discourage people from eating so much of it.
PISSI, as a state, has been defeated, but there is no celebration in the US. That's because Islamism is a useful right-wing boogeyman, replacing the previous boogeyman of Communism.
How to have a conversation instead of talking at someone else.
The bully's saboteurs have cancelled a proposed rule requiring airlines to say clearly what they will charge for checking baggage.
A rise in the death rate suggest that the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico has killed thousands of people, though not immediately.
When African migrants head for Libya, they don't realize that they will be sold into slavery there.
The Polish government backed off when it tried to ban abortion entirely; but abortion was already illegal except for limited circumstances, so most women have to get very expensive illegal abortions.
Governor Brown of California is connecting the unprecedented wildfires with global heating.
JP Morgan was required by a court to aid homeowners by forgiving part of their mortgages. It cheated, by forgiving mortgages it had previously sold to others.
A bank should not be allowed to sell a building's mortgage to any buyer except another bank.
The authoritarian Polish government is considering a bill to eliminate the independence of the Supreme Court.
Giving witnesses false memories about events they saw is surprisingly easy; legal systems must take care to avoid it. Supposed "recovered memories" can hardly be trusted at all.
US soldiers were ambushed and some killed in Niger, but what were they doing there? The Pentagon gives conflicting statements.
Don't Buy Anyone an [Amazon] Echo!
I don't trust the companies that make the devices not to listen through them. And even if they don't specifically do so, the devices might have universal back doors that would let Big Brother listen through them at will.
Note that the article legitimizes other Internet of Stings devices that it is unwise to trust.
Amnesty International says the tyrant of Honduras and his thugs are using various forms of oppression to gag the people whose election they have stolen.
We don't need to investigate whether the election was stolen, because the thieves' suppression of the counts and the protest is enough to convict them of that.
Intel appears to be violating the BSD licenses that cover Minix by distributing it inside the Management Engine backdoor processor without the notices required by that license.
This is an ironic side issue, because the Management Engine is an injustice and including the required notices would not excuse that injustice.
The US and Canada must do more to protect North Atlantic right whales, and soon, or there will be none left.
A UN investigation found that US thugs use tasers without justification and sometimes in ways tantamount to torture.
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would have the FBI take statistics on terrorism committed by domestic extremists, typically right-wing extremists.
A debate about hostile architecture: designing buildings and outdoor objects to prevent some uses of them.
I think the crucial questions are, which people is it hostile to? And is it justifiable to mistreat those people? The purported justification offered here seems to be, "We were obeying orders from the organization that paid for the project." This gives carte blanche to screwing homeless people if a local government or landowner decides to.
If you don't want homeless people to sleep in your doorway, how about making some other place for them to lie down, where it won't get in your way.
Ethiopia seems to be attacking journalists and dissidents with fishware purchased from spy companies.
Right-wing fanatics are trying to sabotage public awareness of sexual harassment and rape by exaggerating and faking accusations.
They are also doing this by insisting that only Democrats should resign in response to such accusations, while Republicans ignore them.
The article explains that "believe women" does not mean women's accusations cannot be false or that we should rush to judgment of those accused. It means, rather, that we should take women's accusations seriously, not dismiss them out of hand as has so often been done.
I support that principle wholeheartedly.
The troll's men are launching a FUD attack against Prosecutor Mueller to prepare an excuse for his supporters to disregard all the hard evidence Mueller is digging up.
Legalization of marijuana in Uruguay has been a great success, marred only by interference by banks.
Twitter and Facebook have so much data that there is no feasible way to archive it for future study. But even if that were done, it would be impossible to determine in the future, from the data, what users would have seen in the past.
I disagree with the ho-hum conclusion of the article. Given the way these networks influence politics, the question of what they did will be important to study in the future. If we have in the future a political system that permits people to research such questions, the question of why we still have such a system will depend on it.
On-line banking makes bank depositors vulnerable to fraud — and gives banks an excuse to put the responsibility on the depositor. To be safe, don't do it.
Sanders is touring to campaign for progressive politics, aiming to win over some of the voters that supported the troll.
Debt collectors harass Americans to pay debts they don't owe — millions of Americans. Many are intimidated into paying, or get convinced that the false debt was real.
Most of the article describes one exceptionally talented victim who identified some of the culprits, investigated them unceasingly, and set the feds on them. Bravo! But this is not something most of us could succeed at.
US hospitals charge thousands of dollars for a visit to the emergency room, as a "facilities fee".
If you meet an attractive woman at a wealthy company's holiday party this year, maybe she is a model being paid to pretend to be a guest.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter one more time to oppose the tax attacks bill.
Along with network neutrality, the FCC's Pai-in-the-face plan includes weakening the rules for ISPs to be honest about what they charge.
"Ajit Pai says an informed public (not Net Neutrality) will discipline ISPs (BTW, he's also killing the rules forcing ISPs to inform the public)."
The troll is not a normal kind of liar. He lies exceptionally often, even among big liars. Even more unusual, half of his lies are intentionally cruel.
Protesters held a sit-in in Senator Collins's office as it closed, demanding that she vote against the tax attacks.
GOP Tax Scam Attacks Renewables While Nurturing Nuclear and Fossil Fuel Industries.
UCS: USDA's Pledge to Allow Food Stamp "Flexibilities" for States Could Open Door to Misguided Eligibility Requirements.
Even reputable, and partly reputable, scientific journals accept some articles that are glaring pseudoscience.
A journal that accepts 90% of the offered papers, and is willing to retract one, is not in the lowest category. The truly predatory journals accept around 100% of the articles offered to them, and I doubt they ever think about retracting one.
Argentina claims that deportation of journalists and activists who were authorized to participate in the WTO is for the sake of "security".
I must wonder what sort of "security" issue this concerns. Securing ever-tightening plutocratic control over the whole world, perhaps?
I Was Banned From The WTO [based on lies] For Defending People’s Rights.
The WTO must be eliminated, because of the power that it gives to the plutocrats over supposedly-democratic states.
African hospitals often imprison patients that can't pay their bills. Many of them are women that came to give birth.
Aside from the injustice of what the hospitals do, we should notice that parents who can't pay for hospital care for the birth surely also can't pay to raise a child properly. It is irresponsible for them to have children.
Section 702 massive surveillance gives the FBI tons of evidence to go fishing for excuses to prosecute US citizens.
Six other ways that massive personal data harms society.
Glenn Greenwald: CNN published an incorrect story about an email that apparently indicated Wikileaks secretly offered DNC leaks to the bully's campaign. It appeared that way because CNN had the wrong date for the email.
Greenwald says that CNN should publish who told it about the email and gave it the wrong date, and reports that several news reports criticizing Russia or Putin appear to have been planted and false.
I saw some of those stories, and didn't know they were false — I have no practical way to check that — but I felt they were drawing big conclusions from small evidence, or exaggerating the significance of what was known. So I did not post about them.
Progressives must resist the pressure to criticize the tax attacks about increasing the deficit or the debt.
Atlanta Targets Good Samaritans Sharing Food with Homeless.
Open letter from economists to the U.S. Congress, published by the Sanders Institute.
When a thug decides you're armed and dangerous, and you're not, there is literally nothing you can do to assure your safety.
Pipeline protesters barged into the "Wells Fargo Investment Thought Leadership Forum" to deliver a petition for banks to stop funding the Keystone XL pipeline.
The name of the event seems to indicate a greatly distorted world view, as events in China about "Xi Jinping Thought" do.
The wildfires in Southern California are unprecedented; the head of firefighting for California said "There will be no ability to fight fires in these winds." The fires spread through forest and town as if through tinder.
This is because global heating has caused a persistent drought in the area for several years. It will get much worse over the decades.
US medical care nowadays is so horrible that mentally ill people get put in prison instead of treated. In prison they are beaten and tased instead of treated.
Should prisoners' human rights include in-person visits with family?
It might be very important for society to encourage such visits.
Disabled people (and people who will be disabled) are campaigning against the Republican tax attacks, which would cut off their medical care.
The Republican tax attacks bill would sabotage many government programs that Republicans' rich masters don't like. Plutocratist Democrats are not campaigning for a positive alternative.
Tax experts say that the SCROTUS tax attacks are full of confusions, loopholes, and provisions that would be hard to interpret.
The Grand Unifying Theory of the Republican Party is plunder.
Amnesty International: the troll has authorized secret permissive policies for drone assassinations nowhere near battlefields.
Arguing Over Art Is Right But Trying to Ban It Is the Work of Fascists.
Teaching everyone to program (or trying to) is of no particular benefit to most students, but it sure feeds a lot of money to computer companies while getting students hooked on those companies' proprietary software.
The biggest 10 US drug companies are pushing up drug prices very fast and dodging US taxes.
Leading Economists Demand that Not a Penny More Goes to Fossil Fuels.
Current measurements are following the harshest scenarios of global heating's development.
It appears that US chicken farmers are using less antibiotics in their factory processes. The total used in agriculture declined 14% in 2016.
This will be significant if the trend continues, but that one decrease will not by itself change much.
The fact that the US has not adopted laws to drastically reduce the cause of a problem that kills over 20,000 Americans a year is worth contrasting with the harassment and tyranny inflicted on us in the name of saving us from the comparatively minuscule danger of terrorism.
The FCC Still Doesn't Know How the Internet Works.
A careful analysis of the legal jeopardy of the bully and his campaign team: what the evidence is, and what charges could be sustained.
Note the report that firing Mueller would not protect them, because he has arranged for New York State prosecutors to take over if he is stopped.
We have known since November 2016 that the bully did not win the election "fair and square" that month. The election was rigged by Republican voter-suppression, including voter-ID laws in several states.
There was also the "crosscheck" program which gave Republicans an excuse to remove a million Americans from voting rolls.
Republicans tried to rig previous elections, too, and they will try to rig the next one.
The US "economy" is "doing very well", so why don't Americans see much benefit?
US citizens: call on the Senate to block the "concealed carry reciprocity" bill that would enable one state to undermine another state's gun control laws.
Jewish Voice for Peace held an event about the difference between criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism, including for instance the antisemitism of right-wing US supporters of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League defamed the organizers, and right-wing US supporters of Israel tried to interfere with the event.
Some Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism for a century or more, and perhaps still. They believed that Jews were supposed to wait for the Messiah to bring them back to Israel, so that Zionism was sacrilege. I think that idea is ridiculous, but it certainly isn't antisemitism.
The FCC Tried To Hide Net Neutrality Complaints Against ISPs.
Success would have helped ISPs such as AT&T cover up the ways they violated network neutrality.
Former Argentine president Fernandez may be prosecuted for treason, the specific occasion being that she made an agreement with Iran to help Iranians escape prosecution for a bombing at a Jewish community center which took place in 1994.
Her alleged actions don't fit the word "treason" as it is used in the US, but would constitute a coverup of crime.
Thatcher (a Tory) began selling England's public housing to the tenants, and not replacing it. 40% of them were eventually resold to private landlords that charge a lot more rent.
Tories regard poor people as a nuisance, and privatizing public housing offered an excuse to tell some of them, "We can't help you."
Gush Shalom: the bully has put an end to Middle-East mediation by the US, but since the US was nearly 100% on Israel's side, it was hopeless as a mediator. Now there is room for a new mediator, probably Putin, but perhaps the EU.
If the UK goes ahead with exiting the EU, it will carry all the requirements and burdens of EU membership without any say in what those will be.
If you want to reduce killings, reduce inequality.
Many poor men feel they have nothing to be proud of except maintaining themselves high in the pecking order, which means nobody dares to disrespect them.
Ralph Nader: "Slashing and burning in every direction, this legislation [the tax attacks] endangers the financial security of regular Americans of every age and every occupation."
Indigenous Climate Action, in Canada, has refused a prize from the insurance company Aviva because it invests heavily in fossil fuel companies.
Some other insurance companies have divested from fossil fuels because global heating is likely to make them have to pay more in the future to those who purchase insurance.
A Sri Lankan family, trapped in the United Arab Emirates by ever-increasing debt, tried to commit suicide. The parents succeeded, but the daughters survived and now face punishment.
I can never understand why people who are oppressed hate themselves instead of hating their oppressors. If I were one of those daughters, I would dedicate my life to bringing shame and disgust on the UAE.
Half the coal-burning electric plants in Europe are running at a loss, but they all need to be closed and soon.
A woman writes about being groped at an office Christmas party, and how she has hated them ever since, and now is glad she can refuse to go.
I never was in a situation that compelled me to go to office holiday season parties, but I did sometimes go to them. I appreciate that they weren't designated "Christmas" parties, and sometimes I enjoyed conversing with people that were not drunk. The culture of Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn't pressure people to get very drunk, the way it does in England.
I don't expect anyone would grope me at drunken parties, but I still find them horrid. I can't understand how anyone can stand them. I can't imagine letting other people pressure me into going to them, either. There is a limit to what I will do to "fit in" with others, a rather low limit.
I am glad the author of the article can now refuse to attend office parties, but she shouldn't have to justify or explain it either.
People with state permits to carry concealed guns have killed a substantial number of people.
After six months, most of the families made homeless by the housing project fire in London are still not living in permanent homes.
This is because of the UK's general policies that sell off public housing instead of building more.
The International Rescue Committee: Salafi Arabia and its "coalition" (including the US) are still blockading Yemen.
The troll publicly called on Salafi Arabia to end the blockade of Yemen, but if he were serious about this he could just pull out of that "coalition" and make it end.
Arab leaders, both official and unofficial, condemned the troll's decision about Jerusalem.
Suggestions for policies that could really put an end to tax-dodging through tax havens.
I don't think we need to let concern for the possible poverty of small populations of the tax-haven islands deter us from fixing this enormous problem. The tax-dodgers include corrupt Africans stealing from countries whose populations are much poorer. If we put an end to this giant dooH niboR, the non-rich will benefit all around the world.
Kim told Russia he wants to negotiate with the US.
In a sense, this means that the bully's treatment of North Korea is what we would call a success. The only way to eliminate North Korea as a threat to the US, and to South Korea, is by negotiation, and it's clear Kim very much wants a deal, so it should be possible to get a good deal on peace.
Does the bully join us in calling this situation a success? Does he want to get a good deal, or does he just want to look and feel strong? If he wants a deal, why has he waited this long without negotiations? It's not as if it were news that Kim wants to negotiate. This is confirmation of what we already knew.
US citizens: support Sanders when he says that the SCROTUS tax attacks are class warfare.
Everyone: call on New York State to investigate the bail industry and end the system that jails and gouges poor people.
In the latest video games, "loot boxes" constitute a sort of networked slot machine. The player pays for a benefit and only then sees what it contains. The contents of the box are ostensibly random. In some places, these may violate laws on gambling.
It is invalid to argue that loot boxes are acceptable because it is the "next step" in a continuing progression towards increasingly exploitative games. Sure, they are that, but it doesn't follow that we should permit this slide down a visibly slippery slope. Some national legislatures are considering banning this practice.
Are the contents of loot boxes indeed random? We can't assume that. A game could be made even more manipulative by cheating — choosing the rewards to make them even more addictive. Since Volkswagen's software cheated, we should consider that games and game servers may also cheat.
In my view, any game with in-game purchases is primarily designed to addict and exploit those who play it. Don't let them make you a sucker. Play chess, or cards, or a board game, or a digital game which is free software and doesn't depend on a server.
An executive of Volkswagen has been sent to prison for 7 years for making cars cheat on emissions tests.
This job was done using proprietary software in the cars. We should never trust a proprietary program!
The UN Committee against Torture told Cameroon to stop using torture against prisoners suspected of working for Boko Haram.
Food and Water Watch petitioned for the US to bar imports of Brazilian beef because of repeated violations of safety rules.
UK thugs jailed a Polish couple after they reported being attacked by criminals in their own house.
Senator Franken will resign from the Senate for groping several women.
I suppose he will resign during a recess so that he can be replaced before the recess ends.
The thug that killed Walter Scott will spend around 20 years in prison for 2nd degree murder.
Pipeline companies are trying to sue a social movement called Earth First under the RICO law. The law says this is not allowed, and anyway a social movement has no address at which to serve papers. So they sent the papers to a magazine called "Earth First!".
I have always worried that the RICO law is too broad and could be used for repression.
The SCROTUS tax attacks are targeting the Earth's biosphere as well as non-rich Americans.
Many large companies are pushing Canada to make all ISPs block access to a list of sites that support sharing.
To defeat these proposals, of which they will generate an endless series, we have to go beyond opposing each specific proposed system or method. We have to condemn their goal. Canadians should demand the legal right to share copies. This means the noncommercial redistribution of exact copies of any published work.
Sharing is good. To stop people from sharing means dividing people to subjugate them.
UK thugs set an impossibly high criterion for evidence to convince them to investigate, when thugs have killed people in the process of arresting them.
Wildfires are threatening thousands of buildings in various parts of Los Angeles.
Global heating is drying out southern California, so the fires 30 years from now will be much bigger.
Dangerous incendiary talk from a UK minister: kill Britons that joined PISSI.
If they are armed enemies of the UK, in a failed state which can't arrest them, fighting them may be legitimate in some circumstances. But the idea of exiling them is outrageous. If they come to a British embassy and surrender, what would he do? Kick them out and then shoot them?
Protesters in Vancouver objected to housing for the homeless because it was in their backyard.
I do not sympathize with nimbyism. If they want to replace this solution, they should campaign for a solution that is better in general.
Christine Keeler's life was kept in the gutter by the twisted condemnation dished out to women for not being chaste.
It strikes me that affection may have been the most intimacy she knew how to cope with at that point in her life — and if she had been granted the continuation of that affection, it might have given her a basis to heal and take charge of her life.
Crisis of Honduras Democracy Has Roots in US Tacit Support for 2009 Coup.
Rosa Parks didn't unleash the Montgomery bus boycott by accident. She was an activist; the boycott was carefully planned and then carefully supported. That's what enabled the blacks of Montgomery to persist and win.
Australia has legalized same-sex marriage.
Republicans want to allow oil drilling in exactly the places that caribou have their calves each year.
China has banned the importation of plastic waste. Perhaps China now produces so much plastic waste of its own that its recycling capacity is now saturated.
Countries need pay for proper disposal of plastic waste, and make the cost of disposal part of the cost of plastic by taxing plastic accordingly.
A small claims court for copyright infringement might not be a bad idea, but the current US bill to create one would make it biased and useful for copyright trolls.
When an organization of large and powerful companies praises a measure that is supposedly meant to help small companies, we must suspect trickery.
The Tories are desperate to build heavily subsidized nuclear power plants even though those can't compete with simple and safe wind turbines.
A courier company has blacklisted a worker who won a judgment against another courier company. The courier workers' union will sue.
In this one way, the UK is better off than the US. US couriers find it almost impossible to unionize, and the law won't help their demand to be paid the minimum wage.
Germany is considering a law to require backdoors in all connected devices, including cars and computers as well as phones.
Are we really sure the German government will never do things like snoop on everyone, put dissidents in prison, and kill them?
Although the giant Adani coal mine in Australia seems to have been blocked by loss of bank support before it could endanger any endemic species, it demonstrated the weakness and inadequacy of Australia's environmental laws when planet roasters control the government.
If those planet roasters really lose 1.5 billion dollars, that will be a great victory because it will teach a lesson to coal extractors everywhere. It would have better to teach them that they will be blocked to protect the world from coal burning, but teaching them that they will have trouble getting loans is a lot better than nothing.
Due to human actions, the oceans are threatened as never before. Governments are not taking this seriously. Plastic companies are lobbying to "preserve jobs" in plastic factories no matter what damage that does.
There is a small error in the article. CO2 dissolving in water does not damage "the water". It damages various animals that live in the water. In particular, too much acidity kills corals and some other organisms with hard shells. Excess CO2 can confuse the thinking of some fish, making them vulnerable to predators.
This could wipe out thousands of species.
The Saboteur of Labor proposes to allow employers to confiscate part of waiters' tips.
After a neo-Nazi was interviewed in the New York Times, people began threatening violence against his employer and the other staff. Not only he, but his family as well, lost their jobs.
Threats and intimidation are unacceptable no matter who the victim is. Right-wingers already use this approach, and we need to strengthen businesses to resist such pressure. We can't succeed at that if we use the same pressure tactics.
Senator McConnell won Senator Collins's vote for the tax attacks by making several specific promises, which he has already broken.
The Senate needs to vote again on the reconciled bill. Will Collins vote for it again because of already-broken promises?
Some Honduran police are not thugs. They refused to repress protests against the attempted theft of the election.
The American Petroleum Institute lobbies for a weak voluntary methane leak reduction program, as a substitute for the current mandatory program.
Businesses always say, "Don't regulate us — let us do the job 'voluntarily." Do you trust them to really do it? Or will they save money by not really doing it?
Fracking companies have set up a pretend-movement in favor of fracking.
Given money, it it is possible to make any position appear valid and rally some people to it. The frackers' arguments will probably persuade some people, if only those who don't recognize what harm fracking does and can do. But that doesn't make it anything but a form of PR manipulation.
Repressive right-wing regimes in Eastern Europe blazed the trail for the bully.
It should be noted that one of the reasons Fidesz remains popular is that it shuts down newspapers and institutions that don't bow down to it.
An Israeli minister said some of the leaders of the UK Labour Party are "antisemitic".
When Israeli officials say "antisemitic", they mean "critical of Israel's occupation of Palestine." Israel has no complaints about real antisemites, as long as they cooperate with Israel.
The bully says that recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel does not mean it can't be the capital of Palestine as well.
In some theoretical sense that might make it ok, but the world may not consider that enough to avoid the likely bad consequences.
Of Course Russian sport Is Corrupt, But Then So Are the Olympics.
So many women want to sue Harvey Weinstein that a class-action suit is proposed. [Please email me the specific URL of this political note after you post it.]
Erdoğan is going to visit Greece.
It would be good to end the traditional hostility between Greece and Turkey, now that almost 100 years have gone by since the last reason for it. But it would be a shame to legitimize the tyrant Erdoğan.
Greeks now have a chance to overwrite the traditional hostility with the friendship Turkey needs now. I suggest to Greeks that they organize a protest against Erdoğan in the name of Turkey. Imagine the banner, "Erdoğan, set Turkey free," with translations in Greek and Turkish. "Turks Deserve Human Rights." "Friends of Turkey = Enemies of Erdoğan."
Paris's snooping rent-a-bike system has broken down, leaving an opportunity for a competing system that almost surely snoops even more.
It is almost certain that the dockless system tracks riders all the time, everywhere they go.
France used to boast that its privacy regulator was so strict that the state had to prove justification to look at the personal data held by the bicycle system. Whoops, due to the state of emergency the state can look at any or all of them with no limits. Any system in France that gets your personal data is working for the "security forces".
Putin is so popular (after restricting opposition press) that he will almost surely win a free and fair election, but he's not willing to take the risk of having one.
US citizens: phone your senators (both of them) to demand they vote against the final tax attacks bill.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: Tell Congress to adopt a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons.
The troll's transition team colluded with Israel as well as with Russia.
A researcher who studies tracking and targeting of people with drones shows how scientists can find excuses to ignore the moral implications of their research. His topic: "What happens when a town has been so thoroughly destroyed, you can't recognize it anymore and get lost?"
As the song could go,
"I send the drones up, who cares if they attack?
That's not my department, says dense Yuval Zak."
Australia has an unofficial policy of using family separation to coerce refugees to give up rights.
President Do-dirty has restarted the bloody war against people considered to be associated with drugs.
Most of the bully's supporters still support him, and 2/3 applaud him for breaking rules.
The bully's regime is arresting 40% more unauthorized immigrants, and most of them have developed deep ties to the US including relatives.
Civilian volunteers in the Philippines are protecting endangered trees from illegal logging.
All the ways of measuring global heating show it is steady and continuing.
Of course, short-term fluctuations continue. Not every year sets a temperature record. But almost every year is hotter than the average for 10-20 years ago.
Random needles help back pain about as much as careful "acupuncture" needles. The placebo effect is a matter of making people feel they are being carefully treated.
Bolzano found a way to defang a fascist sculpture of Mussolini instead of removing it.
It appears Mr Kim is forcing fishermen to go out further to catch more fish, which he exports to China while starving North Koreans.
Homelessness in the US has increased in the past year, mostly because rents are too high and wages are too low.
The idea that "the economy has improved" is a fundamental error since it measures "the economy" by totals, which rise because the rich are richer. For poorer Americans, "the economy" is no better than it was 40 years ago, and more Americans are poor now than 40 years ago.
If we make the real economy improve for most Americans, we might have less homelessness.
The campaign for prudery now demands removal of paintings from museums.
They will drive us back to 1950 if they can.
The Tories are considering a voter-ID law which could stop millions of poor people from voting. Since there is no real reason to do this, they are tacking it on to measures to stop manipulation of elections, so that it won't be judged on its own terms.
A study suggests that millions of babies suffer prenatal damage to their lungs, and to their brains, from air pollution.
Trump Disbands Panel That Helped Cities Respond to Climate Threat.
A Democratic Socialist won election to the town council in a Republican-leaning suburb. His advice: focus on programs to help everyone.
Plastic manufacturers knew in the 1970s that plastic waste was a special threat to the oceans, and began coverup campaigns like those of the tobacco companies and the fossil fuel companies.
The EU has adopted some mild sanctions against 17 tax-haven countries and territories. 47 others have been spared sanctions for the moment because they have committed to reforming pertinent laws.
These sanctions are not enough, but the fact that the EU has adopted some sanctions is a signal step forward.
Stiglitz: The problem with the US's business-supremacy treaties is not that the US negotiators failed to get what they wanted. It's that they succeeded in serving multinational business against the people of all the countries involved.
I will add, to what Stiglitz says, that we can't expect retraining of workers for new jobs to counteract the injustice of globalization. We need global measures to make companies pay more to their employees, even their low-skilled employees, and to make them pay more taxes to give the low-paid and the unemployed a better life.
Finland's laws and policies help parents and parents-to-be, for the sake of healthy and capable children. Finland successfully encourages fathers to spend as much time with their children as mothers do, for the sake of the children.
In the US, by contrast, men can get fired for taking unpaid leave to care for their children or other relatives.
I want a world in which all children's families get this kind of help, for the well-being of all children. Would it be too expensive? Not if we bring the birth rate down to the level that the world can sustain. We need to reduce the human population by means of fewer births to avoid the coming disaster that is likely to kill billions of people painfully.
Everyone: call on UPS to quit ALEC.
Everyone: Call on MGM to release the bully's incriminating sexual attack tapes.
The proposed alternative route for the Keystone XL pipeline threatens water supplies for humans and wildlife, including endangered species. If US government agencies are honest, they probably have to reject the route.
We cannot expect the saboteurs that now run these agencies to be honest, since their mission is the contrary.
However, water pollution is a side issue anyway, compared with the global danger to civilization and hundreds of thousands of species that are not endangered yet.
China seems to have killed Australia's proposed mega coal mine by refusing to finance it.
Many other big banks have also refused. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that burning coal is becoming uneconomical.
The mine would have damaged the Great Barrier Reef as well as hastening global heating disaster.
The troll will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, thus endorsing Israel as an apartheid state.
The so-called "peace process" is a sham that Netanyahu uses to pretend he is willing to negotiate peace. He states publicly that he will not accept any sort of peace except the permanent apartheid state.
The US government is pulling all available strings to make Reality Winner's trial unfair.
Presidential candidate López Obrador in Mexico proposes to stop fighting the "war on drugs".
I think the proposed amnesty for gang leaders would not do much good, for reasons given in the article. However, legalizing drugs would do a lot of good.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, and the result continues to be improvement on every dimension — except for drug dealers, whose business has declined.
Legalizing drugs would eliminate most of the fighting between Mexico's narco gangs because they would all lose most of the income that they now fight over. Likewise, it would eliminate a lot of their bribery of politicians because there would be no need to bribe them.
If you allow politicians to treat addicts with cruelty, next thing you know they will be treating minority groups, poor people and disabled people with cruelty. Those politicians win support by demonstrating cruelty towards scapegoats, and anyone that lots of people can be convinced to despise will function as a scapegoat.
Two visions of Puerto Rico's future: renewable power and prosperity, or corporate subjugation.
If the UK leaves the European Union, and desperately seeks "trade agreements" to attract business, they will involve surrendering sovereignty to business. That is much like surrendering sovereignty to the EU only with no democratic element whatsoever.
One example is that the UK will be compelled to accept low standards for food safety.
Red List: Thousands of Species at Risk of Extinction Due to Human Activity.
Farm antibiotics spread into surrounding land and create antibiotic resistance across wide areas.
Facebook's censorship rules are sometimes incomprehensibly strict. Many women's accounts have been turned off for posting "men are scum".
Some men are scum, but not all. It is unfair to generalize that statement to all men. People should ideally know better than to be sloppy in generalization, even if they are justifiably angry at grave crimes.
However, is it right to gag people for unkind sloppiness like that? Clearly not.
Loading a Website Should Not Be a Copyright Violation.
Farming, which in Europe and Asia stems from an invention around 10,000 years ago, was the cause of hierarchy and inequality.
I've read that farming of tubers in some islands in the Pacific has existed for 25,000 years. I don't know whether that farming also resulted in increased inequality and violence, but I suspect it did: in some places in the early 20th century, "big men" (and other would-be big men) competed to organize their relatives to produce a big surplus. Until European colonizers stopped this, they could use the surplus to recruit lots of followers as a war band to raid neighboring groups.
This doesn't prove that intergroup warfare was nonexistent before farming.
The cheater is considering setting up a private spying network that would bypass the CIA and could be used for kidnapings.
CIA agents were allegedly "failing to give the president the intelligence he needed," which could mean they were giving accurate reports instead of fake intelligence. Maybe they regret letting Dubya twist their reports to excuse the invasion of Iraq, the wreckage of the Middle East, and the resulting development of PISSI. Maybe the private spying network would give the bully the answers he wants.
I suspect that one side benefit of it would be to more easily bypass US laws that limit spying on Americans.
But we cannot be certain about any of this, and that shows the danger of secret operations by a government that spits on laws, human rights, and democracy.
China is planting trees massively to try to stop desertification. But the trees planted are not natural to the region, and not useful for the animals that live there. There are doubts about whether these trees are good in the long term for absorbing carbon from the air.
Are the trees they plant useful as lumber? If they cut down grown trees and use them for making houses or furniture, that wood will not return its carbon to the air any time soon. The forests could sequester lots of carbon if used as a plantation that way.
However, they still need to plant native trees in some places to host the other native species.
Global heating is visible in Britain's bird population.
The cold-adapted birds that now have trouble living in Britain are not immediately going extinct. They can survive in colder places. But as global heating continues, those places may become too hot for them, and then they will go extinct.
Fish, plants, and insects are also globally moving away from the equator.
Registering as a medical marijuana user in Hawaii and some other states makes a person vulnerable to various sorts of unfair treatment.
This article claims that President Hadi of Yemen was supported by Salafi Arabia even when he was installed in 2012.
ACLU: when immigration thugs ask local thug departments to hold someone in jail, the procedure typically used is unconstitutional.
Cloudflare plans to stop censoring political views.
I agree that we should not censor views, even views you or I consider odious. If such censorship is allowed, it will certainly be turned against the speech of Americans that criticize the politically powerful — which means, me, and you too I hope.
We need to redesign network communications somehow so that it doesn't encourage fake news and contempt for truth, but this must not be through censorship of certain views or we will leave the frying pan for the fire.
The New America Foundation advocates plutocratist politics such as making deficit reduction a priority. It is called "left-of-center" by right-wing activists. Their general strategy is to shift the overton window by labeling mildly right-wing views as "leftist", implying that the "center" is even more right-wing — somewhere between the Republicans and the plutocratist Democrats.
Most Americans agree with Bernie Sanders' politics; that's the real center.
More damage from undercover thug infiltrators: one had a son with the woman he used to establish himself in the community. The son is now suing for compensation.
The policy of infiltrating environmental groups was adopted based on the claim that they might commit crimes in their protests. It is true that sometimes they commit crimes. However, more powerful organizations such as banks, fossil fuel companies, and agribusinesses commit crimes too — and they tend to be far larger crimes, with human victims. Why not infiltrate those first?
US citizens: call on the FCC's inspector general to investigate Ajit Pai's moves to favor growth of the Sinclair TV chain.
Everyone: Call on the Delaware River Basin Commission to ban fracking in the Delaware basin.
US exports and export policies encourage obesity; watch out for treaties with the US, since they could block measures to limit obesity.
The troll is reducing the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument specifically to permit coal mining to destroy priceless fossils of the last dinosaurs, just before the last mass extinction.
The coal mining will hasten the next mass extinction.
When foreign academics working for UK research institutions make work-related visits to other countries, the UK rigidly cites that as an excuse not to renew their visas.
I doubt anyone thoughtfully considered the question of how to treat people in that situation. I suspect, rather, that higher officials wrote down a simple policy, with no mention of this kind of situation, and told lower officials that "the priority is to find people to kick out".
Such rigidity generally leads to this kind of problem.
An FSF staff person wanted to work remotely and reside in Germany. Germany refused permission, due to laws intended to stop foreigners from coming there and taking jobs away from Germans.
I understand the reasoning behind that law, but this person did not want to take a German job; on the contrary, person had a US job and wished only to spend the money in Germany. By the same reasoning, Germany should have said, "Please don't leave!"
In just 20 years, Britain went from 80% of children going to school on their own, to just 9%.
Pepsico's joint venture in producing palm oil in Indonesia mistreats workers in many ways, including paying less than the minimum wage and not protecting them from toxic pesticides.
If we don't preserve wildlife habitats, the future of nature will be a manicured Disney theme park in which visitors get a taste of carefully designed nature while being tracked all the time. Disney is already building them.
Because of the tracking, I would refuse to go there if invited. Even if my best friends were going and asked me to come along, I would still decline, specifically because of this injustice to visitors. I hope you would, too.
The International Criminal Court will investigate accusations that UK troops in Iraq killed prisoners.
Too bad it can't investigate Dubya for the crime of aggressive war, which the allies prosecuted the highest Nazi leaders for.
The Supreme Court has allowed the bully's partial ban on Muslim visitors to take effect temporarily, pending final judgments.
An artificial intelligence might conceivably take over the world and destroy it. Corporations are already doing just that.
An AI might decide that all humans are superfluous. Corporations alone, without automation, need humans, both as employees and as customers. Their directors are human, too. So corporations would not intentionally wipe out humanity. Automation decreases their need for humans but doesn't eliminate it.
Nonetheless, corporations can well decide that most humans are superfluous, and make them die of hunger while living on the street.
Art made by prisoners in Guantanamo, exhibited in Brooklyn, carries the message that they are human.
The US government, loathing this message, responded by banning all removal of the prisoners' art from the prison. The government will destroy the art rather than let it speak.
The US has the obligation to give every one of the prisoners a fair trial or release him at once. If there is no place to release a prisoner to, the US should create a village inside Guantanamo Naval Base where they can live as free men under US law.
It's Time to Talk About Who Can Access Your Digital Genomic Data. I already find the danger sufficient to dissuade me from letting anyone scan my genome.
The article mentions a project to use a blockchain, somehow, to give users control over access to their genomic data. I don't see how a blockchain would help this. A blockchain is a means of verifiable decentralized publication, not a means of limiting access. If someone understands what good a blockchain could be for the latter, I would like to know.
Former President Saleh, who switched from the Houthi side to the Salafi Arabian side, has reportedly been killed by the Houthis.
Both Saleh and Hadi seem to have been nothing more than grasping opportunists, ready to compete to be Salafi Arabia's chosen pawn.
US soldiers killed 10 Somali civilians on Aug 25, then denied it with false reports and faked photos.
Bolivia has eliminated term limits, allowing President Morales to continue running for office.
By contrast, Honduras still officially has a term limits for the presidency, but the president has disregarded them and seems to be getting away with pretending to have won the election.
Thousands Protest in Honduras in Chaos over Contested Presidential Election.
The President of Honduras Is Deploying U.S.-Trained Forces Against Election Protesters.
I expect this is precisely what the US trained them for.
All four members of the UK's social mobility commission have resigned. The chairman said that the government has no political will to do anything to improve social mobility.
Social mobility is no excuse for policies that inflict poverty on people.
The UK is planning a censorship system for journalists' use of private information.
Republican Senator Hatch claims the CHIP program (medical care for children) has to be terminated "because we don't have money anymore".
Didn't he just vote for a big tax cut for the rich? Didn't he vote a few weeks ago for a big increase in military spending?
Income inequality appears not to be increasing in the UK, if you don't count most of the income of the rich.
Animal Agriculture Is Choking the Earth And Making Us Sick. We Must Act Now.
US citizens: call for medical insurance to cover birth control.
US citizens: call on the US to condemn the genocide of Rohingyas.
What data is enough to identify a unique person, and why?
It also shows clearly why it is possible to learn many things about a person (for instance, sexual orientation) from a few "what do you like" questions.
In regard to the case of trying to learn about movie preference associations from crowdsourcing, identifying a person from a data base that lists which movies each person has watched seems to be possible only if you know some set of movies the target person has watched. But I think that if you don't have a way of getting that starting data about a person, it is impossible to identify anyone.
Suspects have been arrested for the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who investigated corruption.
The opportunist-in-chief is downplaying his relationship with Kushner, his son-in-law, perhaps anticipating that Kushner may be prosecuted.
This suggests that the opportunist would not mind abandoning Kushner. Would Kushner be able to sell his testimony about the opportunist? Alas, I expect there is no chance of this. The opportunist can't be prosecuted by a court, only by Congress, and SCROTUS will stand by the opportunist no matter what crimes he commits.
The bully made a tweet which was a confession of obstruction of justice. Now his lawyer is trying to take the fall for him.
If the lawyer's claims are factually accurate, would that mean the bully is not guilty of obstruction of justice? Or would he still be guilty?
We should not be surprised that Evangelical Christians support domineering men, even if they harass or even rape. Patriarchy is at the center of their religion.
Progressives should condemn this attempt to distort the word "progressives" to describe web apps that respond fast.
These web apps almost certainly make the user run nonfree Javascript software, which is an injustice, and spy on the user as well, which is another injustice.
A lawsuit attempts to remove religion from the US citizenship oath.
I think the plaintiff's argument is valid. Even if Atheists are offered a different version of the oath, the assertion of the existence of a god (and that there is only one of them) in the standard oath is promotion of monotheistic religions, and opposition to other religions as well as to Atheism.
This violates the First Amendment.
Some states prohibit atheists from holding elected offices, and even some kinds of lower non-elected public offices. Free Inquiry has published articles about this. Courts use various twisted reasoning to refuse to consider lawsuits to overturn these unconstitutional restrictions — for instance, the excuse that "unless you have won the election, you don't have standing to sue."
Another threat to freedom: dockless bicycle rentals can seem very appealing, but they track the user everywhere.
It looks like they require a smartphone, which also (like all portable phones) tracks the user everywhere.
Governments, rather than promoting systems predicated on surveillance, should discourage and even prohibit them.
The UK covers up deaths (often suicides) in its immigration prisons.
The UK arranged to privatize many state schools, and led some of them to become part of larger businesses. These businesses are now dropping the schools that are unprofitable, in some cases after stripping them of their funds on hand.
The US has formalized some criteria for deciding whether to conceal a security hole (to attack computers with it) or help get it fixed. However, the practical procedure will tend to bias it towards the former.
The article doesn't say whether these criteria will be applied to the bugs in Windows that Microsoft shows to the US government.
Some states are developing new methods to stop employers from stealing employees' wages. Meanwhile, the US immigration thugs are actively facilitating theft of wages from unauthorized employees.
Among the "evidence" in the prosecution of inauguration protesters for exaggerated charges is a video made by a right-wing group known for false testimony. Fake news is now joined by fake evidence.
Arguing that the internet should be a public utility, not private.
I see one possible counterargument: a public utility would make it easier for the state to block access to particular sites. However, if court orders start flowing to require all ISPs to block access to various sites, that would be just as bad.
Arguing that the stubborn and non-listening trap that online debate has fallen into is a self-reinforcing collective phenomenon, a sort of strange attractor, and people arguing for various positions contribute to reinforcing the phenomenon.
After reading this, I asked myself whether my political notes are part of the cause of the problem. I can't be an objective judge of myself, but I think I mostly avoid this. The reasons I think so are that I don't adopt wholesale the ideas of some group of people, and I don't adopt the terminology wholesale from some group even when I agree with its views.
Nonetheless, I wonder if I could write my political notes so that there'd be a better chance a person who disagrees with me would pay serious attention to them, in a way I wouldn't find unacceptable on other grounds.
US prosecutors make a habit of illegally concealing when they use PRISM to get evidence which they use in court against someone. Apparently they do this so as to avoid giving the ACLU an opportunity to argue that the law is unconstitutional.
Almost every aspect of how the US government interprets the FISA law is secret, meaning that they could be twisting it like Republican senators with impunity.
The case about who would direct the CFPB went to a judge installed by the bully, who declined to stop the bully from immediately installing a new acting director of the CFPB.
The battle over who will be the acting director of the CFPB is not over.
Meanwhile, the bully is disregarding various federal laws about acting directors of federal agencies.
The campaign against "fake news" is hitting left-wing independent web sites, as well as RT.
RT sometimes presents valid criticisms of the US — it's a surveillance state (though Russia may be even worse), it invades other countries, it overthrows democracy in other countries (most recently Honduras). Sometimes RT presents fake news. Doing one doesn't mean it can't do the other.
The traffic to gnu.org from Google Search declined drastically in May 2016, and declined further in 2nd quarter 2017. It is now just 1/5 of what it was in early 2016. Our other traffic has remained more or less unchanged.
Texas Prisons Ban The Color Purple — But Mein Kampf And KKK Books Are Fine.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to resist Republican plans to deregulate banks.
Shipping companies outsource the breaking and recycling of old ships to companies that do it in Bangladesh and disregard their workers' safety.
SCROTUS presented a letter of support for the tax attacks, "signed by 137 economists". It was fake news.
Pennsylvania legislators want to make it a crime for drug dealers to carry naloxone — a drug that prevents death from overdoses of opioids.
This scheme aims to discourage opioid use by making it more dangerous.
A woman hopes that fembots will satisfy men's shallow attraction so that men will leave her alone.
People have debated for decades whether a robot capable of humanlike thought and emotion would really be conscious. Applying the question to hypothetical sexbots with human mental capability, the question becomes, do they have real orgasms or faked orgasms?
If they don't have real orgasms and feel real delight, I can't see what the point of having sex with them would be.
WeWork: a scheme to merge people's non-work life into their work life and collect data about every activity in it.
I refuse to use Meetup.com because it requires running a nonfree app and identifying oneself.
Disinformation about HIV leads people to have unsafe sex because they think condoms don't prevent transmission. Then they don't dare get tested for HIV.
The plan to capture some vaquita porpoises so they could reproduce in safe circumstances had to be cancelled. It turns out that they cannot endure captivity.
How about sailing around and cutting the illegal nets that kill the vaquitas? It's better than giving up and letting extinction take its course.
After the SCROTUS tax attacks, non-rich Americans should say, "We want our money back!"
This refers to the money that we will have to pay to make up for the Republican cuts in programs that we depend on.
Clinton's negotiations brought North Korea onto a path away from nuclear weapons through the Agreed Framework. If only Republicans had allowed it to continue, we wouldn't have to worry about North Korea's ICBMs.
One point in the article calls for correction. To make a contingency plan for how to attack North Korea does not constitute "planning to attack North Korea".
Warning: many advertised "anonymous" mailboxes aren't really anonymous.
New medications are becoming available to treat opioid addiction.
How the SCROTUS tax attacks will deny cancer treatment to many non-rich Americans.
This on top of other cutbacks in cancer care that were caused, over the past 3 years, by the "sequester".
Americans, when your relatives or friends are killed by Republicans, denounce the Republicans in their funerals!
Parents should help children cope with the unfairness of life, not pretend life is fair.
Coping with unfairness does not mean being downtrodden. In order to fight against injustice, you need to understand that justice and injustice both exist in life. Sometimes the way to cope with an unfairness is to fight and change it. But in order to win you must be prepared to continue even though you lose some battles.
The false testimony Flynn pled guilty to concerned an effort by the troll to work for Netanyahu to sabotage then-president Obama's foreign policy. Obama had decided not to stand in the way of UN condemnation of Israel's annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu thought the troll could prevent the vote from taking place.
By offering to do this, the troll violated a law called the Logan Act. That violation is what Flynn was testifying about when he lied.
The government of Honduras, which appears to be in the process of stealing the election, has declared a form of emergency powers to help thugs and soldiers suppress the people's resistance.
Senator McCain claimed a few months ago to have principles about proper Senate procedure, but he has completely forgotten them now.
An independent investigator says that the Charlottesville thug department did a very bad job of dealing with the white supremacist rally, and since then has tried to thwart his investigation at many levels.
Britons find it hard to admit just how much the bully is their enemy.
The article is basically right, but one interesting and sad point should be noted. The British opponents of exit from the EU have come to adore trade treaties uncritically, accepting the idea that "What's good for UK exporters is good for the UK". They completely ignore the injustice that these treaties will do to everyone.
The Houthis and the supporters of former president Saleh, who used to be allies, are now fighting each other.
The European Union is getting ready to fight hard against tax dodging through tax havens.
The Prime Minister of the UK is fighting to perpetuate tax dodging. Perhaps partly because her husband works selling tax dodging schemes.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to vote against gun control "reciprocity", which would deny each state the power to regulate carrying guns in that state.
US citizens: call on Congress not to force a reporter to show his notes.
US citizens: call on Congress to impose economic sanctions on Burma to stop its genocide against the Rohingya.
People with disabilities are especially likely to be arrested in the US.
Many NIH-supported cancer centers now promote quackery including homeopathy under the name "integrative medicine."
The promoters have rebranded exercise and diet as "integrative medicine", so they can prove that not all "integrative medicine" is bogus, and they pretend that that lends credibility to the other things that they label the same way.
Senate Republicans have passed a version of the tax attacks bill, which also allows oil drilling in ANWR and cuts off funds for treatment of non-rich people that get cancer.
The House and Senate versions are different, so to finish devastating millions of Americans' lives, the Republicans in the two houses need to agree.
This provides a small chance of derailing them.
As poverty in the US increases, many Americans who can't afford any home are now living in cars.
Often they work for Amazon, because Amazon pays so little. This is one of many reasons not to buy anything from Amazon.
It's not just thugs that operate imitation cell towers to snoop on the public. Some of them may be operated by foreign spies.
The latter may be more shocking but I think the former is more dangerous.
The US Senate is considering a bill to prohibit "concealed ownership" of a bitcoin wallet. Or any other digital currency.
It would be only one small further step to prohibit concealed ownership of dollar bills.
Malta avoids investigating political murders.
The US has a lot at stake in making corrupt president Hernández win in Honduras.
I wouldn't expect the US to respect democracy in Honduras more than Republicans do in the US.
The bully has cancelled a plan to stop using cluster bombs that leave lots of unexploded submunitions that can maim children later.
Argentina has barred some activists from the WTO negotiations.
The WTO negotiations are potentially very dangerous because many governments will want to strengthen that business-supremacy treaty, and it is not certain that others will block this. Governments can easily be bought off if they look at the matter of trade in terms of maximizing exports, which in a plutocratic state is at best a secondary factor for people's wellbeing.
The bully tried to pressure Republican senators to shut down the investigation into his ties with Russia.
Walmart treats workers with contempt, as well as paying them very little. Now it has bought some clothing companies that sell online and appeal to wealthier patrons, who propose boycott.
Keep in mind that Amazon is just as bad — boycott them both.
The UN is investigating whether the extreme poverty now afflicting many in the US has the effect of denying poor people their human rights.
The Symphony for a Broken Orchestra is a way to show what budget cuts have done to music education in Philadelphia, and probably in most of America.
The SCROTUS tax attacks include special tax cuts for particular industries that are linked to relatives of Republican politicians.
A judge decided to take children away for their parents and have them adopted, because their parents (who live together) have other sexual relationships.
While officials say they are not concerned with the parents' other sexual relationships, only with alleged "neglect", it is clear that they have defined "neglect" to include "having other sexual relationships." This shows their decision stems from monogamist bias.
The Labour Party says: Social Mobility Isn't Enough.
Michael Flynn, previously the bully's national security advisor, appears to have made a plea bargain.
Flynn's guilty plea indicates his testimony inculpates someone important in the bully's transition team.
A Tory minister is accused of … looking at pornography??? So what?
As a Tory and a member of Parliament, he is directly involved in kicking the unemployed, the disabled, and low-paid workers out of their homes and making them go hungry. He is directly involved in undermining the National Health Service, thus denying medical care to all but rich people. He is directly involved in massive surveillance and censorship.
Looking at pornography may be the only thing he does in his job that doesn't harm most Britons.
"If Damian Green looked at porn at work, that’s not a police matter."
The saboteurs at the EPA held just one hearing about cancelling the Clean Power Plan, and that in a coal-mining area. But even though coal magnates made their employees attend, plenty of local people spoke in favor of the Clean Power Plan.
The opposition candidate Nasralla had a tremendous lead in the presidential election in Honduras; then the election computers mysteriously went down and the military's candidate asserted he was the winner.
Something similar happened in Mexico in a presidential election in the 1990s.
Hondurans should not allow their election to be stolen.
Wells Fargo overcharged hundreds of business customers for brokerage services. This happened because it gave its employees incentives to cheat.
US hospitals look for any excuse to do more tests and procedures that they will charge an arm and a leg for.
Chicago is offering over a billion dollars to get Amazon to situate its second headquarters there.
Offers like this undermine the tax revenue, not only of Chicago, but of other American cities and states.
A new 100-mwh battery is now operating in Australia to store excess power from a windfarm and distribute it at other times.
Gela, in Sicily, has an extremely high rate of birth defects. The executives of the oil refinery there have been charged with dumping toxic wastes into the nearby sea.
Graduate students protested at many US universities against ruinous tax increases for them in the Republican tax attacks.
Bias in the Department of Justice: it is more interested in punishing despised individuals for small crimes than in punishing multinational corporations for giant ones.
To be fair, this didn't start in January: Obama also shielded the rich and powerful.
Family farms are not in any danger from the estate tax. That is to say, the few family farms that Reagan didn't wipe out.
Small farms do face economic problems, but not about the estate tax.
The Local FARMS act would help more of them sell food directly to the public.
A truce in East Ghouta, Syria, should include evacuation of sick and wounded people.
Corbyn responds to Morgan Stanley, "So when they say we’re a threat, they’re right. We’re a threat to a damaging and failed system that’s rigged for the few."
Let's threaten the banksters' dominion!
Bigots in the UK exult in being endorsed by the bully.
Bullies Never Respect Sycophants: the UK should cancel its invitation to the bully.
Italy has a peculiar plan to start the Giro d'Italia bicycle race in Jerusalem. Now Israel demands that Italy describe this with terminology that endorses Israel's annexation of the old city of Jerusalem, or else Israel will refuse to participate.
Regardless of politics, I don't see how it makes sense to include Jerusalem in an Italian road race. If the race organizers want to avoid foreign politics, they should hold the Giro d'Italia inside Italy.
A general of the Bosnian Croats committed suicide with poison just after hearing his 20-year sentence confirmed. Now investigators seek to find and prosecute whoever gave him the poison.
I don't think they did anything wrong, and it is silly to investigate anyone. I can respect a person's preference to die, rather than live in prison. That doesn't mean I disagree with the sentence.
A European court ruled that Guber and other companies owe their employees (which they pretend are "independent contractors") back payment for years of legally required holiday pay.
The troll's belligerence toward North Korea is making allies uncomfortable.
US Spends Twice As Much on Tax Break for Rich As on Rent for the Poorest.
The GDP is a bad way to measure how the economy does good for people. It counts many forms of waste, even harm. It also disregards inequality. Let's stop focusing on that.
Rohingya Girls As Young As 12 Compelled to Marry Just to Get Food. This is because rations for refugees are handed out "per family".
The root cause, however, is having too many children. Is this because we have failed to provide them with reliable birth control?
Why Do Ministers Do Nothing about Bosses Who Steal from the Low-Paid?
Because the victims are not rich?
The rate of litter from the sea arriving on British beaches rose by 10% in 2017.
Has Trump Made It Easier To Spy on Journalists? Lawsuit Demands Answers.
The only reliable way to make snooping on journalists any harder is to eliminate the systems that make it easy to snoop on anyone and everyone.
The bully has installed many "acting directors" as saboteurs for federal agencies. Some of these are now pretending to be properly appointed directors.
Some Argentine pilots who carried drugged prisoners to be thrown into the ocean have been sentenced to life in prison.
Nine Democratic senators, plus Sanders, wrote to Nehanyahu opposing planned expulsions of Palestinians.
Alex Azar has a history of pushing drug prices up, but now he says that if he becomes the Saboteur of Health and Human Services he will push them down.
Either he has suddenly developed a conscience, or he is a shameless liar like the troll.
Sea-level rise will affect the White House, Jamestown, and many historical and archaeological sites on the US east coast, in this century even with the lowest possible estimates.
RT's main target is the idea that there is truth and that we can determine what it is. Just like the troll.
If you accept that, you may give up on opposing the banksters, the planet-roasters, and dooH niboR. But they won't stop working on making you poor and perhaps killing you.
Global heating denialists focus their disinformation campaigns on various specific consequences or indications of global heating. In the minds of susceptible people, those specific points act as stand-ins for global heating itself; convincing people that those consequences or indications are false (even fallaciously) helps them feel comfortable with the claim that there is no global heating.
One elementary school started giving the students four 15-minute play breaks each day, and discovered that the kids mostly did better.
A single experience is not proof that this method will improve every school, but does show it is not generally harmful. Why not try it elsewhere and see?
The UK has arrested 379 people for supposedly promoting terrorism in July 2016 to June 2017. Only 105 of them were subsequently charged with "terrorism offenses".
Some of these 105 were charged for preparing (or even carrying out) a real terrorist act, or trying to persuade others to do so. The state would like us to assume that all 105 were found doing those things, but we have every reason to doubt that. This is because the laws against "terrorism" are so broad that many sorts of other activities can be prosecuted as "terrorism".
Nonviolent support for various progressive causes has been labeled "terrorism" in the UK. So has studying or working on the information Snowden gave us.
The FBI has often prosecuted feckless fantasy terrorists, who dreamed of carrying out an attack but would never have tried anything outside their fantasies (and lacked the competence to try). I suspect the UK does likewise. Surely some of those charged in the UK are in the same category.
Surely some are being prosecuted for having a copy of a book that the state disparages. That is included in the laws against "terrorism".
Even being suspected of preparing terrorism has been defined as a crime in the UK. People can literally be prosecuted for the crime of being suspected.
By lumping these people together under a vague heading, the state directs attention away from the question of what these people were really accused of doing. This enables the state to magnify the danger (thus scaring people into parting with their freedom), make itself look efficient, and disguise whether those people are real terrorists or not.
US cable TV networks are saying nothing about impending network neutrality decision. Perhaps that is because most of them are also the ISPs that stand to profit from eliminating network neutrality.
The Koch brothers are spending heavily, and secretly, on an ad campaign for school vouchers in Arizona.
Americans have nearly always rejected school vouchers, which are a scheme for states to direct public money into religious education. The plan is typically designed so that a school voucher would not offer enough money to pay for an unsubsidized private school. (Those would remain limited to wealthy parents.) Thus, the only schools that the vouchers would enable parents to select would be religious schools, subsidized by a church.
The big US banks would get a 28-billion-dollar gift from the SCROTUS tax attacks.
SCROTUS are rushing in the hope of hiding the bill's consequences from the public.
That's what they did in their previous attempt to take medical coverage from millions of Americans (which this bill also would do).
In case you don't know what this bill would do, here are descriptions.
The UK is deporting people who came there lawfully in the 1960s and have lived there ever since. Some of them were brought as children.
Electricity for an electric car is much cheaper in the US than the equivalent amount of gasoline.
Noa Gur Golan refused to enter the Israeli army and serve the occupation, and was jailed. Her mother stated support for her decision, so the Israeli extremist newspaper demands she be fired.
Israel and the Zionist Organization of America are allying in public with right-wing antisemites. This is not a joke.
Israel cares less and less about support from mainstream US Jews, since its lobbying power in the US now comes from rich Christians.
I forecast that a few more years will see Israel calling most American Jews "self-hating anti-semites" while saying that right-wing Christian billionaires and Bannon are not anti-semites. This is what Orwell referred to as "blackwhiting".
Israel's parliament is considering increasing the fees for Palestinians to file court cases. Israel's courts sometimes protect Palestinians' human rights when state agencies decide to trample them, and the right-wing ruling parties want to squelch that without overtly prohibiting it.
Israel has ordered the Palestinian inhabitants of Jabal al-Baba expelled from their homes to give their land to Israelis.
Former El Salvador Colonel Extradited to Spain over 1989 Murder of Jesuits.
This killing was done as part of a US-supported campaign to repress a guerrilla uprising against the repressive plutocratic state.
Britain's army has suffered from a specific psychological pattern of incompetence that has caused military disasters for over 150 years. We may be seeing the same thing in political leadership now.
Eating one seed of corn soaked in neonicotinoids is enough to cause some songbirds to have trouble navigating for their migration.
Mormon feminists are challenging sexual abuse in the Mormon church, which combines with scorn for women that aren't "chaste" to cause great suffering.
There are fathers that rape their daughters — and there are also "recovered memory therapists" that implant false memories of childhood sexual abuse that didn't happen. A priori, either one could have happened here. The fact that Carol did not remember the abuse until she worked with a therapist makes me suspect the latter. It seems that Carol's sister also need "help" to remember.
I hope there is a way to determine which one really occurred.
The UK government is still investigating journalists that worked on the documents that Snowden revealed.
The UK labels this journalism as "terrorism", demonstrating that even in pretend "free" countries we must be suspicious of policies labeled as being against "terrorism".
Young People Aren't Stalinists — They Just Wonder What Fairness Might Look Like.
Don't equate Socialism with Communism!
Once again, activists for Food Not Bombs are threatened with fines for giving food to homeless people.
The cited reasons for this law include discouraging people from living on the street, as well as bogus excuses.
Senators including Sanders and Warren proposed a plan to help Puerto Rico, both short-term and long-term.
The campaign that labels opposition to Israel's occupation policies as antisemitism got a musician kicked off the radio in Germany.
Since false accusations of antisemitism are being made systematically for political reasons, it is wrong to treat a person as suspect because of "accusations of antisemitism" without looking at specifically what the person was accused of doing. Was it real antisemitism, or was it defending Palestinians' human rights?
Wind turbines do not make people sick, but anxiety about them does.
There are so many endangered species now that it is impossible to fund efforts to protect all of them.
In 40 years there will be so many that it will be hard even to keep track of the ones that we drive extinct.
Uber operated a team to spy on competitors and to "impede, obstruct or influence" legal investigations, according to an ex-manager who was involved with the team.
Tillerson said that budget cuts for the State Department and foreign aid are predicated on the assumption that some of the world's main conflicts and disputes will be solved very soon.
This is an aspect of global heating denialism. Global heating has contributed to the conflict in Syria, which spilled over into Iraq, and we know it is going to create more.
Which candidate was going to increase US war — Clinton, or Trump?
The answer is, either one was going to be worse than Obama, and much worse than Sanders.
Puerto Rico: Urgently Needed Tarps Delayed by Failed $30m FEMA Contract.
Aside from the carelessness on the specifics, this approach is asking to lose.
Nowadays, even real commercial suppliers don't have a large inventory of their products on hand. A real supplier of tarps won't have a million in stock. How long does it take to produce a hundred thousand tarps and transport them to the US from wherever they are made?
To handle a large disaster, FEMA must maintain large stockpiles of tarps ready to hand out, not depend on purchasing them after the disaster strikes. Likewise for everything else that is needed fast after a disaster.
You can make disaster response a lot more efficient by aiming to handle only the smaller disasters. It looks like this is what the US has done — under pressure of budget cutting that should not be happening at all.
Mnangagwa, new president of Zimbabwe, announced a three-month amnesty for return of state funds stolen and sent offshore, after which he says he will energetically prosecute the corrupt rich people that did the stealing.
London's mayor says he will arrange to increase the number of public toilets, in particular those for disabled people.
This is very good, but I hope these toilets will be accessible to poor people with no money.
UNICEF says that 11 million children in Yemen need humanitarian assistance as a result of the war. While the statement doesn't say who is responsible, we know that those responsible are Salafi Arabia and its backers, primarily the US.
Since poverty increases the likelihood of death, some simple arithmetic shows that the Republican tax attacks would kill around 30,000 per year, while Sanders' tax plan would save around 30,000 per year, both compared with actual trends.
It also shows that going further than Sanders could save a lot more.
An actress is suing Harvey Weinstein, alleging events which would amount to rape. Strangely, the article describes this as "sex trafficking".
That's nonsense — she was not trafficked. Rape should be called "rape", and trafficking "trafficking", because they are very different issues.
Explaining to an American generation that has never known peace how the US could have chosen peace in 2001, and avoided disaster after disaster.
The US in 2001 could have got the Taliban's help in kicking out al-Qa'ida, in exchange for peace with the US. The Taliban had offered such a deal a short while before.
The history in the US since World War II has been a series of wars, massacres, and coups.
Ancient Greek democracy had problems too. Athens under democratic government converted its alliance into an extractive empire, fought a war to defend that empire, and eventually lost, partly due to mismanagement. Along the way, it too committed massacres.
7 Surprises That Climate Change Will Throw Us.
Humans may be too desperate to survive to keep track of these things. Less reproduction would be a good thing.
The Amazon Effect: How Deforestation Is Starving São Paulo of Water.
Indian thugs in Assam are kicking squatters out of an elephant refuge.
It is necessary to do this, but protecting any sort of wildlife will get ever harder as India's population increases. The only long-term solution is to reduce births and start to bring the human population down.
Amnesty Seeks Criminal Inquiry into Shell over Alleged Complicity in Murder And Torture in Nigeria.
China disappeared Lee Ming-cheh as he was visiting China, and only later admitted he had been arrested. Now he has been sentenced to five years in prison for supposedly planning to hand out subversive publications.
That it makes this a crime convicts China yet again of tyranny.
Argentine activists advocate a law to allow people to testify against their parents. Some want to testify that their fathers confessed to helping murder dissidents during the military dictatorship.
I would like those murderers to be convicted, but should it be possible to convict a person of a crime based on a witness's report that the defendant confessed to per? It seems to me that that would make it easy to frame anyone for any crime: just testify "he confessed to me that he did it."
Toxic chemicals used in nail salons make the staff really sick. Simple equipment, provided by the EPA, can protect them.
Turkey threatens to send millions of refugees to Europe if Syrian Kurds are allowed to participate in peace talks.
This means either there will be no meaningful peace talks, or Turkey and maybe other involved countries will try to crush the Kurds.
Vladimir Timoshenko was sentenced to prison for "insulting officials" in an internet post. This demonstrates the tyranny of the Russian regime.
Imprisoning people for insulting someone is tyranny.
Global heating is enabling sea urchins to wipe out kelp forests and the many other species that depend on them.
Most large sea animals start out as tiny larvae which need a place to hide. Coral reefs and kelp are very important to shelter the larva.
It is cheaper in some places to build new renewable electric generators than to continue running existing coal or nuclear power plants.
However, the owners of the existing plants have money to spend on buying political support to keep running them and make the public pay.
"Each generation perceives the environment into which it's born, no matter how developed, urbanized, or polluted, as the norm."
Many of the Tory benefits cuts result in increased state expenditure. Does that make them irrational?
It does, according to their stated goal of reducing expenditure — but their real purpose is to demonize people that need help. That, they do achieve, however great the cost.
Romanians Protest Against Weakening of Anti-Corruption Powers (again).
Info about the previous time.
Over a million Americans have had their driver's licenses suspended because of fines they can't pay. They have to drive anyway so they get fined more for driving with a suspended license. This leads to a vicious circle of debt.
The only way to make fines achieve their supposed goal is to make sure everyone has enough money to pay a fine — and nobody has so much money as not to notice a fine.
US financial aid for students demands a long list of personal information. Even worse, it makes that information available to anyone who has the applicant's social security number.
This includes lots of crooks, as well as any government agency that wants information about people.
Religious fanatics in Pakistan are protesting to demand explicit repression of minority Muslim sects, effectively barring them from public office. The protests are so big that the government gave in.
The European Union has a "consumer protection" regulation that authorizes officials to order blocking of web sites without a trial.
The UK is holding an "investigation" of thugs that were sent to infiltrate protest groups and form sexual relationships with their members. The investigation carefully protects the thugs and reveals nothing.
"[The US is] spending $1.2 trillion on [nuclear] weapons that invariably make the world a more dangerous place."
Tobacco companies were ordered to publish apologies on TV for their lies that covered up the dangers of smoking. They have delayed this for 11 years with court pleadings, but ultimately lost (or decided to stop delaying).
Their delaying strategy was very effective, because the order from 11 years ago did not require them to publish apologies in Facebook, Google or Twitter.
Criminal convictions, even minor ones long ago, exclude many people from all but the worst kinds of jobs.
A copyright troll in Poland sneakily manipulated thugs into seizing the computers of 200 or more people. Some of them are accused of forbidden sharing in 2013. Some of them are merely mentioned as witnesses in the case.
EU citizens: help protect Europe from imposing a legal requirement for automated censorship.
Switzerland is considering a new copyright law with that same kind of requirement.
Myanmar Accused of Wiping Out Secret Network of Rohingya Reporters. Too many of them have disappeared for it to be a coincidence.
Zuckerberg seems to be planning to make himself president, and Facebook's personal data base and manipulative power could enable him to do that.
The Koch brothers are about to buy Time Magazine.
We must expect they will slant it to right-wing and planet-roaster propaganda.
The UK's policies make disabled people struggle to qualify for the benefits they used to get. Some of them think about suicide.
Many disabled people have been put in inaccessible apartments, so they can't get out unless people come to help them.
The effects of privatization are visible in the lack of training of their assessors. I suppose that the companies that contracted to do this committed to hire qualified people for the job. But the state does not sue them or punish if they don't carry out that promise. In practice, privatization leads to unaccountability, and it shows.
The value of bitcoin is shooting up in a speculative bubble.
Evidence suggests that fires in São Paulo favelas are intentionally set to force poor people off the land.
Privatization of government functions usually leads to doing them badly. One must not be surprised that privatized forensic analysis has put 10,000 British criminal cases in doubt.
Government forensic analysts are not guaranteed to do a proper job either, as shown by the bad work of the FBI crime lab, but that is no reason to create systematic incentives to do it badly.
Such Is the Poverty of Tory Ideas That They Deny Poverty Even Exists.
"When a government shows contempt for a group of people, it is hard to advocate for those people without showing contempt for the government. And then you’re not a charity: you’re a campaigner."
Yellow-eyed penguins are endangered by fishing nets.
Workers in Beijing are being evicted from their homes and onto the street, in many cases with just a few minutes notice so that they lost nearly all their possessions. They have nowhere to go.
The official plan says that millions of workers will be evicted from buildings that were built without permission.
It might be legitimate to tear down those buildings, but not in this way.
Hindu-nationalists falsify Indian history to make it support their nationalist myth.
Now they have imposed this on California; they convinced the state board of education to eliminate mention of the caste system.
Canada's finance minister is attacking workers' pension benefits for the benefit of the company he used to be an executive of.
SCROTUS made a last-minute change in the tax attacks bill to keep taxes on corporations low after 2026.
A small handout for poor people won't even bring them to the point where they can afford living expenses.
The DMCA forbids developing a tracking-detector for iOS apps, effectively forbidding anyone from informing the users how they are being screwed.
The only way users can estimate this is by assuming that proprietary iOS apps are at least as bad as proprietary Android apps.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Cheating And Lying to Give the Internet Away to Big Telecom.
Although he is now ostensibly working for the US government, in fact he is still working for Verizon.
The bully regularly accepts bribes via events held at Mar-a-Lago.
Facebook still allows housing advertisements to be targeted in discriminatory ways.
The US government thinks that drone war is great. Few US soldiers are killed, and as for the civilian casualties, it can lie about those.
The US government is funding propaganda for GMOs, based on "science" from research that the seed companies chose to permit.
The latest climate conference resulted in small, incremental progress which if done 20 years ago might have been sufficient then.
Tracking software in popular Android apps is pervasive and sometimes very clever. Some trackers can follow a user's movements around a physical store by noticing WiFi networks.
Papua refuses to recognize as a refugee an Iranian it acknowledges is likely to be tortured or killed if he returned to Iran.
An MD says that fraud, incompetence, and the domination of medicine by pharma and food companies has made medical science untrustworthy; doctors have trouble using published research to determine the best way to treat patients.
I have suggested removing Pharma companies from any role in funding tests of the effects of drugs. But more change than that is needed.
U.S. Generals Might Stop Trump From an Illegal Nuclear Strike — But Who Will Save Us From a Legal One?
Alt-America: the Time for Talking about White[-supremacist] Terrorism Is Now.
The current minister in charge of all thugs in Honduras has been tied to drug smuggling.
US citizens: call on the Government Accountability Office to investigate the EPA's removal of independent scientists from advisory boards.
3 steps for stopping the Republican tax attacks.
These were intended for "before Thanksgiving", but you can still do them now.
US citizens: oppose SCROTUS's proposed abortion ban.
Zimbabwe Activists Fear Post-Mugabe Human Rights Crackdown.
Australia is constructing a data base to identify everyone in that country by face recognition. Now it plans to sell companies access to the data base, compounding the initial wrong.
The dispute between defenders of transgender females' rights, and the feminists who distrust them as males, is getting so heated that it is causing difficulties for various progressive and radical movements. The plutocratists must be chuckling.
In principle I think both sides have a valid concern. However, in practice the transgender people face a real problem, while the fearful feminists face only a theoretical problem.
There is indeed no formal obstacle to stop a straight male from putting on women's clothing and calling himself a transgender woman in order to visit women's bathrooms; but surely this must be very rare. Most straight males who might consider going to such lengths to peep at women would feel a horror of making themselves "effeminate" by dressing as women. They wouldn't consider actually doing that.
Papuan thugs are blocking Médecins Sans Frontières from visiting the refugees of Manus Island in their new prison.
There are ballot campaigns to legalize psychedelic mushrooms in California and Oregon.
Global heating effects are causing poverty in parts of Africa, so farmers' daughters are compelled to marry young.
The other jaw of the poverty vice is overpopulation. Marrying young is likely to increase population growth, driving the population into a spiral that leads to mass starvation.
Due to Tory cutbacks, most of the women in the UK that need to flee from a violent man can no longer find a place to flee to.
The "Iron Fist" Response to Terror Attacks in Egypt Never Works.
Aren't we mature enough to stop punishing people for viewing pornography?
The North Atlantic right whale was recovering in population due to protection from whaling, but now new fishing methods are killing them and the population is declining again.
Leveraged buyouts are looting many US retail companies, which leads to closing of stores and loss of employment.
I view this with concern because I don't do e-commerce (it does not respect privacy).
Chief Joseph's surrender speech was probably fabricated by the man who claimed to have written it down. Likewise many other famous quotes attributed to indigenous people in what is now the USA.
It should be noted that indigenous tribes did not live in general peace with each other or have a system of generally recognized land rights. It was common for tribes to fight other tribes and take land from them.
By present-day standards, what they did to each other was wrong, and it was wrong again when the European colonists did it to them.
These standards were brought by the colonists, who made treaties with various tribes, then upheld the treaties in a one-sided way (only when that advantaged the colonists). We can judge those colonists for their cheating, but it is a mistake to project present-day standards back to people of the past in an anachronistic way.
Leaks revealed that the bully's regime is manipulating the media by reports of crimes that it can attribute to Iranians, as a scheme to whip up support for further sanctions against Iran and destroying the nuclear deal.
This deal is why Iran does not have nuclear weapons.
The "crime" that is supposed to be horrible is hardly one we should care about at all. It does not harm or threaten the United States or its people. It only affects a corporation that imposes several injustices on its clients as standard practice.
Please join me in telling Netflix to go flick off.
The governor of Illinois promised to give information to Israel about "terrorist" suspects — which will probably end up meaning anyone that campaigns to end the occupation of Palestine.
Protesters against fracking in England face heavy punishment under the right wing's harsh laws.
A foundation that celebrates former Spanish dictator Franco succeeded in blocking Madrid from changing the names of streets that commemorate the dictator's "heroes".
I suspect that this success reflects the hidden power of his supporters that remain influential in the right-wing governing party and in the state.
I don't think it is right to try to ban ideas, but the state can legitimately cut off the mechanisms of influence that they use to promote tyranny.
Meanwhile, Spain has done little to commemorate Franco's victims — those that died fighting his coup, and those that his forces murdered or imprisoned afterwards. Many of them were used for forced labor, building monuments that say little about who built them.
A doctor who treats patients with great pain that no one else can treat is facing threats from the DEA.
The vote for Britain to leave the EU was procured with illegal campaign spending.
Uber is aggressively trying to make itself "too big to ban", but it can still be banned.
If a company is "too big to ban", it is too big to exist.
Arguing the need for managed deindustrialization.
I am skeptical of the claim that population increase is not one of the main drivers of exhaustion of the Earth. The article does not try to demonstrate that.
Saboteur General Sessions has taken aim at Justice Department guidance that instructs other government agencies in giving all Americans equal protection of the law.
Since Verizon is lobbying to abolish network neutrality, Americans will protest at Verizon stores on Dec 7.
The "Homeland Security" department's community liaison said he hated blacks and Muslims. Establishing cordial relations with American Muslims is a part of his job, but he's not going to be able to do it with those views.
Roy Moore saw Kayla Kisor soloing in a dance performance and she made such an impression on him that, after they subsequently met eight years later, they dated and got married.
The modern prudery movement would like us to find this disgusting, because she was 15 or 16 when she made a lasting impression on him.
Moore is a dangerous theocratic extremist. Please support the Doug Jones for Senate campaign, and help defeat Moore. Please do it in a way that doesn't inflict prudery as collateral damage.
Police officer Sean Suiter in Baltimore, waiting to testify about corruption in the thug department, was murdered. The thug department imposed repressive measures on the neighborhood for days, and a record-setting reward to get information about the killer, but has not found anyone. People wonder if the killer was a thug.
The Tories seem strangely reluctant to take any action to limit the tax-dodging revealed in recent links.
One may suspect that they want these rich companies and individuals to continue dodging taxes. After all, many of them support the Tory party and help it to get elected.
Amnesty: The government of Lagos has evicted 30,000 poor people by bulldozing their homes. Sometimes thugs shot people to chase them out. Sometimes the bulldozer operators did not wait for all the people to get out of the homes.
The low price of renewable electricity generators is leading to massive investments despite the efforts of planet-roasters to hold it back.
Electric power generation is, alas, only one of the sectors that cause greenhouse emissions. There is transportation, which usually means burning fossil fuels; there is deforestation; there is farming.
Converting electric generation to 100% renewable may not be enough to avoid global heating disaster, though it is a big step towards that goal.
Senate candidate Roy Moore tried to start dating/sexual relationships with teenagers some decades ago.
He tried to lead Ms Corfman step by step into sex, but he always respected "no" from her and his other dates. Thus, Moore does not deserve the exaggerated condemnation that he is receiving for this. As an example of exaggeration: one mailing referred to these teenagers as "children", even the one that was 18 years old. Many teenagers are minors, but none of them are children.
The condemnation is surely sparked by the political motive of wanting to defeat Moore in the coming election, but it draws fuel from ageism and the fashion for overprotectiveness of "children".
I completely agree with the wish to defeat Moore. Political Christianists such as Moore hold views that conflict essentially with human rights, just as political Islamists do. If Moore, with his extremist policies, gains public office again, he will harm millions of American women, and secondarily society as a whole.
Ms Corfman says she was hurt afterward, and attributes this to feelings of guilt based on the belief that she had done something wrong (which, of course, she had not). Is this is another sign of Christianity at work?
I sent a check to Doug Jones US Senate a few weeks ago. Please support his campaign too. You can mail a check here:
Doug Jones US Senate
PO Box 131025
Birmingham, AL 35213
Phone: +1 205-703-4785
https://dougjonesforsenate.com/
Assad Regime's "Starve Or Surrender" Strategy Is a War Crime, says Amnesty.
"We'll never stop Brexit or Trump until we address the anger fuelling both."
The Bitcoin exchange Bittrex has "suspended" thousands of accounts, in many cases those of Iranians, and won't let them have their money.
It doesn't respond to their questions, either.
How Religious Sectarian School Voucher Extremists Made Useful Idiots of the Charter Movement.
Militarist American politicians trot out the "sacred soldier" to silence public debate about war and its consequences.
Several Republican candidates tried racist campaigns in the recent election, and lost.
The Vietnamese government now represses people for insulting visiting US politicians.
You'd never guess that this government came to power through a war to kick out US puppets. It has now become, more or less, a US puppet, in exchange for business opportunities.
Thousands of US citizens are wrongly deported from the US every year. Because being an unauthorized immigrant is not officially a crime — just treated like one — those accused are presumed guilty.
Regarding unauthorized immigrants working in restaurant jobs that Americans won't take: if the restaurants couldn't hire unauthorized immigrants, they might all have to pay higher wages, stop stealing wages, stop making work precarious and unpredictable, and then Americans would take these jobs.
The opioid carfentanil is so powerful that a tiny dose can be fatal. It is somewhat unpredictable, so it encourages overdoses. However, the effect it is used for is the same as the effect of larger quantities of other, less potent opioids.
The reason for interest in carfentanil is that it is smaller and thus easier to smuggle. Thus, the danger of carfentanil is the direct result of prohibition.
The rebellion in the Donbass region of Ukraine bubbles on with occasional shelling that sometimes kills civilians.
Putin no longer needs that war for his destabilization attacks against the west, but there seems to be no prospect of ending it.
President Do-dirty has boasted of killing people, and said he wished he had raped a woman (who was killed).
No wonder the bully admires him.
Deforestation in the Congo region threaten to release the carbon stores in vast peat deposits.
Hundreds of thousands protested in Catalonia demanding that Spain release their leaders from jail.
I don't advocate independence for Catalonia, but I support this demand. Rajoy's power means repression, all across Spain.
Medical students' activism has helped convince various medical charities to stop holding fund raisers at the bully's resort, Mar-a-Lago.
The bully's approach to Afghanistan: more of the same strategy that has failed for 12 years or so, a little more harsh and cruel, and more covering up the details.
The troll is tightening US sanctions against Cuba, while fawning on the equally communist China as it becomes ever more repressive. There is no way that can make ethical sense.
EU countries are prosecuting people for helping refugees travel — or even simply giving them food — using laws that were meant to punish people-smugglers.
Britain and US Urged to Release Papers on Dag Hammarskjöld's Death.
There have always been suspicions that his plane crash was no accident.
Salafi Arabia is experiencing a palace power struggle between different factions of the gigantic royal family, presented as a campaign against corruption.
Those targeted may indeed be corrupt, but not necessarily more than the others in the royal family.
Increasing numbers of young adults are quitting Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
While I wish they had taken up the principles of the free software movement, and defending privacy on principle too, this is a big step towards reducing the technological subjugation and it might lead them towards recognizing those principles.
There are other ways to remember your friends' birthdays. For instance, put them in a text file in calendrical order.
When US thugs train with Israeli thugs, they tend to exchange worst practices. This teaches US thugs to treat blacks like an occupied people.
Due to cutbacks, the UK's National Health Service does not have enough ambulances. A woman died from waiting 85 minutes for one.
This was always the inevitable result of Tory budget cuts.
UK Prosecutors Admit Destroying Key Emails in Julian Assange Case.
It seems clear that this is part of a dishonest scheme.
The TSA plans to go beyond merely annoying air travelers more or less and start recognizing travelers by their faces and their iris scans. First step, some of us. Next step, all of us.
US citizens: Tell the EPA to continue the Clean Power Plan.
US citizens: call on Congress not to let kratom be banned.
Farmers in Queensland have gone wild on cutting down native forest.
Houston faces a political battle about how to rebuild: including minorities and immigrants, or (as Republicans wish) leaving them out of reconstruction funds.
Texas seems to need Reconstruction as well as reconstruction.
Many companies engage in veiled advertising by paying celebrities to promote their products and pretend to be disinterested.
Proposed order: a 1000-pound fine for sleeping in a tent on a street in a town in England.
Homeless people can show their contempt for this cruel order by daring the court to fine them again, again, and again — and each time, responding, "fat chance you'll ever get that money out of me."
Richard Cordray, resigning as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has named a deputy director who will automatically run the agency until Republicans formally install a saboteur to wreck it. Even then, the saboteur will face a fight.
The new prison for the Manus refugees is "still a construction site".
Since they were put there by force, and since envoys such as Costello are blocked from entering, it is clearly a prison.
The Tories policy towards disabled Britons amounts to war.
Bangladesh's government forces kidnap people and disappear them, and the government pretends they have simply gone missing.
PISSI's branch in Egypt bombed a mosque because its worshippers practice a form of Islam that is kind and thoughtful, not rigid and cruel.
Corrupt President Hernández of Honduras, chosen in an election managed by military coup leaders, is reported as leading in opinion polls run by pro-coup newspapers.
Recall when President Zelaya of Honduras was ousted by a military coup supported (though not overtly) by the US under the authority of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
The supposed justification was that Zelaya wanted to hold a referendum about permitting reelection of presidents. The referendum would have taken place after he left office.
FEMA's attempt to aid Puerto Rico was not merely too little and too late. It was not even designed to function in those circumstances.
The cabin crew of Cryin'air have been crying, or will be soon. The airline said it will punish those who don't sell enough in the cabin.
I never buy what the crew sell in an airplane. Moreover, many airlines won't take the cash that I might pay with.
Please help defend privacy rights by refusing to pay for products and food with anything other than cash.
Some extremist Hindu-theocratic Indian agitators are making threats of violence against the female star of a film, offering bounties for mutilating her, and doing so with impunity. Perhaps this is because the Hindu-theocratic ruling party doesn't mind them much.
They are also threatening arson in the UK to suppress its release there.
This calls to mind the violent threats of Iran against those involved in publishing The Satanic Verses. In both cases, the threateners seem to be mistaken about what the work actually says, and not interested in correcting their error.
The UN should consider amending the rules of war to recognize the large chance of civilian casualties from even small bombing raids on soldiers in cities.
The Ghouta region of Syria, near Damascus, is still held by rebels. Assad's forces are starving them out.
The "crocodile" that seems to be making himself the new president of Zimbabwe was the strongest supporter of Mugabe's tyranny until recently.
City Council member Yuka Ogata brought her baby with her to the council meeting, to dramatize the shortage of childcare in Japan, but male council members forced her to leave the meeting.
Indian Newspapers Run Blank Pages to Protest Journalist Killing.
It appears that supporters of the right-wing Hindu-theocratic government are behind both murders.
Protests across the US are aimed at convincing a few Republican senators to reject the SCROTUS tax attacks.
Aside from plenty of dooH niboR, the bill also includes a provision that would effectively ban all abortions.
Papua thugs hit refugees with metal poles to drag them away.
Australia and Papua New Guinea have been keeping journalists and aid workers away from the refugees, trying to cover up this violence. The thugs arrested Behrouz Boochani, the refugee journalist who works as a reporter for foreign media, and took him away, evidently with the same purpose.
Keep in mind that none of these refugees ever sought to enter Papua New Guinea. That country agreed to hold them on Australia's behalf.
"Behrouz Boochani exposed Australia's evil on Manus. The shame will outlive us all."
Boochani writes, Manus police pulled my hair and beat me. 'You've damaged our reputation,' they said.
The bully has nominated a supporter of gerrymandering to head the Census Bureau.
We can expect him to try to help Republicans in future elections by undercounting poor people. That is easy to do — just don't try to find them.
80% of waitresses have experienced sexual harassment. And 70% of male restaurant workers too.
The statements made by restaurant representatives are examples of the way companies twist language and twist logic. They are not literally false, but they deceive by missing the point.
For instance, it is true that there is no (rigid) limit on what employees can receive as a tip. You might, in theory, get a thousand-dollar tip today, and each day for the coming year, then retire. But how likely is that? In practice, the income of most waiters is quite limited.
It is obvious that tipping makes waitresses more vulnerable, because they need to smile even when uncomfortable to get tips from the (mostly male) paying customers.
I wish that tipping were eliminated entirely and waiters received a decent wage.
The Massachusetts ACCESS Act would protect insurance coverage of effective birth control, in Massachusetts.
Efficient lamps are encouraging the spread of light pollution which can harm various species of life.
Salafi Arabia is threatening war against Lebanon after holding its prime minister prisoner for a while and holding his family hostage.
The queer community in Turkey fears that censorship is the harbinger of repression. The state has stirred up hatred and people don't dare admit they are gay.
Replacing a quarter of the sodium chloride in foods with potassium chloride could reduce strokes and heart attacks.
The way SCROTUS are trying to pass their tax cut does not allow them to override the automatic budget cuts enforced by a previous Republican law.
That law was passed to cater to the Republican pretense of horror of budget deficits, which was really just an excuse to stop the US government from helping non-rich people.
Governor Snyder of Michigan set up a "public health council", supposedly to prevent repetition of the Flint water lead poisoning, and appointed a head who is currently being prosecuted for allowing poisoning in Flint.
This confirms what I've thought for years: that Republicans are in favor of killing off poor people, just as long as they can pretend that they are not doing so.
Costa Rica has generated all its electricity from renewable sources for 300 days this year.
Not every country has the option of generating lots of hydroelectric power, but all countries can build wind and solar power facilities if they choose to invest.
Salafi Arabia said it would partially lift the blockade of Yemen, which is not enough to end the hunger and cholera.
But it didn't really do that. It was just bullshit.
The US is obligated to stop supporting Salafi Arabia's bombardment as well as the continuing blockade.
One of the "valve turners" who shut off an oil pipeline as a protest was convicted of a felony after a trial in which he was forbidden to present a justification for his act.
Jurors should never convict anyone of a nonviolent protest.
The FCC refuses to cooperate with New York State's investigation of the fraudulent comments that favored of eliminating network neutrality.
These comments were fraudulent in that they gave the names of people who did not file those comments and do not agree with them.
I think Ajit Pai welcomes the fraudulent comments since, by denying that they were fraudulent, he can cite them as "support". This is the typical attitude of plutocratist politicians: no lie is too dirty for them.
The poll tax used to stop poor Americans from voting. Now some states stop them because they are caught up in the fines-for-fines system.
Bill O'Neill, candidate for governor of Ohio, was castigated for a post in which he summarized briefly his sexual history with adult women.
It takes a boastful attitude, which is un-cool, but it doesn't imply he mistreated any of his lovers. It makes no sense to demand that a candidate drop out of the race because of this — especially since that might enable a Republican to win.
I think the reaction to his post has proved his point.
Employees in offices spend half their day dealing with pointless management.
However, the same is not the case for today's low-paid employees that make up half the work force.
China Blocks Debate about Downfall of [head] Internet Censor, Lu Wei.
The US government subsidizes big farming corporations, because the subsidy was important to protect family farms 80 years ago (back when there were family farms).
Republicans lured family farms into debts they could not pay. Too bad the farmers and their descendants don't hold the grudge that this deserves.
Papuan thugs arrested refugee journalist Behrouz Boochani.
They also took 40 others refugees prisoner and took them away. But they seized the phones of other refugees, and destroyed their meager possessions. They seem to be intentionally trying to cut off all word to the outside world, so they can do dirty work and go undetected.
Keep in mind that none of these refugees ever sought to enter Papua New Guinea. That country agreed to hold them on Australia's behalf.
A Canadian mining company can be sued in Canada for using slave labor in Eritria.
The government of Eritria regularly enslaves people for various kinds of work.
US citizens: call on Congress to prevent the bully from launching a nuclear war, by impeaching him.
To sign this without running nonfree Javascript code, use the Salsalabs Method.
US citizens: oppose Republican plans to subject Americans' birth control access to the boss's religion.
Here's what I posted.
The only person whose religion is pertinent to whether you can get birth control is your own. It would be as absurd for your employer to block you from birth control in the name of his or her religion, as it would be for that employer to impose birth control on you in the name of his or her religion. Please reject the absurd proposed regulation that would authorize this.This and other gratuitous problems come from connecting medical insurance with employment. If we give medical coverage to everyone, we can disconnect them entirely. By raising the funds from taxes on income and profits, not from payroll tax, we can end one pressure for employers to replace workers with machines.
US citizens: call on Congress to make sure crimes get reported for gun purchase background checks.
Netanyahu advocates a law that would forcibly shut down
organizations such as Breaking the Silence, in which ex-soldiers
report on war crimes they committed or witnessed. This would be
considered "working against the interest" of (criminal) soldiers.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-01 because the old link was broken.]
Another proposed law would put part of the West Bank under control of the Jerusalem city government. This would make Netanyahu's policy of rejecting peace with Palestine a part of Israeli law.
We must hold a debate on how to bring production down to a level that the Earth can sustain.
It will be hard to convince the people that live at a decent standard of living to accept the loss of many comforts. Thus, this debate needs to include bringing the human population down to a level the Earth can sustain. My guess is, around one billion people, roughly the number that currently live at a high standard of living. But perhaps it should be somewhat less.
Uber is being investigated in several countries for covering up a data breach instead of reporting it.
More important than this secondary outrage is the reason why Uber had so much data ready for crackers to steal: its practice of making users pay by credit card, thus providing the data to Uber.
If you ride an ordinary taxi, and have the common sense to pay cash, it collects no data about you, and no breach in the taxi company can touch you.
If we require all digital payment systems to pay the merchant anonymously, so that the merchant gets no information except "you have been paid amount X", this will prevent a large fraction of the data breeches that are likely to happen.
The University of Arkansas wants to fire tenured professors if they don't teach a subject the way they are ordered to.
Foreigners losing temporary protective status in the US are likely to start walking to Canada despite the risk of losing fingers and toes.
Raising total production is ineffective as a way to help the poor: almost none trickles down to them. Meanwhile, those who try to reduce their personal greenhouse gas footprint end up blowing all the savings. We need to change the system.
There is one form of personal greenhouse gas reduction that really does work: not reproducing. Each child multiplies your whole ecological footprint.
Wealthy people must reduce their reproduction because each wealthy child will consume a lot and produce lots of greenhouse gas. Poor people must reduce their reproduction because their children will have no prospects except desperation. (We have to give them reliable birth control to help them do this.)
Progressives should use disasters as opportunities for political campaigning at all levels for policies that reduce the danger of future disasters.
Ratko Mladić Convicted of Genocide And War Crimes at UN Tribunal.
Sexual Harassment Doesn't Just Happen to Actors Or Journalists. Talk to a Waitress, Or a Cleaner.
Hunting bears the way people usually do it fails to discourage bears from attacking humans and human property, because it targets the wrong bears.
Do right-wing politicians oppose renewable energy because those dirty hippies are for it?
Or do they oppose for pay?
Doctors "Overprescribe Drugs Due to Fears of Facing Complaints."
Android tracks location for Google even when "location services" are turned off, even when the phone has no SIM card.
The US government distributed proprietary spyware labeled as "protection for children".
Amazon wants to tempt US spy agencies into leaving their data in Amazon's hands.
The security of that is null.
FCC Will Also Order States to Scrap Plans for Their Own Net Neutrality Laws.
Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet.
A sugar industry research foundation cancelled long-running experiments shortly before they finished, to cover up evidence that sugar was a crucial cause of obesity. This was in 1967.
Israel is making the occupation more harsh, and using state power to
crush criticism of it by attacking basic human rights on many fronts.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-01 because the old link was broken.]
13 nasty things about the SCROTUS tax attacks.
Everyone: tell IBM, "Live up to your commitment to support immigrants. Publicly reject Trump’s hate by refusing to build his Extreme Vetting Program."
Ajit Pai's plan to eliminate network neutrality rules is even more destructive than was expected.
British thugs put Ziad Najm on a "terrorist suspects" list, which immediately caused him difficulties in his life, and refused to say why. Now he is suing, but I fear the courts will only look for excuses to back up the arbitrary actions of the officials.
Anti-Semites feted by Zionist Organization of America.
Just as criticizing Zionism is not a form of anti-semitism, supporting Zionism does not imply rejecting anti-semitism.
Israel arrested Palestinian nonviolent protest leader Abdullah Abu Rahmeh again.
The Israeli army plans to demolish 140 apartments before Israeli courts have a chance to rule on whether to demolish them.
The supposed grounds for demolition are that the apartments are too close to the annexation wall. Well, who decided to put the wall there? Not the Palestinians.
The SCROTUS tax attacks could cause a recession if they knock down real estate prices by up to 17%.
The confused term "sex trafficking" undermines the campaign against the grave crime of enslavement and forced prostitution, by identifying that crime with the practice of paying for sex.
A Republican official who made a bogus accusation against Latin American immigrants in general — that they would traffic "children" into the US for prostitution — is now being criticized for supposedly doing that very thing himself. However, when you look at the details, he was not accused of enslaving or trafficking anyone. Rather, he is accused of nothing more than offering to pay for sex, to someone who was a minor. (No word on whether the official even knew that.)
I warned before that the term "sex trafficking" was apt to lead to injustice. Now we see it in action.
The term's confusion will undermine efforts to stop enslavement and trafficking of both adolescents and adults.
The private US medical system indirectly rations medical care, but some socialist medical systems (in capitalist countries) offer luxurious treatment to everyone that needs it.
Some Puerto Ricans are trying to build an autogenerated recovery, but others are fleeing to refugee camps in Florida. Some suspect that the American oligarchs want to depopulate the island so as to turn it into an expensive corporate-owned resort.
Seven trash "medical journals" put a dog onto their editorial boards.
On the internet, people still don't know you're a dog if they don't bother to check.
Don't Rehabilitate George W. Bush: Why the Enemy of Our Enemy Is Still a War Criminal.
Karen Fonseca, threatened by a Texas sheriff for having a "Fuck Trump" sticker on her truck, added another one about the sheriff.
Even the charter schools that are not explicitly "for profit" have numerous ways of diverting public funds to private profit. This may be the real reason why charter schools are allowed in the US.
In Latest Ethics Offense, NRCC Offers Supporter a Stay in Trump's Hotel In Exchange for Donation.
The real big donors negotiate a payoff in legislation.
US thugs raided stores that help people fill out orders for prescriptions from foreign pharmacies. They are enforcing a law that was purchased by the Pharma companies to make drugs very expensive for Americans.
Some Uber drivers are using a GPS-spoofing app to fool the Uber app and increase their fares.
This seems to be a response to a change Uber made to reduce drivers' pay.
The Medical Misinformation Mess: most medical research studies are low quality and neither patients nor practitioners know how to identify and disregard them.
This leads to wasted expense, continuing sickness, and sometimes death.
Many US states require licenses to practice professions such as "cosmetician" for which there is no evident rationale for requiring one.
There are a few cases in which licenses are required specifically to reduce competition, and it may be a valid goal. For instance, before taxi medallions were created, it is said, too many people tried to drive taxis and most of them lost money. The problem was serious because buying a taxi was a big investment, making it hard to enter the taxi field.
However, in other professions which don't require buying something so expensive as a new car, this reason would not be valid.
State schools in the UK propagate class inequality by giving the children of working class parents a markedly worse education.
A similar thing happens in the US, though it works using zoning: wealthier parents congregate in suburbs where the smallest lot size excludes anyone less wealthy, so their real estate taxes can fund a better school. The urban poor get lousy schools that can't afford anything.
To stop stunting the growth of children from poor families, we need to fund their schools as well as wealthy children's families. We need to spend a lot more money per child than we do now.
We need to get the money by taxing the rich and the corporations.
Unlike Most Western Leaders, Corbyn Demands End to US-UK Complicity in Yemen's Suffering.
Intel's intentional "management engine" back door has unintended back doors too.
Raping male prisoners is common in Syria, perhaps as common as raping female prisoners.
Privatization strikes again, this time in "manipulated" forensic tests affecting as many as 10,000 court cases in the UK.
The article begs the question of whether the false results were the result of dishonesty or merely mistakes.
The US will end temporary residency permits for Haitians in 2019, requiring the earthquake refugees to return to Haiti.
In principle, I see nothing wrong with accepting refugees from disasters temporarily. Is Haiti safe for them to return to? Three hurricanes have devastated Haiti since the earthquake, as well as the UN-installed cholera epidemic.
I don't know the facts well enough to judge the answer to that question. I don't have confidence in what the US government says about it, but I don't know of any unbiased judge either.
"You'll Never Work Again": Women Tell How Sexual Harassment Broke Their Careers.
Poland Faces €100,000-a-day Fines over Illegal Logging in Białowieża Forest.
After Iraqi soldiers capturing the last center of PISSI resistance in Mosul, they began killing all the men they suspected of being PISSI fighters. If the men said they were not PISSI fighters, the soldiers tortured them until they confessed or died. If they confessed, the soldiers tortured them from sheer hatred.
Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong has been sentenced to prison after confessing to "inciting subversion of state power", which basically means exercising his human rights. This confession was probably squeezed out of him, though we don't know the details.
The Tory government wants to impose trade treaties without even a vote by Parliament.
The SCROTUS tax attacks would make graduate student teaching assistants and research assistants pay tax on the tuition fees that universities waive.
Universities would have to pay them extra to cover the tax, and this would fall on research funders. But funders may not all increase their research support. Universities would have to cut the number of graduate students by a large fraction.
The troll has decided to label North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism."
Since the US already has almost total sanctions against North Korea, I think this is merely an act of name-calling.
It's also untrue. The assassination of Kim Jong-Nam was not terrorism, as the word is properly understood, because it was not meant as an act of political pressure. It was simply murder. The kidnapping of an unknown number of Japanese people to force them to teach Japanese was not terrorism; it was simply kidnaping.
Do we need to strain to call them "terrorism"? Aren't murder and kidnaping bad enough by themselves?
California prisons were sued and agreed to end long-term solitary confinement, but they have invented new pretexts for it.
Jared Kushner told Congress that he did not know of any meetings between the bully's campaign and Russians. This was false.
Countries other than the US are foolishly proceeding with the TPP or Pacific Partnership Trance.
They have tentatively dropped the chapter that bears the incoherent label of "intellectual property", but they have kept many other harmful rules, worst of all the ISDS ("I Sue Democratic States") provision that gives foreign companies more rights than citizens.
If you are a citizen of New Zealand, please agitate against signing the TPP as long as it contains ISDS.
The EFF article encourages the confusion of the term "intellectual property" by using it as if it had a coherent meaning. Please take care not to do that.
Some Rohingya are trapped on the beach in Burma, with no path to flee.
Economics is a toolkit, not a physical law. We can fix parasitic drains (such as tax-dodging) by changing the system so that they are illegal and can be stopped.
Thirty Countries Use "Armies of Opinion Shapers" to Manipulate Democracy.
Plutocrats say they will help Puerto Rico "recover" by eliminating "structural barriers": minimum wage laws, labor rules requiring just-cause termination, paid sick days for employees, paternity leave, and overtime pay.
In other words, they want a fast recovery for business owners by making things worse for workers.
I wonder if the reason they fight for rapid global heating is to make more disasters they can use in this way.
A journalist used just metadata to tie Comey's pseudonymous Twitter account to him personally. This shows that we should not dismiss snooping on "just metadata" as unintrusive.
Everyone: call on Turkey to drop charges against encryption activists.
Partially burnt trees after fires in California's Sierra Nevada are vital for other species; we must not cut them down.
The UK's massive reshuffle of welfare benefits, called "universal credit", regularly leaves people with no money for food, heat, even rent. Many go hungry; many get evicted. Food banks can't cope. The new system is so rigid and bureaucratic that it leaves victims arguing with a computer.
Tories may have said that the purpose was to encourage people to work, or to make the system simpler, or other kinds of bullshit, but the real purpose of everything Tories do to the welfare system is to degrade the poor so that people with badly educated consciences will despise them and vote Tory.
"Universal credit" is simply a game of sleight of hand, in which benefits mysteriously disappear but people can't see where they went.
An inadequate proposal: taxing data brokers for using people's personal data.
Profiling people based on personal data makes it easy to cheat people, manipulate people, repress people, even manipulate elections. Taxing the companies a little would hardly make up for the harm that they do, but they would cite it as legitimizing their activities.
Putting minors in prison leads them towards a life of crime.
Maybe prison for minors cannot be entirely eliminated. There might be a few for whom sensible measures are useless, and who must ultimately be imprisoned as the last resort. But it would be a great step forward to avoid turning all the rest into hardened criminals.
Russian "Troll Army" Tweets Cited More Than 80 Times in UK Media.
A senator proposes to ban smoking in new French films.
Forget about the response that attacks a straw man (to ban showing old films where characters smoke, which nobody proposes); I ask, why do films show smoking? Is this because French directors just love to show smoking? Or is this paid "product placement"?
If it is the latter, that suggests prohibiting paid product placement, direct or indirect, and not censoring the films themselves.
Nebraska approved the Keystone XL pipeline. Earth defenders will still try to stop it with lawsuits and protests.
The Sackler chain of businesses can do all the stages of making money from a painkiller — from designing it, to getting approval of it, to marketing it, to organizing "the public" to campaign for access to it.
Now Sackler is turning the same methods to promotion of charter schools which he can own.
The UN has proposed a global insurance plan to cover poor people against damages due to global heating effects.
A system like this could reduce the harm done by global heating effects for some period of time — perhaps ten years. But if we fail to curb the emissions, this will be like compensating people on the sinking Titanic for their inconvenience during the sinking process.
Of course, the wealthy countries ought to pay for this. They ought to pay the costs of ending fossil fuel use, too.
A Judge Just Ruled The Government Can Access Facebook Accounts [in regard to bogus charges of "rioting" at the bully's inauguration].
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Pharma lobbyist Alex Azar as Saboteur of Health.
Everyone: ask the Norwegian Parliament to choose only people that support peace to vote on the Nobel Peace Prize.
Republican tax cuts are meant to block future Democrats from solving the country's problems, if those don't have the courage to make "Tax the rich!" their battle cry.
This approach has worked for Republicans before. Democrats must repudiate entirely the plutocratist principles that have governed the US for 20 years.
Many states and cities subsidize film production. It's a racket that benefits businesses at the expense of the public.
It's basically the same issue as public subsidies for sports teams or factories.
The US crushed animal rights protests by labeling them as "terrorism" and imprisoning the protesters as "terrorists". No wonder Republicans are now trying to apply similar repression to other kinds of protests.
A Lesson from Syria: It's Crucial Not to Fuel Far-Right Conspiracy Theories.
If the president of the US orders a nuclear attack, generals cannot
block the attack by calling the order illegal, since the order goes
straight to launch crews.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-01 because the old link was broken.]
"Have we reached zero tolerance for sexual misconduct?"
Since the term "misconduct" extends so far, zero tolerance of that would mean a oppression by prudery. The worst you can say about what Franken did is that it was not nice and he shouldn't have done it.
We need to improve recycling of discarded electrical devices, and this starts with replacing them less often.
I think that products designed to be hard to open and repair should be prohibited. Likewise other practices that impede repair, such as secrecy about the devices, or refusal to sell replacement components.
The refugees Australia dumped in Manus Island are getting sick, some from the lack of clean water as well as the lack of medical treatment.
The international system of asylum was designed to handle thousands of refugees moving between culturally similar countries, or dozens fleeing from very different cultures. Now that hundreds of thousands are fleeing to other continents, the system is breaking down.
What will we do when tens of millions are fleeing for their lives?
If Sinclair takes control of local broadcasting in large parts of the US, it could broadcast only fake news.
The men that use a domain of local power for sexual bullying often bully the others around them too, as part of a workplace pecking order.
One policy that keeps housing in the UK down is that the state can't buy unbuilt land based on the value of its current use. It has to pay market rates which are inflated by the idea of selling the land for development.
The supposed reason for offering "US" multinationals a tax break for bringing foreign profits officially to the US is that they would then invest it in the US.
The idea is totally bogus, because they already have plenty of money in the US, but they are not investing it because they see no opportunities.
We need to tax away a substantial amount of that money and invest it in society's needs — infrastructure, measures to reduce global heating (including birth control and abortion), and food and education for all children.
Online sales, a dangerous surveillance system, are wiping out sales jobs. About 8% of these jobs have been lost in Britain recently.
The Tories' response to this developing disaster is to push to eliminate jobs for drivers as well.
Once they have made millions unemployed, they will castigate those millions as "lazy".
Putin has tried to pin the blame for three murders (of people associated with a massive fraud scheme) on the people who have tried to expose the fraud.
The US has concentrated pollution sources in areas where poor or black people live. The troll and SCROTUS are eliminating the regulations to keep this in check.
Sometimes poor people are economically compelled to move near pollution sources because housing elsewhere is too expensive for them. Sometimes the pollution sources are built in areas that poorer people are moving into.
If the pollution affected everyone in the US equally, that would avoid one unjust aspect, but the pollution would still make people sick. Therefore I think we should give priority to reducing pollution and the harm it does, and spreading it more equally should be a secondary goal.
We need not argue about how to site coal-burning generators, when it makes no sense to build any new ones and we need to shut them all down as soon as possible. On the other hand, stored coal ash could be moved into safer facilities that are near fewer people, until we have the technology to render it harmless.
When we raise taxes on the rich, only a few of them move away.
Besides which, if a country raises taxes on income to the rich, even when they leave they will still have to pay the official tax rate on the income they visibly receive in that country.
Some schools and childcare facilities have adopted a policy against using plastic glitter.
I think this is wise. It will not only reduce plastic pollution directly, it will also teach children the gravity of the problem of plastic pollution.
The British Virgin islands are finding that removing the wrecked boats that now litter the land is an insuperable problem.
When stores know who you are, they can offer each customer a different price. The asymmetry of information means this generally benefits the store and hurts the customers.
Once the practice of price discrimination among customers gets big enough, there is no difference between "rewarding customers A, B and C with discounts" and "imposing a higher price on customers X, Y and Z" except presentation.
You can thwart this by paying cash, anonymously. Please join me in defending the right to pay cash, in insisting "cash or no sale".
The US-supported bombardment and blockade of Yemen by Salafi Arabia is killing 130 children a day — through hunger and sickness.
The US has no justification for intervening in Yemen, and stands to gain nothing. It is doing this for the sake of alliance with Salafi Arabia, which is worse than Iran in terms of spreading an extreme and dangerous form of Islam around the world.
US citizens: call for firing Saboteur of Commerce Wilbur Ross.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to defeat the "fetal personhood" clause that SCROTUS stuck incongruously into the tax bill.
The US is closing Palestine's diplomatic office because Palestine has called for the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel's crimes.
The only way it can be allowed to stay open is if Palestine enters "direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel." This is impossible because of Israel's extreme demands for starting negotiations, and because Netanyahu has already said he is not interested.
US claims to be interested in serious negotiations are a pretense since serious negotiations would require applying sanctions to Israel.
Palestine's claims to be working engaged in serious negotiations are also a pretense; those are not happening for the reasons stated above.
The ICC, if it investigates, would consider Palestinian crimes as well as Israeli crimes.
McDonalds workers are striking in the UK.
The SCROTUS tax attacks would give 8 billion dollars to Americans (mostly rich Americans) and 22 billion dollars to wealthy foreign investors.
US intervention built up the violence that now forces thousands to flee their homes in Central America.
UK Trade Minister Lobbied Brazil on Behalf of Oil Giants.
"Republicans have delegitimized taxes in order to delegitimize government."
A BBC TV personality has been taken off the air due to vague, unstated accusations. They don't say what he allegedly did, only that someone considered it "inappropriate".
"Inappropriate" is not concrete enough to be a valid accusation. It stats a judgment call on which people can disagree.
Thus, my response when someone is accused of "inappropriate behavior" is, "Every accused deserves a concrete accusation, which has a clear definition. No one should be punished for a vague and insubstantial accusation. Those should be disregarded."
Flat-Earthers have jumped on the bandwagon of "Don't trust experts; believe only what you see." That approach entails giving up the benefit of science and going back to the ignorance of the stone age.
Almost half of millennials oppose banning assault weapons. Is this the influence of video games?
The GOP Has Done the Impossible: Make Tax Cuts Unpopular.
A study suggests that Tory cutbacks killed 45,000 people in Britain between 2010 and 2014.
This doesn't count people who die because their families can't afford food, heat, or a home.
One driver in Texas put on a bumper sticker that curses the bully's supporters; a right-wing sheriff wants to prosecute him, thus displaying contempt for America's freedom of speech.
A survey found that 40% of Americans distrust "smart" devices that form part of the Internet of Stings.
Rule by plutocratist bullies is addictive to society: as their policies make life harder and more risky for most voters, many voters want to elect a strongman (i.e., a plutocratist bully) to "protect" them.
The bully's hotel in Panama proved an excellent vehicle for others to launder money.
Fake-news bullshit, organized by carefully planned insidious campaigns, is defeating truth.
The current economic system is badly designed, because it persistently leads to bad results. What would it mean to fix it?
Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans celebrated the downfall of Mugabe.
However, it may not make much difference for them except which thieves are in power.
Plastic has reached the deepest ocean trenches, and is damaging animals there.
Germany Bans Children's "Smart" Watches over Surveillance Concerns.
The right to privacy should be not limited to children. We should not allow businesses to tie important activities to snooping, thus to pressure adults to "choose" the snooping to participate in the activities.
Anti-Abortion GOP Congress Shrugs as Program That Helps New Mothers Expires.
In a loss for science, 105 skeletons that are thousands of years old have been "returned" to an indigenous group which will bury them in a secret location.
This skeleton was arbitrarily assigned to a specific indigenous group because it was found on their territory. Today's indigenous cultures did not exist when humans entered Australia; they therefore changed, moved, and subdivided, and some of them disappeared along the way. It is purely arbitrary to relate the 40,000-year-old skeleton of Mungo Man to any specific indigenous group that existed recently.
But what if we could? What if the skeleton were only 2,000 years old, and reliably assigned to a people whose writings we can read? We would say it is for archaeologists to study and belongs in a museum.
There is no reason to let religion triumph over science just because the corpse belonged to an indigenous person in the present-day US or Australia.
The primary value of old human skeletons is what they can contribute to human knowledge of the past. They can contribute this only through scientific study, and we should preserve them for that.
Countries with repressive laws for visitors.
US citizens: Call on Facebook to stop helping antiabortionists spread lies.
Even if you're not a used of Facebook, as I hope you are not, you can still sign the petition.
Everyone: call on Jim Beam to resist the right-wing campaign against Mila Kunis.
An Egyptian is being prosecuted for saying that the water in the Nile is not safe to drink.
I am sure that statement is true, but it is no shame to Egypt. How could any large river that flows past cities be safe to drink from?
What is a shame to Egypt is that it prosecutes people for stating unpleasant facts.
A cartel of big drug companies have driven up the price of insulin in the US so that some diabetics can't afford it. The executive who presided over one of the companies has now been proposed as the Saboteur of Health.
Amnesty: the USA, UK and France must stop providing ammunition for Salafi Arabia's bombardment of Yemen to avoid being guilty of war crimes.
Independent casualty investigators say the US discards information about bombing raids such that it is hard to investigate how many people they killed.
Salafi Arabia is trying to push the US into war with Iran. Why does the bully want to support this?
The bully's choice to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a saboteur who wants to destroy the agency.
Documenting what various fossil fuel companies knew about the danger of global heating, and when, and how they covered it up.
This can provide a basis for suing them.
A small charge on plastic bags to put products in in the UK has cut the quantity used by 85%. Now there is interest in trying to cut the use of other kinds of packaging as well.
The idea may not work as well for other kinds of packaging that are put on by the store before purchase.
Most people condemn poor people that use tricks to get a little more benefits, even though that is likely to mean food for them or their children, but excuse rich people for dodging millions in taxes.
The survey was done in the UK, but I think it would be similar in the US.
The FCC has eliminated several rules that limited radio and TV consolidation.
The troll would like to have just one media company dominating the airwaves, and that one right-wing.
Australian doctors implore the Australian government to allow them to go to Manus Island and treat the boat people Australia dumped there.
Drug Traffickers Taught the Rich How to Hide Money in Tax Havens.
School "security" drills with imitation killers shooting imitation guns occasionally protect some students, but they expose millions of students experiences that can traumatize them.
The last thing parents should ask for is a thug in the school to arrest their children.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been a model, showing how a government regulator can protect the public. Naturally, plutocratist politicians have been fighting to make it ineffective.
Senator Warner, plutocratist Democrat, proposes to deregulate payday loan lenders.
There may be a crash in commercial digital publication, and its visible form is conversion from text to video.
For me, publishing in video means effectively disappearing.
I can't access most video over the internet, because the sites make it depend on nonfree Javascript code; but we can fix that by developing extensions to work around the problem.
But even when there is no technical obstacle, there is always the inherent drawback of video: it takes too long! You can't skim over the uninteresting parts of a video. You have to slog through it.
I will do this, once in a while, when I think something is very interesting. Otherwise, I reject it straight off.
Some major European insurance companies are divesting from fossil fuels.
More than half the guns in the US belong to 3% of the population.
A lawsuit in California challenges the legitimacy of laws against prostitution.
Once, as an aside in a discussion of some other issue, someone used the old euphemism "selling your body". I asked, "If you sell your body, do you die? Do you have to find another body to inhabit?"
It is a mistake to refer to sex work as "selling" one's body, or even "renting" it. (There are science fiction stories in which people do rent out their bodies for others to operate, but that is not possible today.) Sex work is a kind of service.
I don't use that service because sex, for me, is no good unless it is part of an affectionate relationship. I don't need that relationship to be monogamous or permanent, but I need to feel confident that it will continue for a while. I could hardly persuade myself that a prostitute was making love with me from her affection and desire for me, so the service doesn't interest me.
These attitudes of mine are no reason for me to disapprove of the customers of sex workers.
Aung San Suu Kyi is complicit in the atrocities against the Rohingya.
People told me that that was her attitude when I visited Burma in 2015. At the same time, the military's power was quite visible.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the Republican bill, which is also designed to squeeze millions of Americans out of their medical care.
Also object to its attempts to ban abortion. And to tax cuts for the rich.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to drop bogus felony charges against inauguration protesters.
Would-be Latin-American asylum-seekers are suing the US for illegal, dishonest and sometimes violent practices designed to deny refugees the right to apply for asylum.
New South Wales's legislature came within one vote of legalizing assisted suicide, though limited to terminally ill people.
Anyone blocked from suicide by physical incapacity should have the right to ask for help in dying.
Senator Franken is accused of forcibly kissing a woman, and something else.
It is not clear to me what the second action consisted of. Was it grabbing her breasts, or was it making a photo which appeared to show him grabbing her breasts (but without actually doing so)?
I think it was the latter, because if it had been the former, describing the action would have been simple and straightforward.
Even if she found that annoying, it was not groping.
A woman said that Bush I squeezed her ass as they were part of a group photo, in 1992 when he was president and not in a wheelchair.
The (old) Keystone pipeline has leaked 200,000 gallons of oil. This is one reason not to build the larger Keystone XL pipeline.
The main reason not to build it is to keep oil in the ground. To avoid disaster we need to keep 80% of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and we may as well start with the highly polluting tar sands oil that would be shipped through the Keystone XL pipeline.
Giving fairly small amounts of cash to poor people, with no strings, turns out to reduce illness and help children go to school.
The fossil fuel industry already has a lot of influence on the world climate negotiations, but Ukraine, acting for the US, thinks that is not enough. It wants to invite individual companies to participate directly.
Many dissenting views face being banned at US universities because others consider them "dehumanizing" of someone.
I disagree with most of those views (except those of Erika Christakis, who advocated only freedom of expression), but I defend the right to advocate them. Our respect for freedom of speech is measured by our willingness to defend the expression of views we disagree with.
The FDA approved a pill that permits a radio-based system to verify that the patient took the pill.
These pills suppress the patient's liberty. I consider them legitimate in the special case where the patient would otherwise be involuntarily hospitalized for psychosis.
Aside from that, it should be illegal to sell them.
Prime Minister Ardern of New Zealand did not kowtow to the bully.
Norway's state investment fund is considering divesting from oil and natural gas.
Israel is evicting Palestinian shepherds from their lands near the Jordan River. This could be preparation for annexing that land.
The ACLU made Sherwood, Arkansas, stop its practice of dumping fines and jail and more fines on poor people.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is prosecuting students, faculty and alumni for "trespassing" after a nonviolent protest on campus.
The UK's Human Rights Act is being as an excuse for various British territories to conceal who gets the income received by front companies established in them.
One corrective measure would be to tax income paid to foreign front companies that don't reveal this information. The tax can be levied on whoever pays them either dividends or business expenses.
However, the UK should revise its human rights act so it does not cover this issue.
Truth-defying discourse means anyone can claim anything, based on nothing but prejudice, and per influence is based on per identity rather than on any grounds.
I won't use the term "post-truth" because that declares truth-defying discourse the eventual victor. I think we should continue resisting it.
Deforestation in Queensland, permitted by a government bought by business, is endangering the Great Barrier Reef.
Politicians in several countries are now denying that air pollution makes people sick and can kill them.
Some web sites send Javascript code to collect all the user's input to be able to reproduce the whole session.
If you use LibreJS, it will block that malicious Javascript code.
Systems that try to do "extreme vetting" of immigrants to detect possible terrorists will flag a large number of false positives, and they will inevitably carry out racial, ethnic and religious profiling.
Hope Not Hate sued a UK right-wing politician for libel after he claimed, falsely, that the organization tended to "pursue violent and undemocratic means."
The politician was compelled to state publicly that that was not true.
Saboteur Zinke has undermined protection of elephants by allowing American elephant hunters to bring trophy heads back to the US.
Drought and famine in the Congo have forced 4 million people to flee.
The article says nothing about whether this relates to global heating, but since global heating makes droughts more likely in many areas, it is probable a priori that this is global heating at work.
As Africa's population is increasing rapidly, and global heating will soon start reducing agricultural production, it is clear that in a few decades Africa will not be able to feed its population. A big decrease in the birth rate is urgently needed to avoid mass starvation.
Cambodia has become a one-party state, terminating its attempt at democracy.
A four-day work week would reduce many of the problems people suffer, including stress, lack of sleep, and isolation in the family.
Alas, this goes in the opposite direction to what plutocrats want: to knock down wages and make poor people work long hours.
Women accuse Moore of hounding and pressuring them for dates.
Opium production in Afghanistan has reached a record level, and now Afghanis are becoming heroin addicts.
Pence claimed that the bully's campaign didn't talk with Wikileaks. This is known to be false.
If Pence didn't know about the contacts, he should not have claimed to know.
House Approves $700B "Cash Cow for Weapons Companies" -— But Single Payer [Medical Care] "Too Expensive".
This is just one of several ways in which these "military tribunals" are unjust. Every defendant deserves a real trial in a real court, fit to separate the innocent from the guilty.
However, those who are guilty should not be executed. The death penalty is an injustice in itself.
Those found innocent should be freed, because imprisonment without trial is tyranny.
Along with marriage for same-sex couples, how about civil partnership for different-sex couples?
Now It's Official: the Less You Have, the More Austerity Will Take from You.
Freeing fundamentalist Mormon women from the power of the sect leader should not imply evicting them from their homes and leaving them isolated in penury.
Israel and Salafi Arabia do not officially have diplomatic relations, but in practice they are allies against Iran.
I can't see anything about Iran that justifies war, or proxy war, against it.
Zimbabwe: Was Mugabe's Fall a Result of China Flexing Its Muscle?
The US has done this all around the world, for instance in Honduras and Haiti, so it would not be surprising if China did likewise.
The speaker of Indonesia's parliament has been accused of corruption.
He crashed his car and was admitted to a hospital with injuries.
Activists call for a global tax on fossil fuel companies to pay the costs of damage done by global heating.
Focusing on today's damage and helping today's victims is a fundamental mistake — the long-term damage will make today's damage look like a pin-prick.
If a tax established for the purpose of helping today's victims is heavy enough, it might have the effect of discouraging fossil fuel use. It might thus do the necessary long-term job; but we should not presume it will be heavy enough to achieve that.
If not, we had better tax the fossil fuel companies based on the damage that they will cause.
The bully toured Asia, and fawned on tyrants and killers that seem tougher than he is.
Note how the author of the article presented the TPP as something unquestionably desirable. Don't fall for that plutocracy!
Stiglitz sees the bully as a kind of fascist, and fears he will impose repression or start a nuclear war.
However, Stiglitz agrees with the bully on one thing: that NAFTA is harmful.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Brett Talley, evaluated as totally unqualified to be a US judge.
US citizens: Oppose SCROTUS's plan to exclude pesticides from the protections of the Endangered Species Act.
Pesticides endangered bald eagles and orcas.
The Israel lobby in Britain has recruited 4/5 of the Conservative MPs, but it normally exercises its power behind the scenes. The scandal of Minister Patel's "private" visit to Israel (part of lobbying her) shows its normal practices.
Israel refused to accept a visit by members of the European Parliament because they have considered the idea of sanctions against the occupation and blockade of Palestine.
"Jewish-American leaders are slowly beginning to understand just how vast the gap is between their values and those represented by the [extreme right-wing] Israeli government."
They are the Israeli equivalent of the bully and his supporters, but they can do more damage because only a small minority opposes them.
Now that real anti-semitism shows its face in the US, Congress must resist the pressure to mislabel criticism of Israel as anti-semitism.
Norway has given nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu and his wife permission to move there. Will Israel allow him to leave?
Israel has blocked the UN Special Rapporteur from visiting occupied
Palestine, but he has condemned the apartheid occupation regime (not
using that name) and the blockade of Gaza, and endorsed sanctions (not
using that name) to pressure Israel to end these practices.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-01 because the old link was broken.]
Israel is exporting its occupation tactics and systems to the US for use by the plutocrats' occupation of poor people and racial minorities.
A woman who was a client of lawyer Roy Moore says he grabbed her ass as she was leaving his office.
A lawyer's consultation with a client is not a sexual encounter in which one could tentatively take one more step. What Moore did on that occasion was simply wrong.
That Moore was married was irrelevant — this would have been equally wrong if he had been single at the time. Let's not support prudish pressure for monogamy.
Congress has set up a very inconvenient system for reporting sexual harassment, so inconvenient it seems to be designed to discourage reports. A bill proposes to reform that.
Republicans are exploring various excuses to kick some Americans off Medicaid.
GOP Tax Bill Would Trigger $25 Billion in Cuts to Medicare, Warns CBO.
That's 25 billion per year.
AT&T said that if it gets a 3-billion-a year tax cut, it will put one billion, just once, into domestic phone service.
Great deal for AT&T, bad deal for the USA.
Forget the Nordic Diet. Try their Tax Plan.
Congress is considering a bill to deny Israel the use of US funds to pay the military to mistreat Palestinian children.
That is a very narrow limitation, but it is a start.
I suppose Israel's lobbyists can defeat it, but by doing so they will reveal what they do with US funds.
SCROTUS have now decided to make individual tax cuts expire in 2025, but the corporation tax cuts would be permanent.
Roy Moore's wife posted an edited version of a letter of support for the primary in August and passed it off as recent.
If Roy Moore himself were not complicit in this, it would be his obligation to correct the falsehood.
Pence, the vice-bully, lies repeatedly about even small things. He may not be as brash a bullshitter as the bully, but he isn't more honest.
Russia used an estimated 150,000 twitter accounts to send messages of ethnic hatred before the UK's referendum about leaving the EU.
Researchers have used genetic modification to create a variety of banana that is safe from an incurable and unstoppable fungus.
I have no objection to this kind of genetic modification, assuming the modified plant does no harm to people or wildlife — and the chance that it would do that harm is tiny.
However, I fear it will carry devastating patent pollution that would make it dangerous to grow other than for giant plantations.
Pakistani thugs attacked sit-in protesters.
The protesters demand harsh prosecution of blasphemy — a despicable policy because it tramples freedom of speech. However, they too have freedom of speech, including the freedom to peacefully advocate this policy.
Transcanada cancelled two planned pipelines in Canada. Short-sighted businesses say the cancellation was a disaster.
In fact, it could help avoid disaster, but only if it reduces the extraction of fossil fuels, especially tar sands oil. I have a sad suspicion that the reason for this cancellation was that Transcanada now believes it can build the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline, so it no longer needs a substitute.
A landlord company has preemptively prepared to evict all its tenants when impending changes in the welfare system cause many of them to fall behind on rent.
Wikileaks used to serve the cause of exposing corruption and lies. Assange has brought it down to the level of corrupt lies.
The bias in the electoral college is not specifically due to small Republican-leaning states.
That doesn't mean the electoral college doesn't slant presidential elections. We have seen two Republican presidents win in the electoral college while losing the popular vote. The only conclusion we can draw from this analysis is that the slant isn't specifically due to the small states.
It's possible that neither of those Republicans would have "won" the election if not for Republican voter-suppression.
Students protested in London demanding higher taxes on the rich.
A woman in London was ostracized by a religious sect; a court then denied her the right to see her children because they might be ostracized too if she did.
This ruling gave too much power to any group motivated to ostracize people. If other people hurt your children because they hate you, you are not responsible for that harm — those who do it are responsible.
A military coup has removed Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe. He will be replaced by his former "chief enforcer".
Perhaps this means only a change in the name of the tyrant.
The solidarity economy is making progress in the US, especially among minorities.
Australians voted by a wide margin to legalize same-sex marriage.
If the bully tries to start a nuclear war, the US military could reject the order as illegal. But can we rely on soldiers to do this?
The UK is trying to block the ICC from prosecuting the crime of aggressive war.
The motive, apparently, is to protect Tony B'liar from prosecution for aggression in Iraq.
A Brazilian supreme court judge calls for legalizing drugs to take away the power that drug gangs exercise.
"Russia is meddling in western politics as it has nothing to lose."
The US and Europe could do various punishing things to Russia, if they were united. But what is really needed is not punishment of Russia, but rather to pressure Russia into stopping this meddling. However, there is no way to make a deal with Russia that includes stopping, because there is never clear proof that Russia is doing this. It is always a matter of surmise and probabilities.
US prosecutors systematically pressure unauthorized immigrants to sign away the right to ask for asylum as part of plea bargains.
Russia posted a faked photo to "prove" that the US supported PISSI in Syria.
Congress has a sneaky bipartisan plan to reduce the regulation of some big finance companies.
The ostensible reason is to help the smaller community banks, but naturally it benefits the big banks more.
Appliances that respond to voice control manipulate people's feelings.
"Let's be clear: Muslims [viewed collectively] are neither good nor bad. We're just human."
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, prisoner of Iran, has become a diplomatic pawn.
I am concerned that elevating her importance to the UK might convince Iran that she is a valuable hostage for concessions.
I can't assume that she is innocent of the charges against her; but if Iran won't give her a fair and speedy trial, she might as well be innocent as far as justice is concerned.
A bribery scandal has hit the Indian Supreme Court.
Sessions is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation.
I don't find the idea inherently outrageous; the Clintons or their foundation could well have done something illegal or wrong. However, I don't trust Republicans to do this honestly. I expect they will twist the law to make mountains out of molehills — as they did with the Clinton emails.
A Peruvian farmer, whose farm faces the threat of flooding due to a melting glacier, has sued a fossil fuel company in Germany for contributing to that danger.
It is possible nowadays to estimate the fraction of present or likely damages due to global heating in any place that are the responsibility of any particular emitter.
AI security systems pipe video from cameras to servers which use machine learning programs to try to recognize threats. People worry that these secret, nonfree AI programs are biased.
A company that sends such data to someone else's server to be analyzed is making itself the victim of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute).This is equivalent, in denying that company the control of its own computing, to running a nonfree program.
The article doesn't mention the worst threat of these systems: videos transmitted to a server can be recorded by the NSA, which makes this a very dangerous massive surveillance system.
Of course, we know better than to trust the NSA to be "good guys". Don't be a sucker!
Operating a video camera that is connected to a network, or that can make the video available other than locally, should be forbidden by law except when authorized by a specific court order.
On the other hand, if the camera is locally connected to a computer that runs a free machine learning to analyze the video, and which doesn't send the video anywhere else, that seems basically legitimate as long as the program's behavior is not biased. Given that the program is free, it will be possible to check for bias and correct it.
Jacques Pauw, author of a book which accused South Africa's State Security Agency of crimes, is being prosecuted for revealing secrets.
No word yet of any intention to investigate the crimes described in the book.
Capitalism in its current form is totally broken: mergers have nearly eliminated competition, and unmeasured externalities are bigger than the total economy that's included in markets.
The rich divert so much wealth into tax dodging that they get most of the economic growth that occurs.
Under these circumstances, the rest of us have no interest in economic growth.
Bernie Sanders: We Must End Global Oligarchy.
Killer robots are an easier challenge than driver-less cars, say those proposing the UN set up a treaty to ban the development of the killer robots.
A book exposing Chinese lines of influence in Australia was dropped by its publisher from fears that the Chinese government might sue the publisher for defamation.
Is Australian defamation law too lenient towards plaintiffs? Why should Australia allow foreign powers to sue in this way?
"American Apparel" now makes clothing outside the US. Its new union-busting owner, Gildan, makes clothes in sweatshops that work people into the ground.
Everyone: call on REI to give its staff a raise to $15 an hour.
Greenpeace is suing Norway for plans to explore the Barents sea for oil.
Don't be fooled by Canada's green rhetoric: tar sands mining is the worst of the worst, combining CO2 pollution and toxic pollution.
We need to work out how humans will prosper in a world of robots.
The example of hunter gatherers shows that people can be contented with life without having to work very much or very hard. But they did that in a highly egalitarian society, with no billionaire oligarchs.
A US appeals court allowed a limited version of the bully's partial ban on Muslim visitors.
It has been cut back enough that it won't often lead to gross injustice.
Miniature farm robots could deposit pesticides only on specific infested plants.
If this enables the use of much less pesticide, I am for that. But that doesn't make it wise or safe to use neonicotinoids.
SCROTUS want to weaken the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Making it easier for businesses and harder for people in wheelchairs — isn't that just what you'd expect from Republicans?
There was a time when I had trouble walking, due to a knee injury. There was a time when I broke an ankle and needed to use two crutches or else a wheelchair. These problems of mine were temporary, but they taught me to appreciate the importance of the ADA, for those who are temporarily disabled and even more so for those who are permanently disabled.
If teenage criminals are not afraid of being jailed, they won't be afraid of being jailed for longer. What we need to do is get them something better than crime to live for.
Washington DC's "independent consultant" to investigate violence by thugs at the bully's inauguration appears to be insufficiently independent of the thugs.
House GOP Tax Plan Would Hit Grad Students With Massive Tax Hike.
A woman accused Roy Moore of trying to push her into sex and then threatening to use his power as DA to silence her if she told anyone.
On this occasion he seems to have been too slow to take no for an answer, as the woman thought he was about to rape her.
Roy Moore, as an Alabama judge, often argued to interpret rape shield laws laws to favor the accused rapists.
A thug shot a knife-armed man over and over, and is being sued by the man's relatives. An appeals court ruled he is not entitled to immunity.
I can understand how a person can become enraged and continue shooting someone threatening even after that person has ceased to be dangerous. But people should not do a job that involves carrying a gun unless they have enough self control not to do that. Once Zion was on the ground, he with his knife was not an immediate threat to anyone; Higgens should have stopped shooting immediately then.
The Republicans' tax attacks favor people who get money from investments over people who work for their income.
The UK itself has laws that serve great for tax dodging.
TSA employees fail to find weapons or bombs a lot more than half the time in tests.
New technology will lead to a large increase in US oil extraction in the coming decade. This will lead to economic pressure on the US government not to "throw away the investment" by not extracting all that oil.
Scientists forecast "widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity" if we don't cut back emissions.
Do we want to "throw away" all the investment we have made in our civilization? Burning the oil can do that. To avoid it, we need to leave 80% of the known reserves — as of a few years ago — in the ground.
The details of the private Twitter messages between the bully's campaign and Wikileaks.
The tax attacks would mean 72 billion dollars in tax cuts for the rich in 2018. Here are some other things the US could do with that money.
The bully is planning to make the IRS an unofficial enforcement-free zone.
Sessions is not planning to name a special investigator for the Clinton Foundation.
US citizens: oppose the nomination of a saboteur to head the Council on Environmental Quality.
US citizens: call on Congress to let veterans have medical marijuana.
Polish President Condemns Far-Right Scenes at Independence Day March.
Donald Trump Jr. asked Wikileaks to help the troll's campaign, and Wikileaks responded by begging for some sort of deal.
The UK government wants parliament to approve a hypothetical future business-supremacy treaty with the US in advance, regardless of what the threaty might say.
LA thugs have worked out a system of hand signals so they can plant evidence undetected by the mikes on body cameras. Then, just once, they tripped up and were caught.
These uniformed thugs are a menace to society. For our safety, we must prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.
A remote-control sex toy was found to make audio recordings of the conversation between the two users.
If someone is served ads by phone from the major advertising networks, it is easy to buy ads that will tell you when that person goes to a certain place and how that person uses apps.
A single "like" on Facebook can give substantial information about the used who clicked on that.
The troll's nominee for Saboteur of Health is a pharma executive.
Scottish activists for Palestinians vindicated by a ruling that thugs unjustly impeded their peaceful protest.
Pension funds should swear off fossil fuel investments, and some have done so.
Conservative Governments Really Do Kill People.
In the UK, this comes to tens of thousands of people.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says Australia must bring refugees to Australia from Manus and Nauru.
Information on that organization.
From the Everglades to Kilimanjaro Global Heating Is Destroying World Wonders.
The latest UK veiled welfare cuts are pushing many families into losing their homes or going without food.
You shouldn't have a third baby, or a first baby, if you would need public assistance to take care of it. However, punishing children for being born in such families makes no sense, either in terms of justice (the children didn't choose) or in terms of future well-being (making them grow up stunted, physically or mentally, is bad for society as well as for them personally). Discouraging burdensome reproduction has to be done in other ways.
Many Britons will demand exit from the EU as long as UK austerity leaves them at a disadvantage compared with workers coming from other EU countries.
The root of this problem is that the EU favors business, on the balance, over workers. In an imaginary labor shortage, a Europe-wide labor market could pressure businesses to compete to offer high wages and benefits, but in the real circumstances the effect is to help businesses push wages down.
Polish neo-Nazis call for killing Muslims and the government smiles.
Cities in the Pacific Northwest are using zoning laws to block fossil fuel pipelines.
The US needs to limit ownership of some kinds of firearms and take them away from people.
The SCROTUS tax attacks run afoul of the "Byrd rule" which requires 60 votes in the senate for a law that would cause a lasting increase in the spending deficit.
It is ironic that this rule was imposed by Republicans who like to use the deficit as a tool to cut spending programs that help non-rich Americans. Their concern about the deficit evaporates when it comes to helping rich people.
Since refugees in Britain are kept destitute, even a fine for littering can cost more money than they have, and result in their being convicted of the crime of nonpayment, leading to their deportation.
It's like the US money machine that squeezes fines out of poor people for being too poor to pay fines.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to co-sponsor S. 1539, which would ban those convicted of domestic violence from buying or owning guns.
US citizens: call on Congress to renew the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment whereby the US government does not interfere with medical marijuana legalized by states.
Manus Island Police Begin Destroying Shelters Housing Refugees.
1/4 of the Rohingya children that fled to Bangladesh are so malnourished that they are likely to die from it.
Let's regulate Facebook and Google's addictive technology, especially now that it threatens privacy and democracy. We can impose requirements on such business to protect society's needs.
Their pressure is like a current that is hard to swim against, but you can swim perpendicular to the current and get out of it. You can come do as I do, getting your news and political commentary from other sites. Facebook and Google collect no data from me.
Egypt is arresting people and disappearing them; often that means killing them.
Estonia's new copyright "compromise" takes the extreme repression from France and Spain and calls it a "compromise".
US climate activists, representing states and cities, asked to be admitted to the Bonn climate conference as an alternative US delegation.
The conference ought to recognize that the official US delegation is there only for sabotage, and expel it.
Some fields of science have sunk to such low quality of research that most of the published results fail to replicate. For the sake of knowledge we need to fix this.
A secret appeals court decision ordered a site to identify the employees that posted reviews of a certain employer.
The motive is a good one — that employer is facing a criminal investigation — but the danger that employees will be identified to employers they criticize threatens to chill the system entirely.
Russian trolls worked to distract Americans' attention from the troll's
"grab their pussies" recording.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-01 because the old link was broken.]
UK thugs were fired for expressing their frustration by suggesting that they wished a troubled adolescent would be raped.
If the rich elite keep grinding most people into poverty through dooH niboR, it is likely to lead to violence against them.
We must add this to global heating, which will continue leading to violence — the only uncertainty is whether any of the world will escape that violence.
The saboteurs want to drill for fossil fuels all around Alaska.
Citizens of Massachusetts: tell your state rep to support sentencing reform and reject increases in government surveillance.
US citizens: phone certain Republican congresscritters to oppose even one penny of tax cuts for rich people and rich corporations.
George Blake became a Russian spy after he saw how the US Air Force bombed civilians all across North Korea.
I can understand the feelings that this must have inspired. However, I know that the Communist regimes have often done even worse things.
Sanders calls for specific reforms in the Democratic Party.
Hunter-gatherers developed a finely-honed system for discouraging man from thinking they were superior to the rest of the band. We have forms of the same mechanisms, but we don't use them as effectively as our ancestors did.
Business privatized New Orleans schools after the hurricane there, and it was a disaster. Now they plan to do the same thing in Puerto Rico.
Teachers protested peacefully, demanding that the imposed government reopen schools whose buildings are sound. The imposed government arrested them.
FEMA has failed to hand out tarpaulins in Puerto Rico to cover the tops of the buildings whose roofs were torn off by the hurricane.
Winter in New Zealand is 1 month shorter nowadays than it was 100 years ago. This can knock everything out of whack.
The US has changed the same way.
America's Cruel Way to Punish Poor Debtors: Take Away Their Driver's License. This can mean a life sentence to debt bondage.
Young people are now suing to stop greenhouse gas emissions in several countries.
The US is running an event at the Bonn climate conference — to promote fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Increasing evidence shows that neonicotinoid pesticides endanger pollinators. A Tory minister now says he will further restrict their use and supports an EU-wide ban on using them outside of greenhouses.
US officials show no sign of understanding this.
US citizens: if your congresscritter is a Democrat, call on per to read the Democratic Party autopsy and respond to it.
You can sign this without running the page's nonfree Javascript code using the Salsalabs workaround.
The thugs of Hyderabad have taken the homeless people off the streets for "rehabilitation" because the bully's daughter is going to visit.
Maybe some of them could use rehabilitation for some reason. But surely some of them are homeless and begging simply because they are poor.
Jelani Maraj (who I had never heard of) could be imprisoned for a long time for "sexual assault". What does that concretely mean?
Due to the vagueness of the term "sexual assault" together with the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as "rape" even if they are willing, we cannot tell from this article what sort of acts Maraj was found to have committed. So we can't begin to judge whether those acts were wrong.
I see at least three possibilities. Perhaps those acts really constituted rape — it is a possibility. Or perhaps the two had sex willingly, but her parents freaked out and demanded prosecution. Or, intermediate between those two, perhaps he pressured her into having sex, or got her drunk.
The Zetas drug gang massively bribed politicians and thugs in Mexico while carrying out lots of murders.
The "War on Drugs" fuels all this. Help get that poor war off drugs!
Atlanta is using eminent domain power to force blacks out of their homes, to support gentrification projects.
The troll's fawning to China was acknowledged with a pat on the head.
[The overreaction to] terrorism makes it hard for banks to get your money to people in crisis.
Muslim charities find it difficult to operate in the US. Even when they go to great lengths to follow the rules, they are shut down.
Whether his article was correct or flawed, Professor Mark Jacobson does wrong to sue the lead author of another article which claims it was flawed.
One UK MP has accused another of "inappropriate behavior", and the article gives us enough detail to see exactly what "inappropriate" means.
It means sending her a letter, once in a while, asking to go out with her. There was no pressure in them, as I see it. On the other hand, some might say that the high frequency of his letters — five in a mere 20 years — constituted pressure.
The vague word "inappropriate" makes it easy to put people in the wrong for asking for a date. We must reject vague accusations like that.
Aside from being a direct injustice to specific men, and sowing fear among many more, this distortion also wrongs the many women who have experienced rape, groping, or threats and pressure for sex. Surely most of those complaints are valid. Exaggerations like this one will undermine the response to those valid complaints.
By contrast, what he is accused of doing to another woman, rubbing his crotch against her, went too far. You mustn't do that to people who have not given a direct invitation.
One aspect of the fake news phenomenon is that people circulate articles on "social media" as a way of showing allegiance to an identity. Whether the article is likely to be true and correct is a secondary matter.
The difference between what they do on "social media" and what I do on stallman.org is that I'm not trying to win approval by demonstrating adherence to an identity. Also, I have some heuristics for avoiding false claims — not perfect, but they help.
What the author says "we" do nowadays does not apply to me, and I hope you know better than to act like that. I post about the things I want to tell people. What I wish to keep private, I don't post about.
It is too bad the article falls into the confused conceptual habits of referring to publications as "content" and to reading them as "consumption". I think people think using those terms makes them sophisticated. But that doesn't make the point invalid.
1000 immigrants who were given permission to work, under DACA, rallied in Washington for renewal of that program.
During the past 1500 years, natural climate changes caused social upheaval. We are on the path to cause heating bigger than any of those natural changes.
The effects will endanger everyone — even wealthy regions can encounter devastation it cannot cope with.
A rational allocation of funds to the climate danger would be to put almost all the funds into curbing the greenhouse gas level. (This in addition to cutting off all subsidies to fossil fuels.) When a region is devastated in a way that is likely to repeat in a few years, we need to move the population elsewhere rather than rebuild in place.
This gives us the best chance of avoiding global disaster, and that must be our priority.
Comcast, which profits from an effective monopoly on internet subscriptions in Colorado City, spent $200,000 to campaign to stop the city from even considering the possibility.
The city needed to have a referendum to begin considering the issue because of a Colorado law purchased by the main ISPs. This is an instance of how business corrupts our governments at every level.
Americans, when you see an expensive ad campaign for any political question, I suggest you suspect that the ad campaign advocates a course of surrender to business — so, if you're not an expert, vote against the ad campaign.
Dear Senators Portman & Blumenthal: What Should Blogs Do If SESTA Passes?
Tamil men say that Sri Lanka's prison thugs raped and tortured them when they were prisoners.
Former senator Feingold: US Campaign Finance Laws Resemble Legalized Bribery. We Must Reform Them.
The troll's Saboteur of Medicaid wants to encourage states to impose work requirements on their Medicaid programs.
Based on the UK's example, we can expect that these work requirements will be enforced in an intentionally error-prone way that errs in the direction of cutting people off.
The bully is dismantling the regulatory part of the US government, endangering the safety, health, and welfare of all Americans.
Some men that don't commit rape do encourage or tolerate rape, and that is a substantial part of the problem.
I agree with the overall point of the article, but I should make a few points.
Tax dodging is corruption and it makes democracy rotten.
Tax Avoidance May Be Legal But It's Bankrupting Our Social Order.
Tillerson, during his career at Exxon, was the manager of two different offshore subsidiaries that were set up for tax dodging.
US citizens: call on US bank regulators to cut off Wells Fargo.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 1-866-665-4470 and call for removing the clause in the tax bill that declares fetuses to be persons (and abortion to be murder).
A shortage of labor in some fields is starting to give some British workers a raise.
The WTO has issued guidelines for farms to reduce use of antibiotics. I think we need to make laws about this, rather than depend on farms to act voluntarily.
SCROTUS plans a "Public Lands and Waters Giveaway to Dirty Industry."
Nation That Says It Can't Afford Medicare for All Has Spent $5.6 Trillion on War Since 2011.
War can be though of as negative medical care, since it creates the sort of problems that medicine aims to correct.
dooH niboR is accelerating in the US, as billionaires get richer faster than ever before.
Many employers give Equifax data about their employees, including their salaries.
This should not be allowed.
FEMA is unable to help people in Puerto Rico because its methods assume functioning infrastructure, and because its staff can't speak Spanish.
It seems that FEMA designed its methods for rather small disasters.
Britain kidnaped dissidents for Gaddafi, then based on what Gaddafi's torturers made them say, put various people under house arrest incommunicado.
Football fans in Hong Kong shouted their rebuke when China's national anthem was played. "We are Hong Kong."
If the football association demands fans give their names, Hong Kongers should boycott the football matches. A few months of low attendance will make the football association back down.
Senator Graham admitted that the SCROTUS tax plan is a gift to the billionaires that the Republicans work for.
It also includes a ban on abortions, although that has nothing to do with tax.
The American racial distinction between "black" and "white" was set up in 1676 so that all the poor people in Virginia wouldn't unite against the rich plantation owners.
By telling some poor people that they were "white", the plantation owners convinced the poor "whites" to identify with the masters, the plantation owners.
Remember when the troll said he had saved the jobs at Carrier's factory? They are dribbling away.
SCROTUS want to make Puerto Rico into a low-wage haven for companies, especially planet-roasting companies.
A former president of Facebook admits that the system was designed to exploit the "vulnerability" of users.
Please don't let yourself be used by Facebook. Especially, don't let it use you to get data about your friends. (Giving data about your enemies might be ok.)
The ACLU has accused the thugs of Kern County of frequent unjustified violence, sometimes deadly violence.
The bully is a coward at heart; in China he accepted Xi's demand for a press conference with no questions.
Asking the bully questions is about as useless as asking Xi questions, but it remains the case that a good US president would not have agreed to this.
Three Richest Americans Now Own More Wealth Than Bottom Half of US Combined: Report.
Progressive candidates won many races this week, showing that the Democratic Party must turn progressive in order to win.
Chinese dissidents face extra repression because the troll is visiting.
The right-wing bigots worked with billionaires, and perhaps with Russia, to make the bully president. Now they will work to protect him from Mueller's investigation.
The owner of the New England Patriots (a football team) owns a Bermuda company set up not to disclose his income.
Presumably this is tax dodging.
Bloomberg's war on coal now targets European coal-burning electric generators.
Ceasing to burn coal means at least less toxic pollution to breathe today. But in order for it to mean less greenhouse emission, we must avoid replacing it with burning natural gas.
Australian protesters face criminal charges for dropping banners from the roof of the Sydney opera house.
The repression of protesters in Australia is not as severe as what it did to the boat people, but it reflects the same general attitude.
Tax havens are not a fringe phenomenon. They are at the center of dooH niboR. We suffer lack of medical care, hunger, homelessness, occasionally even collapsing bridges, because haven't made rich people and businesses pay their proper share of taxes.
Sometimes their tax dodging is lawful; sometimes it is a crime. I consider that a secondary detail, because either way the primary point is that we have to put a stop to it.
Who is morally to blame — the system, or those who abuse it? Both are!
The citizens of Maine voted to adopt ranked choice voting. The legislators passed a law to get rid of it. Now the citizens are organizing to veto that.
The NHS Is Still Standing. But Underfunding Will Soon Bring It Down.
We need global standards for safety and minimum wage, to protect subcontracted workers.
But we also need global mechanisms for enforcing workers rights — for instance, their right to receive their pay. I think we need to limit imports from countries that don't effectively make employers pay their workers.
Sometimes the US doesn't adequately require employers to pay their workers. In some situations, we might want to require employers to post a bond to pay the workers if the company fails to. Or we might want to make the marketing front companies that sell the imported goods responsible for paying subcontracted workers.
Women who report sexual harassment often face harsh retaliation, even blacklisting.
The principal information obtained from the "paradise" papers.
Australia gave a coal plant a subsidy of $117 million, and the owner then moved a billion to tax-dodging investment.
It looks like the plant didn't really need a subsidy to keep operating.
Many prestigious US universities have invested in tax dodging.
Puerto Rico's imposed, unelected government is trying to use the hurricane's devastation as an excuse to privatize the schools. However, people in some towns are reopening their local public schools.
The troll is driving diplomats out of the foreign service. To make up for this loss will take many years, maybe decades.
Due to the hairtrigger mentality, when children are playing sports and collide and a hand touches what will someday be an erogenous zone, the staff treat this as a horrible incident.
We see the weasel-word "inappropriate" at work here.
Mexican women who miscarry a fetus can be imprisoned of murdering a baby.
Religious fanatics have done similar things in the US.
UK train companies are excited about new methods of selling tickets, that clearly will make users identify themselves.
The troll remains illegitimate as president. Merely not being impeached is insufficient to change that.
Ivory Coast and Ghana have made plans to curb deforestation for cocoa plantations.
US Military Consistently Fails to Report Domestic Violence to Gun Database, Senators Say. This is what enabled the recent Texas massacre.
Prosecutor Stephanie Morales, who prosecuted and convicted a thug for killing a black, has been reelected by a landslide.
Saboteur of Commerce Wilbur Ross appears to have exaggerated his assets in order to get onto Forbes magazine's list of the richest people.
The Charter of the Forest, in 1217, made the wilderness areas of England a commons that all could use.
A GOP congresscritter admitted publicly that the tax attacks are demanded by his rich funders.
A method for two parties to draw up fair electoral districts such that neither one gets an advantage from them.
This assumes that the parties are equally good at figuring out what is or isn't advantageous to them. That may be a valid assumption nowadays.
It also assumes that there are only two significant parties. In the US, some local officials are being elected by the Green Party and perhaps others.
Harvey Weinstein employed private investigators to pry into the lives of women he thought might accuse him.
The main effect was to frighten them, since they believed he could sabotage their careers.
US citizens: call on Mattis to make a plan for peace in Afghanistan.
US citizens: tell the Troll to send aid to Puerto Rico.
US citizens: endorse the "Preventing Preemptive War in North Korea Act of 2017."
Disney punished the LA Times for negative coverage by barring its reporters from movie previews. Many other reporters responded by saying they wouldn't go either, and Disney backed down.
The CEO of Disney seems to have political ambitions. Perhaps he was inspired by the bully. I don't think we should elect him.
The Labour Party grudgingly readmitted Moshé Machover, after many members protested that his support for Palestinians' rights is not antisemitism.
My mother told me about the antisemitism she experienced as a girl. After Easter, her fellow students, some of them normally her friends, would run after her as a mob shouting "Christ-killer."
In the 1930s, antisemitism in the US was not hidden. There were clubs that did not allow Jews in, and places Jews were not allowed to live. (This partially resembled the way blacks were treated.) After the holocaust, antisemitism became socially unacceptable, so I have hardly ever encountered it. Maybe the bully and his friends have brought it back.
Supporting the rights of Palestinians is not antisemitism.
The US stock market has gone up a lot — but that doesn't mean good news for most Americans. It means that dooH niboR is very successful.
Most massacres in the US are carried out with guns designed for war. Why does the US keep allowing people to buy and own them?
Thousands of South Koreans protested the arrival of the bully. They don't want him starting a war in their country.
An attempt to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions of meat and dairy companies shows they are in the big leagues, comparable with some wealthy countries.
Furthermore, they operate with government subsidies and undercut small farms around the world. These small farms aren't so dependent on fossil fuels.
Although Bono said he didn't know about his latest exposed investment in a tax-dodging scheme, U2 set up such a scheme for its own profits in 2006 and faced a protest for this in 2011.
The Country Music Awards threatened to eject any journalists that brought up issues such as gun control, or the murder with guns of country music fans.
Mexican soldiers carrying out the "war on drugs" are hardly ever prosecuted when they violate human rights, and those few who are prosecuted are hardly ever convicted.
Senator Sanders and some Democrats want to investigate the methods of tax dodging that are facilitated by the tax-dodging industry.
US citizens: call on Congress not to pass any tax laws before an investigation of the tax-dodging practices revealed by the "paradise" papers.
The "new home" for refugees that Australia dumped on Manus, which they are bring forced to move to, is not finished and has no running water.
Some US officials have taken up the policy of not mentioning the names of mass murderers, or hardly ever.
I support that policy — that's why I generally don't refer to the bully by name. He is a mass murderer too.
Big banks are involved in tax-dodging through tax havens.
Big US political donors are caught in tax dodging. Mainly Republicans but also a Democrat.
The American Chemical Society won a US court order for ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub.
This won't stop determined users from reaching Sci-Hub, but it takes the US legal system one step further into general repression for the copyright industry.
The perpetrators of massacres are often guilty of domestic violence. If we stop those people from buying guns, it could mean fewer massacres.
South Africa's government is trying to quash the publication of a book exposing the corruption of the government.
Salafi Arabia says that the missile fired by Houthis from Yemen is "direct aggression" by Iran.
What, then, were the thousands of bombs that Salafi Arabia dropped on Yemen? Could even a fool take such a biased accusation seriously?
Alas, I know of one fool who will.
Salafi Arabia has imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid into Yemen.
Spanish thugs have brought about prosecution against the humor magazine El Jueves for a satirical article. This shows that the arrogance of Spanish thugs is comparable to that of American thugs. It also demonstrates the repressiveness of the Spanish state.
As the article says, "Just because you're offended doesn’t mean you're right." That applies to any kind of offense.
The assassinated admiral Luis Carrero Blanco was the chosen successor of the dictator Franco, his comrade in rebelling against the Spanish Republic. After they won, their regime killed thousands of prisoners. Killing Carrero Blanco was as legitimate as killing Franco would have been.
Why does the Spanish state punish people for merely joking about this? My Spanish friends say that the right-wing ruling party, led today by Rajoy, is the descendant of Franco's party and includes many people who supported Franco's dictatorship.
Prosecuting people that joke about killing Carrero Blanco is the Spanish equivalent of putting up statues of confederate generals.
Syria has signed the Paris climate treaty, leaving the US as the only country openly opposed to saving the world from disaster.
Offshore Cash Helped Fund Steve Bannon's Attacks on Hillary Clinton.
This is not to say that Clinton is a great campaigner against tax-dodging. For that, we need President Sanders.
The Catholic Church is starting to face internal pressure to stop requiring priests to be celibate.
The argument against has lost its validity now that married women do not have to be dependent on their husbands.
Great as it is to use the internet to expose rapists, public shaming can become mob rule if it is used to deal with small annoyance that are not so clear cut.
If you decide not to rape people, it isn't very hard to recognize what you should avoid doing.
I've seen articles posted which say that men that show attraction to a women in a way the woman finds uncomfortable are culpable and deserve to be condemned. In effect, they treat a man as vicious if he does not have perfect judgment.
Asking a woman out too many times is one of the things that men can easily do because they are not mind-readers. I must have done it quite a few times.
I always believed that "no" meant "no." But many women wouldn't say "no" — instead they said things like, "Sorry, I have other plans for that evening". Believing them, I asked again for a different day. Each time, they were busy.
Eventually someone told me that the women who said this might mean they didn't want to go out with me. But even knowing that that message was sometimes a code, I could not determine in any given case whether it was a code or not. I agonized over that question with various women. The problem ended when I recognized that my asking for a date had never turned out well, so I stopped.
If some man is not entirely hopeless at dating, that doesn't mean he understands what to do. Most men are not powerful, nor polished. Many are flailing around in trial and error. Inevitably they hurt others' feelings as well as their own.
Instead of looking to jump down their throat when they get it wrong, calling them misogynists or abusers, how about helping them understand a good way to approach women? A way that won't offend, but also gives a hope of reciprocated interest?
Europe must stop extracting natural gas, as well as other fossil fuels, by 2035.
This is needed to stay within the Paris agreement limits, which as we know are too high to be almost sure of avoiding disaster.
The idea of natural gas as a "bridging fuel" has never made any sense except as an excuse to keep drilling and burning.
Egyptian TV hostess Doaa Salah has been sentenced to three years in prison for discussing the possibility of single women having babies.
Tories have struggled for years to protect tax dodging by the rich.
Part of the reason is that some of them engage in tax dodging.
A lobbying association for companies that help rich people dodge taxes boasted of having influence at the top of the UK government. This may be true, but perhaps the Tories would have served those companies even without lobbying.
The UK is subsidizing the Isle of Man so it can remain an aid to tax dodging.
Overprotecting your child is not a rational response to rare acts of random violence.
Suggestions for democratizing the Democratic Party.
9 reasons to reject the SCROTUS tax attacks.
Well, the idea that it breaks a "promise" made by the troll does not seem like much of a reason to me.
The advantage the tax attacks would give to rich people would grow as the years go by.
Hush money paid to silence people who have been raped or groped (or mistreated in any other way) should not be a tax deduction.
I do not use the term "sexual assault." Just because raping and groping are both wrong, and both related to sex, is no reason to lump them together.
When it comes to limiting US wars Congress has been a coward for a long time.
Shoppers at Zara stores found clothes with labels saying, "I Made This... But Didn't Get Paid".
Claims that the world has reduced extreme poverty rest on fishy statistics and failure to fully adjust for inflation. The world's median income has decreased drastically in the past 10 years, as global plutocracy cuts into everyone else's wealth.
I suspect that both global heating and increasing population play a part as well. The most important aid for poor countries' future is contraception.
Laws in the US set pitfalls for the poor such that it is almost impossible not to fall into them. Once you fall in, you are loaded down with debts that you can never finish paying.
Protests have spread around St Louis since the acquittal of the thug who killed Anthony Lamar Smith with explicit premeditation.
The thugs have repressed the protests fiercely, teaching many about what they really are.
Florida is running a megaproject to restore some of the natural water circulation of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades.
To truly protect the Everglades requires curbing global heating before we cause so much sea-level rise that this whole part of Florida becomes ocean.
Bernie Sanders points to tax havens as the way the world's oligarchs rip off the rest of the world.
The UK fights stubbornly to preserve global tax-dodging.
Juli Briskman gave the bully the finger as he rode past her, and the jerks that employed her fired her, making a hypocritical excuse to put her in the wrong.
I suspect that the bosses, aside from being hypocrites, expected retribution from government clients if they did not fire her. They support plutocratic rule out of their cowardice.
When Ireland made itself less attractive for tax-dodging, Apple nominally relocated some of its income to Jersey.
Over 250 billion dollars went along with that.
Nike funnels its money through various countries, through a path that includes a subsidiary that claims not to be located in any country.
These and other tax-dodging companies say they do this because it is lawful, but why is it lawful? Because their political power prevents governments from changing their laws to put a stop to it.
African families send their children to be smuggled into Europe because that's the only way the family can get food.
In other words, they have children because they can't feed the current population. That is collective suicide.
Many US mothers of teenage boys are terrified that their boys are being pressured into enlisting in the army, while also being seduced by military recruiters that they meet in their school.
If you think grooming teenagers to be prostitutes is bad, how about grooming them to be soldiers and fight for plutocracy around the world?
The lack of decision-making ability and character that is produced by denying American children the chance to play or move around on their own surely makes them more vulnerable to this.
Bonn Climate Talks Must Go Further Than Paris Pledges to Succeed.
The US is trying to sabotage the process.
If we have a choice between spending money effectively on adaptation, or resilience, or whatever you call it, or spending the same money effectively on curbing the increase of greenhouse gases, we should always choose the latter. The harm done by each increment of greenhouse gases affects the whole world, so avoiding it helps globally, while protection against the effects has to be done in parallel in every place we want to protect.
Tax attacks: while increasing the amount of the child credit, SCROTUS want to deny it entirely to parents that work for low pay.
ACLU: the bully is holding a US citizen prisoner incommunicado in Iraq and making absurd excuses to stop him from talking to a lawyer.
So many Tories face sexual accusations that their resignations might bring Tory rule to an end.
It is natural for male Tories to act this way, because using one's power to get someone into bed is entirely coherent with the party's political philosophy that the powerful should take what they want.
US citizens: support the athletes protesting for justice.
US citizens: demand that political ads identify the advertiser.
US citizens: call on Jamaica to give justice when people there are killed by thugs.
Oil spills damage human ova. In Nigeria, babies are twice as likely to die in the first month if the mother had previously lived near an oil spill, even as much as 5 years before.
State investigators say that Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was murdered.
It could be that the latest investigation is an attempt to do dirt to the ex-president. I can't rule that out. But the early investigations seem to have so many anomalies that I trust the latest investigation more.
90% of plastic that enters the ocean comes through 10 rivers in Africa and Asia.
It might be possible to change the practices that put so much plastic into those rivers.
The Queen of England hides investments in abusive businesses via a front company.
The troll's saboteur of commerce owns investments in a Russian company run by the Putin family, and concealed this using front companies in tax havens.
Before Rosamaria Hernandez was released from immigration prison, the thugs stopped her from getting medical care.
The US government wants to develop technology to identify people visually even if they are looking away or part of their face is hidden.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to object to SESTA — the bill that threatens to make all web sites responsible for what users post. It was changed just a little, but the EFF says that it remains dangerous.
Some wise warnings from Joseph Weizenbaum in 1985.
In particular, what he says about computers and banks is interesting.
The planned vehicle-to-vehicle radio requirement for cars has been canceled.
In principle, this system will be a good thing if it can be designed to respect privacy. It was supposed to be designed for that, but there are flaws in the design that need to be fixed.
Plutocratist Democrats are spreading lies to discredit the revelations about the Clinton campaign's corruption of the DNC.
A running race in North Carolina is a protest to highlight the screwy Republican gerrymander.
"The only logical explanation was that businessmen, politicians, officials and financiers rape, or attempt to rape, hotel workers all the time. It’s just that normally, those assaulted know there’s nothing they can do about it."
SCROTUS ordered the destruction of a backup replacement satellite to measure the Arctic sea ice. As a result, there is no way to replace the one that just broke down, and a gap in coverage is now inevitable.
The US is waging climate war against more or less all other countries and the Earth's ecosphere.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown says that the US misled the UK government (even the ministers) about Iraq's fictitious "weapons of mass destruction".
That's what happens to you when your government enters into a "special relationship" with a great power, of the sort generally called "subservience".
The Himalayas have been an exception to the worldwide tendency of decrease in mountain ice.
Part one of the US National Climate Assessment has been published, and reports honestly on how human actions are causing global heating.
Apparently the troll's saboteurs were unable to interfere. I wonder what stopped them. Were heroic scientists quietly at work? Did a bureaucratic structure protect them?
"Stopping terrorism" is a new excuse for stopping you from changing the software in your car.
Since terrorism is insignificant as a cause of death or injury in the in the US and Europe, this would be the tail wagging the dog.
"Stop doing companies’ digital busywork for free." Many companies offload their own bureaucratic work onto their customers.
The same systems also snoop on users, which I consider nastier than merely using some of my time. They also typically require running nonfree software. So I generally reject those platforms. Even for medical companies, to which I have to give my name, I still refuse to talk to their web platforms.
The size of the universe, compared with the tiny part that humans occupy for such a short part of its existence, is an argument that there can't plausibly be a god that cares particularly about humans.
This is not a precise mathematical proof, but it is a strong philosophical argument nonetheless.
The Houthis in Yemen fired a missile at Salafi Arabia.
How many thousands of bombs has Salafi Arabia dropped on areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthis?
Russian influence in British politics must be investigated. Some of the same people that were involved with the bully's campaign were also involved with the campaign to leave the EU.
The investigation of people that wish to immigrate to the US is already so strict that it would be foolish to demand more merely because one immigrant has committed murder.
The anti-immigrant bias and racism at the root of the US pledge of allegiance.
I agree with what the pledge of allegiance says, except for the words "under god" which I would say only under threat of force, but trying to force students to recite it violates the spirit of freedom that it endorses.
To the people that want to ban disrespect for the US national anthem: move to China and you'll find a tyranny to your liking.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 877-795-7862 to oppose the SCROTUS tax attacks.
US citizens: Reject Saboteur Perry's plan to make us pay to keep coal and nuclear power afloat.
Harvey Weinstein is being investigated for rape, because one of the many accusations is recent enough that it could be prosecuted.
What I find most shocking about this report is the total selfishness of his reported actions, lacking the slightest interest in intimacy with her.
I can't imagine having sex that way even with someone who asked me to. Without a feeling of shared intimacy, and the hope it will continue beyond that sexual act, what would be the point? If my hand on her head isn't comforting and exciting for her, and likewise her hand on my head, we aren't in a situation to consider going any further.
I suppose this is what is meant by the statement that rape is about power, not desire. Rapists, at least many of them, are not trying to force someone into an act of intimacy. They seem to want a sex act that has no intimacy in it, and that act is what I can't imagine.
US citizens: Call on Congress to impeach Sessions for lying to Congress.
Local people are blocking fossil fuel projects in 70 places.
Dianne Feinstein Wants Twitter To Just Hand Her A Bunch Of Private Communications.
A US bomb raid killed 40 or more civilians in Afghanistan, then Afghan thugs or soldiers kept the victims' families away, apparently stopping the public from getting any verification of what happened.
Both Spain and Catalonia are acting undemocratically.
Many UK workers are paid so little that they need to borrow for necessities.
It looks like Mueller is cooperating carefully with NY attorney general Schneiderman so that, if the troll were to pardon Manafort for federal crimes, New York could prosecute him for state crimes that the president cannot pardon.
Russian disinformation operatives invented a bogus person, "Jenna Abrams", to present bogus right-wing claims. This hoax had large political effects.
China serves as the testing ground for new technology for massive surveillance because it is so tyrannical that it doesn't need to disguise them. Then they get implemented in the US and elsewhere.
We have to train ourselves to reject the excuse that "this is to protect us", every time we hear it.
Volkswagen's CFO said that Volkswagen didn't do tax-dodging. That was not true.
The troll's bogus promises to resurrect coal mining are convincing many former miners not to learn to do something else.
There is no possibility that retraining will give all Americans prosperity, because the globalized economy creates only a few good jobs in the US. This is only a partial solution.
The SCROTUS tax bill would permit churches to endorse candidates.
The troll has withdrawn support for a program to limit bribery by fossil fuel companies.
Workers at Time Warner Cable have been on strike for over 6 months rather that accept cuts in their retirement and medical benefits.
Workers at Gothamist formed a union, and the owner shut down the company.
This sort of tactic is possible when businesses are owned by robber barons and good jobs are very scarce.
Hidden in the latest National Defense Authorization Act is a clause that would give Amazon dominance over federal purchases.
If private investment in renewable energy and efficiency continues, it could reach the Paris targets, which might avoid global disaster.
The planet roasters are not licked yet.
They are fighting hard to reduce the rate of investment by cutting various incentives for this investment, such as net metering and tax credits.
They may yet succeed in destroying civilization and killing billions of people.
Female Members of Congress Describe Sexual Harassment by Male Lawmakers.
When black lives really mattered — the history of reconstruction of the south is mostly ignored in teaching US history.
Some Thoughts On Gag Rules And Government Unmasking Demands.
US states and/or major cities should set up publicly owned banks.
These will avoid several of the dangers of today's large hardly-regulated banks.
Clint activists around the world will march for action to reduce global heating.
People regularly get arrested in Zimbabwe for insulting President Mugabe.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Bridenstine as head of NASA. Here's a suggested call script.
Hi, my name is ____, and I am your constituent calling from _____. I am calling to demand that Senator ____ vote to oppose the confirmation of Jim Bridenstine for NASA Administrator. Bridenstine’s ties to the oil and gas industry, his lack of scientific background, his denial of global heating, and his bigotry are disqualifying. Will Senator ____ commit to voting no on Bridenstine’s confirmation?
Capitol Switchboard number: 202-224-3121
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to ask them to support legislation to stop the troll from undermining Robert Mueller's investigation.
Capitol Switchboard number: 202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the FCC to block the Sinclair-Tribune merger.
Also call on the FCC not to change its rules to allow more media concentration.
Everyone: call on Florida to close the privatized juvenile prisons that are run to make prisoners fight each other.
US citizens: call on the DoE to protect net metering from a biased review.
Two New York thugs have been charged with arresting a woman and then raping her while she was handcuffed.
That's more thuggish than most thugs.
The FBI may be investigating how tiny Whitefish Energy company won the giant contract to restore Puerto Rico.
There is every reason to suspect corruption in whatever the troll's saboteurs do.
The bully's supporter, Robert Murdoch, is trying character assassination against Robert Mueller.
I don't think the charges against Manaforte and Gates tie the troll to a crime. However, they may be offered lesser charges in exchange for testifying against others.
Papadopoulos's testimony shows that the troll's campaign had ties to Russia.
It also shows that Sessions lied to the Senate to cover up these contacts.
I fear, however, that his base have already insulated themselves against caring about proven ties to Russia. He could blow up the Statue of Liberty and have his fanatical supporters crash Air Force One into the Capitol, and they would still support him.
Paul Manafort: how decades of serving dictators led to role as Trump's go-to guy.
White supremacists rallying in Nashville punched a white woman who refused their invitation to leave her black boyfriend and join them.
Stop Letting Powerful Men Silence Victims with Confidentiality Agreements.
The appearance of the term "intellectual property" in the article shows that the author has fallen into the confusion which that term generally spreads. If he had said "trade secrets", he would have made a coherent and clear statement.
However, other confused people have taught him the habit of using the vague term "intellectual property", and he didn't know that he was bringing in other irrelevant laws. Nondisclosure agreements have nothing to do with copyrights, patents, trademarks, plant variety monopolies, or publicity rights. Including them here was a mistake.
I refuse to sign a nondisclosure agreement for generally useful technical information, such as software. They are a conspiracy to keep society in the dark.
A hypothetical "fourth industrial revolution" would supposedly make new good jobs in the UK.
If these predictions prove accurate, the UK might gain 175,000 good jobs — but that is minuscule compared with the millions stuck in McJobs, and the millions that might lose their jobs. The state will have to give them funds so they can have a decent life.
It's the same thing in the US. We should decide which technologies to allow to reshape society — not let companies compete to make them addictive.
Five former US presidents asked Americans to donate money for aid to repair hurricane damage. But why not ask Congress to provide the funds?
"Britain can deal with its [PISSI] returnees. But not by killing them."
Killing armed enemies on the battlefield is legitimate because arresting them is not feasible. However, killing prisoners is unconscionable — the sort of thing that PISSI does.
Hindu fanatics in India hate the Taj Mahal because it was built by a Muslim.
They cite absurd fake history that would fit perfectly into the US lunatic right wing.
This would be funny if not for the fact that the ruling party comes out of that fanaticism, and it shows in things that affect Indians in their lives.
US citizens: Object to building a federal prison on top of toxic coal waste that would poison the prisoners.
US citizens: Call on the FEC to require disclosure of origin on internet political ads.
US citizens: phone 413-923-6120 to urge your congresscritter to defend Net Neutrality.
US citizens: Call on Congress to pass the USA Rights Act, which will limit some PAT RIOT Act surveillance.
Thugs in Gulfport, Mississippi, arrested Kelvin Fairley and his children at gunpoint, because they thought they had all burgled the house where they actually lived.
The thugs were unwilling to look at his identification, which would have demonstrated the truth, until they had brought him to jail.
Later, when he went to complain, the thugs didn't care. So now he plans to sue them.
Ohio Republicans cheat to make Republican districts by counting prisoners (who can't actually vote) in drawing the lines.
Indiana removes voters from the voter list using a program that is wrong 99% of the time.
The program is called Crosscheck, but Indiana used to crosscheck its results before removing people. Nowadays, if the program says a person with your name and birthdate is registered in another state, Indiana will take you off the lists immediately. Even though most of the people the program accuses do belong on the list.
Being double-registered is not wrong, anyway. Voting twice is fraud, but having a registration in another state may only mean that you moved and the other state doesn't know. As long as you don't actually vote twice, you shouldn't be blocked from voting once.
Facebook’s 2016 Election Team Gave Advertisers a Blueprint to a Divided US.
Senator Warren affirmed that the Democratic primary election system was rigged in favor of Clinton, and demands that the party set up a system that won't be rigged.
Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy was investigating the murder of Giulio Regeni by the Egyptian government, so now they have jailed him.
Ironically, the big Republican gift to multinational corporations is coming at a time when they have more money than they have ways to invest it.
The Clinton campaign faces charges of disguising expenditures for lawful opposition research as legal services.
This misrepresentation should be investigated and punished, but I don't see it as a big deal.
The latest damage done by copyright law: preventing scientific study of AI systems.
Facebook and other companies regularly delete photos that show casualties of war because they are “too gory”.
This hampers efforts to document and investigate war crimes.
The bully dehumanizes enemies just as terrorists do.
The saboteur-in-chief's nominee for head of the USDA's science and economics division, Sam Clovis, has withdrawn his name from consideration, but not because he would be a saboteur.
He is involved with the ties with Russia that Mueller is investigating.
The Republican tax attacks bill would cut the clean energy credit, in a last-ditch attempt to keep us racing towards global disaster.
In 2015, the Democratic National Committee was broke, so it sold itself corruptly to the Clinton campaign.
Here's other information.
That is why Sanders is not president of the US.
SCROTUS aim to eliminate deductions for medical expenses.
If we had Medicare for All, we wouldn't have crushing medical expenses, so we would need deductions for them.
The troll's idiotic treats may have made a fair trial impossible for the New York truck terrorist.
He might get a mistrial; he might even get off.
We should know better by now than to respond to murder by destroying law and human rights.
SCROTUS' tax attacks will “deposit a trillion and a half dollars into the bank accounts of the richest people in the country and then hands the bill to the middle class.”
It is not true that the middle class will pay the price of this. It will pay a part, to be sure. But poor people will pay, too — not much through increased taxes, but greatly through cuts in the government help that they depend on.
An article argues that AI will eliminate half of all jobs in 10-20 years, and nearly all human work a couple of decades later.
It could happen.
However, that advance of technology will be in a race against global heating disaster that could destroy high-tech manufacturing entirely.
The article is too quick to conclude that we cannot either tax or ban robotic production.
There are tasks have to be done locally, and if we want to reserve those jobs for human workers, we can simply pass laws to do so. As for foreign robotic competition, we don't have to allow imported goods made by automation.
“Free trade” is just a trick to give power to the rich; we need to get rid of those treaties anyway.
We can also do as the Amish do: decide which technologies to adopt and which ones to reject.
I am not saying that limiting automation is necessarily the best option.
Nationalizing the robotic production, so that the former owners have to get their share of the robot-made bounty along with all the rest of us, might be better.
But if the robot masters stop us from doing that, the Amish option would be a good second choice.
The Amish show that it is possible for society to decide which technologies to adopt.
Once we start doing this, companies will find it hard to sucker people onto technologies that are designed as addictive malware.
We could even require — force — desirable technologies to be designed so that we control them instead of they us.
SCROTUS plan to ban abortion (almost entirely) and eliminate support for adoptive parents.
War has poisoned Mosul so much that we must regard the environment as a casualty.
The bully admires tyrants, perhaps because he sees them as champion bullies.
Legalizing marijuana is a good way to reduce the demand for opioids and antidepressive medicine, while providing considerable additional funding for other medical care.
Children need to grow up in families — orphanages stunt them, especially mentally.
Canada's supreme court ruled that a plan to build a ski resort can go ahead even though an indigenous tribe considers the lane sacred.
People are entitled to their beliefs, but people are not entitled to have whatever resources their religion says it requires.
Indigenous peoples have moved around quite a bit, and when they can't use their former sacred place, they designate a new one.
So I think it is valid that an important public interest can override anyone's idea of a sacred spot.
On the other hand, a ski resort is hardly an important public interest.
If nothing more than a ski resort is at stake, why not cater to the tribe's wishes?
I don't think people should have the power to stop other people from using their land, merely by calling it “sacred”.
On the other hand, maybe this land belonged to the indigenous group and Europeans took it away from them.
Ocean acidification can hurt a species' survival in synergy with a predator that isn't harmed by ocean acidification.
The precarious employment of most professors makes them afraid to say what they think about any issue.
3C of global heating will eventually raise the ocean enough to inundate 1/3 of Florida — not to mention many great cities around the world.
The cities include Bangkok, Shanghai and Tokyo.
The most powerful countries rejected the use of UN funds for Haitians that contracted cholera in the epidemic started by the UN soldiers that were sent there after Dubya had President Aristide kidnaped.
I think the UN should look ahead, not back.
Its primary obligation in regard to cholera in Haiti is to pay for the infrastructure that will put an end to cholera there.
Climate negotiators are starting to recognize the importance of indigenous peoples that manage the forests they live in.
Puppets of China quietly snuck a law punishing disrespect for China's national anthem into Hong Kong's constitution.
Criminalizing “desecrating” a flag, or disrespect for some official statement, violates the principle of freedom of expression.
I think state disrespect for that principle is far worse than an individual's disrespect for some symbol.
Interrogations by US immigration officials can reduce refugees to incoherence, so that they are unable to describe the torture that drove them out of their native countries.
Businesses tend to promote men for having characteristics that tend to go with sexual harassment.
Couples that met while homeless, or while at least one of them was homeless, tell how they met and what their lives are like.
The UK Parliament is imposing a very strict standard of sexual harassment.
I think it would be wrong to impose that standard on everyone.
However, Parliament is a special case.
Legislators and their staff have special status, which they compete hard for, so it can be legitimate to hold them to a stricter standard than everyone else.
This could be a change for the better.
However, every standard should be objective.
“If someone else took offense at you, you're wrong” gives arbitrary power to anyone who takes offense.
I suspect that Leadsome does intend an objective standard of what is offensive, but her words say there won't be one.
Spain has arrested most of the leaders of the government of Catalonia and they face imprisonment for decades.
I still think that Catalans' objections to paying taxes to help poor regions of Spain are churlish.
However, if a sizeable majority of Catalans want independence, they should get it.
Photojournalist Matthew Abbott was barred from Papua New Guinea, clearly because he had revealed embarrassing facts about the Manus Island camp where Australia has dumped refugees.
US border thugs have released 10-year-old Rosa Maria Hernandez from immigration prison.
It was absurd to put her in one.
Since she is 10 years old, mentally disabled, and seriously ill, she could hardly be able to run away or live on her own.
The prosecution of security researcher Justin Shafer seems to be related to the prosecution of John Rivello for sending a video to Kurt Eichenwald which was designed to send him into an epileptic seizure.
I think it is legitimate to prosecute someone for doing that.
We might also want our software to detect such videos to detect them.
This ties up a loose end in the previous political note but doesn't address the issue of Justin Shafer himself.
The International Criminal Court wants to investigate all sides' war crimes in Afghanistan.
The Red Cross seeks to prosecute the staff that stole 6 million dollars from the funds for dealing with the Ebola outbreak.
KGB disinformation, now magnified by the internet, threatens every democracy.
It is interesting to contrast China's political censorship requirements with Germany's.
Denial of the mass murder of Jews was one of the first right-wing lie schemes, and it's despicable, but we must not use censorship to get rid of it.
US citizens: call on Congress to defeat the plutocratic deforestation bill.
US citizens: call on the Senate to require the bully to get Senate approval for new IRS head.
US citizens: Call on the Senate to reject the bully's extremist judicial nominations.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass a law to protect Mueller from being fired by the bully.
US activists must resist co-optation by Russia. As Russia infiltrates social movements, every social movement will become vulnerable to the suspicion it is nothing but Russia's tool — even when that isn't so.
After forcing unemployed Britons to spend lots of time in jobcenters, and to go hungry to afford taking a bus there, now the Tories are closing 10% of the jobcenters, which will make reaching them even harder.
Injured and sick people will have to hobble.
A first step to curb the power of Google and Facebook would be to ban them from buying other companies.
Nobody knows how to stop the murderous gang violence in Baltimore.
I wonder if replacing the thug department with a new department would provide an opportunity to turn over a new leaf.
Korean-Americans consider the bully more of a danger to South Korea than Kim Jong-un is.
Are terrorists influenced partly by their own mental illnesses?
Even Israeli right-wing politicians and officials warn that Netanyahu is attacking democracy in Israel.
We need a plan to manage the end of most fossil fuel use. Here are the requisites for a good plan.
Verizon is asking the FCC to ban US states from protecting ISP customers' rights.
Many states are really trying to do this.
Americans: phone 866-OUR-VOTE if your state stops you from voting.
Unfortunately, this group of legal assistants cannot help when states are correctly interpreting unjust voter-suppression laws.
Russian political manipulators were very astute in stirring up hostility among Americans.
The article lists various false accusations that Russians supplied to right-wing Americans, many of whom are eager to snap them up without checking. However, for left-wing Americans and blacks, it was sufficient for the Russians to point out the truth.
South Koreans plan a massive protest against the bully when he visits.
Part of their demand is to get rid of the South Korea-US business supremacy treaty.
Eliminating this treaty is necessary for two reasons I know of.
DRM is an injustice and treaties like this prop up the injustice.
Every treaty with this requirement must be abolished.
An indigenous group has built houses with solar power on their land where the Unkinder-Morgan pipeline is supposed to cross it.
One thing that right-wing and Islamist extremists have in common is that they come from communities that are socially isolated, not integrated into society.
Springer has blocked certain articles on its web site for users in China, obeying the Chinese tyranny.
However, Springer's nastiest policy is what it does to everyone.
Paywalled scientific journals are an injustice in any country.
Plutocratist groups in many US states are campaigning to eliminate measures to promote renewable energy.
A new variety of orangutan has been discovered on the west coast of Sumatra, but it may not be around for long before humans wipe it out.
SCROTUS have published their tax attacks bill.
Some of these changes might be improvements, depending on details that someone would have to analyze carefully.
However, they can't make up for the giveaways to the rich.
This article does not mention the big giveaway to multinationals which would allow them to bring into the US the profits they have stored in tax havens, paying no tax on them.
The idea that cutting taxes on corporations would boost anything for the rest of us is known as “trickle down”.
It didn't work in the past and there is no reason to expect things to be different this time.
It is pure dooH niboR.
The troll and his family would save billions in taxes from this.
Calling for an EU investigation to find the murderers of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Maltese journalist that investigated the gangsters.
Uri Avnery: A hypothetical Iranian nuclear weapon would not put Israel in any real danger.
The leaders of Iran know better then to use the bomb as anything but a deterrent.
Notwithstanding that, I think it is better if Iran does not get nuclear weapons.
Continuing the nuclear deal with Iran is our best chance of achieving that goal.
Twitter has very little security against rogue employees.
They might even be able to start a war by faking tweets on the bully's account.
Hypersensitivity has reached the point where you can't cite a bigoted joke to condemn its bigotry, without getting rebuked for bigotry yourself.
It is impossible to discuss any subject thoughtfully if you are barred from citing examples.
In 1950 it was almost impossible to discuss the question of what is or is not pornography; you couldn't cite examples of pornography, so you were limited to abstract statements whose concrete referents were hard to be sure of.
Now the taboos have shifted: there is no obstacle to discussing what is pornography, but it is difficult to discuss what is bigotry.
Different people will always have different judgment about how to state a point.
As long as we agree on opposing bigotry, which is the substance, we should stay calm in disagreeing about the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of presenting this opposition.
You'll note that when I talk about the disrespectful practice of mislabeling the GNU system as “Linux”, which denies us credit for our work, I don't jump down the throats of people that do this, or even demand an apology.
I just ask them to please give us equal mention henceforth.
How will Europe deal with 20 million Africans global heating refugees trying to get into Europe rather than die of hunger or thirst?
Keep in mind that global heating won't be the Africans' fault.
We in wealthy countries are burning most of the fuel.
When pregnant sharks are captured, they often abort their young.
The FCC's fraudulent comments against network neutrality include dead signatories, as well as living people who didn't file “their” comments.
Thugs in Virginia arrested a reporter for covering a candidate for governor, supposedly because he said “fuck”.
They were violent about it, too.
Deir ez-Zor has been taken from PISSI, leaving it with very little territory.
A British MP is being punished by his party for doing something “inappropriate”.
That should never happen.
“Inappropriate” means “not fitting for the circumstances, and causing annoyance.”
That is a vague and weak criticism.
Nobody should be reviled, let alone punished, for having “done something inappropriate”, because that is too vague.
I don't know what that MP is accused of doing.
So I won't say it was not a really bad thing to do.
Perhaps it was.
Or perhaps it wasn't.
“Inappropriate” fails to tell us.
What I do say is that anyone who is criticized has the right to a clear statement of the criticism.
The UK's new cuts in welfare will imprison women who say they got pregnant due to rape if they did not make a police report.
Women often don't make police reports about rape, because they rightly fear that they'd have to go through with a trial in which they are effectively the accused.
Should you reject an artist's work because you condemn something that artist did?
The US says it might label North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism.
This is not the case, as far as I know.
Assassination of a specific person, in this case Kim Jong-nam, is premeditated murder, but it is not terrorism.
Kidnaping of Japanese people, which North Korea did many times, is a crime but it is not terrorism.
Why do our politicians think that you have not really condemned a crime unless you call it “terrorism”?
Saboteur of Energy Perry said that fossil fuels were needed to reduce “sexual assault”.
The term “sexual assault” is not suitable for a serious discussion, because it covers crimes of varying severities which call for different responses, plus sexual harassment which is not a crime.
If we want to discuss why Perry's claim is mistaken, let's not let him sweep us into another confusion.
As far as I can see, it is mistaken because rapes are usually committed by someone who knows the victim, and that doesn't require darkness.
It is also mistaken because, to whatever extent light is useful, it is equally effective if made from renewable power generation as if made from fossil fuels.
If we keep burning fossil fuels as now, that could reduce the rate of rape by 50% by 2100, if it reduces the human population by 50%.
Papadopoulos has admitted that the Russian contact only wanted to meet with him because he was part of the bully's campaign, and that the purpose of the contacts was to get supposed dirt on Clinton.
Republicans are using fabricated scandals to distract attention from the troll's real scandal.
The CO2 level in Earth's atmosphere increased last year faster than before, and has reached a level last experienced 3 million years ago.
That's before the Earth started the current series of glaciations.
It has also been reported that human CO2 emissions have been stable for a few years, that they are no longer increasing.
These two observations do not conflict.
It could well be that the natural absorption of CO2 from the air has decreased due to causes such as deforestation, as well as ecological changes.
The progressive “autopsy” of the 2016 Democratic Party defeat shows how it needs to stop seeking support from the plutocratic right-wing “center” and start appealing to the progressive majority of Americans.
This is also necessary for a more basic reason: unless it does this, the Democratic Party will not deserve support.
Demanding that immigration thugs release a 10-year-old handicapped and seriously ill unauthorized immigrant from prison so she can see her parents.
The bully's publicly visible policies focus on being tough to weak people so as to make authoritarian followers feel strong by identifying with him.
A handicapped 10-year-old who just needed surgery is a perfect target for that.
His other policies, those meant for their real effects, are aimed at helping businesses make more money and pay less tax, which imposes suffering on the non-rich.
Two thugs that had been shot and wounded tried to sue the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming the shooter was acting as a part of it.
The judge tossed out these suits because a social movement is not a specific group with members, it is just a point of view.
There was no need to mention the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement does not advocate shooting anyone.
Around half of black Americans, in a poll, report racial discrimination by thugs and courts.
1/3 have refrained from calling the thugs for help for fear that they will show their thuggish side towards blacks.
Six weeks after the hurricane, the inhabitants of Dominica mostly have no homes, electricity, work, school, or income.
If hurricanes will come every few years, there is no use rebuilding the place &mdash people will have to leave.
Big planet-roaster corporations have hijacked continuing negotiations under the Paris climate agreement.
The reorganization of welfare benefits in the UK hits disabled people hard.
Especially those with mental disabilities and those that live alone.
A UK minister is accused of flirting with a party activist.
If the minister did what Maltby claims, what would it imply? In general, there is nothing wrong with touching someone's knee for a second, or sending a message hinting at sexual interest, as long as there is no pressure in it.
However, for a political leader to request a relationship with a party activist, if it risks offending the activist, risks harming the party.
Our society does not offer a way of expressing sexual interest in someone that avoids all risk of offending.
That is part of what makes starting a relationship so difficult.
What the Democratic Party needs to do, to be worth supporting and then to win.
The Washington DC thugs bought a thousand gas masks, plus lots of weapons and ammunition to attack inauguration protesters with.
They gratuitously attacked hundreds of protesters, then arrested them with no valid reason.
The Patriotic Millionaires warn the US middle class that Republicans are about to increase their taxes as a gift to millionaires.
An immigrant, inspired by PISSI, carried out a small terrorist attack in New York City.
A NYC thug responded well: he shot the truck terrorist, and even better, managed not to kill him.
Thus, it will be possible to interrogate him and try him.
He became a supporter of PISSI after immigrating to the US.
It will not be feasible to discover such people even with all the surveillance that the state will demand.
So let's strengthen ourselves now to reject the demand.
Our best shield against terrorism is to have the perspective not to freak out about it.
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are really taking steps to make peace with each other.
Keith Wood was convicted for handing out Fully Informed Jury Association publications in front of his local courthouse.
His lawyer in the trial was forbidden to mention the First Amendment, which this conviction apparently violates.
Today's global capitalism produces ever more addictive goods that get society ever more screwed up.
I like this quote: “The logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people.”
John Kelly expressed regrets that the US didn't reach some sort of "compromise" about slavery in 1860.
This is the same false-equivalence veil for bigotry that the troll has used.
The US Congress made a series of compromises over slavery in the decades preceding the Civil War. (See the Missouri Compromise in Wikipedia.) The effect of these compromises was to perpetuate slavery, and that would have been true in 1860, 1880, 1900, and 2000 if the North hadn't said "No more compromises."
A court in Mississippi banned a woman from contact with her baby because she had not paid fines.
The article makes it clear that this is part of the general US practice of loading down the poor with fines they can't pay. It is noteworthy that the mother was jailed while looking for work. It is clear that the system is designed so that the fines cannot be paid.
If you want to be able to fine any American, you must stop making millions of Americans so poor that they have to go to jail rather than pay.
A Portuguese ISP shows what the loss of network neutrality would lead to: separate fees for access to various services.
Medicare for All, by disconnecting medical care from employment, would free Americans from being stuck to a specific job.
If employers did not have to pay for employees' medical care — if that came from taxes not associated with employing anyone — that would also reduce the pressure to replace workers with automation.
Groups Denounce Energy Department’s Sneak Attack on Solar.
The attack consists of setting up a study that seems designed to provide an excuse to eliminate net metering — the practice of buying electric power from owners of home solar power systems.
I met someone who said per business was "selling solar systems." So I asked, "How do people that buy solar systems travel to them? Have you got faster-than-light travel?"
US citizens: support the Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act.
To sign with Javascript disabled, you will need to use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: Urge Republican senators that have criticized the bully to make Mueller's investigation independent.
US citizens: call on the Senate to block the proposed ban on abortion after 20 weeks.
The bully is starting to lose approval even among his supporters.
Sanders would have defeated the bully, according to the bully's chief pollster.
Increasing concentration of the food industry harms workers, consumers, and soil.
North Korea's hydrogen bomb test seems to have destabilized the mountain it was conducted under. It has had repeated earthquakes since.
A study forecasts that global heating effects could drive a billion people from their homes by 2050.
Even if the study is off by a factor of two, and only half a billion become refugees for this reason, so many people won't find places that will let them in. A million or so refugees were enough to convinced the European Union to take firm measures to keep refugees out, even unjust measures.
However, many of the billion will be armed, and ready to fight for other people's land rather than sit down and die. We will see wars around the world.
Most European countries have prohibited giving shelter or giving food to unauthorized immigrants.
The US is proceeding with notable slowness in repairing the power and water systems of Puerto Rico.
Israeli colonists in Palestinian territory regularly steal olives from Palestinians' olive trees. This time, some of them poisoned the trees as well.
In some cases, the Palestinians can't monitor their trees because they need special permits from Israel even to approach them. But if they could stay near the trees to guard them, it wouldn't do much good, since the colonists can maim or kill Palestinians with impunity. Often Israeli soldiers stand by and allow the colonists to do this.
Afghan Women Beg Key Question: What on Earth Has This War Accomplished?
They don't appreciate any extra freedom that foreign intervention has given them, perhaps because it isn't much freedom, or because in practice they don't dare exercise it.
One thing that they desperately needed, but didn't get, is birth control so that they could avoid having the children that they now can't feed.
More about the Whitefish scandal.
Inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands have implored Australia not to fund the proposed new giant coal mine.
This mine would also speed the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
Frackers in the UK are seeking a sweeping injunction against all sorts of protesters, to imprison them.
When peaceful protests are broadly forbidden, you can't criticize people for turning to violent opposition.
US citizens: tell the FBI to stop supposing that Black Lives Matter supporters are likely to be terrorists.
Everyone: call on iHeartRadio to fire right-wing misogynist announcer Bill Handel.
Facebook has lured publishers into helpless dependence through collaboration in manipulating the public.
Perhaps the solution could take the form of a new anti-monopoly law regulating companies that have more than 1% of the US advertising market. The rules could require the site to identify every ad an ad, each time it is shown, along with the company it is an ad for, as well as what criterion it is targeted at. This would apply to articles reposted on behalf of other sites, when the articles are partly advertising.
In addition, the site should be required to publish (permitting anonymous access) all ads under the heading of the advertiser that paid for them, along with the price it paid for each one.
Further regulations might be required for the site's relationship with commercial publishers. Perhaps Facebook should not be allowed to repost any published articles or works, only links to them.
Facebook says it will do some of these things, but we should not leave the choice up to these businesses.
By shutting its immigration dump in Manus Island, Australia will close a "dark chapter" in its treatment of refugees, which will segue immediately into a new dark chapter.
20 Republicans voted against the dooH niboR budget, but that wasn't quite enough to stop it — that needed three more.
Nestle is looking for a "certification" of its water-bottling from an organization it helped to set up.
In the original affluent society of the Ju/‘hoansi, social equality is maintained by condemning those who look might come to think of themselves as above the rest.
If we develop robots that can do almost all the work we want done, maybe we will all be able to work only 15 hours a week. But if we want that society to be stable, we will need to adopt customs that effectively discourage anyone from trying to be above the rest. In other words, the post-scarcity society is the opposite of plutocracy.
I disagree with the use of the word "civilization" to describe hunter-gatherers. The word refers to living in cities.
Just 4% of What Australians Spend on Clothing Goes to Garment Workers.
This unfair division of the funds is quite standard. I think it occurs because the businesses have more clout than those workers.
Reports of the death of coal are anticipation of its wished-for demise.
The bully's base is not giving up on him, because it trusts his lies more than it trusts any source of corrective information.
Organic food produced in the US is being replaced by cheaper production that cuts corners on the rules. Due to regulatory capture, the US fails to enforce its standards fully.
I do not make a point of buying organic food; I do not know if it makes a big difference. Nonetheless, I object to falsification.
Inspection of food is one of the many jobs of the state. If we don't tax the rich enough, the state cannot do its jobs.
The real winner of the US presidential election was none-of-the-above, reflecting most people's disgust for both the major parties.
That's because the Democratic Party has been bought out by rich right-wingers and has ceased to stand for the progressive, liberal policies that most Americans want.
Will the party learn to be progressive again, or will it continue to be Republican Lite?
The bully's Orwellian PR: “We have always considered Paul Manafort unimportant.”
New Zealand may allow special visas for global heating refugees.
Mexicans have rejected the corporate holiday of Halloween by incorporating a parade into their celebration of the Day of the Dead.
An unconditional basic income, being tried in a part of Finland, has enabled some people who were previously dependent on welfare to start businesses.
Successful entrepreneurs love to emphasize that they took a risk — when it comes to arguing that we should not tax them much.
Then they argue that everyone should be more entrepreneurial, ignoring the point that you shouldn't gamble what you can't afford to lose, and most people can't afford to lose a dollar.
The basic income gives poor people some money that they can afford to lose, so they can rationally take a risk.
The basic income does not justify Finland's cuts in education and welfare.
The UN says that current greenhouse gas reduction pledges are inadequate and would lead to 3C or more of global heating in this century.
Global heating effects are harming the health of hundreds of millions of people.
A steel plant in Australia will be powered by solar cells together with a large energy storage system.
Introduced nutria are overrunning southern Louisiana.
They can wipe out native species.
Louisiana encourages eating the nutria, which raises the question, is the nutria nutritious?
Another Chinese medicine superstition has arisen and is making donkeys unavailable to farmers.
Giving trigger warnings is not a sign of censorship — often it is just the opposite.
The troll has nominated a saboteur to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who has made a career of defending dangerous products.
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