[ 2008 March - June | 2007 November - February | 2007 July - October | 2007 March - June | 2006 November - February | 2006 July - October | 2006 March - June | 2005 November - February | 2005 July - October | 2005 March - June | 2004 November - February | 2004 July - October | 2004 March - June | 2003 November - February | 2003 July - October | 2003 March - June | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]
Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
US citizens: call your senators and tell them to override the FCC decision that allows more media concentration.
If you want to donate aid money to help the Burmese, do it through http://www.uscampaignforburma.org.
Canada is prosecuting an author for "hate speech" for a book that apparently criticizes Muslims.
I have not seen the book, and I do not know whether I would agree with anything in it. But that is irrelevant: censorship is more dangerous than anything that a book might say.
Haitians rioted to demand the return of kidnaped President Aristide, so his enemies fabricated accusations of murder against them.
Global warming may threaten koalas.
The Burmese military rulers have seized foreign emergency relief supplies.
They also demand payment of import duty on relief supplies. Paying this would support their regime.
I support the proposal to deliver relief supplies in defiance of their power, since they are in no way the legitimate rulers of Burma anyway. If it is necessary to defeat the Burmese army in order to do this, so much the better — then Aung San Suu Kyi could take office.
Tsvangirai says he will return to Zimbabwe for a run-off election but only if international observers can make sure it is fair and free.
There are 5 million orphans in Iraq, according to official statistics of the "Iraqi" government.
Uri Avnery, who saw the Israeli war of independence as a participant, explains how it resulted in the expulsion of Palestinians.
The film Body of War describes how a soldier in the Bush forces was wounded and permanently paralyzed, then became an activist for Iraq Veterans Against the War.
When Congress tried to restore effective enforcement of sex discrimination laws, McCain did not support it.
A number of employers in the UK are planning a blacklist database to identify anyone that has ever been accused of crimes, or other bad work habits — never mind whether they have been convicted (or even charged).
Two men took photos on a ferry boat, and our paranoid police started an international search for them. It turns out they were just taking pictures, as we all do.
To suspect people of being terrorists because they take pictures is as absurd as suspecting them because they breathe. Maybe the ferry boat captain who photographed those two is a terrorist. You never know, right?
1/3 of the women in the US military get sexually assaulted during their period of employment. Some are then murdered, and the commanders often call it "suicide".
This problem is small compared with the number of deaths of Bush forces soldiers, which is itself small compared with the number of Iraqis that the Bush forces have killed. But it parallels the general attitude of the Bush forces towards a wide range of corruption.
The Clown regime seems likely to miss half its stated environmental goals, and these are concentrated especially in the area of global warming.
The EFF is fighting an attempt to twist copyright law to give the software developer total power over execution of the program.
Victory in this case will not eliminate the practice of restricting how users run proprietary programs. It will only limit the developers to using contracts as the means. This will not make users free. If you want freedom, you must reject proprietary software and use free software .
Even as the EFF fights this attempt to stretch copyright power, it perhaps unwittingly encourages future such attempts, through its use of the term "intellectual property" to describe copyright.
That propaganda term is biased: it gives people the wrong idea of the basis for thinking about copyright issues. In addition, it is confusing: it encourages people to conflate copyright with other totally different laws that raise different issues.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation.
Using that term in this article was totally gratuitous. Avoiding it would have been trivial.
The EFF ought to stop using that propaganda term, and teach other people to reject it too.
Iraqi Bush forces have arrested the leader of Al Qa'ida in Iraq.
Someone else will replace him, as he replaced the previous leader. This will not eliminate that organization. Bush's only chance to do that was in 2003: all he had to do was not invade Iraq.
Shi'ites and Sunnis are fighting in Beirut.
There is a danger this will restart the civil war.
In the UK, the Minister of Police Power calls for harrassment of suspects.
ASBOs mean that the local authorities can order people to stop doing literally anything they don't like. If the victims don't obey the order, they can be imprisoned, if if the activity is not a crime at all.
This is obviously unjust, but not very effective at deterring unruly teenagers, who consider the ASBOs a badge of honor. So now the Minister of Police Power calls for further nastiness.
The latest thing for governments that say they want to eliminate poverty is to ask the megacorporations that run the sweatshops to expand their operations.
At the base of this absurd idea is Reagonomics and trickle-down, but they have stopped explicitly arguing for that. Instead they take it for granted.
Marijuana use in the UK is falling, but the Clown regime wants to increase penalties so as to look "tough on drugs".
The ACLU and EFF made the FBI back down from using the U SAP AT RIOT act to search library records.
We know that the FBI has often violated even the lax rules of the U SAP AT RIOT act.
But let's not confuse "violating the rules" with "unjust". The power to search without even a court order is fundamentally unjust. The U SAP AT RIOT act must be eliminated.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, " No compromise with Bush on FISA. Defend our freedom; don't increase Big Brother's spy powers, which are already too much, and don't let the phone companies off the hook for their illegal spying."
Small changes in how we live are not enough to avert environmental disaster.
The USDA refuses to ban the use of meat from very sick cows even though agribusiness is asking for this.
The New York Times is spreading propaganda for attacking Iran, just as it spread propaganda for attacking Iraq in 2002.
US TV stations that were platforms for the Pentagon's propaganda "military experts" have still said nothing about the issue.
NPR intends to keep using its Pentagon "expert".
Rising sea level threatens Alexandria and is destroying Egyptian farmland with salt.
Due to global warming, glaciers are melting earlier, so the water is not available when needed for agriculture.
A UK police official justified allowing Chinese police into London because otherwise China would have sent the Olympic torch through another city. And he excused them for punching protestors because it was a "natural reaction" to possibly "losing face".
Does he believe that people in general are allowed to punch protestors that make them lose face? Or is this a special privilege for Chinese thugs only?
A principled UK government would have told China to take its thugs elsewhere. But the Clown organization is not known for principle.
The recession has turned Sick-o into Sick-o squared.
Polish police attacked and arrested protesters when they were sleeping, after the protest, then made various obviously dishonest excuses for it.
There were riots in Somalia over food prices.
I think there is something more going on. The article talks of "old 1000-shilling notes." I wonder whether the US-imposed regime that controls Mogadishu has caused hyperinflation, or tried for other reasons to replace the currency.
The US has started constructing a DNA database of everyone in the US. It is being done gradually: only for newborn babies, who are too young to defend their rights.
US citizens should go to another country to have babies.
All the surveillance cameras in London have had almost no effect on street crime, even though that is supposed to be their purpose. The authorities say, "It will work, once our surveillance goes deeper."
They also would like us to assume that the system is safe as long as access is limited to "authorized" people. But that does nothing to protect Britons from the worst threat: Big Brother.
Since the B'liar regime used "anti-terror" laws to sabotage protests, do you believe that the Clown regime won't use CCTV to find and sabotage opposition if it ever works well enough?
The state of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, voted for and declared "autonomy" but not secession.
The state powers described in this article do not seem controversial to me, since in the US every state has them. At the same time, I suspect that foreign oil companies have something to do with this, and that somehow it is a scheme to keep the oil revenues in their own hands.
I hope that the Democracy Center will provide a useful analysis of this.
Many members of the African National Conference, including Nelson Mandela, are on the US "terrorist" watch list and need waivers to visit the US.
This is not the only way the US is nasty to foreigners. It takes fingerprints of them when they enter the country, and for that reason alone everyone should stay away from the US if possible.
It certainly is right to remove the heroes of the fight against apartheid from this list. However, it sounds like this is just an example of a broader problem. If even the Secretary of State cannot get them removed, something very strange must be responsible. Does anyone know what?
Maybe someone in Rep. Berman's district can ask him what it is.
Bush's corrupt system of contractors in Iraq repeatedly kills Bush forces soldiers.
According to George Soros, the financial crisis is partly due to right-wing ideology. Markets are unstable, and government intervention is periodically necessary for them to work well for society. But the US government regulators came to believe right-wing propaganda telling them to place their faith in the invisible hand.
A South African woman is in difficulties because she cannot get a national ID card. It requires a fingerprint, but she has no fingers.
To require citizens to give the government their fingerprints for ordinary life activities is unjust even if they do have fingers. National ID cards should be abolished everywhere.
The Bush regime is sending a fleet to the Caribbean as a threat to invade countries there.
They are fortunate that the US army has been sufficiently worn down in Iraq that it could not occupy a substantial country against determined Iraq-style resistance.
An Iraqi man, imprisoned for a year but never tried, was made to kneel for two hours to a US flag. Wonder of wonders, he now hates Americans.
The US owes him, and all Iraqis, an apology.
Mugabe's run-off, which gives him a second chance to threaten voters, may be delayed for up to a year — meaning yet more chance to do so.
Shark attacks against humans are increasing; is it due to human destruction of their food sources?
The theory that it is due to more people spending more time in the water does not hold water, because that is a gradual trend.
Bush's Iraqi government denies that Iran is supporting the Mahdi Army. Evidently Bush's control over it is not complete.
Bush wants an excuse to attack Iran. The Shi'ite SCIRI party that controls the Iraqi government is quite friendly with Iran. They both would like to destroy the Mahdi Army, but for different reasons.
For KBR, Iraq is anarchy. Its staff take advantage of this by operating the most outrageous rackets, such as looting, and selling the Bush forces' weapons. The local managers support the rackets and punish anyone that tells about them, which I suspect means they are getting a share.
Folklore has it that military quartermasters, soldiers in charge of supplies, also frequently sold those supplies. But I doubt that the US Army gave dishonorable discharges to soldiers who reported such crimes.
The mortgage crisis was fueled by fraud in which all kinds of participants connived.
Fraud is wrong, but I think that the responsibility of individuals for this kind fo fraud is diminished by the fact that they were invited and encouraged by the institutions that they were supposedly defrauding. It would be legitimate to prosecute those who provably committed fraud in exceptional degree, but we must hold the institutions (ultimately the government) responsible for the overall problem.
Retired Justice O'Connor is campaigning to end election of judges, because it gives the rich a way to corrupt them.
As part of Bush's War on Integrity, the EPA chief for the Midwest has been fired for doing her job.
The local Chamber of Commerce has been corrupted too. That's not news, it's standard practice, but it's important to see how it happens. Their reasoning is, "For the sake of local jobs, let the employers pollute." If everyone accepts that, we won't have more jobs, but we will have a lot more pollution.
Why is Obama's connection with Rev. Wright treated as a scandal, while Bush's connection with Sun Myung Moon is not?
If you buy Parry's book, please don't get it from Amazon, maker of the Swindle(DefectiveByDesign.org).
Rather than conserve oil, Bush is launching a new Cold War against Russia and China for control of the dwindling supplies.
McCain has similar ideas.
Unlike the first Cold War, in which countries that respected human rights most of the time opposed Communist dictatorships, this will be a contest between two groups of brutal tyrants, both of which deserve the opposition of all people of good will.
I think these evil regimes will use this Cold War as an excuse to become even worse. Both sides will sponsor terrorists to attack the other side, and then both sides will use the "terrorist threat" as an excuse to further trample the human rights of their people.
If the US apologizes to the people of Iraq for conquering and destroying their country, and to the people of Iran for overthrowing their democracy in 1954, it would go a great way to reducing the desire of Islamic extremists to practice terrorism against the US. And if the US cooperates with Russia and China to develop alternative energy sources instead of starting another Cold War, they won't be victims of each other's terrorism. That is the way to be safe.
Uri Avnery contrasts Israel's independence and the Palestinians' catastrophe.
Will the Iraqi militias that Bush is paying turn around and become enemies of the US?
I think they will not follow a path like that of Al Qa'ida, because they are not idealistic enough to care. But they are likely to prove unreliable allies.
The Zimbabwe election commission released results, but they differ from the counts posted at polling places and give Tsvangirai a lower total which would justify the run-off Mugabe intends to have.
It seems Mugabe is trying to prevent that run-off from being held freely, and the opposition refuses to participate in it.
Clinton wants to eliminate the gasoline tax so that Americans can produce more CO2 this summer.
The magnates of Eastern Bolivia are stirring up racial hostility to try to break away from Bolivia, and keep the wealth of their region for themselves instead of supporting poor Bolivians with it.
Police in the UK stopped a showing of On The Verge at Southampton University, threatening students with prosecution. University officials helped the police and conveyed these threats. The film depicts police attacks on protests.
It would be interesting for a group of students to show it and dare the police to prosecute them.
2.5 million refugees have fled Iraq. Hardly anyone wants to return, but they are having trouble living anywhere else.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote that President Chavez had increased Venezuela's food production. That is what I recalled from my first visit there, but, more recently, price controls have caused food shortages.
Mario Uribe, President Uribe's cousin and advisor, was arrested for collaborating with paramilitary thugs.
Although the paramilitaries pretend that their purpose was to oppose the guerrillas, their main activity is organized crime. For instance, they serve Coca Cola Company by killing union organizers and their families.
They are also known for attacking villages to terrorize the inhabitants into selling their land, very cheap, to people like Mario Uribe. I heard one of the victims speak in Spain; he lives there, sponsored by human rights organizations, because he would not be safe in Colombia. There was no guerrilla activity near his village, and the army seemed to close its eyes to the attack by the paramilitaries.
President Horrible (in Spanish it sounds enough like Uribe) gave the paramilitaries an amnesty, whose effect is that they get to keep this land that they extorted. People interpret the amnesty as intentional aid to them.
That's just the sort of person that Bush would want as an ally.
US citizens: Tell the EPA to oppose an expensive project to drain vital wetlands to please a few wealthy landowners.
Jesse Jackson reminded Americans that the US owes Haiti an apology as well as food aid.
Oxfam calls on Israel to stop starving Gaza.
Uri Avnery explained when the Annapolis "peace process" was announced that it was a failure from the outset.
This article from Jewish Voices for Peace analyzes the situation today.
It is misleading to compare the siege of Gaza to apartheid in South Africa. Although South African forced the Blacks to live in special zones, it did not lock them up in those zones and starve them.
Timothy Garon was denied a liver transplant because he had used marijuana to cope with the pain of his liver disease.
I've been told that the active ingredients in marijuana relieve nausea like nothing else, but only when smoked.
Victims of politically motivated prosecutions, and their witnesses and their lawyers, have been the targets of strange burglaries and even arson.
I do not doubt that these crimes were organized by the state. The evidence points that way, and there is no reason to find it incredible. Even Nixon arranged burglaries, and Dubya is far worse.
When we condemn government surveillance, the usual response is that "If you are not doing anything wrong, you have no reason to object if we know everything that you do." That's not true under a regime that might frame you or burn down your house if it doesn't like what you are doing.
Sami al-Hajj, a journalist freed after 6 years imprisonment in Guantanamo, did not hesitate to condemn the way the captives are treated there after being imprisoned without trial.
Microsoft has build a new back door in Windows for the use of the police.
In regimes where the police do things like ship you to Syria to be tortured, this is a threat to your human rights. Organizations that oppose government policies cannot trust Windows — or any non-free software, because users cannot tell what those developers have done.
An Australian musician says he was duped into contributing to an anti-"piracy" video.
The EFF is campaigning with Congress against unlimited searches of travelers' computers at borders.
The Supreme Court approved state ID requirements for voting which will tend to exclude poorer voters that don't have the required ID cards, can't afford them, etc.
This is part of a general Republican strategy to lock up elections by excluding voters that won't support them, and continues the method used by Bush to steal the 2000 election.
Here's the text of Rev. Wright's speech, which led Obama to break with him.
There are things in it I disagree with. Above all, the religion: I am sure that an omnipotent, omniscient that allowed all the suffering and injustice of our world would not deserve anyone's admiration. And I don't believe such a being exists anyway.
Secondly, and much less important, I do not believe that the US government produced HIV. Nobody in 1980 could have done such a thing; even today, genetic engineering is nowhere near advanced enough. Indeed, HIV has been found in tissues from people who died long before that.
I do not condemn Wright for saying that, I just disagree with it. To have made the AIDS virus would be only a couple of grades worse than what the US government has done in Iraq, so I reject the claim that the government would never do something so bad, but I don't believe it did.
Meanwhile, I admire Wright's principal points regarding race (both repentance and reconciliation), and regarding oppression and empire. I'd rather have him as president than either of the Democratic candidates.
Why did Obama denounce Rev. Wright? Here's one theory:
Genetically modified soybeans do not improve crop yields.
They might have some other advantage, but when we compare that against the dangers (to health, to ecosystems, and to farmers' rights), we must not weigh them against hypothetical benefits.
Fiji bottled water, which engages in the absurd practice of bottling water in Fiji and shipping it to the US, is reaching for absurd straws to greenwash this practice.
A US bombing raid in Somalia killed the leader of Al Qa'ida there, along with several people in nearby buildings — bystanders, presumably.
The Ethiopian army occupies Somalia with US help. Ethopia's government is a dictatorship that pretends to be a democracy but imprisoned the leaders of the opposition — just the sort of regime that Bush would love. I would hate to be ruled by the sort of Islamist regime that brought stability and peace to Somalia until the Ethopian conquest, but it is clear that the Bush-sponsored occupation is even worse.
Iran has stopped accepting US dollars for oil sales.
As the WHO looks for a new system of funding the medical research that the big drug companies don't do — essentially, research that would save lots of lives rather than make fairly wealthy people more comfortable — these drug companies are using dishonest PR techniques to sabotage the negotiations.
The governments that support the drug company positions are those that serve as the national representatives of the megacorporations. Their citizens would be very unhappy if they knew what "their" governments were doing "on their behalf", but the government and the corporate media hide it. And democracy has been corrupted and weakened to the point where their wishes count for nothing.
Everyone: make phone calls and send email in support of Professor Al-Arian, facing persecution in the US.
Israel plans to close Palestinian orphanages, dumping some 300 children onto the street.
The article says where to send your complaints.
China has publicly convicted 30 people for protests in Tibet with sentences up to life imprisonment.
I wonder how many have been disappeared secretly, like the young Panchen Lama and his family.
Ministers must be held responsible for the persistent use of torture by British troops in the Bush forces.
I'm sure the troops that carried out the torture were a small minority of the British contingent in the Bush forces. After all, only a small minority of any army is directly involved in guarding prisoners, and those who committed torture must be a fraction of them. But this detail changes nothing about the government's responsibility. It is an attempt to confuse and distract.
Israel rejected Hamas' offer for a cease-fire.
Apparently Israel finds it more useful to attack the Palestinians than to end the missile attacks on Sderot which provide an excuse doing so. Israeli authorities are aware of how rarely those missiles hurt anyone.
What do Palestinian children learn from the occupation?
There is a lot of opportunity for diplomacy between the US and Iran, if the US government wants to do it.
The Iraq War Morphs Into the Iran War.
The US government is concerned about the danger of malicious features in IC chips.
This is a rational concern: in fact, most PCs contain malicious features already, for treacherous computing.
Since the US government already uses malicious software to spy on computer users, I am more worried that the US government will put malicious features into our computers than about whatever Chinese crackers may do to them.
When Ecuador's government was a puppet of the US, Chevron praised its judicial system so as to get an environmental case transferred to Ecuador. Now that Ecuador is no longer subservient to business, Chevron's media supporters say the opposite.
Business is good at ting plausible lies, and has experts available for hire to do so, and for convincing newspapers to present a picture that supports them. Therefore, we must distrust all policy arguments offered by business even if they seem superficially plausible. Without an honest, independent investigation, we cannot know whether they are true.
Burger King's vice president anonymously posted nasty comments to attack the Confederation of Immokalee Workers.
The Confederation of Immokalee Workers asks restaurant chains to pay a tiny price increase for tomatoes to give the tomato pickers a substantial boost in their poverty-level wages. Some have agreed, but Burger King has refused.
The Pentagon's secret corruption of "military experts" is explicitly illegal, but that law depends on Bush to enforce it.
British agents interrogated prisoners in Pakistan who were being tortured by Pakistani guards. Some of these prisoners were then shipped to the UK without extradition hearings, and arrested and convicted of "terrorism". One must suspect they were convicted based on confessions extracted by torture.
Here's how the British agents collaborated with the Pakistani torturers.
What the agents did was illegal, but the Clown regime will surely find a ridiculous excuse not to prosecute them, just as it cites "privacy" as an excuse not to admit the wrongs it has done. Its view is that laws are tools of power over the public, not limits on what it can do to the public.
Britons must defend themselves above all from the principal terrorist threat, their government.
The UK government is more concerned with cutting taxes for the rich than with health, so it is kicking people out of hospitals early if they cannot pay.
While the government's propaganda staff call these people "health tourists" I suspect that many of them are simply undocumented. And some of them are babies.
I am not surprised that Andy Finlay gets death threats. I would categorize him as a murderer.
Riad Hamad, founder of the Palestinian Children's Welfare Fund, was bound with tape and tossed into a lake. The police call it suicide.
Here's a letter he sent to Bush.
I don't think the author of that letter would commit suicide, or write a "suicide note" implying doubt about the rightness of his cause. It seems more plausible that someone (working for the Bush regime?) murdered him and faked the note.
The UK's surveillance law, introduced by B'liar as a vital security measure, is being used to investigate littering.
Another injustice in this law is that it requires people to hand over their own encryption keys or face imprisonment.
In Memphis, the police are asking citizens to report anyone taking pictures. Anyone who "talks a little bit radical" is supposed to be a potential terrorist.
This shows clearly that the so-called "war on terrorism" is really a war on each and every one of us. The frequent warnings for citizens to "be alert" against the unlikely danger of non-state-sponsored terrorism are meant as a distraction from the ever-present danger of a tyrannical state. And the jittery trigger-happy state it induces leads to real harm to innocent victims, as Star Simpson and several others have discovered.
I have seen video so violent that it repelled me. (Some of it was sexual, some was not — it's a minor detail.) I hope to avoid seeing any more of it, but I condemn this attempt to censor it.
The Clown regime is planning to prohibit the mere possession of "extreme pornography". The excuse is that one man who liked violent pornography committed crime.
It is true that victims of real violence suffer. (Never mind that in making movies of violence, typically nobody is actually hurt.) The true oppressive spirit of this law starts to show in the prohibition of images of sex with corpses. Are we supposed to believe that corpses can suffer? Or are some cruel prudes trying to impose their prejudices by force?
The prohibition on images of sex with animals is also wrong. Some animals like sex with humans—male dophins are quite enthusiastic, and male dogs seem to like it too. Should you be imprisoned for taking pictures when a dog humps your leg? The parrot that made love to me in the Jurong Bird Park did so of his own free will. (I would never have dared to ask.) Is this photo going to be a crime? Will I be saved only because it is not obvious just what the parrot is doing to me?
The crimes committed by the occasional pervert are nothing against the crimes committed by B'liar in Iraq. So if they want to prohibit video that inspires violence, it would make more sense to go after war movies.
The Sarbanes-Oxley law gives protection to corporate whistleblowers, but Bush's Labor Department has effectively made it nothing.
An Indian Dalit woman died in the hospital because high caste doctors refused to treat her.
Over 12,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan a year have tried to commit suicide, but the Veterans Administration said it was under 800.
The Bush forces appear to be dropping cluster bombs on Baghdad.
This violates a treaty, but Bush doesn't care about adhering to treaties, except for treaties like NAFTA which allow him to say that the US has "promised" to mistreat its own people.
There is a lot to criticize about the ways Russia and China restrict their citizens, but the Bush regime is much more concerned when they fail to restrict their citizens.
Ever since Clinton, the US government has had no real interest in how other governments treat human rights. It has used its influence and power to prevent copying. It is most against commercial copying, but it tries to prevent the public from sharing also.
Canadians! Protest at the Public Policy Forum's push for unjust copyright law in your country.
I don't know which city this event is in, because I know only what it says in that article. But you can find out where it is. Print copies of that article (50 copies would be good) so you can hand them out to people that attend, especially media.
The TV networks have said nothing about the way the Pentagon's group of "military experts" fooled them. Perhaps because it was illegal for the Pentagon to do this.
"Bio-plastic" bags are supposedly biodegradable, but in landfills they either do not degrade or they produce methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas.
I wonder what happens to them in the ocean? If they do degrade naturally there, they would reduce the plastic bag pollution that kills marine life.
But there is also the problem that this plastic is made by growing corn, and thus competes with making food.
China says it will meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama. However, any agreement is unlikely.
When China says it is willing to meet with him if he renounces violence and Tibetan independence, this is just part of a persisent campaign to misrepresent where the Dalai Lama stands. He champions nonviolence, and abandoned independence as the goal many years ago.
Warnings that someone might try violence are a standard excuse nowadays for suppressing protests or driving them to obscure locations where they can easily be ignored. We saw that practice at the US political conventions in 2004, and will probably see it again this summer.
Why did the Bush regime start talking about the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor, after months of stonewalling? Some suggest this is a ploy by some officials to derail talks with North Korea.
Police in New York who shot and killed an unarmed man on the street have been acquitted of all charges.
If the events happened as the police described them, then this verdict would be justified. But I don't trust what they say, because lying in court is standard practice for police. (See many previous pol notes.)
The UN agency that feeds the Palestinians of Gaza is about to suspend deliveries for lack of fuel. Fuel delivery in Gaza is crippled because the workers are on strike, since Israel won't let them have fuel to deliver.
Mugabe's police raided the opposition headquarters and arrested everyone there.
Scott Ritter thinks the Syrian building that Israel bombed was a nuclear reactor, but without the facilities to extract plutonium for making bombs. He also points out that Israel violated international law, while Syria had not violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
A student confronted Ashcroft with the war-crimes conviction of a Japanese soldier for waterboarding. Ashcroft responded with quibbles.
What struck me about this is that Ashcroft designs his words as soundbites, intending them to be absorbed without thought or context. This is clearest when he says "They can't see either" about the students protesting with bags over their heads. The fact that they cannot see is irrelevant to anything, but it takes a few seconds' thought for a person to recognize that. Ashcroft hopes that his audience won't think about his words even that long.
China sent a ship full of arms to Mugabe's dictatorship, but workers refused to unload it, so the arms could not be delivered.
The Bush regime claims that Israel bombed an unfinished Syrian nuclear plant intended to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. A congressman said he does not trust the Bush regime on such questions.
At the same time, Syria says that Turkish mediation has created a possibility of peace between Syria and Israel.
I wonder if the two are related.
The Bliar/Clown regime has a policy that it can freeze someone's assets without trial, by arbitrary order. A judge ruled that this policy is illegal because Parliament never approved it.
If Parliament approves this, that won't make it legitimate. Confiscating someone's money on the mere order of an official is always an injustice.
Pro-business Western politicians are trying to placate China over the protests that their people are making.
The idea that China might abandon its policy of "engaging the West" is an absurdity, given how much Chinese business profits from that. China is now Capitalist, not Communist, even though this has not changed much in terms of freedom.
India's ban on testing the sex of fetuses has proved ineffective, to the point where tougher laws are being proposed to try to stop the practice.
The reasoning behind this prohibition is fallacious.
The desire to abort female fetuses reflects a social prejudice against women. I agree with Indian feminists that this prejudice is cruel and groundless. However, banning the symptom will not get rid of the prejudice.
The lower number of females will mean that many men cannot marry and will have no children. The end result will be less population growth in the future, and that is very very important.
The workers on Irish Ferries are paid low wages and are forbidden to go ashore. That's because these boats (which travel between Ireland and Britain) are officially registered in Cyprus.
The Mahdi Army says that the Bush forces killed 800 people, mostly civilians, in Sadr City.
In Boston on April 30: Benefit Concert for the Children of Gaza.
Iraqis see the US Embassy as the castle of the occupiers.
Some US stores have started limiting large purchases of rice because not enough is available.
Any further WTO agreement is to be feared as long as the rich country governments have more negotiating power, and use it on behalf of their corporate masters.
In the specific area of food, the reason there has been no agreement is that the rich countries refuse to drop their subsidies to agribusiness. Many poor countries have mostly stopped producing food because their farmers could not compete with the subsidized imports from the US. (One thing Chavez has done in Venezuela was to support a renewal of food production there.)
Perhaps the increased prices will restore food production around the world. Eliminating the subsidies would still be desirable for other reasons (we could use the money subsidize wind power, etc., instead).
However, the next worry is that food production will be limited by availability of land, water, or fertilizer made from petroleum. We need to stop human population growth.
Bush and the presidents of Mexico and Canada are meeting quietly with their masters planning how to weaken safety standards and allow China to export through duty-free through Mexico.
Police are accustomed to feeling they are above the law: attack people on the street, they lie in court, and they park in no parking zones and assume that their "brothers" won't give them tickets. However, one cop just discovered that he may not be immune from parking fines.
I am not a zealot for the enforcement of parking regulations, but I enjoy seeing cops get the treatment they usually think they should only dish out.
I've been saying ever since 2001 that a government that doesn't respect human rights is more dangerous than underground terrorists. Now we can demonstrate this with figures.
Under 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Over 4,000 Americans have been killed in the conquest and occupation of Iraq, and that doesn't count the many wounded, or the loss of freedom we have all suffered. The supposed reasons for this war were lies, so nothing excuses the harm it does. Thus, even for Americans, Bush is the worst enemy.
It's true in the UK too. 52 Britons were killed by terrorist attacks, while 176 were killed in the occupation of Iraq, not to count the wounded or the loss of freedom that all Britons have suffered.
The conquest of Iraq has imposed much greater suffering on Iraq; Bush and his cronies are responsible for all of that, since it was their crime that caused it. My point is that Bush is worse even without counting this.
Investigating the Pentagon's pet pundits.
The corruption of Earth Day into a marketing event is the result of a persistent long-term business PR campaign.
The capitalist will sell you the planet he (and the rest of his species) are living in.
When Kenya abolished the school fees that had been imposed by the IMF, 1 million poor children started attending school.
Additional "skeptics" about global warming have been outed as being on the PR industry's payroll.
Businesses such as Wal-mart pretend to be green while lobbying against laws to protect the environment.
Mugabe's men are doing a partial recount of the election, in districts where the opposition won, and seem to be trying to use it to cheat.
The Miss Landmine beauty contest highlights what landmines do to civilians.
Most countries are ready to ban landmines. Guess which one obstructs it?
The scandal of corporate media "military experts", managed by the Pentagon and paid by the military-industrial complex, is part of a campaign organized by Reagan and continued by George I to revive the US appetite for foreign wars.
Arizona is considering a vague bill that would cut off funding to schools that "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization" or "overtly encourage dissent" from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance.
I support democracy, pluralism, and religious tolerance, but I find it dangerous to support them in this way. The way that quotes were taken out of context to misrepresent the Raza program suggests that this is a plan to do wrong.
As for capitalism, that isn't a value, it is merely one method that can be used to organize an activity. Sometimes it provides good results, and sometimes bad results. Elevating it to a "value" is a mistake.
After talking with Jimmy Carter, Hamas announced its willingness to accept and live by a peace agreement with Israel if the Palestinians clearly accept it.
By Israel's response to this, we can measure whether Israel's government wants peace.
Gordon Clown's regime in the UK has given the Bush regime real time access to spy on cars on the highways of the UK.
Paraguay has elected a moderate leftist president.
It remains to be seen how much he will resist the bullying of the US. Arguing with Brazil about who gets how much money from the Itaipu dam will not build unity.
The guards at Guantanamo appear to have destroyed video evidence of their torture activities.
This would appear to be a criminal act in its own right. But will they be prosecuted? Surely not by Bush; he won't even prosecute the male contractors that rape female contractors in Iraq.
The wives of imprisoned Cuban dissidents held a protest in Havana. The police arrested them.
Al Sadr threatened open war against the occupiers.
The ocean has become less effective at absorbing CO2 since 10 years ago. This will make future global warming even worse than expected.
Global warming is causing bigger storms at sea.
The "military experts" that provide "analysis" on US were systematically recruited as mouthpieces by the Bush regime, and many are paid by its corporate cronies. Now the details of how this was done have been exposed.
When I read about the tours that were used to feed these "analysis" biased information, they remind me of the way the Soviet Union used to do the same thing.
One of the people carrying the Olympic torch in San Francisco pulled out a small Tibetan flag. Chinese and US police attacked her.
This must be what Peter Ueberroth calls an "exhilarating experience".
Israel arrested an important Palestinian non-violent activist, accusing him of being a "terrorist", but with no evidence for the claim.
According to Patrick Cockburn, al Sadr wants to make a common front with Sunnis to expel the Bush army of occupation, but the Sunni militias, now getting support from the Bush regime, would rather reconquer the parts of Baghdad that Shi'ites took over.
If they think Bush will support them while they do that, they are fools; what he wants above all is an appearance of peace in Iraq and especially in Baghdad. They ought to join with al Sadr.
Reagan's appointees destroyed the CIA's commitment to objective analysis, and converted it into a tool for fabricating support for political goals. Bush took advantage of this when fabricating excuses to conquer Iraq.
US citizens: support the Responsible Plan for ending the occupation of Iraq.
The goal of restoring Iraq's unity may be unachievable, but I see no harm in trying, as long as failure in that goal is not allowed to derail the rest.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on the major presidential candidates to talk with Hamas.
John McCain's New Economic Advisor Is an 'Innovator' at Hurting Workers.
In Basra, women face danger everywhere, and can be imprisoned by their husbands if they demand a divorce.
The Bush forces' invasion is responsible for this, but I think there is no way to undo what has been done. Certainly the continued Bush occupation does nothing about this problem.
Israel continues expansion of its colonies in the West Bank, showing contempt for the idea of peace with Palestinians.
The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff says he was kept in the dark about torture practiced in Guantanamo. He believed that the Geneva Conventions were still being followed.
The other injustice of Guantanamo, aside from torture, is that people have been imprisoned for long periods without trial.
The Bush regime twists language to deny that torture is torture.
After World War II, the US executed Japanese soldiers as war criminals for waterboarding American troops.
A Pentagon institute calls the Iraq war `a major debacle'.
This story gives a false figure for the number of civilians killed in Iraq. The figure obviously comes from Iraq Body Count, but that organization does not claim its count represents all the civilians killed. It represents only the deaths that IBQ can identify and verify. The total must be considerably more. The best estimate for the total of Iraqi civilians killed is around a million.
Those who want to keep the Bush forces in Iraq always say that Iraq's civil war would get worse without them. It might get worse or it might get better, no one can say. A couple of weeks ago the "Iraqi" forces (filled with the Badr brigades of SCIRI) fought with the Mahdi Army in Basra. The Bush forces supported this attack. Without Bush and his arms, money and troops to back them up, they would not have tried it.
I suggest resolving Iraq's future by inviting al Sadr, the anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni groups, the Kurds to work it out, offering withdrawal of the Bush forces as the carrot if they reach an agreement. The negotiations could be in Switzerland, and representatives of Indonesia (mostly Muslim, distant, and moderate) might be able to help them reach agreement.
YouTube suspended the accounts of two anti-Scientology activists without even notifying them, and refuses to explain why.
This makes two reasons why using YouTube to post videos is a bad thing:
1. Because YouTube only distributes them in Flash, and free software support for Flash is impeded by software patents.
2. Because that gives YouTube a lot of power.
Any web site can host videos, so post them yourself in Ogg Theora format.
Chinese people who got HIV from blood transfusions were arrested when they tried to meet with Premier Wen Jiabao.
Why didn't the New York Times cover the Winter Soldier events of the Iraq Veterans Against the War? It offers bad excuses.
India applied crushing security to the Olympic torch ceremony, turning it into a shabby failure and bringing shame on itself.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the "Personal Use of Marijuana...Act of 2008."
Unequal treaties imposed by the US and other wealthy countries have ruined the farmers in Haiti and poor countries.
Rising grain prices could act as an inducement for people to start producing it again, but that is easier said than done.
Bush is starting to verbally acknowledge the need to reduce CO2 emissions, but his proposal is really just a delaying action to hold off reductions.
Resistance is growing in the UK to attempts to ban photography.
Berlusconi, il ducino, came back to power in Italy. Berlusconi is a semi-fascist and a loyal poodle for Bush.
The reason he escaped some prosecutions for corruption is that he changed laws to make the statute of limitations shorter.
Corporations employ spies to infiltrate NGOs in order to defeat their campaigns.
Earth Day, like Christmas, has been perverted into a marketing event.
Evidence that most of the population of Latin America descended from white men and indigenous or black women may not indicate that the former killed the indigenous men, but rather result from the bigotry of colonial society.
The Burmese generals are imprisoning people for campaigning for a No vote in the constitutional referendum. They have not announced to the Burmese people what the constitution says, but leaked copies indicate it would make Aung San Suu Kyi ineligible for office for having married a foreigner.
If this constitution is "approved" by this unjust referendum, it should be regarded as no more legitimate than the EU constitution which was "approved" by pretending it wasn't a constitution.
Amnesty International estimates that China will execute almost 400 people during the Olympics — most of them secretly.
An 8-year-old boy was suspended from school for sniffing a marker for a moment. When the principal was informed by a toxicologist that it is not feasible to get high by sniffing a marker, he made the school get rid of all of them just to make sure nothing miraculous would occur.
Eathan should learn a lesson from this — a lesson about tyrants and freedom. But I doubt anyone has suggested this interpretation to him. Most children do not think of seriously applying what they learn about tyranny to the way adults treat them. I was an exception.
Is Starvation Contagious? As Haiti starves, few countries pay attention, but it is spreading.
14-year-old Omar has been released from prison in Iraq. He had been imprisoned for 7 months.
The organization Anonymous is holding repeated protests against the Church of Scientology. This one focused on the Church's policy of ordering members to discontinue contact with relatives that leave the Church.
Note how the church spokesperson's response is misleading. She says that she has a relationship with family members. Maybe that is true, but did they leave the church, or did they never join? I am sure that church members are encouraged to continue to talk with their relatives who have never joined the church.
Meanwhile, secret church documents have been leaked, including some that describe how the church punishes people.
Specially chosen Chinese police have accompanied the Olympic torch in several countries, giving the public a taste of Chinese police attitudes. Host country police shared the culpability by keeping them secret.
I commend Australia (and Japan, I read elsewhere) for refusing to allow the Chinese thugs entry.
The US police and policies toward protests will soon face a similar test, when the protests against the Republican and Democratic national conventions occur. In 2004 their policies were designed to cordon off protest to places where everyone could ignore it.
The Colomb family was framed on charges of drug trafficking by police operating from bigotry.
This family had good luck; not everyone who is framed in the US manages to show it. (Some are even executed.) The family's access to the court system gave them the chance to be exonerated.
Now imagine that a similarly overzealous prosecutor accuses a foreigner of "terrorism", and that the victim cannot even go to court. Imagine that the jailhouse snitches can be tortured, not just offered early release. That shows why the Guantanamo prison and the other secret US prisons are so evil.
Zimbabwe's opposition calls for a general strike.
Drought has become more frequent in parts of Uganda, leaving many people hungry. Perhaps this is due to global warming, which is predicted to cause drought in many places.
Global warming combines with human waste runoff to destroy coral reefs. Protecting the reefs from direct human action doesn't help.
A small, localized nuclear war could damage the Earth's ozone and thus endanger people all around the world.
The head of the IPCC says rich countries have failed to lead with the necessary sacrifices for a new climate treaty.
So negotiations are on hold waiting for Bush to be unable to sabotage them.
I have an idea. Obama, Clinton and McCain could get together to appoint a shadow negotiating team, and other governments could talk with that team, snubbing official US representatives. They probably would not have trouble getting the Green Party on board too. This team would have no authority to commit the US to anything now, but other countries could have confidence that the next president would accept.
The IMF has lost its grip on middle-income countries, and as a result, is running out of money to keep poor countries down.
Six cities in the US shortened the yellow light period, creating unsafe driving conditions, in order to make more money from their automatic cameras that issue traffic fines.
Using cameras to issue traffic fines should be illegal itself.
Venezuelan President Chavez accused the US of instigating the protests against China over its actions in Tibet, and opposes those protests. I am very disappointed by that position.
The US does sometimes organize protests to destabilize other countries, but I don't think it is doing so here. If it were, why would it allow the Chinese police to come in for the torch events? I think Chavez is mistaken about this accusation.
More importantly, Chavez has taken the wrong side in a struggle much like Venezuela's. I can understand Venezuela's need to seek allies to strengthen its hand against Washington, but always supporting those allies no matter what they do is not right.
Due to a starvation treaty with the US, India pays $400 per ton of rice to a US company, while Indian farmers are going broke getting only $200
Protests are following the Olympic Torch to Buenos Aires.
It is amusing to see the tremendous concern given to the question of whether this torch is extinguished. It verges on superstition. Do they think that this would be some sort of omen?
Suppose the torch were extinguished — would that prevent the games from being held? Certainly not. Would that convince China to respect human rights of Tibetans and Chinese? Would it convince the US to respect human rights of Americans and Iraqis and Haitians and many others? I doubt it.
So what are they worried about? Why do various unjust governments seem to care so much about this? Why do they let Chinese police come along to jump on anyone that waves a Tibetan flag?
I think they are worried about the appearing less than omnipotent. Their message to anyone who disagrees with the corporate empire is, "We are in total control, and you can't change anything. So give up!"
If protestors can extinguish a torch, who knows, maybe some day they can change government policies such as torture, invasion, censorship, and imprisonment of dissidents.
US citizens: sign this petition in support of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act before the public FCC hearing on April 17th.
Uri Avnery on Israel's hidden anti-peace agenda.
Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine: Israel Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust.
Ecuador's President Correa has fired a number of army officers accusing them of working with the CIA and Colombia.
Some of them had been told about Colombia's attack on FARC negotiators in Ecuador before it occurred, and kept it secret from the Ecuadorian government. This sounds like treason to me.
A British court ruled it was illegal to drop the investigation into BAE's bribery.
B'liar ordered it halted in response to Sa'udi pressure.
The court's decision is admirable, but Clown has decided to nullify it by changing the law to legalize what was done. In effect, he wants power to connive at corruption.
Of course, he will only do this when powerful interests are involved.
Cuba is moving step by step towards a freer economy.
I hope that it won't follow China's path which led to capitalism but not to human rights.
40 million Americans are on the edge of lacking the money to buy food. 11 million sometimes miss meals out of poverty. Bush's cuts in funding for food banks makes their situation worse.
But the cause of this problem is a broad range of right-wing policies that result from the dominion of the corporations.
If a political program doesn't make the megacorporations scream, it fails to address the problem. If the corporate media don't try to deride a candidate, then he's not going to take away their power.
Indonesia ordered ISPs to block access to Youtube because one of the videos there criticizes Islam.
The censorship order has been canceled, but it illustrates the widespread tendency of Muslims (and their governments) to try to suppress criticism. Many Muslim countries explicitly deny religious freedom and freedom of expression.
It is a bad thing to access Youtube if you use Adobe's non-free, binary-only Flash player. The only way to access Youtube and maintain your freedom is with Gnash. But that doesn't justify blocking access to the site.
Ben Allbright, who helped torture prisoners for Bush in Iraq, now wrestles with his conscience, and is embarrassed by the Americans around him who consider him a hero — Americans who "don't care about right and wrong".
Allbright is torn between his ethics on one hand, and a misplaced loyalty to the US government on the other. Perhaps he could make peace with his past by taking that loyalty away from the US government, and the Americans that approve of torture, and giving it instead to the ideals that they have betrayed.
Florida sells unlimited water-pumping rights in drought-stricken State Park to Nestle for $230
This is a particularly flagrant and stupid instance of a widespread corrupt policy. Most state governments (and most national governments) openly boast of bending over backwards to attract business from other states and other nations. In the small, it could seem that the one that wins this "competition" has gained. But the overall result is that the citizens lose and the companies gain.
Not long after Bush praised the "Iraqi" government's attack against al Sadr's Mahdi Army, General Petraeus urged reconciliation between them.
I think that this vacillation reflects a fundamental dilemma for Bush: al Sadr demands the end of the occupation, so Bush wants to destroy him, but Bush can't dominate Iraq if he is actually fights al Sadr.
The European Parliament rejected a proposal to punish people accused of sharing music on the internet.
Maybe this is the end of the EU's string of attacks on sharing, but it won't eliminate the unjust directives already adopted.
The Bush forces are finding it necessary to take cover inside the Green Zone, as resistance attacks start to hit.
Universal Music Group claims that throwing away a promotional CD is illegal.
If Universal were able to establish this claim, it would be able to ruin anybody simply by mailing him so many promotional CDs that he could not afford to rent space to house them. Perhaps it could establish a musical group called "White Elephant" for the purpose.
But I'm sure Universal does not expect to establish this claim, and I doubt it even really wants to. (The question isn't actually relevant to the case anyway.) Rather, it has a more subtle plan. Universal is presenting absurdly extreme copyright demands so as to make its real extreme copyright demands seem moderate by comparison. Thus, this absurd claim can do harm even if it is sure to be rejected.
Massachusetts voters: call your state representative and state senator to support medical marijuana legislation.
You can also send the message through this site but a phone call carries more weight.
Massachusetts voters: if your state senator is on the Ways and Means Committee, call in support of reducing penalties for marijuana.
This site will tell you if your state senator is on that committee.
Clinton continues to use PR businessman Mark Penn despite his work for the sweatshop treaty with Colombia and other nasty causes.
I can understand how a business might hire a PR firm regardless of who its other clients are and what they do. When a candidate acts that way, that seems to imply that the candidate has lowered the election to mere business.
Iraq war coverage has gone down by a factor of 6 from early 2007.
I wonder why this has happened. It is sure convenient for Bush, and for McCain. Did someone arrange this?
Experts associated with the Iraq Study Group say that the Bush regime has made no progress towards its announced goals in Iraq.
I don't know what will happen in Iraq if the Bush forces are withdrawn. A new outbreak of fighting might occur. However, their presence in Iraq contributes to the tensions that might cause this fighting, so keeping them there is no solution.
Supporters of China demonstrated in San Francisco along with protestors.
I wonder who those supporters were. I suspect they were Chinese people whose reside in the San Francisco area and who see this issue through the foolish eyes of nationalism.
We see the same foolish nationalism when Americans are manipulated into supporting Bush's occupation of Iraq through their patriotism.
In Zimbabwe, after Mugabe covered up the election results and demanded a rerun, armed men are telling citizens "Vote for Mugabe or you die".
Businesses have set up a phony consumer group to lobby for further deregulation and more sweatshop treaties.
High prices for grain have caused riots around the world as poor people cannot afford to eat.
Making biofuel from food crops is part of the problem.
2/3 of Americans want the Bush forces withdrawn within a year, according to a recent poll.
US citizens: sign this petition to Rep. Murtha calling for no more funding to continue the occupation of Iraq.
The accused liquid explosive airplane bombers are on trial in the UK, and prosecutors seem to continue to claim that they could have succeeded.
It is possible that the accused were really thinking about trying to use liquid explosives, but they didn't get beyond that. If they had, they would have found that the method doesn't work.
Israel continues expansion of its "settlements" on Palestinian land, creating ever more obstacles to the possibility of peace.
Giant media companies are trying to attack the concept of fair use in copyright law, and doing so by lying about the Berne Convention.
Even if the Berne Convention doesn't conflict with fair use, it is still bad. For instance, it says that every written work is copyrighted even if it is published without a copyright notice. And it requires copyright to last for a ridiculously long time. The Berne Convention should be abolished, and likewise the sweatshop treaties ("free trade" treaties) that refer to it.
Illinois representative Monique Davis told Rob Sherman he had no right to testify to a state committee, because he is an Atheist.
Bigotry against various religions still exists in the US, but most people are ashamed to show it, because many others condemn it. However, our society has not yet learned to condemn bigotry against Atheists.
New technologies put your privacy and autonomy at risk even inside your skull.
Influential members of Congress own lots of stock in companies that profit from the occupation of Iraq.
Biofuel production has combined with climate change, eating lots of meat, oil shortage, and "free trade" to produce a scarcity of grain, causing a big price increase which is making poor people go hungry around the world.
Protests against China have begun in San Francisco.
Isn't it pathetic the way some people consider a sporting event more important than freedom? How these protests affect the "Olympic movement" is insignificant compared with the oppression that they denounce.
Israel is gradually expelling Palestinians from much of the West Bank by demolishing homes and not allowing new ones to be built.
Israeli soldiers shoot and threaten Palestinians that are obviously not armed.
But it's not just with guns and bombs that Israel kills Palestinians.
Bush wants the "Iraqi" government to sign an agreement so the Bush forces can remain there as long as he wishes (but not "permanently"). Perpetual occupation on the installment plan?
A network of state and private surveillance systems work with US systems to implement pervasive surveillance.
The Olympic torch was guarded in France much as a tyrant is guarded from the people he oppresses.
But they were unable to prevent the protests from being very effective.
The Clown's police in London told protestors that even t-shirts were forbidden as a protest.
It is no surprise that the police commander subsequently denied this. Lying is second nature for police.
The protests have convinced the president of the IOC to voice a token criticism of China, although he reserves the harshest criticism for the protestors, by exaggerating their protests into "violence".
It is interesting to note the comment in the first article that responds to the article by criticizing the occupation of Iraq. This reflects a fundamental confusion about what the point is.
If you want to support human rights, you must resist the tendency to attack foreign critics of oppression by saying "Your country is bad too." Maybe it is, and what then? Arguing about which country is worse is a distraction.
Every year the Bush regime publishes a condemnation of China's contempt for human rights. These criticisms are valid. Every year the Chinese government publishes a condemnation of the US disrespect for human rights. These criticisms are valid too. Both of these governments trample human rights, and they are both wrong. The wrongs of one do not excuse or legitimize the wrongs of the other.
The way to advance the cause of human rights is to insist on justice in each country and all countries. If pressure for human rights someday establishes in China a just government which puts the US to shame, that would be a great step forward for the whole world.
As the surveillance society extends, privileged people are given exemptions.
I think this will be a general trend, a consequence of surveillance in a society of great inequality.
Red-light cameras are a nasty system even if applied fairly, because the driver gets the ticket days (at least) after the event, when he no longer remembers the circumstances enough to argue the case. They ought to be abolished, not improved.
Barack Obama and Rev. Wright represent the two sides of Martin Luther King Jr.
Mugabe wants to hold a do-over election instead of releasing the results of the last one. And he has sent thugs to take over additional white-owned farms, a move the opposition interprets as threatening violence.
Now British officials predict that Bush will soon attack Iran.
