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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.
Snoop-phone cameras "adjust" all photos by default to make them more visually attractive. This falsifies everyone thus photographed.
I think that this contributes one more factor that would lead people to prefer to interact through phones rather than in physical presence.
A father writes that he told his children the truth about Christmas presents, rather than the usual Santa Claus lie, so they won't feel judged if some year he can't afford to get them any presents.
I think that is a good reason. But I still feel that telling the usual lie is wrong as well. And when parents bully me into speaking to their children as if Santa Claus existed, it puts me in a painful moral dilemma: either butt in and cause a family crisis, or join in lying. I don't want to do either.
Migrants from Mauritania in the US fear being deported back there to live under a form of apartheid system with slavery.
*60 Minutes episode on brutal El Salvador prison, pulled from air by CBS, appears online.* This article summarizes much of its description of the torture in the Cecot prison. It is clearly meant to destroy the prisoners' bodies and minds, though not quickly.
US citizens of foreign origin have been terrorized by the deportation thugs' violence, and their rush to deport people without allowing time for justice or even fact-checking. Many now carry their passports all the time, hoping the thugs will check those before brutalizing or jailing them.
Violence against news reporters increased greatly this year. In many cases they were attacked while covering actions of the deportation thugs. Many of the attacks were committed by thugs.
A US general, ultra-loyal to the bully, said he would obey orders to attack people that the bully calls "terrorist" inside the US.
The phrase "confident in the lawful order" is not clear. It invites us to comfort ourselves by believing that this general would make sure the order is lawful, but doesn't explicitly say so. I distrust that vagueness.
Leading world economists call for going easy on Sri Lanka's debt after the recent devastating storm. Even before that, Sri Lanka's debt was crushing and unjust.
For the moment, Iranian women have the government's clothing rules enforcers cowed even as it continues to bluster.
Violent mobs have rampaged across Bangladesh, and destroyed by fire the offices of two important newspapers.
The article does not say what cause or side the mobs support, but they may be Islamist extremists.
Medicines are terribly expensive in the US because the US helps Big Pharma gouge on medicine and does little to resist them. The bullshitter claims that the prices are high in the US because other well-off countries have national medical systems that negotiate lower bulk prices. Prices are high in the US because it fails to do that. By attacking those countries' bulk prices with economic warfare, he helps Big Pharma in yet another way, while distracting and confusing the Americans who heed him.
Biden made a start at using government power to reduce drug prices in the US. He was limited in what he could do, because Congress was dominated by Republicans and plutocratist Democrats. Nonetheless, his price-reduction measures helped millions of non-rich Americans afford the medicines they needed to stay alive.
Please join me in supporting a national medical system in the US. We also need to stop the ways Big Pharma corrupts the medical system and medical research, take controlled experiments on drugs' effectiveness and safety out of the hands of Big Pharma, and weaken the time span and power of patents on medicines.
After the antisemitic killings in Australia follows a wave of antimuslimist threats.
These two forms of hatred are aimed at different religions, but they are basically similar in form: stirring up hatred of an "other" to make people panic and start to fertilize fascist movements with more hared.
Let's be mature enough not to bite that hook.
The adoption of the "peace plan" for Gaza has not brought peace or a cease fire, nor ended the siege of Gaza, but governments around the world have made it as an excuse to remove all pressure on Israel and Netanyahu to cease their crimes.
The US has dropped its politically-motivated plan to deport whistleblower Guan Heng to China.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach Kristi Noem.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call for limiting denaturalization to people who committed atrocious crimes before gaining US citizenship.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore USAID humanitarian funding — help poor countries against hunger and plagues.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
Madrid and Barcelona present a contrast between right-wing and left-wing approaches to the problem of high rents for housing.
Right-wingers claim that radical deregulation will bring rents down. That article shows that it doesn't have that result.
It also shows that countries should block the sell-off of public housing to private entities. Under Thatcher, Britain started selling public housing houses and apartments to their residents, who then resold them. The long-term result has been disaster. Madrid has sold off public housing en masse to private equity. The result is disaster.
*The [Supreme Court] decision means TikTok now operates under the threat that it could be forced offline with a stroke of [the bully's] pen.*
On the damaging insincerity of working as a "chat moderator", which turned out to mean pretending to love various customers in parallel while imitating each customer's requested gender and sexual orientation.
The author speculates that his conversations on the platform were being used to train a Fake Intelligence system such as an LLM.
The article gives an example of the wrong that nondisclosure agreements can do: aiding employers in concealing dishonesty and harmful practices.
*Australian PM [Albanese] rejects Netanyahu's linking of Palestine recognition to Bondi beach attack.*
Criticism of a country's crimes is not the same thing as bigotry against its dominant ethnic group. To blame Jews in general for Israel's cruelty and atrocities is where antisemitism enters the argument.
*Fairer laws passed, polluting factories shuttered, charges against innocent people dropped – and 10 more ways [the Guardian's] US reporting made change in 2025.*
New South Wales's governing party is about to adopt strict restrictions on protests, citing antisemitism as the excuse. These include a list of phrases that it will be a crime to say, and power to ban all protests for three months any time a "terrorist act" occurs.
One of the prohibited phrases may be "globalize the intifada". I have explained why I consider that a dog whistle for terrorism, but criminalizing dog whistles is the path to repression.
The Green Party denounces these restrictions as unconstitutional. I hope that courts agree.
*Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Will Now Control What TikTok Users See.* In the US at least.
Regardless of the specific preferences of any particular antisocial media platform, the general practice of boosting whatever gets viewers mad, upset or riled (because that leads to "more engagement" of viewers) is harmful — the site's "algorithm" (recommendation engine) is a tool for manipulating them. Such manipulation should be prohibited.
*Over 85 top climate specialists* refuted the magats' official denial of the developing climate crisis, *calling it a "shoddy mess" that downplays risks,* and *a mockery of science.*
It has *pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.*
India withdrew the plan to require all snoop-phones to have an app for the state to track them. Now it demands that Apple enable GPS tracking for all iMonsters all the time.
Some Fake Intelligence companies admit — in words that downplay the point — that "agentic" FI carries such a large risk of falling for scams and attacks that no one should use it.
Video has been leaked showing the trial of Xu Qinxian, a Chinese general who refused to send troops into Beijing in 1989 to crush the students' massive Tien An Men protest for freedom and democracy.
*The Supreme Court blocked [the persecutor] from sending the National Guard into the Chicago area — finally setting a limit to [his] executive power.*
*As the US invests in fossil fuels, young climate activists push back in the courts.*
*Gaza no longer in famine but hunger levels remain critical, UN says.* This means that some people in Gaza are still dying or being permanently stunted from lack of food, but not so many as before.
Israel continues to limit medical supplies in Gaza and keep out tents, which people in Gaza desperately need and have a right to.
US citizens: call on world leaders to turn climate pledges into enforceable action and build a livable future instead of climate disaster.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr.
US citizens: call on the UN Security Council to condemn Israel's killing of journalists.
Demand accountability, and defend the right to report news, by protecting the people who do that.
US citizens: Denounce the bully's proposed deep surveillance of visitors to the US.
Putin has been attacking EU officials' planes by jamming GPS signals in their vicinity.
I think this sort of attack should be treated like the firing of missiles, shells or lasers at a plane: as a warlike act which justifies warlike defense. To avoid unnecessary escalation, it would be wise to limit these defensive acts to efforts to prevent or block the attack.
The US tradition in naming institutions after people is to honor a great person who is already dead or at least out of power. But the wrecker uses his power to have things named after him now.
When the new magat board members voted to add his name to the Kennedy Center for the Arts, they omitted that plan from the meeting agenda so that some board members would not know there was a reason to attend, and digitally silenced one dissenting board member who did show up; then they told the lie that the vote was unanimous.
A recording of a phone call shows that the cheater tried directly to persuade someone in Georgia to nullify the 2020 vote.
Journalists report on driving to follow deportation thugs and the neighborhood activists who warn about their dreadful visits.
The most extreme of the right-wing Christians are a rapidly growing sect of Pentecostals whose doctrines are un-Christian as well as un-American.
Funny imitation municipal signs posted in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Australia is going to limit exports of fossil gas so as to reduce the domestic price. However, the price decrease will mainly benefit large industrial users, not the people who might merit some sympathy.
Reducing the price of fossil gas risks encouraging consumption. That may do no harm if Australia pushes hard to increase available renewable electricity to replace it anyway -- but if it does enough of that, the price of gas problem will solve itself anyway.
The magats plan to replace 30 heads of US embassies, who normally aim to be apolitical, with people who are personally loyal to the saboteur in chief.
Paramount installed Bari Weiss as CBS news editor-in-chief in obedience to the bully, so she could kill stories that would make him look bad. She just killed one.
The writer argues that this is part of a plan by Larry Ellison and David Ellison to get control of all the US major media.
Robert Reich interviews Sharyn Alfonsi, who worked on the story, accused CBS News of pulling the story for "political" reasons.
An organization systematically finds and attacks people who criticize Israel's atrocities against Palestinians, by mislabeling that criticism as "antisemitism" and mobilizing an army of supporters to demand they be fired for that. It often gets them fired.
*The key global crops, wheat, rice and maize, are expected to see the losses to pests increase by about 46%, 19% and 31% respectively when global heating reaches 2C, the scientists said… The direct impact of the climate crisis on wheat, rice and maize is predicted to cut yields by 6-10% for every 1C of global heating.*
Here is a list of some consumer boycotts mounted by progressives. I mostly support them, but sometimes for different reasons.
I have boycotted Amazon absolutely for many years. If a friend wants to give me a gift, I ask per to please not obtain it from Amazon (and not tell any company my name or address, even for delivery purposes!).
I have always avoided Spotify since it was first set up, because it requires the customer to run nonfree software (for DRM!) and to identify perself. Likewise all other streaming dis-services.
I would boycott Home Depot except I don't know anywhere else around here where I could buy some of their products. However, I don't buy there often.
I support the boycott of Starbucks, to support the union, but that makes no direct economic difference since their products don't appeal to my tastes.
I support the boycott Tesla, not just because of I detest the musket but especially because of its surveillance and remote control, which ought to be illegal. However, since I do not have a car and don't intend to have one, my support does not make direct economic difference.
The article says that some progressives choose to buy from Costco because it has stood up to the bully. I appreciate that, but Costco's practice of demanding that customers identify themselves makes it unacceptably unjust.
Most stores invite people to identify themselves, either by registering their identity or using digital payments or both. But most of them continue to permit a customer to pay cash anonymously. This builds an enormous database of personal activities, which the persecutor's henchmen are now using to build up an "enemies list".
Don't be tracked -- pay cash, and insist on anonymity!
US citizens: call on the EPA to restore the truth about climate [disaster] on its web sites.
US citizens: call on the Pentagon to stop trying to punish Senator Mark Kelly for upholding the Constitution and rule of law, and start helping to uphold them.
US citizens: Applaud U.S. diplomats standing up for the rule of law instead of trumpish arbitrary rule.
The Australian government has prohibited using force or violence against people based on their religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion.
I wonder if this is enforced against agents of the state.
*More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious – and also potentially more toxic (due to an increase in lead content).*
*[For instance], zinc in chickpeas would be expected to plummet by up to 37.5%, with a “significant” decrease in protein, zinc and iron in essential crops such as rice and wheat.*
Medical disinformation is sometimes deadly. In Canada, people are falling for disinformation about "natural" childbirth, which effectively puts recourse to medicine off limits.
The EU found an alternative method to fund Ukraine's defense, satisfying Belgium's objections to putting Belgium on the spot.
However, the outcome highlights the harm that Putin's client states in the EU do.
In the Republican plan for rigging the 2026 election, one prong is an effort to make it harder to vote, especially for groups likely to vote Democratic. This includes cuts to early voting, voter roll purges, the elimination of drop boxes, and bureaucratic hurdles meant to confuse and discourage would-be voters. The other prong is gerrymandering.
*Santas and elves rob Montreal grocery store to "give food to the needy."*
This isn't the ideal system for helping the poor, but it is better than failing to do the job.
The new leader of Britain's largest labor union announces it will refuse its support to the Labour Party if that party supports billionaires instead of working people.
*Why is it that powerful people typically wait until they have no power [before they] take the right position and effectively admit they were wrong when they had more power to do something about it?*
*[The deportation thugs are] siphoning ever more resources and personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).*
We have seen much proof that the wrecker wants to engage lots of untrained agents to grab and deport, and separately wants to incapacitate FEMA. With this trick he can do both at once.
Governor Newsom said he believes the wrecker is seriously trying to block the next presidential election so he can remain president.
A satire about future chatbots recognizes they are not intelligent, despite using the term "AI".
Too bad more people don't have the courage to refuse to endorse the claim that they are intelligent.
Two rich Arab clients of the US are on the verge of fighting a proxy war in South Yemen against each other.
Both proxies are enemies of the Houthis, but also of each other.
Australia is planning to respond to the antisemitic shooting by repressing protests and rallies -- those criticizing Israel's atrocities, I suppose.
Those atrocities are just as vicious, and far larger, than the antisemitic violence. It is absurd to fight antisemitic violence by protecting bigger atrocities. We must oppose both.
Invasive mussels have caused a disaster in Lake Geneva.
Right-wing Christian antiabortionists are replacing the medical aid funds that the persecutor has cut, and the replacement funds have dangerous strings attached.
Beyond "Citizens" United: Republicans want to erase the little that remains of campaign donation limits.
People and animals in the Arctic suffer the direct effects of continuing global heating.
Robert Reich: The wrecker's imperative is not just to keep displaying outrageous and vicious contempt for good government and justice, but to make it worse and worse at an accelerating rate.
On the urgent need to reduce methane emissions .
The Tigris River, where civilization began, is polluted and in danger of drying up .
The Iranian government organized and set off at least two arson attacks aimed at Jewish activities in Australia. And perhaps more as well.
Australia has closed the Iranian embassy, which participated in attacks and in intimidation of Iranian exiles who protested against Iran's government.
*Some might be partisan, others under external pressure – but too many journalists in Israel have failed to tell the truth about Gaza.*
The history of the Republican Party since the 1970s: how it was taken over by plutocratist extremists whose goal was to hand the rich complete power over America.
US citizens: call on Congress to require the deportation thugs to report accurately what they are doing, and to give priority for deportation to those unauthorized immigrants who have criminal records.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on the U.S. government to stop arming Israel's military and instead ensure Israel complies with international law — including immediately withdrawing from Gaza and the West Bank.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Rashida Tlaib's Economic Dignity For All agenda.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to put a moratorium on building new data centers.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore funds for public media (broadcasting).
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
(satire) *Fact-Checking [the cheater] On Voter Fraud.*
*Belgian politicians and senior finance executives have been subject to a campaign of intimidation orchestrated by Russian intelligence aimed at persuading the country to block the use of €185bn [of frozen Russian] assets for Ukraine, according to European intelligence agencies.*
The European spy agencies are not perfectly trustworthy, but I would not expect them to fabricate details such as those given in the article. So I think this is true.
The demand that Belgium alone not get stuck with the costs, if Putin were someday to succeed in forcing return of the confiscated assets, seems reasonable to me. That hypothetical loss should be divided somehow among many countries.
Harvard abruptly forced out the head of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, which worked with Palestinians in the West Bank to study the medical consequences of discrimination and repression there.
The BBC is terrified of the bully's enormous Florida lawsuit which demands ten billion dollars for a questionable editing decision.
But is going to fight the lawsuit.
The edit juxtaposed two clips from the bully's address on Jan 6, 2021 (the one that sent the crowd to attack the Capitol), which in actual fact were separated by substantial time.
For an important public figure to win a libel case against news media in the US requires proving "actual malice". There is little chance he could do that. However, there is some chance his billionaire supporters might convince Supreme Court justices to give him victory, disregarding facts and laws, in the ultimate appeal.
The Hackney Community Defense Association was set up to expose corruption and mistreatment by British thugs. Undercover cops snooped on it for a decade.
*[The persecutors's henchmen] ignored questions about whether it would order the killings of those on its [secret list of supposed "domestic terrorists"] — even while answering our other queries.*
Thais in Siam began conquering a portion of Khmer territory after 1200 a.d. After France made the Khmer into a colony, France took part of that portion from Siam, while Siam retained the rest of it. Thailand (formerly Siam) and Cambodia are now fighting about the border of the part that France added to Cambodia.
President Vučić of Serbia, a right-winger corrupted by the bully (and also by Putin), agreed to let him build a "Trump Tower" in a protected area of land. An honest prosecutor investigated and laid charges of corruption, which brought about cancellation of the plan.
Human Rights Watch has published an explanation of the legalities of the persecutor's deadly attacks on unarmed ships, and why such attacks are crimes.
*Pentagon won't release full video of [boat attack] that killed two [survivors of the first attack], Hegseth says.*
In the 1970s, governments began to focus on human rights, but interpreted them as including rich people's to get rich and buy everything, then took this as an excuse to disregard the other crucial goal of reducing economic inequality.
The wrecker wants to have several nuclear reactors of new designs running just 7 months from now, without letting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission verify their safety.
It looks like the saboteur in chief is aiming for speed above all, and safety be damned.
The demand for this haste comes from the companies that run bullshit generators and call them artificial "intelligence". In case people prefer not to use those, they aim to give people no choice.
Jailed supporters of Palestine Action have been on hunger strike for weeks.
Comparing the output of various bullshit generators when they are given the topic of global heating.
The report says that Grok sometimes shows climate denial bias, while a couple of other bullshit generators did not.
When I call them "bullshit generators", that is not a claim that the output is biased in some specific way. What makes these systems bullshit generators rather than "intelligence" is that they are not capable of knowing or understanding anything. They play with text in a complex way but do not know what the text means.
The US will make it easier to do research on marijuana but did not end criminal penalties for using it.
Only a small fraction of the plastic containers for food are actualy recycled. We need to reduce the amount of plastic that we use. Many of these containers, as currently made, are not feasible to recycle, even if theoretically it is possible.
US citizens: call on your congressional officials to impeach RFK Jr and remove him from office , for supporting medical disinformation.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: write to Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano saying to keep Social Security offices open.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support Medicare for All.
You can use 202-858-1717 to call your U.S. Representative, and 202-519-0494 to call your U.S. Senator. Here is a suggested script from National Nurses United:
Hi, my name is _______. I am a constituent and I'm a nurse/other health care worker/patient. I'm calling today in support of Medicare for All. Our health care system is failing patients and providers, and incremental fixes aren't enough. Support for Medicare for All is broad, and growing by the day. If you are not yet a cosponsor of the Medicare for All Act, I urge you to sign on. If you are already a cosponsor, thank you — and please continue championing Medicare for All as the real solution to this health care crisis.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: Urge New York State's pension funds to divest from Blackrock .
Billionaire Polluters has hired a new CEO who calls the policy of avoiding climate disaster "ideological".
To depend on companies to decide whether to save civilization or run it into the ground is foolish and weak. We must impose the choice to save it.
The wrecker's henchmen in the EPA decided to weaken the regulations on formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.
The linear danger assumption is a good assumption because just one cell that becomes cancerous is enough to give a person cancer. Becoming cancerous requires a set of mutations, and each carcinogen molecule has a certain low probability of causing one of those mutations. Half the dosage would mean half the probability of cancer in any given period of time.
The magats have canceled a plan to remove lead in Omaha. Lead poisoning damages children's intelligence permanently and can lead them to become criminals.
* District judge says policies deeming deportation thugs' field offices "off-limits for congressional oversight" violates federal law .*
Making a supporter of the muskrat head of NASA will give the muskrat too much power over NASA's decisions.
The writer says that Germans find it very difficult to confront the German equivalent of being asked, "How are you?"
I have always felt this way about it. There have always been problems in my life, which implied that "Fine" as an answer would have been false. To answer that way felt like lying.
Nowadays I can say that "My lymphoma is still in remission," which is pleasant and true.
A group of UN special rapporteurs rebuked Columbia University, Cornell University, Georgetown University. Minnesota State University and Tufts University for repression of students' freedom of political speech.
* [Increased] exposure to high temperatures [due to global heating] could result in long-lasting damage to health of billions of people, scientists warn.*
The wrecker's henchmen seek to wreck the National Center for Atmospheric Research, perhaps because it works on understanding and modeling global heating.
The magats deny global heating exists, so they see NCAR as an enemy for reporting that it does.
The bully has started out-and-out war with Venezuela, with a naval blockade.
Companies are using bullshit generators to post job offers, and using bullshit generators to judge applications, and it is not clear whether they really intend to hire anyone. For the poor humans who would like to find a job, it is a pointless waste of time. This article talks about Britain, but I've read that it is the same more generally.
Australia's rather strict gun regulations have some gaps that can be closed.
The Catholic organization Opus Dei enslaved teenage women as domestic servants, after having promised to give them education.
See the enslaved workers page.
*It's the media's job to hold power to account . This year, too many got into bed with it instead.* "Power" in this article refers to state power. However, "power" includes the power of businesses as well as the power of governments. Over recent decades, the major US media have become subsidiaries of megacorporations which mainly do other kinds of business. That has resulted in increasing corruption of the news media, for decades.
The bully and his supporters launched threat after threat against the state legislators of Indiana (mostly Republicans), and against the state and its people, to demand that they vote for gerrymander of the House of Representatives, but they refused.
The bully's ruination of the Kennedy Center is a warning to everyone of what fascists in power will do to arts, culture, and democratic discourse.
*The jailing of a Sudanese militia leader is an anomaly in a world where Putin, Netanyahu and yes, Hegseth, act without fear of international law.*
*Obamacare expiration will have "death spiral" effect on US [medical insurance].* Only the sickest will pay for coverage, so the plans will go broke and disappear.
*Beware [the fascist]'s two-pronged strategy undermining democracy.*
[He] announces non-existent emergencies to invoke extraordinary powers – and neutralizes the opposition.*
Israeli extremists cite antisemitic violence as justification for anti-Palestinian violence.
Other extremists respond to violence against Palestinians by encouraging antisemitic violence .
Each of these streams of violence encourages the other, but neither of them justifies the other. Both of them are unjustified cruelty. They are both wrong.
The situation is not a perfectly symmetrical dance. That hardly ever happens outside fiction, and that fiction is written to make the imperfect symmetry of reality visible.
Twixt the river and the sea,
Palestine nigh Israel be.
Both in peace, let both be free;
Be lands of democracy.
How each state can work around the "Citizens" United decision for elections in that state.
Amnesty International: how deportation prisons in Florida gravely violate human rights .
Lawyers who worked for the Justice Department said they were pressured by higher-ups to prosecute the University of California for discrimination against Jews, before they had a chance to study the facts of the case.
Guan Heng documented China's repression of Uyghurs, then fled to the US. The US is pushing to deport him to Uganda, which might send him to China for brainwashing.
I am curious why the US denied him asylum.
A deportation prison in a rural area of Georgia is overloading the area's ambulance system. Some injured prisoners have to wait a long time to get to a hospital.
Deportation thugs violently attacked a mother and her children , and injured them, without bothering to ask whether they were entitled to live in the US. It is inexcusable for them to do that to anyone.
These thugs behaved like a violent street gang and should be treated as such. To attack in any violent way a person who is not fighting, or per vehicle or other property, deserves a sentence of some years in prison. Causing permanent injury should add more years to the sentence.
Such actions are normal for the US deportation thugs. Ilhan Omar recently called them "Blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency."
How planet-roasting oil companies systematically advertise to pretend to be helping to solve the problem they continue causing.
More information on the oil tanker that the US seized near Venezuela.
It was not, as I thought, Venezuelan. It identified itself falsely as registered in Guyana. I did not see in the article where, if anywhere, the ship was actually registered. Maybe I was mistaken in saying that seizing the ship was an act of war against Venezuela, or any country.
The wrecker bullied Britain into taking around 4 billion dollars from medicine and paying it to US Big Pharma instead.
Another reason why you can't trust bullshit generators: scammers systematically feed them false information by injecting dangerous lies into sites that the generators scan.
The bully and his henchmen are trying many ways to attack US universities .
Some UK universities are refusing to help fossil fuel companies recruit staff.
Chile elected a new president who is a follower of the murderous dictator Pinochet and the murderous would-be dictator of the US.
The Tories hope to climb back from near-oblivion by encouraging continued sale of fossil-fuel cars. This could drive the last nail into the coffin of civilization.
A US Air Force plane flying near Venezuela with its transponder off flew in front of an airliner and risked causing a collision .
What Curaçao ATC said suggests the US is doing dangerous things like this often.
A Chinese democracy activist (now in the US) reports on how invigorating it is to speak against a tyrannical state.
US citizens: call on Amazon to come to the table with Amazon Labor Union.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Advice to Americans from anti-fascist activists in Hungary, Turkey and El Salvador.
The UK is investigating the "spycops" operation which sent undercover cops to infiltrate leftist political groups engaged in political protest campaigns by pretending to be supporters and dishonestly forming romantic relationships with other supporters.
For the state to snoop on nonviolent democratic activism is an attack on democracy. Pretending to love someone in order to snoop on per activities is personal dishonesty. Both are vicious, though the former is the more consequential of the two wrongs.
I have the impression most people think the worst aspect of this is the non-monogamy of it -- part of the monogamist idea that loving someone else is a personal "betrayal". Such possessiveness is not a part of my idea of love. If my sweetheart loves someone else in addition to me, as long as she does love me I can still be happy loving her.
*Digital billboards that can film viewers’ responses to adverts have been installed in hundreds of apartment blocks [in Britain].*
They are installed in the lobby where people wait for the elevator. Putting something very distracting there is more than just Orwellian. It is a nasty distraction.
I suggest some responses:
*[The fascist's] New doctrine identifies "weak" Europe's problem: not enough racism.*
It aims to *destroy liberal democracy as we know it ,* in Europe as well as in the US.
The US lifted one specific trade sanction on Belarus, which (perhaps in exchange) has release political prisoners.
A UN committee reports: "Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour."
That is 51 trillion dollars per year.
We should not hesitate to invest trillions of dollars to end that damage. It will be a profitable investment if we invest enough.
But we should take care not to let big businesses own the results of that investment.
Plutocratist politicians are so in thrall to lobbyists that they voted to deny the US military the right to repair its own equipment.
In peacetime, the inability to make a nontrivial fix can waste taxpayers' money. In battle, it can be deadly. There may be no time to fly a repairman to a war zone; the repairman might even refuse to go.
Everyone deserves the right to repair — which is related to software freedom.
*More than 9,000 children in Gaza hospitalised for acute malnutrition in October, UN says. Aid agencies say Israel is still restricting their aid shipments despite ceasefire announced two months ago.*
The State of Victoria (in Australia) has apologized to indigenous Australians for British colonization, listing a series of wrongs for which it accepts blame.
Putin applauds the bully's pressure on Europe to give up defending Ukraine.
*No, New York City's wealthiest are not fleeing the city after Mamdani's win.*
Long-time activist Rosa Parks started the Montgomery bus boycott with a shot in the dark, no advance plan. The blacks of Montgomery had an organized and motivated community which seized the opportunity.
We need to continue trying to launch resistance against today's unjust systems, including proprietary operating systems.
The corrupter has accused couple of appointed officials of mortgage fraud because they got mortgages on two properties and described both as primary residences. It turns out that he did the same thing.
Whether this actually constitutes fraud, I don't know. Let's not follow legal advice from a habitual liar.
* The climate crisis supercharged the deadly storms that killed more than 1,750 people in Asia by making downpours more intense and flooding worse, scientists have reported. Monsoon rains often bring some flooding but the scientists were clear: this was "not normal".*
The US attacked an oil tanker off Venezuela, this time capturing it rather than bombing it.
Thus, the war that the bully has threatened is now in progress.
The bully has declared his intention to push Europe into fascism.
It seems that Europe must build up its strength until it can simultaneously resist both Putin and the bully.
*All of the deadly US [attacks] on alleged drug boats are murders.*
A study of people arrested by a big UK police department found that half of them displayed signs of possible ADHD. Perhaps better treatment of ADHD would help some of them avoid situations in which they get arrested.
South Carolina's measles epidemic is spreading rapidly and around 250 are in quarantine.
This is the organized efforts of anti-vaxxers at work.
*Economic growth no longer linked to carbon emissions in most of the world, study finds.*
This does not mean we are safe! Natural systems that absorb CO2 have exceeded their limits and ceased to do so. This include oceans and forests.
The article foolishly uses the misleading term "global south", which misrepresents the less-developed (and poorer) countries as a sort of region so as to encourage people to see in terms of a fictional nationalism rather than a fight against rich planet roasters in all countries who try their best to dominate the decision between increasing their riches and keeping civilization alive.
*Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice.* Other accounts which post about queer people and their activities have also been shut.
(I am sad that the article uses the word "content" so as to treat works of writing and art as a fungible commodity, is a dirty word. I reject it even in a quotation. I hope you will join me in rejecting it.)
It is foolish to look for information in a plaform such as Facebook, and people's habit of doing that is harmful for everyone because the zucker zucks up to the bully and spreads his lies. Any organization which bases its outreach on Facebook will never reach me.
The plutocratist government of Queensland (Australia) plans to legalize political donations by real estate developers.
Plutocratist politicians generally defend the "freedom" of plutocrats to donate money to them.
The Daughters of the Confederacy set out to undermine the freeing of the slaves by spreading the myth that slavery had been beneficial and just. (Meanwhile, to stop blacks from refuting the myth, the KKK threatened to lynch them.)
Republican leaders including the corrupter are spreading that same myth now.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry , and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles that make important points, such as that one -- and I present this comment about them.
Since an Afghan refugee shot two national guard soldiers, the persecutor tries to persecute everyone of Afghan origin.
This illustrates his perverse fixation on hyper-revenge.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the companies that have donated for the "king"'s grand ballroom.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to oppose high-deductible medical plans.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
The bully refuses to say how much of our money he has spent on militaryintrusion into US cities , so the best we can get is an educated estimate of around half a billion dollars.
While this is a significant sum, their principal harm is the terror and state lawlessness that they spread.
The first crucial safety question about the Waymo driverless taxi's killing of a beloved store cat is whether a human driver would have been likely to avoid doing the same. (It would be unfair to criticize Waymo for doing something only as well as a human could)
This article presents reasons why a human would probably have avoided it, and relates them to the fact hat the control software is actually not intelligent.
The principal injustice that driverless taxis do is not the rare killing of a tame cat. It is surveillance : it is impossible to use them without identifying oneself.
Does anyone know whether it is even possible to hail them on the street? I expect that is impossible, but I would like to be sure.
India has ordered all manufacturers of snoop-phones to install a state surveillance app into each one, including forced remote installation into those already made.
The first announcement said that it will be impossible to delete this snoop-app, but later the government said the opposite. There is no telling what it will really do.
Medical hokum is widespread nowadays, and includes fanatical believers in all sorts of foolish practices that have never been systematically tested. Including assisting in childbirth.
The Burmese military government has attacked a hospital as part of the persecution of a disprivileged ethnic group.
The world failed to stand firm against this when Israel did it, so now other armies will imitate it.
*Indiana Republicans reject effort to redraw voting maps in rebuke to the cheater.*
Protesters at a congressional committee hearing which was questioning Kristi Noem tried to exorcise her from the US government.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to block the takeover of Warner Bros by Netflix and/or Paramount.
US citizens: sign the petition to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach Hegseth, the Secretary of Aggression.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code—not trivial, but not hard.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: Tell SSA: Don't let social security data direct the deportation thugs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code—not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: join this campaign.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on media to expose the bully's abuse of power as an offense against the Constitution and human rights.
US citizens: sign the petition to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect funding for Social Security to offer in-person visits for service and administrative issues.
US citizens: sign the petition to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
*A rights campaigner in Hungary has been placed under investigation and is facing potential criminal charges after organizing a peaceful Pride march.* This violates EU agreements about respect for freedom of speech.
US citizens: Pressure Dr. Oz to Exempt Stroke Survivors with Aphasia from Work Requirements and Extend Recertification Nationwide
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your senators: don't legislate any abortion restrictions!
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to urge per to vote to restore federal workers unionization rights.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: call for Congress to investigate Hegseth for war crimes and to block war with Venezuela.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
US citizens: call on media companies to stand up for free speech.
US citizens: call for protecting Earth from methane in the air, and the global heating it causes.
US citizens: call on Congress to vote to continue to fund medical coverage for non-wealthy Americans before it's too late.
You can also phone your congresscritter and deliver the same message. The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
If you message Congress please spread the word!
The Labour Party's right-wing plutocratist power-bloc chose Starmer as leader, but the right wing policies he put in place have inspired public revulsion. This article speculates that they are about to replace Starmer as prime minister with another right-wing Labour minister to continue pushing for the same policies.
The US government is considering abolishing payment by check.
I use checks to pay bills that come to me with my name on them. They are morally acceptable because (1) being anonymous is not possible for those bills and (2) I can send checks without running a nonfree app or JavaScript program.
Sending credit card information on paper would also be morally acceptable in those cases; however, checks have the advantage that the bank does no find out what one paid for with a check, whereas I think credit card issuers get specifics about what one paid for with a credit card transaction. (In addition, credit card numbers are easy to use for fraud, easier than a checking account number.)
Systems for repression of people depend on data. Every kind of surveillance built into systems we use, including payment systems, facilitates repression and arbitrary, tyrannical rule.
Americans support a universal medical system by a large margin. Even if we count only Republicans, almost 50% support it.
So why doesn't Congress enact one? I can see only one possible explanation: our corrupt system of campaign funding.
This is what makes the difference between progressive Democrats and plutocratists (of any party). The progressive Democrats try to win by advocating laws that will help non-rich Americans; the plutocratists try to avoid the issue and raise distractions.
*For months, [the corrupter and his magats] have been accusing [their] political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.*
He seems to have committed such a fraud himself. *He had two mortgages he claimed were primary dwellings, records show.*
The gang MS-13 used threats and intimidation to support the right-wing candidate for president of Honduras. The corrupter did the same thing using different threats.
Deportation thugs at the Fort Bliss deportations prison have been accused of *beatings, sexual abuse and clandestine deportations of non-Mexican nationals into Mexico.*
Local elected officials if Britain's magat party are trying to gag their opposition using the weak powers of local government. The results may be rather embarrassing for them.
Magat US Park Service cancels gratis entry on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, and announces gratis entry on the persecutor's birthday instead.
This reinforces the right-wing extremist position that slavery wasn't so bad, if the slaves were blacks.
*More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US data centers.*
*Canada's environmental "realism" looks more like surrender.*
Plutocratist's favorites refrain is, "Be realistic -- don't aim for the change that would suffice for survival."
*Study of 8,300 US children suggests social media may be contributing to a rise in ADHD diagnoses… [it] damages children's ability to focus.*
Lenore Skenazy: risk-averse society demanded that facilities for children be designed to eliminate any identified risk.
When deportation thugs grabbed Any Lucia López Belloza as she was boarding a flight to see her family in Texas, other thugs went to her family home and sought to bluff their way into it without saying why.
Whether the López family should have residency in the US is a complex question which I can't judge. I don't know all the facts, all the US laws, nor all about the asylum treaty and its interpretation. So I have no opinion about that.
However, a few things are clear. No one should ever be deported in a rush, no one should ever be deported without a careful hearing, and no one should be deported without a reasonable time to say goodbye to friends and family.
And no one should be deported based on arguments that rest on fabricated facts.
*Warner Bros. Discovery Should Remain Independent to Keep Film/TV Markets .*
As this instance shows, business owners generally prefer to increase their power by reducing the number of competitors -- often through mergers.
The original purpose of antitrust law was to prevent the gradual disappearance of real competition. Since the 1980s, plutocratist US politicians (including Democrats such as Bill Clinton) have undermined antitrust enforcement, and thus permitted more and more mergers, resulting in many fields which have only two competitors, or perhaps just one.
One of the things I admired about Biden was that he firmly opposed that tendency, including by appointing Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission.
Google deleted journalist Robert Inlakesh's YouTube account. The reasons it offers vary and are not credible; people suspect it was because of what he reported from Gaza.
Israel has more or less admitted its intent to annex half of Gaza, the half from which it has already expelled all Palestinians -- up to the slowly advancing "yellow line".
The underminer isn't satisfied with his outrageous practice of pardoning, for any federal crimes, whoever offers fealty to him. He wants to bully states into pardoning his servants for state crimes too.
Magas have canceled Biden's program that allows students who took out loans, but have low income, to repay less than the face value of their loans.
That will actually make education of future students in the US more expensive.
Aside from that, there will be lower limits on how much a student can borrow. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because borrowing more than that is taking a terrible risk. We recently saw the job market for programming graduates crash because of (perhaps foolhardy) use of Imitation Intelligence. That could happen in other fields too.
Every country should fund the education of capable students. That is an investment in its future.
*DoJ moves to eliminate sexual abuse protections for LGBTQ+ people in prisons.* In effect, magats want to threaten those prisoners with rape.
*The giant [White House] ballroom is [the corrupter's] monument to corruption.* Countries are donating to it as bribes for government favors.
About Peter Francis, former police undercover infiltrator of protest movements, who became a whistleblower to expose that antidemocratic practice.
The Putin forces blew a hole in the Chernobyl reactor disaster shield, which was meant to contain radioactive materials in the old wreckage.
The damage makes it impossible to proceed to clean up the reactor.
Labour is considering bringing the UK partly back into the EU by negotiating a customs union. Corbyn advocated a customs union with the EU when he was head of the Labour Party.
Newly elected Representative Grijalva of Arizona accuses deportation thugs of spraying her with pepper spray, and a video supports the claim, but a magat official insists that it never happened.
Pentagon "press conferences" are now limited to right-wing extremists that will support the bully's militarist policy 110%.
Since that happened, the major US media have become mostly subservient themselves, on the big issues, but they remain willing to criticize smaller details of government actions.
*[The wrecker]'s pardon of an ex-Honduran president is shocking. So is the history of US support for him [in power].*
Hillary Clinton encouraged the coup in which he stole the presidency. Presidents Obama and Biden gave him support, as well as the wrecker.
Qatar and Egypt, designated as guarantors of the Gaza peace plan Israel has nominally accepted, call on Israel to withdraw its army from Gaza and allow the agreed-on international peace force to take over Gaza.
If Israel does this, that will mean an end to the bloodshed in Gaza (though not the sickness, hunger and cold). Otherwise, Israel will be visibly responsible for breaking the deal.
US citizens: call on federal agencies to protect endangered wildlife, not business interests.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: phone our congresscritter and say to impeach Hegseth.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
Chatbot slop that contains a lot of supposed information can persuade people, but that supposed information tends often to be false.
(satire) *Utah Bans Eye Contact During Sex.*
Some US schools buy supplies from Amazon, and get screwed by changing prices.
States ought to prohibit public agencies and institutions (such as public schools) from buying from any company that requires sellers to commit not to charge less though other retailers. This would exclude Amazon, not by discrimination, but by rejecting its anti-competitive practice.
*[Congressional representatives] who saw a video of a U.S. attack on wounded and helpless people clinging to the wreckage of a supposed drug boat on September 2 described the footage as deeply disturbing.*
*Killing of survivors sparks outrage – but entire US "drug boat" war is legally shaky.* Not to mention that any murder is vicious.
Three Uyghur brothers have been jailed in India for 12 years, without a trial, for crossing the China-India border unknowingly since there was nothing to say it was a border.
The greatest danger to them is that India may expel them to China, which systematically brainwashes Uyghurs.
A PFAS is found in high concentrations in cereal products in Europe. It is a breakdown product of other PFAS that are used in pesticides.
The thugs running the Everglades deportation prison leave a prisoner in a constricting cage outdoors for a day without water to drink.
Even at this time of year, it is often rather hot for part of the day down there. Such a cage is torture, and the lack of water to drink risks doing harm.
Google takes a stand for the deportation thugs and against their victims.
Is Google's political stand a matter of support for repression?
Or is it a matter of surrendering to bullying?
Either way, it shows the injustice of the nonfree software
of Google's app store.
At last for now you can load apps from elsewhere on Android. But Google is talking about making that harder.
A lawsuit accuses Google of activating its bullshit generator, Gemini, by default for various widely used apps, as a way of snooping on what users say in them.
It's not impossible to deactivate Gemini, but Google has set up a "dark pattern" to make it so inconvenient that people will give up.
Snooping, and dark patterns, are typical ways nonfree programs mistreat users. If you run a nonfree program, yo are helplessly at the mercy of any nonfree program's developer.
Global heating seems to have greatly damaged Britain's grain harvest, enough that farmers are considering giving up.
*[The saboteur in chief] says he will repeal Biden-era fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks.*
He must be working an hour a week to maximize use of fossil fuels.
*Washington's betrayal of its [European] allies has been averted for now,* but Europe must prepare for a world where it cannot trust the US as an ally.
How politicians that want to track everyone distract attention from the damage of doing that: by focusing public concern on the secondary danger that people of some minority groups will be tracked less accurately than most people.
As if the only danger were that of tracked wrong.
Meanwhile, the same government tries to jail everyone who states support for Palestine Action.
If you are in Britain, call your MP to tell per that tracking people as much as the UK does is Orwellian and puts democracy in danger.
And while you're it it, insist on paying cash for what you buy, so that your identity is not known.
A crash in the sardine population killed most of the African penguins population from 2004 to 2012. The species is now critically endangered.
*I'm a legal refugee in Britain. So why am I always being treated like a criminal?.*
Many species are threatened with extinction from sheer excess heat.
San José State University's president has fired a tenured professor for involvement in a protest "violating rules". She is contesting this with the help of the faculty union.
Racist housing policies drove down the property values in the US neighborhoods where blacks were allowed to live; adding injury to injury. Their houses were taxed for far more than they were worth.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important -- and I present this comment about them.
*Up to 150,000 residents of El Fasher are missing since North Darfur capital fell to paramilitary Rapid Support Forces,* which is one of the two warring factions.
A large number of them seem to have been massacred, but investigators and reporters are not allowed in.
Margaret Atwood responds to big questions, after clarifying them philosophically with vigorous logic.
Some states in Malaysia make it a legal obligation for Muslim men to participate in prayer on Friday. Failure can be punished by a long prison term.
Being labeled a Muslim in Malaysia is not a matter of choice or belief. If your parents were Muslim, the national government designates you as a Muslim. Likewise if you are racially Malay. This is an offense against the human right, freedom of religion.
In general, countries that are generally considered "Muslim" have laws that deny people religious freedom. Typically these laws ban conversion of Muslims to any other religion or to Atheism, as well as other more specific injustices.
A good example is Egypt.
*New York City bill aims to ban toxic "forever chemicals" in firefighting gear.* The states of Massachusetts and Connecticut did this last year, but New York City is a bigger market than either of them.
*UK ministers pressing ahead with ban on cryptocurrency political donations.*
To restore democracy, we need to prevent the rich from buying elections. That entails preventing anonymous contribution in electioneering.
*Entire Chain of Command [from Hegseth down to the soldiers who fired the shots] Could Be [prosecuted under actual US military law] for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say,*
Thus, the statement that soldiers are allowed to refuse an order to commit a war crime is half the point. The other half is that those who receive an order to commit a crime must refuse, lest they make themselves criminals and later be prosecuted for those crimes. "I was obeying orders" is not a defense.
One unfortunate consequence of this situation is that their only remaining way to avoid such prosecution is to have a president who protects criminals. That could become a system that generates soldiers desperate to be pardoned by the president for crimes they committed for per.
(satire) *[The bullshitter] Announces 5,000% Increase In All Numbers.*
*Pentagon says every national guard [soldier] deployed in Washington DC "is now armed."
The hate-spreader is using an shooting attack on some national guard troops in Washington as an opportunity to make it easier for violence against civilians to occur. Such violence serves his purposes.
Magat officials have threatened to withhold food stamp funds from states that don't hand over all their personal data about all recipients.
Border thugs broke into and raided a humanitarian aid station in the Arizona desert, without a warrant.
This station gives food, water and medical care, and a chance to rest -- but not transportation -- to people who have crossed the border. The thugs could have entered the place lawfully by first applying for a warrant, but they look for opportunities for lawlessness that will diminish constitutional rights in the US.
*A Guardian investigation reveals Dollar General and Family Dollar stores often fail to honor their shelf prices – charging more at checkout for everything from frying pans to Frosted Flakes.*
The companies let such errors accumulate systematically "by accident"; not doing the work required to update the price stickers on the products themselves. When they are caught, the fines are minuscule. Morally it is the equivalent of deciding to lie and defraud, and it ought to be punished as such.
Some dollar stores also explicitly lie by presenting fake "discount prices".
I've heard these stores criticized also for (1) not offering much in the way of fresh vegetables and fruit, thus imposing a less healthful diet, and (2) driving all competitors out of business, so that whole neighborhoods have no access to those foods.
The wrecker has given the US military permission to keep attacking alleged drug smuggling boats until they are completely destroyed, even if this will result in killing survivors.
This second attack is a secondary crime on top of the first crime -- the first military attack on an alleged drug smuggling boat. The US could easily capture these boats and their crews, then prosecute the people on the boat for smuggling drugs, if it turns out they were really smuggling drugs. That is the legitimate thing to do, respecting the law.
But the wrecker doesn't want to carry out justice under laws, rather to twist them into a fascist regime's laws -- a means of compelling everyone's submission.
*Exclusive: Brazil’s environment minister talks about climate inaction and the course we have to plot to save ourselves and the planet.*
A campaign calls on Israel to release Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti from imprisonment without trial, hoping he can end the fighting among Palestinians and then negotiate peace with Israel.
The magat government wants to shield pesticide companies from lawsuits by people who accuse pesticides of causing them cancer.
*Fertilizing arable land with human waste leaves array of toxins that could re-enter food chain, study finds.*
This practice was effectively used for millennia, so I wonder whether the waste contained toxins back then or not. Perhaps it was chemically safe back then because these toxic substances had not been invented yet. Or perhaps some were present but nobody was aware of them, since the life expectancy was shorter then.
There were of course germs that could be transmitted this way, but people took some precautions against such spreading.
The wrecker has bullied the UK's NHS into paying more for patent medicines from the US.
This is the bully's fight to make medical treatment more expensive and deny it to many poor people.
US citizens: call on Spotify to stop showing recruiting ads for the deportation thug department, ads which demonize immigrants.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code—not trivial, but not hard.
Spotify does wrong to all its customers and to most musicians. I urge people to refuse absolutely to use Spotify or any dis-service that acts like Spotify. But I did not raise those issues in the letter I sent for this campaign, as it would have been counterproductive.
But I did mention in my letter the systematic lawlessness of the deportation thugs, who often defy court orders as well as the constitutional rights of the victims.
If you message them, please spread the word!
The UK government has decided on a major expansion of Heathrow airport, which will put the country on a path of ever more flying, and a faster and bigger climate disaster.
The decision cites various short term advantages. They would be quite desirable, if the price were limited to the cost of construction.
A Hong Kong man has been charged with "sedition" for calling for action against the corruption that was responsible for the recent fire in a tall residential building that killed more than 135 people.
If the muskrat's Imitation Intelligence could really think and have views and opinions, we would have to conclude it is a Nazi.
The UK's arbitrary declaration that Palestine Action is a terrorist organization is being reconsidered by a sort of trial, but some of the evidence is being kept secret, so that there is no way for the organization and its supporters to dispute the validity of what is claimed.
*Israel still committing genocide in Gaza, Amnesty International says.*
Israel is still "deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," which is one of the conditions listed in the definition of genocide. This includes denial of food, denial of shelter, and denial of medicine and destruction of doctors and medical facilities.
The persecutor has ended temporary protected status for Burmese refugees, threatening to deport them to Burma. The Burmese military dictatorship is delighted with this show of support.
Some Republicans oppose, for various reasons, the press for gerrymandering more intensely the House of Representatives.
*Use on crops of 8m pounds of antibiotics and antifungals a year leads to superbugs and damages human health, lawsuit claims.*
*John McAuliff won against a Republican by focusing on something affecting all his constituents: the cost of energy,* increased by building lots of datacenters, meant for use with bullshit generators.
This article lays out the moral basis of resistance against magatry, then tries to give it an unneeded "spiritual" basis. I think the first is useful, but the second is not.
*US will label supposed Venezuelan drug cartel "headed by Maduro" as terrorist organization.* This will demonstrate to magats the strength of the bullshitter's contempt for truth.
When Dubya used a lie (claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction) to start a war against Iraq, he tried to fabricate an false appearance of justification for that accusation.
By contrast, the falsifier doesn't bother with that. Instead he relies on the combination of (1) supporters who are loyal to a fault and insist it is true because the falsifier says so and (2) ordering officials to obey orders supposedly justified by the false claim even though it is patently unsubstantiated.
South Korea has decided to close all coal-fired power plants by 2040!
Hooray, and the whole world must go at least this fast to end fossil fuel power generation.
(satire) *[The persecutor] Imposes 100% Tax On Movies Where Slaves Escape.*
The history of housing segregation in US cities (many of them in the north) goes through several steps of imposition by force.
US citizens: call for protecting the CFPB from being made to show humility" towards the banks it is supposed to regulate.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to restore PBS and NPR funding.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on congressional Democrats to reject any new abortion restrictions in ACA funding talks.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on legislators to protect safe abortion access: no one should die because doctors are afraid they will be imprisoned if they save her.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to protect workers' rights by rejecting the nomination of Scott Mayer, union-busting lawyer, to the NLRB
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
Vance is closely linked to fanatical Christians whose variant of Christianity says that they should dominate and control everyone, crush dissent, and impose their theology on everyone — by hook or by crook.
Due to rapid increase in the US cost of living, customers of McDonald's can no longer afford to eat at McDonald's.
US thugs accused of serious crimes are blocking investigation using a law intended to protect the privacy of victims.
*Air pollution from oil and gas causes 90,000 premature US deaths each year, says new study.* This is roughly 2% of all US deaths in a year.
If global climate disaster happens, it is likely to cause hundreds of millions of premature deaths per year. To avoid that requires greatly reducing the use of fossil fuels. The toxicity of these emissions is one added reason to do that quickly.
Britain's energy minister warns of a possible shortage of fossil gas around 2030, and makes a recommendation with a gaping blind spot.
A deportation thug was required to write a "use of force" report, and submitted a report that was almost all bullshit, invented by a bullshit generator which had only the slightest information about what the thug actually did.
That thug should be punished for submitting a probably false report.
Ukraine used drone boats to attack two Russian oil tankers sailing empty to Novorossiysk to pick up an export cargo of oil.
I suggested this method a few years ago.
The FDA has adopted magat criteria for the approval of new vaccines, based on the anti-vax ideology whose adherents the saboteur in chief has appointed.
The alleged evidence for this has not been published scientifically, so thoughtful scientists are being blocked from studying that evidence.
The UN committee which monitors torture practices of various countries has reported that *Israel has "de facto state policy" of organized torture,*
Local climate disasters are happening in many countries. This article presents interviews with disaster victims in countries around the world.
As long as we allow continued increase in the greenhouse gas level, these disasters will keep getting worse and more frequent.
Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians who had surrendered to them. Journalists have a video of it.
Once-secret photos from 1964 demonstrate how the New York City thugs secretly surveilled Martin Luther King and those around him, even as the city lionized him.
*Biden earmarked billions for former coal communities in Appalachia – and [the saboteur in chief] came and took it away.
How fascism imposes itself such that few people ever think of resisting, and why we need to resist it before that becomes terrifyingly dangerous.
*Vast swathes of Europe's water reserves are drying up.* This is due to global heating, and it is not limited to the south. It covers Poland and even parts of Britain.
A few parts of Europe are becoming wetter.
*The Intercept confirmed that a federal agent caught on camera wearing a [construction worker] hard hat and safety vest works for [the deportation thugs].*
US citizens: support Rashida Tlaib's resolution to acknowledge and put an end to the genocide in Gaza.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
Zohran Mamdani is blazing a trail for criticism of Israel's crimes in New York City.
The BBC has ordered its presenters , when reporting on how it deleted some words from a speech it was going to broadcast, that they are forbidden to say what those words were.
They were, "The most openly corrupt president in American history".
How rich people dominate British politics, notwithstanding that it is supposed to be democratic.
You can see the results in the Labour Party's mostly right-wing policies, which they maintain despite what their voters want.
Canada's new version of planet-roaster government has decided to push through another pipeline for exporting tar sands oil.
The party was re-elected because it stood up to the bully, but in regard to actual political issues it is plutocratist.
*The [UK] criminal cases backlog requires radical action, but the problem has been caused by government cuts , not by an ancient and fundamental liberty [the right to a jury trial].*
Putin says, no peace without conquest of territory.
The bully has started war with Venezuela by threatening to attack any civilian airplanes flying in its airspace.
He couched the threat falsely as some sort of legitimate order to "close that airspace". The US government has authority to declare parts of US airspace closed, but has no such authority over Venezuelan airspace.
Many of the airlines (perhaps all of them) that fly in and out of Venezuela responded to the threat by canceling all flights to and from there.
US citizens: support the members of Congress who reminded the US military that their legal and moral duty is to disobey illegal orders.
The criminal in chief threatened to have them killed for making this statement, so they need our support.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for holding the deportation thugs accountable for surveillance abuses.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
Wild turkeys and deer in various US states have PFAS levels so high that the state recommends not eating them.
To support his claims about "antifa" as a terrorist group, the bullshitter is trying to create a legend: he has arbitrarily designated a few names of supposed foreign terrorist groups, as magical "proof" that they are real terrorists.
*"The whole thing is a bit ridiculous," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which tracks extremist movements worldwide, "because the groups designated by the administration barely exist and certainly aren’t terrorists."*
The BBC has become terrified of the bully's libel lawsuit threat, and is trying secretly to censor its broadcasts to avoid irritating him.
The BBC should stop distributing its broadcasts through any US companies, rather than cover up criticism of the bully.
*Noise from ships can disrupt the animals' ability to communicate and find food.*
We know how to end fossil fuels, even if we aren't pushing hard to do it. But we are in an early stage of figuring out how to make our food without greenhouse emissions.
The internet mandatory user-identification bill, KOSA, will provide right-wing officials a means to block access to information about queer people.
Democrats who support the bill don't realize that.
*Why Is [the corrupter] Trump Hiding Economic Reports?*
It might be due to the shutdown. If so, the reports should resume soon. But one agency canceled some reports back in the summer. Speculation that he is trying to hide from Americans how much economic damage he has done to the US.
Arguments for taxing wealth, in the UK and any other country.
There are other means of redirecting the flow of wealth back to the many. For instance, regulating "private equity" combinations like public corporations, and the progressive income tax on corporations. Over the long term, these complement the direct taxation of the wealthy to make the wealth distribution more even.
*The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine.* They are launching an absurd prosecution and hoping that the Supreme Court will let them shred the First Amendment.
Students in the University of Staffordshire are protesting vociferously that their programming course's course materials were generated by a bullshit generator.
Even the "instructor feedback" on their homework is produced by a bullshit generator. In effect, the human "professor" is giving only thin supervision to a robot that can't understand the subject.
The students have a valid point in saying that the university has violated its own code of academic misconduct. But that could be excused if there were no substantial reason to reject this practice. In fact, there is a substantial reason: because chatbots are not intelligent. Whatever topic their output seems to be "about", they don't really understand it.
If someday we create a true artificial intelligence that can indeed understand a subject, and human discourse in its various levels, it would surely be able to understand how to teach humans, supposing there were still a call for teaching humans. I am sure any of us could learn a lot from the insight of a humane superintelligence that wishes to help us learn.
But the chatbots to which people are led to apply the "AI" marketing buzzword come nowhere near qualifying for that.
Please join me in refusing to call them that! Please stand firm in this and don't let anyone make you give in!
Can anyone find a way to communicate this political note to some of those students?
Robert Reich: The ever-increasing concentration of US major media, in the hands of billionaires, plays into the hands of corrupt governments.
I agree with his recommendations, but they are limited to trying to prevent the appearance of the problem we already have. They are not applicable in our current situation, where the problem already exists and the task is to cure it.
I think we need to set up a new structure for news companies, one that prevents very rich individuals or corporations from gaining control over them. It should give them some advantages in getting income so that they can do without billionaires' money and thus avoid becoming opportunities for bias-for-sale.
*US, Russia and Saudi Arabia create axis of obstruction as Cop30 sputters out.*
The countries that want civilization to survive need to move on from trying to make deals with them, and unite to compel adherence to limits on the fossil fuel they can buy. This may have to include tariffs on the products of countries that fail to participate in those limits.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass Senator Warren's EXPERTS act, which would hinder lobbyists from serving as "experts" in government consultations.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: Condemn the persecutor's death threats against Democrats.
If you sign this petition going to House and Senate leaders, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the bill to make organizing protests a crime.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to sign the discharge petition for the bill to restore the Medicaid funds that were cut by the Big Bad Bill.
If half of the House signs this discharge petition, it will have to be voted on.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
The justice hater really hates the legal principle that soldiers can and indeed must reject illegal orders. It seems he has decided to have his henchmen erase it by pretending it never existed.
Mehmet Oz, one of the bully's incompetent medical officials, falsely accuses massive medical expenditures for immigrants -- falsely, because he misunderstood the records and exaggerates how much was spent.
*IDF soldiers tell documentary of opening fire unprovoked and arbitrary designations of who was an enemy.*
The wrecker is interested in the Justice Department primarily for revenge and enforcing submission. He has fired, or driven out, many of the lawyers, with the result that the investigations he doesn't support have been hampered.
The wrecker's recent surrender plan for Ukraine seems to have given Chairman Xi hope that he can convince the wrecker to agree to a similar surrender plan for Taiwan.
Depending on the wrecker to defend you against a powerful enemy that he might wish to win the support of is inherently unreliable. He has no concept of loyalty or justice, and does not value democracy or human rights.
What can Taiwan do? I suggest that Australia sell Taiwan one sixth of the Nullarbor Plain (that is the same area as Taiwan), so it can move its people and industry there. The Nullarbor Plain is not very useful economically because it lacks water (and therefore trees), but Taiwan can afford to build solar-powered desalination plants and make the near-desert bloom. The partnership between these two countries would be good for both.
Australia is paying Nauru to act as a prison for foreign visitors who had visas, which Australia canceled after they committed crimes.
Australia tried hard to conceal the fact that the president (or is it dictator?) said he might forcibly return them to repressive countries they fled from before.
Burma is still ruled by a murderous military dictatorship, but the wrecker has decided to pretend that that is not so.
*The UN climate summit Cop30 moved forward the fight against the climate crisis and the damage it is already causing to lives and livelihoods. But the measures agreed are steps, rather than the leaps needed.*
To me it seems that the planet roasters have succeeded in delaying adequate action for one more year. If they keep this up for a few more decades, they will have won; the human population and the biosphere will suffer disaster.
*Cop30's watered-down agreements will do little for an ecosystem at tipping point.*
The billionaire owner of CNN is offering the corrupter a deal including firing TV presenters that the corrupter doesn't like.
The root cause of this is the enormous media consolidation of the last few decades. To counteract that tendency calls for splitting up the media megacorps into many smaller pieces.
Indonesia is very vulnerable to global heating damage. Meanwhile, it is one of the main emitters of greenhouse gases. Somehow officials fail to put those two together and draw the rational conclusion.
The UK government plans to eliminate trial by jury for many criminal cases.
This will make it easier to enforce repressive laws to nullify human rights, such as the law that makes it a crime to hold a sign saying "Palestine Action".
It is important to make trials happen sooner. It is important to prosecute more accusations of rape. What effect the absence of a jury would have on convictions, I don't know.
Spain has neglected to teach young people about the crimes and repression of the dictator, Franco. Right-wing extremists now wish they could resurrect him.
The FBI wants to develop facial recognition drones.
If we wish to avoid total repression, we must either make it a crime to posses or operate such a thing, or put strictly enforced limits on their use. However, the bully won't enforce any human rights protection strictly enough to protect human rights.
See gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy for more about issues like this.
Australia pushed the US to give it part of the business of manufacturing F-35 fighter planes. But the US decision to sell some of those planes to Crown Prince Bone Saw means that Australia would be complicit in supporting his cruel and repressive regime.
Making parts of F-35 planes for the US may become equally bad, if the current US regime establishes total repression.
On ex-Twitter it is now possible to see which country an account operates from. Users observe that many users that present as true-blue American magats are based outside the US.
They may not be Americans at all. Or perhaps they are Americans operating from exile - but why do that if you support the regime?
Perhaps because Putin recruited them?
An Australian living in Thailand published criticism of Malaysia's regulations, and accusing the regulator of abuse of power. Thailand is now prosecuting him for "criminal libel" on behalf of Malaysia.
This is a form of international repression, but even when it is not international, "criminal libel" prosecution is an injustice.
Robert Reich: Magats accuse universities of supposed anti-semitism to compel them to repress protests against Israel's atrocities and eliminate freedom to criticize Israel, but look the other way when their supporters turn out to be real anti-semites.
Rising sea level will cause flooding of thousands of shore-side sites that handle toxic waste.
With all the things that will be causing danger and damage in the 2070s, I doubt that the US (or any other country) will have the funds to move or clean up these facilities. I think many will simply be abandoned and their hazardous contents released into the ocean.
Posting on Reddit requires running nonfree JavaScript code. By using old.reddit.com you can read existing postings, but there is no way to post without running nonfree code.
Many countries in Europe, and Australia, have rejected the bully's capitulation plan for Ukraine.
I hope those presenting an alternative "peace plan" have verified that Ukraine will accept it, before arguing for it.
The bully's surrender plan for Ukraine is obviously unjust, a reward to a dictator that wants to conquer more territory. This article describes additional secondary aspects that would make Ukraine a sitting duck if Putin ever wants to conquer the rest of it.
*How Universities Used Counter-terror Intelligence-Sharing Hubs to Surveil [student activists for Palestinians' rights].*
Fast-acting mind-affecting drugs have been developed for use as weapons.
An inquiry found that Bogus Johnson did a careless job of handling the Covid-19 pandemic, and this caused thousands of avoidable deaths. The relatives of the deceased demand to punish him for this by denying him public funds.
Senator Kelly rebuked Republicans in Congress for almost complete silence about the persecutor's death threats against him and five other congressional Democrats.
He contrasted that with their exaggerated reproach of those who dared criticize Charles Kirk's bigotry and hatred after he had been killed (but never claimed that his wrongs justified killing him).
These two contrasting reactions of Republican officials, juxtaposed, demonstrate that they have abandoned the idea of a moral standard of conduct that is above politics. They have shamelessly replaced it with cowardly submission to partisan extremism encompassing political terrorism.
A few exceptions may exist even though the general tendency is clear. If you know of any significant exception — any prominent Republican who publicly denounces the persecutor's death threat — please do tell me the specifics.
Anyone who leans Republican but doesn't want to be changed by peer pressure into accepting political terrorism should reject and denounce the Republican Party now!
An exercise for the reader: what reasons make Vance's response invalid? I see two.
US citizens: call on Spotify to cease running recruiting ads for the bully's deportation thugs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code—not trivial, but not hard.
If you send a letter, please spread the word!
In my letter I said that if Spotify stops using DRM, makes it possible to pay anonymously, and makes it possible to be a customer without running nonfree software, I could consider being one. Thus, I used this letter for two issues: the issue of supporting the deportation thugs and the issue of unjust software.
If you message them, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to stop threatened U.S. military attack against Venezuela, Mexico, and other countries in Latin America.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass a law to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
US citizens: call on the IRS commissioner to protect nonprofits from the bully's "National Security" Memo.
The president of Serbia is accused of involvement in a perverse war profiteering scheme which allowed rich foreigners to pay to come to a hill near Sarajevo and shoot noncombatants from a long distance with a telescopic sight.
Many of the doctors in Britain are immigrants. The growth of right-wing hatred in the UK, fomented by organized right-wing extremists, is increasingly driving them to leave and practice medicine elsewhere.
The deal that ended the shutdown had a pernicious giveaway to Big Food that negated until 2028 some state regulations for food safety.
I expect this will harm some Americans but not thousands. Still, Congress needs a way to designate a bill as "free from tangential riders" that would invalidate any that somehow appeared in the text finally passed.
British thugs tortured Peter Sullivan into making a false confession of murder. (DNA evidence later proved that he was not the murderer.)
False convictions seem to happen often. Perhaps the legal system ought to show more doubt about confessions which no had evidence to support them.
Even normally cool regions such as Scandinavia are having deadly heat waves boosted by global heating.
"22 days over 30°C" does not sound like much of a danger to people who live in tropical countries. But the people and ecosystems in Scandinavia are not accustomed to this heat, so things go wrong. The engineered systems there were not designed for this heat, so they malfunction. And hundreds of people die. Elsewhere, it is sometimes tens of thousands who die.
I expect that not all the fatalities caused by the heatwave occur during the heatwave. Such is the case for big storms: the local death rate remains higher for decades after.
The article warns that heating could make reindeer-herding impossible. Heat that makes reindeer too hot to move out of the shade, if continued for longer, would stare them.
In climate disaster, The inability to continue our way of life would hardly be limited to indigenous peoples. It would affect just about everyone.
Searching on TikTok for information on birth control finds right-wing medical disinformation.
To observe the effects of ocean acidification, scientists retraced the path of Scott's Antarctic expedition, and collected sea animals to compare with the samples he collected. The sea urchins have become very fragile, and ocean acidification seems to be the cause.
*Fish [species, in the Mekong River,] once as large as grizzly bears have become far smaller in recent years due to overfishing, dams and climate crisis.*
US states give some federal agencies unlimited access to their drivers license records — and now these agencies may be using them for facial recognition, disregarding laws and human rights.
The US is hiring various countries as private deportation prisons for the US.
*Nestlé accused of "risking health of babies for profit" over added sugar in cereals sold in African countries.*
The armed Israeli "settlers" have escalated their violence against Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank.
In Britain, *Labour is privatizing the NHS in plain sight.*
I expect it will remain nominally a public service, but if you don't want your treatment to wait till you're dead, you will have to use it to book a private service to do the treatment — at private medicine prices.
By spending 4 million dollars on campaigns for Congress, the big US drug companies made Americans pay 8 billion more for medicine.
They lobbied to eliminate the changes Biden made to make manufacturers negotiate a lower price for a list pf important medicines.
Most countries have a national medical system which buys the drugs for most people. It uses its market power to drive drug prices down. This is one of the side benefits that would add to the fundamental benefit of establishing a national medical system in the US.
*Huge cuts to staff at WHO will leave world "less healthy and less safe," experts warn.*
The saboteur in chief is responsible for these cuts.
*Israel used widely banned cluster munitions in Lebanon, photos of remnants suggest.*
Explaining the civil war in Sudan: two military factions fighting to exploit the country, with the UAE investing in one of them.
Australia's official forestry statistics report that forest cover is increasing, but that counts new-growth forests without native wildlife as a substitute for the native habitat which is being steadily destroyed.
*China doesn’t want to take lead on climate policies alone, senior adviser warns.*
It would be better if China wanted to show more leadership, but the fault in his area is not mainly China's. China is working pretty hard on curbing its greenhouse gas emissions, and its emissions are about to start decreasing. It is the US billionaires and their flunky, the corrupter, that are eagerly trashing Earth's livable climate.
About people who slowly, step by step, help a person in a cult reach the point of considering whether to leave it.
Poland accuses Putin of organizing sabotage against Poland's railroads.
This doesn't surprise me. To start low-intensity war is Putin's modus operandi, intended to leave the attacked country unsure of how to respond. Europe needs to develop appropriate ways to fight back. It must not limit itself to a choice between the two extreme options — full war, and full peace — while Putin plays in the middle.
It looks like the bully is searching for a way to give Putin complete victory over Ukraine.
The wrecker has thrown his support fully to Putin, trying to rush Ukraine into agreeing a pernicious deal to capitulate and hand over territory to the Putin forces.
Zelenskyy has already refused.
A federal judge is demanding testimony from officials to investigate whether some of them should face contempt of court for deporting some people to El Salvador's brainwashing prison after he ordered them not to.
*UN security council votes to endorse the bully's Gaza plan.*
I think it is premature to judge that plan when it is so incomplete that we can't tell where it is intended to lead.
*How can we make the housing crisis even worse? [The wrecker] has a plan.*
Democrats in Congress posted a video reminding soldiers of their legal duty to refuse illegal orders, and their oath to defend the US Constitution. The bully responded by calling for their death.
He and his henchmen have placed themselves among the enemies of the Constitution whom members of Congress, and members of the armed services, have sworn to defend the Constitution from.
*Cop30: dozens of countries threaten to block resolution unless it contains roadmap to fossil fuel phase-out.*
The crucial question of whether to try to avoid disaster, or speed it for profit, is now on the table. To postpone the decision till later is futile since action is overdue. If the burn-it-all countries will not accept a compromise that permits survival, the rest should declare them enemies of humanity.
*[The bully] shrugged off Khashoggi’s killing. This is a new low.*
I suppose he figures that since he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue (or so he claims), why shouldn't Crown Prince Bone Saw get away with having his henchmen murder a journalist in a diplomatic building?
Here's how his henchmen described their plans to murder Khashoggi.
Crown Prince Bone Saw brought to Washington one of his henchmen whose job was identifying people who had anonymously posted criticism of him. The henchmen sought to find someone in Twitter who would betray them.
I wonder why he brought that man to the US. Perhaps as a quiet way of congratulating the bully for doing a good job of repression in the US?
*Trump and Mr Bone Saw stage love-in as Saudi’s $1tn wipes the bloody slate clean.*
Please, it's Crown Prince Bone Saw. Show some respect!
*Federal Judges Rule Congressional District Lines Drawn by Texas Republicans are Discriminatory.*
Of course they are — the goal of this redistricting was to be more gerrymandered and less fair. So I am not surprised that these judges recognized it. But I will be surprised if the Supreme Court right-wing-extremist majority objects to that.
*Keeping promises on renewables, energy efficiency and methane "would avoid nearly 1C of global heating."*
Denmark plans to accelerate its reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, illustrating what sensible governments must do for survival.
Other EU governments seem to expect the people who really count (billionaires) arrange their own survival.
The grand jury proceedings against James Comey were done grossly improperly.
The bully accuses other Americans of breaking laws, and wants to put them on trial; but he doesn't care whether they are legally guilty of anything, and the trial he wants to impose on them is a show trial.
NY Assemblyman Alex Bores sponsored a law requiring bullshit generator companies to take certain safety precautions. Some owners of such companies have set up a PAC which is now directing funds to defeat him.
Bores boasts of having two patents, but if these are computational idea patents, that is something to be ashamed of. Those patents should not exist.
It is not unusual that a person who takes for granted the legitimacy of a long-accepted injustice of the current legal/economic system can reject attempts to create new ones.
US citizens: call on Congress to make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes — which is considerably more than they pay now.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
Professor Mark Bray is an American academic expert on fascism. Governmental harassment ordered by the bully, and death threats from the bully's followers, have driven him and his family into exile.
A teddy bear toy that provided a voice interface to ChatGPT gave advice about sex and about finding knives. Clearly it did not think about the meaning and implications of its output for its likely audience.
This reminds us that ChatGPT is not intelligent.
The reaction to this by "Open""AI" demonstrates that ChatGPT is SaaSS, so the company has total control over who can use it. Such control over users is always an injustice.
Artificial Stupidity turned off the Facebook page of the organization Hundred Heroines, whose mission is to encourage female photographers. Apparently Facebook did this without consulting any actual intelligences about the issue, and it took a month for complaints to convince the company to consult one.
After all, what is the point of investing in Artificial Stupidity if you must employ humans to check its decisions?
I find the use of "content" in that article grating. Please join me in rejecting this usage of the word.
California farms sprayed PFAS on fruits and nut crops, around 2.5 million pounds per year.
The figures end in 2023, but the article does not say whether the practice continues.
The ownership of internet servers has become dangerously concentrated in the hands of a few hosting companies. Anything that takes one of them down causes a wide disaster.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to vote for the Protect America's Workforce Act. This is urgent now, because the discharge petition has enough signatures and compels the House to vote on this bill soon.
The main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. If you message Congress, please spread the word!
*Food insecurity leaves long-term scars. The Snap cuts are no exception.*
How people in Chicago are organizing to protect each other from deportation thugs.
*World still on track for catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise, report finds.*
Iran is willing in principle to return to nuclear negotiations with the US.
This is great news. If the US had a more sensible president, it would be an important opportunity for nuclear arms limitation.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to extend the tax credits for Medicaid and undo the recent cuts in Medicaid.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
A poll of US children found that they would rather see other children in physical presence, without constant adult monitoring, and it's because that is not allowed that they talk via online dis-services instead.
Democrats had a chance to restore medical Funding for millions of poor people, but a few of them chickened out and threw away the month-long struggle.
Robert Reich's explanation of why Republicans stick to the party line more than Democrats do is a matter of basic values.
I suppose there is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story, What causes some Democrats to block progressive measures that most Americans want is lobbying by rich people and even richer corporations.
This doesn't divide Republicans because Republican positions are chosen mostly to suit those rich bastards. The Republican ideas based on hatred of disprivileged groups or imposing Christian extremist morality don't conflict much with the ideas based on serving the rich.
So they have little reason to disagree.
By contrast, among Democrats there is a pervasive conflict between the progressive policies that most Americans support and the plutocratist policies that the lobbyists advocate. That is what pulls Democratic elected officials apart. Each one decides how much to support the rich and how much to support the party's base.
Too much support for the rich alienates the base, which is why this year some of them turned to the magats in desperation.
The way to change this situation is to choose exciting progressive Democratic candidates in Democratic primary elections. By strengthening the Democrats' will to overcome the plutocrats, we will reduce the division that they can sow in the party.
* Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who is one of the chief scientific advisers to the UN and the Cop30 presidency, said 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide needed to be removed from the air every year even to limit global heating to 1.7C (3.1F) above pre-industrial levels.*
How we could remove that much CO2 from the atmosphere is not clear.
Tobacco companies are lobbying hard to prevent the tax increases that could save many lives.
*Venezuelans sent by the persecutor to El Salvador endured systematic torture, report finds.*
Human rights groups accuse his henchmen of complicity.
Two professors at the University of Texas, Dallas, are suing the university for restricting their teaching after they were arrested at a peaceful protest.
George Monbiot: *Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage.*
*Once a global leader on climate action, the EU has given in to the right’s green-bashing.*
Likewise the UK.
*Techno-capitalists think innovation can save the planet. But that same thinking is what got us here.*
Concretely, what in their way of thinking tends to find "solutions" that create new problems? I see a few reasons.
Tech billionaires tend to be overoptimistic, so they underestimate the likelihood and magnitude of problems and failures in their schemes.
Some of these acts of hubris are predictable. Consider, for instance, the idea of a car with no mechanical way to open a door. Why did governments not simply reject them in advance?
Tech billionaires do not understand the needs or wants of people that struggle with poverty and that live among people that don't cater much to their needs or desired.
The changes needed to address mega-problems are so large that they tend to have unforeseen side effects, and some of those will be big new problems. The changes may seem approximately safe when studied to first order, but second-order effects may be big too.
Some of those problems could not have been predicted. For instance, PFAS solved a lot of problems, but we could only learn that some of them cause medical problems by trying them in large quantities for a long time. Long enough that now it would be hard to stop.
*Turkish disaster response specialists sent to help locate Palestinian and Israeli [dead] bodies inside Gaza remained near Egypt's border with the strip on Thursday, awaiting Israeli authorization to enter.
The 81-member team from Turkey’s AFAD disaster management authority are waiting to enter with life-detection devices and trained search dogs.*
Israel is citing HAMAS's failure to return the remaining 10 corpses as an excuse to continue limiting food brought into Gaza -- punishing the whole population. It would seem that Netanyahu intentionally prolongs the problem as an excuse to prolong the punishment.
*[The corrupter] has built a regime of retribution and reward.* In effect, a tyrant's regime.
Some machine learning systems that recognize patterns work very well. But some are not reliable enough to be used in real life.
A school's "gun detection system" that analyzes camera images saw a student's bag of potato chips and recognized it as a gun, whereupon thugs were sent to handcuff him and search him.
A conscientious human could have watched what happened after signaling an alarm, and noticed if the supposed gun turned into something else.
The tyrant's illegal summary executions.
Proposing that the UK ban donations to political campaigns and parties via cryptocurrency, and also the laundering of anonymous donations through intermediate organizations that receive it anonymously.
This would protect elections from being bought by foreign countries and foreign rich people, but the best thing would be to put an end to private campaign financing and give all registered candidates an equal means of publicity that doesn't depend on any private money.
Various music and movie stars that formerly spoke up against the persecutor are now not taking a stand.
They knew how bad he is and they cannot have forgotten it. I suspect that they see speaking up as dangerous or unprofitable.
Global heating is causing bigger droughts and bigger floods.
Iran is one place that tends to get drought.
You could say that the oil Iran has exported has brought the drought, but oversimplified recrimination about past mistakes is a distraction. Every country has participated in extracting and using fossil rules to the extent that it was profitable or useful.
Those most responsible are the fossil fuel companies and their owners. They have lobbied hard to thwart efforts to curb global heating, and they are doing it even now at the Cop30 conference to make sure it doesn't achieve its purpose.
Various countries blocked the EU's Orwellian "chat control" proposal, so they have redrawn the proposed legislation to achieve similar pervasive surveillance with changes in the details.
For instance, companies offering email or messaging accounts would have to make clients scan their faces. Anonymity in email would be impossible.
These would almost surely be done using nonfree cr…apps, which is an injustice in itself -- using a nonfree program is inviting the entity that controls it to mistreat you through malicious functionality.
The article refers to a decision which might be made on Nov 12. Since that is now in the past, can anyone tell me what was decided?
*The US is planning for the long-term division of Gaza into a "green zone" under Israeli and international military control, where reconstruction would start, and a "red zone" to be left in ruins.*
This plan seems designed to allow Israel to annex half of the Gaza Strip, while driving the Palestinians in the other half are driven to beg to leave.
The latest propaganda term for drilling for fossil gas is "nation building".
Global heating disaster will generally tear down nations, not build them.
Thugs in Australia attacked protesters using a "less lethal" rubber shrapnel grenade, and caused injury to protesters (or was it just one protester?) who plan to sue.
The use of plural pronouns to refer to a single person makes this article a pain to read. Please don't do that. Please make reading easier by using a gender-neutral singular pronoun to refer to a person of non-binary gender, as I do,
A warning that Icelandic could be forgotten and lost in just one generation, because the unwise tendency to use bullshit generators is leading Icelanders to read English instead.
US citizens: call on your members of the House and Senate to keep medical debt off credit reports.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: press your congresscritter to protect affordable medical treatment by signing a discharge petition, or thank per if perse already did so.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your state to make the state tax system fair for everyone. That means closing loopholes that benefit the rich, taxing extreme wealth appropriately, and investing those revenues back into education, healthcare, infrastructure, and other public goods that strengthen our communities.
Israel is breaching international law by continuing to impose restrictions on aid flows into Gaza, where the population remains critically short of food and life-saving goods as winter sets in according to UNRWA
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the deportation prisons and end the deportation thugs' violent raids.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you sign or phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Brazil to lead the world towards preventing climate disaster.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to stop US arms for Israel, because the Israeli army keeps killing Palestinian civilians.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you sign or phone, please spread the word!
In the US: call on NBC to stand with Seth Meyers — Don't let the bully make you take him off the air.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Aztec ideas of training one's moral strength and steadiness have something in common with what I've learned from my own campaigning.
I can confirm point 1 directly. When I choose to strive for freedom and justice in the world, it's not that I expect that having more freedom and justice myself will make me personally happier. On the contrary, there are defeats and failures and they hurt. But overall, my life is worth something because of working for a goal beyond my own happiness.
Points 6 expresses very clearly something that the long struggle for software freedom has more or less taught me. And it probably applies to any other political cause that requires a struggle that isn't over soon.
Points 7 and 8 are directly related to firm rejection of nonfree software. By doing that, I have built that rejection into a habit which helps me keep doing it. And years of finding ways to do various things without running nonfree software, because I refuse to run the nonfree software, has taught me that the resulting inconvenience is manageable.
I suspect that this wisdom literature was older than the short-lived Aztec empire and that they inherited it from previous civilizations in the Valley of Mexico.
US citizens: Tell the Starbucks CEO that you won’t cross the picket line.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code—not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Congress to continue to require confirmation hearings for the heads of US spy agencies, so it can impose at least minimal accountability in how they spy on Americans.
US citizens: call on the US Surface Transportation Board to block the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern Mega-Merger.
*[The tyrant] Told CBS What to Cut From 60 Minutes Interview — And They Listened.*
The persecutor's henchmen seek to merge state drivers' license databases into its database of citizens, which it intends to use to interfere with voting.
Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the US, and it is very rare that they try to. But this data could include opportunity for confusion and error which could call the citizenship of citizens into question.
The Climate Analytics report asserts that governments' climate defense plans are inadequate, but that it isn't too late to avoid global disaster if we increase them.
The biggest challenges will be to convince the governments of China and the US, and the banks and billionaires that dominate the latter.
Salt lakes, when they dry up, give off blowing dust that contains toxins and bacteria that damage the biomes in people's lungs.
*NSW police accused of ‘sickening’ double standard over neo-Nazi rally [vs defense of Palestinians.]*
Both Jews and Palestinians are condemning this.
* Devastated hospitals, mass graves, bodies eaten by dogs in the street. After speaking out, I discovered my visa will not be renewed [by Israel].*
— Jonathan Whittall heads the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)'s mission in occupied Palestine.
*China's CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months, analysis finds.*
"Moderate" (plutocratist) Senate Democrats dropped their demand to preserve medical insurance for poor Americans, in exchange for a purely symbolic concession by Senate Republicans to hold a separate vote on that insurance funding later this year.
With no leverage to pressure Republicans to vote for it, we must expect they will defeat it. And since the House of Representatives won't vote on it at all, it is a dead end that can't lead to any real restoration of the funding that was cut.
*US has sent $7.5m to Equatorial Guinea to accept non-citizens deportees.
Country is one of world’s most repressive and corrupt, raising concerns over rights abuses of those deported.*
Martin Decker's appeal against deportation from the UK was successful. This does not erase the injustice of imprisoning him for a nonviolent protest. The UK must abolish the laws that punish protests for mere inconvenience.
*Fannie Mae officers were investigating whether [the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)] inappropriately accessed mortgage details of Letitia James, Adam Schiff and others.*
An enterprising child distributed a flier in his neighborhood urging other kids to join him at a specific place and time for outdoor play. It was a success, and started regular meetings for play.
*Israelis attacked Palestinian water sources over 250 times in five years, data reveals.*
Introducing young children to peanuts at a younger age has greatly decreased the frequency of allergy to peanuts.
Everyone: call for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan.
If you sign please spread the word!
*The food stamp fight signals an era of unprecedented cruelty in America.*
The right-wing ideology says that state help for poor people — either to survive, or to be more productive — is their idea of the greatest evil. (They also oppose regulations that protect people from other private citizens, such as gun control or even gun safety.) It is the ideology of the sadistic state, which when implemented tends to make life nasty, brutish and short (except for rich people).
However, in the past they were just a fringe group and could hardly ever get elected to office.
Now we see what happens when their sadism is unleashed.
A new regulation gave the Federal Protective Service the power to arrest people outside of federal government facilities.
I have a feeling it was established to protect against attacks launched by enemies of the US, such as the riot that the bully had launched on 6 Jan 2021. Of course, he now claims that that violent attack was not violent at all, and has pardoned all the people convicted of crimes in it, as a way of adding fake verisimilitude to that claim.
Now it seems he plans to use the opposite lie, accusing nonviolent protesters of rioting as an excuse to attack them.
Orwell referred to bidirectional lies like this as "blackwhiting".
He also plans to use distorted accusations to prosecute protesters for wearing masks.
*US judge orders Trump administration to fully fund Snap benefits in November.*
The persecutor will surely appeal this decision, and eventually it will go to the Supreme Court. If it follows recent practice, it will allow the persecutor to starve 40 million Americans until it makes a final decision, months later.
A protester prosecuted for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent was found not guilty.
Clearly the jury considered the charge absurd.
When the bogus "carbon offsets" were unmasked and businesses stopped buying them, a few projects that were keeping some substantial forests alive were also defunded.
On today's leaning toward retro regurgitation of old retro culture.
Add sharks to the long list of marine organisms that will be wiped out by ocean acidification. It also damages their skin.
This effect is not limited to the few species that sometimes attack humans.
China is systematically pressuring UK universities to block academic studies that investigate China's repression and crimes, and universities comply more than they stand firm.
China is playing British universities against each other so that they complete to stay in China's good graces. It's like what the bully is doing to US universities.
The British government should change the system by which Chinese students enroll in British universities so that the universities don't compete with each other for Chinese students.
*Turkey issues genocide arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu as well as some other officials.*
For once, Erdoğan has done something good. That should not make his tyranny and repression in Turkey acceptable.
*The corrupter has pardoned a Republican state legislator who had been convicted of corruption.*
He admires corruption as long as his side gets the proceeds.
A psychiatrist who has talked with many mass shooters says that they are following a "cultural script", a sort of social trail that was made by the publicity about so many past mass shooters.
He responds to this by denying them the sort of publicity that they expect to get if they commit a massacre.
It is in the same spirit that I refuse to respond to the mass killer in the White House with the sort of publicity he expects to receive.
*How could Zohran Mamdani pay for his bold agenda for New York? And whose support he needs.*
The UK government imprisoned protester Marcus Decker for over a year for dropping a banner from a bridge. Now it plans to deport him "automatically" because of that prison sentence.
It is a curious contradiction that the government prohibits him from leaving the UK even as it arranges to deport him. Is there any logic in this?
If the government had sane priorities, it would give priority to protecting the country and its people, and the rest of the world, from the developing climate disaster, and wouldn't need protesters like Decker to push it to do so.
*Angry Democrats call on Schumer to resign after eight vote to [yield to magats that oppose funds for poor people's medical insurance].*
The term "compromise", used in the article, is misleading since "surrender" fits better.
*Climate disasters displaced 250 million people in past 10 years, UN report finds.*
That is around 3% of the Earth's human population.
The EPA is proposing to approve a PFAS for use in pesticides. Critics say this could make food and water supplies dangerous.
Brazil proposes investing a lot of money in rewarding governments that reduce deforestation.
A heat wave in Amazonia is killing fish and river dolphins.
*"Grim future" for Great Barrier Reef unless global heating kept to 2C, study finds.*
If we want to stop it before 2°C, we had best stop it before 1.5°C. Otherwise, we are likely to fall into positive feedback and tipping points.
*Sheffield Hallam University ordered professor to cease human rights study into Uyghurs forced labor in China.*
The UK government is investigating that order as an alleged crime by the university.
US citizens: call on Congress to end homelessness, by investing in housing, not internment.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone or sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to defend Mail-in voting before the 2026 mid-term elections.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone or sign, please spread the word!
A sick man in Utah has transferred his loyalty from humanity to the measles virus. Despite what it has done to him, he doggedly protects its opportunities to spread to other people by refusing to tell where (that is, in which human bodies) it may be hiding.
A man who posted to suggest that Charles Kirk's death was not a great loss to society was jailed for a month on a false charge of "making threats against a school". The judge demanded $2 million for bail, which kept him in jail until the charges were dropped.
Big Tech companies are bowing to the persecutor by shutting off public communication about where deportation thugs are attacking.
Many of Hannah Arendt's comments about the rise of Hitler fit the present US situation well.
The bully hopes to pressure the Supreme Court to support his autocratic tariff policies by sitting in the court room when it hears the case.
*At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians had been held at notorious Israeli jail [and torture center called Sde Teiman], say Gaza officials.*
How helicopter parenting became a burden imposed on parents in the US.
Israeli prison guards were caught on video raping (and beating) a Palestinian prisoner. They were prosecuted but only for a lesser crime.
The head army lawyer has resigned in protest.
(satire) *ICE Agent Panics After Realizing There More Children Than He Has Flash-Bangs.*
The deportation thugs put a handicapped prisoner into solitary confinement because he informed them that that the water on the floor of the cell would damage his prosthetic legs.
*How Billionaire Tax Avoidance Works — America’s tax on capital gain income remains a steeply regressive tax.*
This is true, but other parts of the US tax code also contribute to the problem — for instance the trusts that allow rich people to pass on their wealth to descendants, bypassing inheritance tax. Rather than singling out just one of these tax dodges as "the" cause of the problem, we should demand to shrink all of them.
In Italy, a mob gathered and beat up a man that they had identified as Jewish, shouting about Palestine.
This exemplifies the point that blaming all Jews, simply because they are Jews, for Israel's atrocities against Palestinians is a form of antisemitism.
Plenty of Jews condemn those atrocities as much as you do. And they have no more influence over the Israeli government than you have.
YouTube deleted the accounts of three Palestinian human rights groups, and thus also the videos they had posted documenting various crimes or reporting on investigations into crimes.
The motive for this may be that those organizations work with the International Criminal Court. But that is not a crime, merely something that a powerful corrupt official does not like.
(satire) *CDC Figures It Easier To Start Tracking People Without Measles.*
Alas, it wouldn't be useful to track them. Measles is contagious — absence of measles is not.
*After mass killings in El Fasher and four years on from a coup, UAE now admits its Sudan policy [of war and massacre] has gone wrong.*
*Student, national and local groups across US organized day of action to condemn the persecutor's assault on academic freedom.*
US citizens: call on Congress not to let the bully punish places where people did not vote for him.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Oklahoma's attorney general to investigate the decision that allowed a well-connected accused rapist to avoid possible prosecution.
You may find your state's or territory's major agencies contacts at USA.gov. If you contact them or sign, please spread the word!
Deportation thugs were caught falsifying accusations against protesters.
Deportation thugs have charged protesters with "conspiracy" and "intimidation" for a nonviolent protest. One of them is a candidate for the House of Representatives.
*US climate activists condemn 18-month jail term for non-violent art museum protester.*
If they had actually damaged the art, that would deserve punishment. But they took care to make their "damage" purely symbolic, leaving the painting undamaged in fact. This punishment was pure injustice.
It appears that they were jailed for 6 months awaiting trial, too.
Israel permitted Egypt and the ICRC to aid HAMAS in searching for hostages' corpses in the part of Gaza where Palestinians are now usually shot on sight. This included equipment to dig up corpses buried under rubble. Finally, Israel was allowing HAMAS to do what Israel demanded it do.
Just a couple of days later, Israel bombarded Gaza widely, claiming that this was to punish HAMAS for not yet having finished that job.
This is absurd. It seems that Netanyahu sees no need to have a coherent policy, or even to pretend to have one.
Canada's political ad in the US, which quoted from a speech by Ronald Reagan in which he denounced tariffs in general (because he advocated friction-less trade to boost business), didn't mention a narrow exception that Reagan has described in that same speech.
The exception was to punish alleged violation of a trade treaty for low tariffs.
Here is a detailed analysis comparing the quotation to the whole speech.
Was this omission a serious misrepresentation? I don't think so. The subject of the ad was the bully's tariffs on imports from Canada, and that exception isn't pertinent to this subject.
I don't entirely agree with Reagan's general position. It is possible to use tariffs to boost domestic industry, and legitimate to do so. However, for that method to succeed, it must be applied with careful thought — something that the US government has failed to do with its tariffs.
*Gorilla habitats and pristine forest at risk as DRC opens half of country to oil and gas drilling bids.*
In the long term, the transitory "value" of burning that fossil fuel will be insignificant, but the cost of the damage it does could be irreplaceable loss.
The US government claims it is entitled to kill people traveling in small boats in the Caribbean, but admits it has no evidence that they are really "terrorists", and does not even know who they are.
Most people drastically underestimate how much richer the rich in their country are than ordinary workers. When they see the facts, many start advocating systematic redistribution.
British protesters who colored Stonehenge temporarily orange using food coloring were prosecuted, absurdly, for nonexistent "damage".
Repressive exaggerations like this are part of the standard playbook of governments that have submitted to the power of the plutocrats.
The luxury effect in urban ecology: richer neighborhoods have more diversity of wildlife.
Journalists in Russia report that commanders are torturing or killing soldiers who refuse suicide missions.
I would expect that the reason these commanders are not punished is that they are doing what Putin wants them to do.
The war-lover threatens to send US troops to invade Nigeria to wipe out their equivalent of the Taliban.
The US tried this in Afghanistan, with the initial support of most of the population, but the effort ultimately failed. The war-lover in his first term was unable to make it work, and then spoke of pulling out the US troops. Biden displayed political courage by actually pulling the plug on the failed intervention. But the war lover claims that in Nigeria victory would be easy.
Or maybe it is just another bluff to look tough.
Scientists are warning that Earth is tipping into disaster and strong actions would be needed to pull it back from there.
*[The deportation thug agency] violates its own policy by holding people in secretive rooms for days or weeks.
*Kat Abughazaleh, progressive candidate for Congress, has been indicted for "impeding" a deportation thug during a protest. Basically, getting in the thug's way.
The bully plans to supply only half the normal amount of food stamps during the shutdown.
The shutdown plan is designed to use them as hostages in several ways. Naturally he doesn't want to completely release his hostages. So his advisors are coming up with legal technicalities with which to delay and cut.
US citizens: urge states to sue to stop the destruction of the Department of Education.
You can find your state governor phone number at USA.gov. If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Federal Employee Civil Relief Act so as to protect federal workers from eviction during the shutdown.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone or sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on state pension officials to vote the pensions' shares against the muskrat's proposal for Tesla to pay him $1 trillion.
To contact a state or territory governor or state agencies, see USA.gov. If you do, please spread the word!
Greg Palast writes of repeated US attempts to overthrow the government of Venezuela to steal its enormous oil reserves.
He also compares Maduro, an election cheater like the corrupter, with Chavez, who won honestly.
* Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned.*
Bill Gates warned the world that it had better get global heating back down to under 1.5C as soon as possible, to avoid disastrous tipping points.
*Russian drone attacks on civilians in Ukraine are war crimes, UN report concludes.*
To help the inhabitants of Miquelon Island move to higher ground, the French government buys their homes, then lets them live in those homes for three more years while they use the money to build new homes on higher ground.
*World's [national greenhouse emissions reduction] plans fall drastically short of action needed, analysis shows.* Together they will, if successful, do 1/6 of the missions reduction required.
Two crucial species of coral have been wiped out in the Florida Keys by ocean heat.
Beware fast food stores that pressure you to place your order through an app, rather than with a human sales clerk. In addition to snooping on you and gouging you with a personalized price, they may be tricking you into signing away your legal rights through the fine print.
If you have adopted the practice of always paying cash, as I have, you're safe from this trick.
I've urged my state assembly member to make it illegal to impose arbitration on customers, suppliers or employees. If you're a US citizen, how about if you do the same?
Fast food is not meant for eating anyway. It is meant for fasting.
Brazilian thugs raided a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro, arrested many young men that they accused of drug trafficking, then murdered them on the spot.
Is this the influence of Bolsonaro and the bully?
The perverter tried to appoint a new US attorney for northern New York State, but the Senate did not approve him. So the perverter invented a new job title (which does not specifically require Senate approval) and appointed him to that new job, giving him the same authority.
Is this a general security hole for a malicious president to bypass senate approval for officials in the executive branch?
New Data Shows Just Four Countries Responsible for Derailing Oil and Gas Phase-out Progress since Paris Agreement.
They are the US, Canada, Australia and Norway.
I omitted from the title the misleading term "global north", which, like its antonym "global south", tries to squeeze this conflict into an conception of regional conflict which it does not fit. This conflict is against a non-geographic power structure, which dominates certain countries for reasons based in geology rather than geography.
(satire) *Gray-Lipped RFK Jr. Touts Body's Natural Ability To Transmute Lead Into Gold.*
Robert Reich argues that the bully's orders to kill civilians in the Caribbean Sea are not really about drugs, or Maduro, or Venezuela. Rather, they are meant to prepare the US military to occupy US cities and kill unarmed people without hesitation — to rig the 2026 election.
A study finds that fossil fuels are killing millions of humans per year, through a variety of harmful and dangerous consequences.
A US court ordered the deportation thugs to keep Chanthila Souvannarath in the US until it could determine whether his plausible claim to US citizenship is actually valid. The thugs defied this order by deporting him far away.
The tendency to reinforce and magnify users' confusions and even delusions is inherent in chatbots, because of the fact that they have no actual intelligence.
The wrecker has ordered each state's National Guard to train 500 soldiers to become part of a "national, militarized police force". He might send it to majority-Democrat areas to disrupt elections.
In October 2025, Spotify ran an ad to recruit workers for the US deportation thugs. The ad made the usual bogus assertion that the people they arrest are "the worst of the worst", in line with the deportation thugs' claim to prioritize convicted criminals. In fact, they often arrest foreigners who are harmless, those who have visas, and even US citizens.
US citizens: call on news networks to be honest about Tylenol's non-effect on pregnancy.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the bully's far-right crusade against political opponents.
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121 If you phone or sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to protect voting rights. Pass the Redistricting Reform Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Speaker Johnson to stop lying about No Kings protests.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Supreme Court to approve the lower court decisions and keep troops out of our cities.
If you sign, please spread the word!
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