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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.
Everyone: call on the New York Thug Department to investigate arrests for "shopping while black".
Divestment from fossil fuel companies is spreading.
In Australia, students from poor families are falling into a life of poverty because of low skills. I would expect it is the same in the US.
This may be partly due to insufficient spending on their education, but the fact that there are no longer decent jobs for most people could also to blame.
Honduras is about to have a presidential election, but the coup-installed government will rig it, more or less.
Clandestine gold mining in the Amazon is causing accelerating deforestation.
Glenn Greenwald discusses honesty in journalism and the factors that degrade it.
The witch hunt against pedophiles led a mob to kill a man.
This is an unusual extreme, but the same spirit that whipped up this mob can be found in other measures taken against adults that have sex (or even head in the direction of sex) with teenagers.
Another accused man was found dead at home when he was supposed to go to court.
Either anxiety killed him, or he committed suicide, or this was an unlikely coincidence.
In all such cases, the official accusations carefully suppress the distinction between rape and willing sex, even love. First they define willing sex as "rape", and then they try to bury all knowledge of whether it was willing sex or not. We're invited to judge all these men as rapists, which some of them are and some are not.
The most important point about bugging the phones of politicians in Germany, Spain and elsewhere is that the NSA was keeping Obama and Feinstein in the dark along with all of us.
To stop snooping on a few allied leaders is not sufficient remedy. The US should stop snooping on Americans, too (except those for whom there is a specific, constitutional court order).
Feinstein, aren't US citizens' rights as important as Merkel's?
Polio has broken out in Syria.
Hamad al-Naqi will be sentenced to 10 years in prison in Kuwait for tweeting insults.
Making insult a crime is an injustice, whether it's in Kuwait, France, Ecuador or Britain.
Congress plans to cut almost a million US veterans from food stamps, and other people too.
Only part of Texas's law to make abortion effectively impossible has been rejected in its first appeal.
People Who Live Downwind Of Alberta's Oil And Tar Sands Operations Are Getting Blood Cancer. The connection is not mysterious, given the measured levels of pollutants in the air there.
The NSA says that its massive collection of information on phone calls in Spain and France comes from intelligence agencies in those countries.
It's not clear whether France reports to the NSA about phone calls in France while Spain reports about phone calls in Spain, or whether France reports on those in Spain and Spain reports on those in France.
If someone wanted to present the situation as "US bad, Europe good", this would put a spike in it. But I think the issue is that states are massively surveilling their citizens, often with the help of other states, and this news only indicts more governments as participants.
Perpetual War: How Does the Global War on Terror Ever End?
The German government is tapping Skype calls, and is raiding Pirate Party politicians to try to find the leaker.
Everyone: tell FIFA to insist on no slavery in building facilities for the world cup in Qatar.
US citizens: tell
Congress not
to allow banksters to hold derivatives in FDIC-insured bank
subunits.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell
Congress not
to cut life-saving foreign aid.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
What dish combines cocoa and eggplant?
Australia's PM argues against the danger of global heating using a fallacy so dumb that anyone can see through it.
It's not that he's stupid, but rather than he is confident that support for his statements will drown out all attempts to point out the flaw in them, thanks to the influence which the fossil fuel companies exercise over the mainstream media along with him.
A free and fair election requires freedom before voting day, as well as during the voting.
Over a million British children live in houses that are too cold for their health.
The Tories are working hard to increase the number, and Labour is aiming to maintain it.
Even Senator Feinstein, supposed to "oversee" the NSA, says she has been kept in the dark.
In general, Feinstein supports massive general surveillance, so an investigation won't do much good if controller by her and her like.
Investigating and exposing North Korea's crimes against humanity in the hope of convincing China to demand some improvement.
Australian thugs search the lunchboxes of asylum seekers' children on the way to and from school, and they don't say why.
US citizens: call on the FERC to stop rubber-stamping oil and gas pipelines and other dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure.
US citizens:
tell
the US government not to approve oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
Mexican
popular militias try to suppress gangster murders where the state
is no use.
Honduran dissident photographer Manuel de Jesús Murillo Varela
was murdered, having been threatened for years and
not
given the protection that he needed.
A citizen planted flowers in unused flower boxes
in the DC Metro.
Someone
tore them out. Perhaps the Metro tore out the flowers because
they were unauthorized and unapproved.
With
JPMorgan Under Spotlight, Growing Calls to Jail the Banksters.
Obama seems to want planned Syrian peace negotiations to start an
Oslo-style
process of endless negotiations that arrive nowhere.
This reflects the fundamental problem of the Syrian rebels: they are
divided, and the strongest factions are as vicious as Assad's regime.
The Taliban committed a
Bush-style
wedding massacre, and the villagers took revenge on a suspected
Taliban sympathiser.
If enough Afgans feel this way, the Taliban will lose; but there's a
long way to go before that happens.
A pessimistic view: plutocracy is entrenching itself to the point that
it will
cause a
revolution.
I fear that that revolution would be the opportunity to eliminate all
the people whose work is no longer needed by the elite.
If Obama
Didn't Know About Merkel Spying, What Was It For?
The Greenpeace 30 illustrate the
horrible
conditions faced by Russian prisoners in general.
Don't forget that the US keeps thousands of prisoners in conditions
which are similar except that
solitary
confinement is added.
"Rent to own" computers
spied
on their users.
With proprietary software, spying is only to be expected.
Obama has one more chance to show due attention to the growing danger
of global heating: by
blocking
Keystone XL.
Dean Baker:
Alan
Greenspan Owes America an Apology.
There is no way to produce "sustainably" as much as humanity is
producing now. We need to reduce
wasteful
consumption.
The article shows how the EROI (energy return on investment) for
fossil energy is declining, because we have already extracted most of
the easy-to-extract fossil fuel. However, it errs when asserting that
renewable energy's EROI is part of the decline.
The EROI for renewable energy is increasing with advancing technology;
meanwhile, we have a long way to go before it must decline because all
the easy-to-collect renewable energy flow is already being utilized.
Even when that happens, we will be able to continue steadily drawing
the same amount of renewable energy each year at the same efficiency,
as long as the Sun keeps pumping it out as now. In other words, the
idea of sustainability does make sense when applied to renewable
resources.
I don't think this invalidates the article's overall point however,
that we must reduce overall resource use greatly rather than just make
some activities "sustainable".
Articulating opposition
to Islamist fundamentalism from a Muslim perspective.
US citizens:
call for an end to
gouging prisoners on phone calls.
Cholera has
spread
from Haiti to Mexico. It was
introduced
into Haiti by the UN "peacekeeping" forces
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone:
call
on Denver not to ban the smell of marijuana.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Massive NSA spying on France, and not just "terrorists".
Google is using anticompetitive measures to prevent the manufacture of devices that are sold with any forked version of Android.
(The crucial point is on page 3.) This is even more important than the steady replacement of free apps with nonfree.
The important aspect is that includes any free version of Android, such as Replicant. This is not quite the same as the way Microsoft abuses its power in the PC market, but it has comparable effects.
Of course, if you want freedom, you shouldn't use any of the Google APIs, and Google Play (offering so many nonfree apps) is something to run away from.
The article talks about "open source" rather than "free/libre software", seeking as usual to avoid ethical opposition to nonfree software. Please don't imitate that practice! The way to encourage other people to think in terms of freedom is to raise the freedom issue visibly whenever it is relevant.
The UK allows some companies to impose filtering to block whatever sites they wish by calling them "pirate".
Even if a site really does do unauthorized redistribution, that is no justification for Internet filters.
US citizens: call on the FDA not to impose impossible burdens on fairly small farms.
The working American's lifestyle tends to lead people to spend money on things they don't need.
I'm happy to say that I don't buy anything to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill a childhood vision of what my adulthood would be like, or to broadcast my status to the world. I do get some things to cheer myself up — mostly chocolate — and that cheers me up when I eat it.
Faux News is said to use sock-puppets against blog postings that criticize it.
US-based VPN companies discuss whether you can trust them not to serve as tracking arms for the NSA.
Thousands Demand End to Government Spying.
Organized crime is
involved
in recruiting workers for the Fukushima cleanup.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Since they skim the workers' pay, they reduce their effective wage. These dangerous and delicate operations need the best workers they can find.
US citizens: sign
this additional
petition to defend Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid against
cuts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
US thugs
invade
people's homes at night without identifying themselves, and if the
people prepare to fight the intruders, the thugs often kill them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
In 5 years, we will have a battle when Hollywood tries to extend copyright again.
We should shorten copyright instead.
Why AT&T shouldn't be allowed to end telephone regulation.
Companies say they will make some food products with less saturated fat, but the real danger may be from the sugar in them.
The witch-hunt for "pedophiles" has inspired overeager vigilantes to try to catch some — and if they don't find real ones, they make false accusations.
If an adult and a real 15-year-old agree to meet in a cafe, and if they later have sex, that doesn't mean anyone did anything wrong. That 15-year-old is clearly not being coerced or pressured. People should let them alone.
Remember the British school girl who ran away to France with her teacher, and later said, when he was on trial for "abducting" her, that she had asked him to run away with her so they could have some last time together?
That prosecution represented an attempt to impose a prejudice on reality. These vigilantes are motivated by the same prejudice.
Dick Cheney Feared Assassination by Shock to Implanted Heart Defibrillator.
Cheney's worries were entirely justified.
Rape is regularly used as a tool of cruelty in Syria.
Of all the loathsome acts described in this article, the second worst is that of the man who rejected his wife because she was raped. The worst of all is that of her father. Their attitude also inspires the rapes.
Film production in LA is disappearing as other places lure it away by offering tax breaks.
Cutting taxes to win business away from other jurisdictions is a form of "beggar thy neighbor": businesses play states and countries against each other to the detriment of all of them. Plutocrats' pet politicians might call this outcome success, but those that are loyal to their country should instead propose a treaty to ban competing via tax breaks.
France
refuses
to play this fool's game.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
A Chinese journalist confessed to making up stories about corruption, saying he was bribed to write them.
Next will he confess to making up false confessions?
Many companies are now exercising "investor-state" provisions that give them more rights in other countries than the citizens of those countries.
We can call them the "unequal treaties", and all of them should be abolished.
Forever war is forever profit — for some.
The right wing is winning the battle in Washington on a basic question: what is the economic problem that the US faces.
This relates to the political influence of plutocrats' money.
The voting principle for Americans should be, "Punish every expensive right-wing campaign." You can't go far wrong by marching towards the sound of the TV attack ads.
Of course, that heuristic is not guaranteed to be right all the time, but is usually right. The nasty things the ads accuse are probably misleading half truths. But even if once in a while the accusation is spot on, it is a side issue. The fact that the rich are paying to attack a candidate is an overwhelming point in her favor. Anything bad about her is secondary.
Thus, if you don't have time to study an issue or a race in depth, vote for the progressive side that the plutocrats attack.
California thugs shot a 13-year-old who was reportedly carrying a pellet gun that looks like an AK-47.
We can't take their word that this is what happened; the facts must be independently verified.
If the facts are as stated, I can't blame the thugs this time. If you carry a realistic replica of a deadly weapon, people will treat it as real. To give a child such a replica is terribly foolish; to have one is foolish too. If this starts to happen often enough to be more than a rare fluke, it would make sense to ban them. But I doubt that will happen.
Time for the Truth about 'Targeted' Killings and US Drones' Civilian Victims.
Why reinstating Edward Snowden's passport is an important issue.
About bills under consideration in the US Congress to curb general surveillance.
What the EFF recommends would be a step in the right direction, but in order to really stop general surveillance we need to prevent the creation of a massive dossier about each person.
Censorship is a bad way to try to address social problems, even really bad ones.
A Wisconsin court went to great lengths to respect human rights for a fetus, but not much for the woman it is in.
To take drugs that could cause abnormalities in the fetus is a grave act if the fetus develops into a damaged human being. It's legitimate for the state to take steps to prevent this, but imprisoning the mother-to-be doesn't seem very constructive, and neither was imposing conditions that caused her to lose her job.
The absence of universal medical care in the US seems to play a role in the problem. This woman can't afford to see a doctor.
However, there is a point I don't understand. When she was invited to take her drug under medical supervision, she declined. That sounds like gratuitous noncooperation, and doesn't make sense. But maybe she had a reason — for instance, would she have had to pay for it, which she could not afford?
Stores want to track customers by their mobile phones' WiFi MAC addresses. The EFF says that a proposed opt-out system is an inadequate safeguard.
As far as I'm concerned, just having a phone company track me (or you) is too much.
Japan is on the verge of passing a law to ban informing the public about government secrets.
Maine has found a way around US drug gouging by allowing reimportation of drugs exported from the US for sale in Canada and some other countries.
US officials' focus on the misguided goal of cutting the US deficit reflects the money they get from rich funders.
Reportedly the planned US-Europe free exploitation treaty, TAFTA, is going to include an "investor-state" provision that would elevate foreign companies above each of the countries involved.
TAFTA stands for "turn all freedom to ashes".
US citizens: sign this petition too against cuts in Social Security and medical care.
Due to changes in urban architecture, cities no longer offer places for children to play outdoors.
There may be other factors, including exaggerated fear of declining street crime.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Save America's Pollinators Act.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to put strict limits on CO2 pollution from
power plants.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
A new scientific study estimates that 450,000 Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of the Bush invasion, through 2011.
Uri Avnery compares and contrasts the situation in Israel with apartheid in South Africa.
Bushbama's extension of NSA surveillance recapitulates Nixon.
Here's my idea on how to address this problem.
Letters about the flaws of neoclassical economics, which is economics as designed to justify the policies that rich people want.
An initiative petition in Switzerland proposes limiting an executive's
pay to
12 times
the least paid staff of the company.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
I agree with this in principle, but I fear it will lead to more subcontracting of the lowest-paid workers. Thus, it needs a companion measure to prevent a change in that direction. Since contracting out work is an avenue for so many abuses, including some that endanger workers' lives or encourage fraud, we need to limit it in any case.
Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters.
Murdoch's newspapers turn the facts upside down, condemning the US for fining fraudulent banks a small fraction of what they gained.
I've moved out most of the money I had in (what had merged into) a big bank. Have you?
Iraqis think their country should be united, but nobody sees how that could happen.
Iraq's divisions have been sucked into the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict, which is itself largely the result of Bush's invasion of Iraqi.
Robert Fisk says the US is taking the Sunni side, but the recent Saudi outburst seems to indicate that the rulers are not satisfied and want the US to do so even more strongly.
Hotter summers are killing people in Sweden, as well as China and the US.
Imagine how bad it will be when the average global temperature is 4C hotter, or even 6C hotter.
Canada is on track to exceed its 2020 CO2 emission target by almost 20%.
Report: Governors Engaging In Crony Capitalism Disguised As Economic Development.
Another earthquake caused a tsunami that
hit
the Fukushima area.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Fortunately it was small and did not affect the nuclear plants. But what about the next one? The cleanup will take decades. If a big tsunami comes in the coming year, it will wash away the used fuel that remains on the site. It could even cause a fission reaction if it pushes the used fuel rods, stored in a pool, together and causes criticality.
Have they built a tsunami defense dam to protect against this?
The head of the NSA said that the US should shut down journalism about massive surveillance.
Every NSA staffer, including him, has sworn to prevent the government from doing that.
GCHQ feared public and legal backlash if the extent of its spying on the public became known.
New Spanish pun about Christopher Columbus.
Egypt's military-dominated government proposes to legalize the killing of protesters, which is already its practice.
Monsanto's GMO corn failed in South Africa, as pests developed resistance, so now it is trying to push the same corn in the rest of Africa.
A thug who shot a schizophrenic man in Dallas, then tried to frame him, faces criminal charges.
It's standard practice for thugs to frame people; a fraction are caught, but even most of those are not prosecuted. Perhaps Chief Brown deserves the title of "policeman" instead of "thug".
Chinese torturers are on trial after they tortured a suspect to death.
ExxonMobil knows what effects global heating will have, and considers them an opportunity to extract more hard-to-get oil, which will cause even more heating.
You'd think they lived on another planet and didn't have to share ours.
Australia was warned years ago that global heating would lead to increased bush fires.
US citizens:
call
on the US to prosecute JP Morgan instead of negotiating with it.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
In the US: rebuke CNN for its one-sided documentary to promote nuclear power.
US soldiers and officers in charge of nuclear weapons repeatedly show a shocking lack of discipline.
Israeli soldiers
shot
a Palestinian cameraman in the head with a rubber-coated bullet,
and he's now in the hospital.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Israel has greatly increased the construction of colonies in Palestine.
Israel moved chemical plants into Tulkarem in Palestine so they could
spew
unregulated
pollution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Former soldier Peter Van Buren's letter asking for a reduced sentence for Chelsea Manning (fka Bradley Manning).
The Israeli legislature is considering many bills to attack the human rights of Palestinians, and in some cases Israeli Arabs too, as well as a bill to rule out any territorial concessions in Jerusalem (which I suspect would include the nearby Arab towns that have been annexed to Jerusalem) and thus assure there is no peace agreement.
US citizens: call on Obama to reduce, not expand, arms sales.
US citizens: take the Social Security pledge.
US citizens:
tell
your Congresscritter to support banning brokers and investment
advisors from requiring their customers to agree to mandatory
arbitration.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
French advocates of boycotting Israel have been prosecuted and acquitted for this, over and over.
A Liberal Zionist calls for anti-occupation Jews to support boycotts, divestment and sanctions too.
The world's global heating negotiations won't dare confront the crucial point that there's a limited budget of carbon that we can afford to emit.
When Figueres says that allotting part of the carbon budget to each country "would presume that there is no advance in technology [to reduce emissions]", that is an error. It is just the opposite: if the US is allowed to release X more tons of CO2, and through advanced technology it cuts the CO2 release of a certain activity in half, it could therefore do twice as much of that activity.
The thoroughly fossil Australian government is burning a straw man to distract attention from a painfully hot fact: pumping greenhouse gases into the air makes for ever worse forest fires.
On a given day, causing "bushfire weather" does not imply causing a fire. However, over any length of time, causing more bushfire weather implies causing more fires.
Australian leader Abbott endorsed Indonesia's brutal colonization of West Papua.
Leaked documents show that Pakistani agencies cooperated with the CIA on drone attacks while the government of Pakistan denied this.
Nabeel Khoury, formerly of the US State Department, says that each drone attack gives the US 40 t0 60 new enemies.
A company bludgeoned Scottish workers into accepting big givebacks by threatening to shut the plant instead.
In such a situation, a government on the workers' side would have nationalized the plant for the depreciated value of the equipment, then resold it to the workers.
Movie companies are trying to play countries against each other to escape taxation.
For countries to compete in this way leads to loss for everyone. The whole idea is self-defeating and foolish — unless their real goal is to enrich the rich more, in which case it is a roaring success.
Rep. Grayson says, "Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke".
Two Roma who accepted a baby from a woman who couldn't support another child now face charges of "child abduction".
That woman ought to have had an abortion rather than bring a child into the world that she could not support. However, to call these events "abduction" is a lie. When a law asserts a lie, that doesn't make the lie true, it only makes the law a liar.
Saudi women plan to protest by driving for the right to drive.
How members of the US Congress and their families profit from their "campaign contributions".
US citizens: tell Congress, cut the Pentagon, not Social Security or Medicare.
US citizens: call on the
senate not
to let Senator Cruz impose his will on the FCC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: join a protest on Nov 5 against Intercontinental Hotels for its collaboration in the occupation of Tibet.
US citizens: call on Obama
to remove all US
troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the US not to let JP Morgan deduct any of its penalty (for fraud) from its taxes.
Everyone: Rebuke McDonalds
for buying
a luxury jet while paying workers so little they need public
assistance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
If McDonald says competitive pressures don't let it give workers a raise, it should support an increased minimum wage so that its competitors will have to do likewise.
Refuting the UK government's pro-GMO misinformation.
The UK government sold its post office for 40% of what it was told it could get.
Bad for the treasury, but great for the purchasers, whoever they were.
Their campaign to destroy the National Health Service by underfunding it is going great guns, as staff at many hospitals say the cuts threaten patients' safety.
$40 Million Allocated for Drone Victims Never Reaches Them.
India wants to legalize copying textbooks.
The third Koch brother, a fossil-fuel billionaire, is leading the fight against Cape Wind.
If he can prevent offshore wind power from taking off, his companies will be more profitable, and as they raise the temperature, his family will buy a way out of it.
How Much of JP Morgan's $13 Billion Fine Will Taxpayers Pay?
The absurd charge of "piracy" with 15 years imprisonment against the Greenpeace activists and their embedded journalists has been reduced to the absurd charge of "hooliganism", for which the penalty is 7 years.
At least it's a step forward.
Don't forget the US protesters who face 30 years in prison for their purely symbolic "damage" to a US nuclear base.
'Big Dollars, Little Sense': Community and Student Groups Debunk Charter School Mythology.
Senator Warren agrees: prosecute the banksters who committed fraud.
The lure of royalties from Chinese publication has corrupted many authors into approving political censorship of their books.
Global heating threatens beer, apples, and maple syrup. The end of American football would be a good thing, but not good enough to justify global catastrophe.
US textbook publishers stood up to demands from Texas Christians to undermine evolution in biology textbooks.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer says that air pollution is definitely linked to cancer.
Presently business-funded pundits will start grasping at straws to cast doubt on this conclusion.
US citizens: oppose cuts in food stamps.
US citizens: support Rep. Grayson's push for stricter regulations on large banks.
Corporations Claiming "Religious Liberty" Try to Infringe on Their Employees' Religious Liberty.
Prisoner Russell Shoatz, held in solitary confinement for 22 years, has asked the UN to investigate the practice, which is very widespread in the US.
NSA spying on Germany's highest officials has cost the US yet more international support.
Germans should be concerned about snooping by their own government, as well as by the US government. German snooping on them could be directly dangerous for them, whereas US snooping can only harm them on special occasions.
One brand of Sunni Islam says that women who don't have genital mutilation are "impure".
In the 2012 election, Obama received tremendous support from companies in digital and communication industries, perhaps explaining his continuation and intensification of Bush's surveillance.
Three UK thugs who lied about politician Andrew Mitchell (saying he called them "plebs") are getting repeatedly disciplined.
They should be punished, but what about when thugs lie about someone who isn't a Tory politician?
Countrywide, a major US mortgage company, has been convicted of fraud.
Hooray! But there are many other banks that committed fraud, and Obama let most of them off the hook.
Politicians like privatization of services because it enables them to duck responsibility for subsequent bad service.
Facebook graph search is the harbinger of many dangers if lots of people can analyze "big data" about other people.
The Canadian government sent thugs to attack nonviolent Native American anti-fracking protesters; the mainstream media are spinning it in favor of fracking.
The Theater of Security Agency is checking airline passengers' background extensively before they get to the airport.
If there is a serious reason to suspect someone might be of planning terrorism aimed at airplanes, it is more just to search him carefully than to arbitrarily stop him from flying. But such searches presume there is a real reason for concern. The TSA privately admits there isn't any, that the airport security operation is mere security theater, but they are prepared to spread distrust through society to carry it out.
A Problem With Discipline: The Guys In Charge Of Our Nuclear Arsenal Are Napping, Gambling and Otherwise Screwing Up.
Big clothing companies still have not agreed to pay compensation to the victims of last December's Rana Plaza factory fire in Bangladesh.
We should not leave this up to those companies. We should make the company that imports the goods and/or commissions their production responsible for (1) keeping track of subcontractor in its supply chain, and (2) applying Western standards of working conditions to all of them.
The issue applies also to palm oil production.
25 years of evidence show that global heating is increasing the danger of wildfires in Australia, but Australia's PM brashly denies the facts.
He could not have won the election if he were stupid, so the explanation must be something worse.
Meanwhile, Faux News promotes denial through false balance, which validates denialists even more than if it presented only them.
Everyone: call on Pakistan
to repeal
its deadly blasphemy law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The prospects for Americans who work for a living (or need to) are getting ever worse; but methods to reverse these developments are known.
Canadian citizens: support the lawsuit against massive surveillance.
US citizens: tell Senator Durbin not to cut Social Security or medical care.
The siege of Gaza, which
forces
people to extract too much water from the local aquifer, will make
it permanently salinified and useless in a few years.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Islamic extremists in Egypt attacked a wedding celebration and killed people.
The Bush forces did that in Iraq, with far more casualties, but not intentionally as this time.
It appears that the violent massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood protesters has lead to a spreading violent Islamist uprising. The Islamists were not the initial aggressors; the military attacked them first. However, the Islamists' choice of targets shows that it doesn't take much to get Islamists to kill innocent people that they have dehumanized.
I think this will lead most Egyptians to hate the Islamists even more. I won't blame them for that, but they will be playing into the military's hands if they don't aim for democracy.
The US executive branch has lied to the Supreme Court about NSA surveillance, as well as to Congress and the public.
Major Loopholes in Privacy Regulation — EU Parliament Must Stand For Citizens.
Data Protection Vote — One Step Forward, Two Big Steps Backwards.
While Australian politicians talk about the cost of avoiding global heating, Australia is experiencing the high cost of the early stages of global heating.
The pesticides used on GMOs in Argentina seem to be causing a surge in
cancer,
birth defects, and other diseases.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Some US cities are reversing past privatizations of important services such as water supply.
Obamacare's startup IT problems were caused by rip-offs by private contractors.
How Apple makes it easy for the NSA to collect users' address books.
Experian sold personal data on 500,000 people to a company that made them available for "identity theft".
Ivan MacFadyen sailed across the Pacific and found it a desert filled with human junk, where he used to find fish.
Endorsement of fructose in food is based on mistaken science.
An EU Parliament committee voted to stop exempting US data processing companies from EU data protection laws.
This is one step in a long process, but it is a good one.
The trail of horsemeat in discount "beef" burgers in the UK is quite complex.
The same complex business arrangements lead to contaminated food in the UK, and factory fires in Bangladesh. For public safety, we must not allow supply chains to be so complex. We must require registration of these details such that business can't shift around so easily. It might also be wise not to allow chopped meat to be shipped internationally.
I wonder if the reason such complex supply chains are frequent is because they provide opportunities to hide abuses. Otherwise, each level would tend to increase costs.
US universities impose broad and intolerable surveillance on students and staff.
The US military is so powerful that no rival can defeat it, but when used, instead of a victory it achieves devastation.
China is extending hydroelectric power by leaps and bounds.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say that US drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan are war crimes.
They also warn that others are getting drones and will use them against Americans.
What Fine? Why JP Morgan Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank.
Bankers should go to jail for those crimes.
The Australian wildfires are causing hazardous air pollution in a large area.
A list of food companies that paid secretly to defeat Washington state's initiative for GMO labeling.
Some scientific journals now refuse to publish research sponsored by tobacco companies, which have in the past tried to spread false doubt based on distorted science.
Let's Get This Class War Started.
'Shock Doctrine' Americana: Endless War as the Ultimate Business Model.
The Food and Agriculture Organization says that 75% of crop diversity was lost during the 20th century.
The use of GMOs is now destroying even more.
The TSA (Theater-of-Security Agency) tested passengers' drinks for explosive — drinks they had purchased inside the terminal.
Of course, the imaginary would-be terrorist could easily avoid this obstacle: he only had to wait until getting on the plane before mixing the hypothetical dangerous substance with water received from the flight attendant. Good thing he doesn't exist.
Another clever TSA trick: ordering all the travelers in the security check area to freeze instantly, and menacing them if they don't.
Reports from more victims: http://www.infowars.com/confirmed-the-tsa-is-ordering-travelers-to-freeze-on-command/
The reason is, there's no telling what they might have to do to stop the imaginary would-be terrorist, so they must drill us into unthinking instant obedience as a precaution.
Now that we know that would-be terrorist does not exist, let's make the Theater-of-Security Agency not exist.
Argentina: Case Study in Perils of Pesticide-Heavy GMO-Crop Boom.
Although "Roundup-ready" corn supposedly permits the use of a small amount of herbicide, the amount needed has been increasing as weeds develop resistance, and previous techniques employed a clever combination of methods to avoid pesticides.
Considering ethical issues raised by AI programs applied to people's medical records, or to driving cars.
The ethical issues mentioned in this article are not the biggest ones that these technologies raise.
For medical records (including prescriptions), the biggest issue is not whether IBM's program should be allowed to chew on them, but a logically prior issue: whether everyone's medical records should be put in a centralized data base where the state can trivially look at them, even in less sophisticated ways.
For driverless cars, assuming are as safe as human drivers, who to blame for the occasional accident will be a side issue. The biggest issues will be whether they construct for each person a travel dossier that GCHQ or the NSA can study years later, and whether they condemn today's millions of paid drivers to the underclass of the permanently unemployed.
In the times of increasing unemployment, and redistribution of wealth to the rich, efficiency is a misguided goal.
Report on the torture of political prisoners in Ethiopia.
The US also forces prisoners to hold painful "stress positions".
Just as negotiations with Iran offer some hope of success, the US congress wants to impose additional sanctions.
I think it is clear what's going on. The powerful Zionist lobby, backed by the money of lunatic right-wing Christians who think they can cause the second coming of Jesus if they rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, wants Iran to remain an enemy of the US, would like to prevent any deal.
NSA massive surveillance of French phone calls has created a diplomatic incident.
Massive surveillance of citizens is just as bad when the French government does it as when the US government does it.
It's awfully ironic that Hollande threatened the US with blocking a treaty that threatens democracy and that no country should ever sign.
Nuclear energy's string of broken promises shows that the the UK's new nuclear reactors are a stupid deal. Now they have promised many sorts of subsidies, while pretending they are not subsidies.
I wonder who convinced them to do this, and how much it cost.
The Pebble Mine in Alaska is not dead.
"Constant agony": Anti-Torture Activist Undergoes Public Force Feeding To Protest Gitmo.
Uranium Ore Tempts Tanzania to Dig Dangerously.
The Yes Men Pose As Oil Executives.
Right-wing states have denied medical coverage to 5 million poor Americans.
Washington State has sued the Grocery Manufacturers Association for disguising payments to campaign against the state's GMO labeling initiative.
Fukushima cleanup workers are badly paid and their morale is suffering. That tends to provoke mistakes, which are occasionally very dangerous. For instance, any mistake in handling the very hot and dangerous "spent fuel" in Fukishima #4 could lead to spewing far more radioactive material.
Ralph Nader explains how the Democratic Party has faded to the point where it has no positive program to offer.
A few Democrats, such as the two new senators from Massachusetts, do have good positive programs.
Most, including Obama, endorse the harmful goal of budget cuts, which serves only the rich.
A report from a journalist who spent a day with a thug patrol in London, watching how people are searched.
It appears that some sort of grounds are required to search someone, that searches are not totally arbitrary. That is a step in the right direction; I don't think New York thugs need any grounds to search someone on the street.
I expect the thug department picked a model officer for the journalists to follow, and that he was on his best behavior. Thus, the usual facts are probably worse than the picture this article presents.
JP Morgan may have to pay 13 billion dollars as a penalty for various crimes connected with the housing and fiscal crisis.
I wonder how this compares with what it gained from the crisis.
Ransomeware programs encrypt all the data on a computer, then demand a payment to get the decryption key.
When the article says this "only affects PCs", I think that means it only affects Windows and that a PC running the GNU/Linux system is safe.
However, the crucial technical question is about your mail-reading program through which the program is introduced. If you ask to see more than a one-line summary of the message, will that run programs in the message? We've known for years in the free software community that that must not happen.
With my mail reader, Rmail in Emacs, I'd have to go out of my way to copy the program into a file to get it to run. I would hardly do that for a program sent to me by a bank.
Fresh Leak on US Spying: NSA Accessed Mexican President's Email.
"Investor-state" treaties, which allow companies to sue governments in kangaroo courts, are theoretically unjust. Now the practical harm is showing up around the world.
GMO agriculture inherently lowers the diversity of crops, and makes agriculture more vulnerable to biological and climatic disasters.
An Irish environmental group will sue the UK for planning to build a nuclear power plant just 150 miles away from Ireland.
Ireland will be vulnerable to fallout emitted if the plant has a disastrous accident, if the wind is from the east. Of course, the UK will be vulnerable if the wind is from the west.
The promise to pay twice the going price for electricity represents a giant subsidy. No one wants to build a nuclear power plant without a giant subsidy.
Half of young Japanese women (and a large fraction of young men) have no romantic relationship. The result is a big decrease in births.
I am sad for the people who have despaired of finding love. I understand how women reject marriage if the price is losing their careers. The characteristics of normal Japanese marriage strike me as very unpleasant, and well worth avoiding; but a couple could decide together to have a different sort of marriage. As for the decrease in births, given that the human population is increasing, I think that is a good thing.Smooth Criminal: Chevron Sues Rainforest Communities It Contaminated.
Many Egyptians admire the head of the army for his violent suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. He may run for president and win honestly.
Explaining how mediums and ouija boards fool people, and how unconscious decisionmaking fools people too, in a sense.
As the Australian right-wing government goes all-out to fry the world, Australia is already burning. The Labor Party seems to have made the carbon tax a fundamental position.
A partially communist village provides a spot of hope in the state-imposed despair of Andalucía in Spain.
Earthjustice reports several court victories to protect whales, coral reefs, and the environment in the US.
Mexico has prohibited genetically modified corn. And other victories against hidden GMOs in the US.
3D-printed guns, good for just one shot, might really be dangerous.
It would be silly to make a fuss about the possibility of bringing such guns into airplanes or trains. There are other deadly weapons that current airport security won't stop, such as a strong thread with which someone might be strangled. With either weapon, a killer might manage to kill someone before being overcome by other passengers, but this danger is too small to be worth much protective effort. It's only barely worth worrying about bringing real guns onto an airplane, since the shooter couldn't crash the plane; if he just wants to kill some people, a shopping mall or city street is a softer target. However, assassinating an official with a printed gun might be a significant danger, and might call for new security measures on government offices.
Ecuadorian Women March in Defense of the Amazon.
Corruption in Peru Aids Cutting of Rain Forest.
The US has still given no explanation of why it barred German anti-surveillance activist Ilija Trojanow from visiting the US for a conference.
He has personal experience with being spied on in East Germany, where his family was suspected of supporting freedom and human rights. Now the US is following in East Germany's footsteps.
US citizens: call on Congress to abolish the debt ceiling.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call for ending the required minimum quota for imprisoning illegal immigrants.
US citizens: Call on Secretary of State Kerry to restore Snowden's passport.
Russians seem to hate the Greenpeace protesters irrationally.
These Russians have been fooled, like the non-rich Americans that think they will be better off if we burn oil from the Arctic Ocean. In the latter case, they have been fooled by media manipulation.
In the Russian case, it is Putin's media manipulation.
Inefficient systems are often preserved because someone benefits from them, and sometimes the benefits are not obvious.
What's needed for compassionate care for old people.
UK dissidents will sue the state for keeping records on them as "extremists".
Thousands of poor Britons are being sued for new tax payments they can't afford.
The court notices urged them not to attend the hearing so that they would lose by default. This reminds me of the way Republicans spread lies about the time and place of voting so as to sabotage poor voters.
Australia's government is looking for budget cuts, and first in line are research grants for clean energy.
This will knock down the economy, as well as making it harder to avoid burning fossil fuels, thus killing two birds with one stone.
Statistically analyzing surveys from different parts of Amazonia suggests that there are 16,000 different species of trees in the whole forest.
1/3 of these species are estimated to have under 1000 members. Practically speaking, there is no chance of identifying them.
Think of that when people talk about preserving species outside their ecosystems, or perhaps preserving tissue or DNA. If the Amazon forest dries out and burns up, it will never come back.
Apple's iMessage Security Claims 'Basically Just Lies', Say Researchers.
Here are technical details.
In the crushing tyranny of Iran, even walking a dog is dangerous.
Research into the historical climate of today's Sahara desert shows that it dried up in just 100 or 200 years.
This rapid change, about 5000 years ago, was caused by a much slower change in the Earth's orbital parameters. The crucial point is that a slow increase in heat coming in can make a rapid change in climate.
We're now causing a much faster change in heat coming in (or, more precisely, a faster reduction in how much heat can escape into space each night). Maybe regions will become deserts in 10 years.
Nebraska's requirement for parental consent forces teenagers to have children because they are "not mature enough" for an abortion.
A secret TSA document admits what its critics have said: its airport security activities are mostly security theater. They would be ineffective against the supposed threat, which fortunately does not exist anyway.
This implies that the TSA recognizes that the supposed reason for the no-fly list is invalid. Meanwhile, Senator Feinstein called for putting people on the no-fly list based on a secret tip from relatives.
That the TSA concealed this from the court is even more outrageous than the way it treats us.
Let's roll down the curtains on the TSA!
A Moroccan editor has been imprisoned for posting a link to a news article that linked to a "terrorist" video on YouTube.
The fact that the video is on YouTube, a US company, adds additional absurdity to the accusation. However, posting links should never be a crime.
I've been told that Morocco liberalized its laws around 2000 to respect human rights more, but Dubya pressured Morocco to retract part of the change. In general, "anti-terrorist" laws are more dangerous than terrorists.
Bullying often results from being bullied.
The UK Labour Party is promising to be harsher towards the poor than the Tories.
The unions should kill off the Labour party and make a new one.
The UK government is trying to ruin the National Health Service by cutting funds. Sometimes there is a 7-hour wait for an ambulance.
US citizens: urge Obama not to negotiate with
Republicans about
cuts in Medicare and Social Security.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
How the campaign to free Canadians Tarek Loubani and John Greyson from nonsensical imprisonment in Egypt worked, and what it tells us about Egypt.
They got out after two months. Many innocent people imprisoned by the US in Guantanamo are still there.
The population of monarch butterflies has crashed.
Snowden learned the hard way that reporting problems to management was useless, when he reported a security hole in the CIA's software to his boss and got slapped down as a troublemaker.
The Drone Paradox: use of drones seems to be more tolerated than would be use of manned bombers or cruise missiles, even in the same situation.
A CNN TV program asked rich CEOs what to do about the high level of economic inequality in the US. Naturally they suggested not doing anything about it.
Don't believe the New York Times when it says that defaulting on loans generally harms a country.
TSA Loudspeakers Threaten Travelers With Arrest For Joking About Security.
Perhaps this is meant to refer to threats as jokes, not jokes in general. If so, they should say so.
Another Canadian oil train has exploded.
Fortunately, this time the inhabitants of the town were not killed, but I fear their houses were destroyed.
Libya is on the verge of breaking up.
There is nothing sacred about the frontiers of Libya, which was created artificially after World War I, fusing together various provinces of the Ottoman empire. However, renewed war would be very bad. I hope that they reach some sort of settlement without a lot of bloodshed.
Is it better to farm rhinos for their horns, or keep a ban on trading their horns?
I've read that it is possible to inject something into the horn that makes it unsalable while not hurting the rhino. Isn't that the ideal solution?
Using Facebook graph search makes it a lot easier to find details of someone's life in order to attack him.
Chile: Led by Students, Tens of Thousands March for 'Free Public Education'.
Turn
Back the Clock on FISA Courts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
NSA surveillance was used to find Hassan Ghul, an agent of al Qa'ida, and send a drone to kill him.
I would not criticize the US government for spying on the foreign communications of specific people for specific reasons in order to catch people such as Hassan Ghul, or thwart their plans. However, spying on all of us is a different issue. It has nothing to do with finding someone in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, drone attacks are bad for other reasons.
The remaining US family farms
are waiting
to be sold to agribusiness if nothing is done.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The Wall Street Journal blocked reporters from reporting on the scandal of journalistic spying by Murdoch's other newspapers.
Puncturing Feinstein-NSA claims
about massive
surveillance and one of the Sep 11 hijackers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The US government ignored warnings about that hijacker, which would have provided grounds to tap his phone.
The Republicans' US government shutdown has done tremendous damage to scientific research, in many cases causing a lasting setback.
The Republicans probably consider this a victory, because they consider science a threat to their fantasy world.
It would be useful to prepare a reserve fund to preserve strains of lab mice, for when the Republicans try it again.
The Republican Party pretends to represent black Americans, in addition to pretending to represent white Americans.
Snowden explains how he made sure Russia could not get any US secrets
from him: he
got rid of all his secret files before he went to Moscow.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
He also explains why reporting the injustices of the NSA's massive surveillance to the people responsible for doing it would have been completely futile.
I admire Snowden tremendously. He recognized what needed to be done, and he planned it with the greatest care. Thank you, Snowden!
Only one thing went wrong: he got stuck in Russia. He must hate receiving shelter from Putin.
isoHunt, a search engine for torrents, was compelled by an MPAA lawsuit to shut down.
Since isoHunt was a profitmaking activity, it was is on the border of what I think should be legalized. Perhaps its shutdown is not wrong. But any victory for the MPAA is a defeat for Internet users.
There is no pause in global heating, but if you ignore 98% of what's going on, you can pretend there is one.
UK ministries are illegally keeping millions of old files secret.
A movement has emerged against privatization of trains in the UK.
High school students in Paris went on strike after one of them was deported.
In general, I don't think any country is obliged to accept as an immigrant anyone that wants to move there. However, it appears that Leonarda Dibrani is an example of a special case: people who have been in the country since such a young age that they don't know any other home.
Albert-László Barabási: Scientists must spearhead ethical use of big data.
The idea that you should "own" your personal data sounds nice, if you wish to think of human rights as deriving from property. I think that is perverted: human rights are more important and fundamental than property. In any case, it is clearly insufficient to protect us from dangerous surveillance. What you own, you're entitled to sell, and businesses are adept at getting most people to "voluntarily" give up enough data to make a tremendous dossier.
We need to ensure that systems do not ask people to surrender such data.
How Ronald Reagan's bogus idea of "trickle down", which George I called "voodoo economics", threw the US into decline and debt.
As a means to achieve its stated, supposed aims, Reaganomics was a failure. But he probably wasn't sincere about it anyway. Considered as a scheme to enrich the rich and screw the rest of us, it was a great success.
The Strange Stalinization of the American Right.
Stalinist political authoritarianism has little to do with the political questions that distinguish right-wing and left-wing.
It does not surprise me that the Tea Party has revealed that its true colors are the confederate colors of a slave system. But that does not mean they are racist. They are equal opportunity rip-off artists, eager to impoverish most Americans of whatever race.
Captain Swenson received the medal of honor for saving rounded soldiers, after having been subject to many lies as a whistleblower.
The Hungarian government has tried repeatedly to shut an art exhibit in Austria that compares a racist right-wing Hungarian party to Nazis.
I don't generally compare the parties and officials I criticize to Nazis, because they usually don't deserve it. The article suggests that that party does deserve it.
Ian Dunlop, former coal executive, asks shareholders of a mining company to make him their representative in the annual meeting so as to accuse the company of sabotaging environmental protection.
Everyone: urge the leaders of Brazil, India, South Africa and the EU to pressure Russia to free the Greenpeace protesters facing absurd criminal charges.
US citizens:
call
for an investigation of a judge who denied a 16-year-old an
abortion from his personal bias.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
It is crazy to demand that minors get permission for an abortion, but not get permission to have a baby. The abortion is safer in every sense.
In 17 states, most students in public school are from poor families.
I wonder what fraction of school-age children in those states are from poor families. That fraction has increased quite a bit thanks to plutocratist policies.
Progressive Insurance misleads people about what it can do with the data it gets from its in-car tracking device, and the data might cost drivers dearly.
Some of the arguments in the article seem mistaken to me. Even though "telematics devices" commonly include GPS, it doesn't follow that everything which is called a "telematics device" has a GPS. The fact that the patent cites the possibility of a GPS also doesn't imply this device has one. Perhaps the company is telling the truth when it says there is no GPS in the device.
But it's a fact that cell phones are tracked all the time by triangulation even without GPS. Sending reports in real time by a cell phone connection makes this device an injustice; that practice ought to be illegal. The data should be saved in the device, which the driver would hand in from time to time.
I refuse to carry a tracking device on my person, and I would not allow one in my car either.
In addition, the device should not record any data except the data that are supposed to be used. If it is meant to check for certain risky driving practices, it should only record those. For instance, if the issue is accelerating very rapidly or braking hard, it should record instances of those, but should not record acceleration or breaking when they are not excessive — or the speed.
With these changes, the device would be acceptable.
An Australian legislator plans to sue the author of ad that pointed out how he changed to support coal mining and trash the Great Barrier Reef, and suggested that "they got to him" to change his mind.
This change of position must have an explanation, and he has not presented a plausible one.
Australian scientists are considering trying to relocate wildlife to new areas as global heating makes their existing habitat uninhabitable.
Organisms do try to shift their range, but they run into trouble because many of them can't shift fast enough to keep up with heating at the rate it is occurring.
The UN joins Malala Yousefzai in concluding that US drone attacks are unjust and fuel hatred.
Wildfires have destroyed hundreds of homes in Australia, and it's still early spring.
"Normally" the fire season would not even have started yet, but thanks to global heating, this is likely to become the new normal, until it gets even worse.
Baltimore tried to ban protests in the city center. The ACLU made it change policy.
Blogger Arrested for Posting Cartoons of Algeria's President.
Obama, enemy of the fourth amendment as usual, asked the Supreme Court not to consider a case about NSA surveillance, claiming it has no jurisdiction.
EU citizens: tell the European Parliament you want strong data protection.
Amory Lovins describes the tremendous potential for improvements in energy efficiency in cars and homes.
The government of Gujarat, which is Hindu nationalist, is trying to harass the Dalits that converted to Buddhism.
The law claims to protect "religious freedom", but its real aim is to try to stop Dalits from officially ceasing to be considered Hindus.
How the Bush regime forced the ouster of Jose Bustani a head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, then lied about it.
Privacy Fears Grow as Cities Increase Surveillance.
Collecting a dossier of everywhere every car has been is too much surveillance; it should be illegal to make or operate such equipment.
Is the NSA blackmailing officials?
The UK government will invite Chinese companies into planned UK nuclear power rectors.
Do they want these plants to have accidents?
I'm not the only one who sees danger in this.
Fossil fuel companies want us to celebrate because there is even more fossil fuel than was previously believed.
The only problem with them is that burning them would cause global heating catastrophe.
The UK government wants to promote oil extraction in the Arctic.
This is what Naomi Klein called "extractionism": they regard nature and other people as resources to be used up. It's a murderous plan.
Human agriculture needs the genetic diversity provided by small farms, but unjust laws have wiped out 75% of the crop diversity that we once had.
If plant variety monopolies reduce crop diversity, they are doing the opposite of their purpose, and that is sufficient grounds to repeal them. Of course, the treaties that require these monopolies must be torn up, for many other reasons.
A study estimates that vehicle exhaust and factory fumes cause 230,000 cases of lung cancer annually.
The first survey of slavery says that 29 million people are enslaved. Half of them are in India.
The UK thugs who accused a politician of calling them "plebs" seem to have lied in multiple ways.
There are plenty of true reasons to condemn Tory politicians, but that doesn't justify lying about them.
How "stand your ground" laws give everyone a license to kill.
A student was suspended from school in South Carolina for bringing to school a drawing of a nonrealistic bomb, imitating a video game.
"Zero tolerance" is a damaging practice, and it deserves condemnation in general. What it means in practice is, "We have to be idiotic because we made an idiotic rule and now we have to follow it."
Note how the school officials duck the question of whether their actions are legitimate by claiming to protect the privacy of the victim. That's a standard symptom of abuse of power.
The students now have a great chance to take those officials down a peg with an "I am Spartacus" response. Imagine if 50 of the best students hand the principal similar bomb drawings and say, "I'd like to take a few days off from school, so now you have to suspend me!" They would find a way to change this idiotic rule.
Everyone: call on the New York Times to explain budget figures as a fraction of the total.
Everyone: call on Coca Cola and Pepsico to stop buying sugar from land grabbers.
Some US towns created by wealthy people to cut their taxes tried outsourcing the entire town government to a company. Of course, they got shafted.
Privatizing government services is generally harmful, since the company has to mistreat someone in order to make a profit. The main exception is when the privatization results in giving the public a competitive market with a considerable number of providers.
Although these towns have stopped outsourcing their whole governments, they continue to abandon the rest of their county, and the rest of their country, with the typical callousness of the rich, who wish poor Americans would crawl away to the cemetery and drop dead, after extracting from them whatever useful labor can be got from them.
Those rich people deserve to be slapped down. When non-plutocrats retake control of the Georgia legislature they should put those towns back into the counties they have tried to abandon.
False balance — giving crackpots equal prominence with real experts — gives the crackpots even more influence than presenting them alone.
This is what makes the theocrats' scheme of "teaching the controversy" about evolution so harmful. The fossil fuel companies' paid global heating deniers use it too.
Poverty isn't due to welfare, any more than sickness is due to hospitals.
Snapchat photos can only be seen for a short period of time by their intended recipients, but if the state gets them first, it can see them as long as it wants.
Note that this system depends on nonfree software. The feature that makes them disappear is a form of DRM.
Global heating seems to be devastating the moose population.
Global heating endangers the colorful fall foliage of New England.
Already leaves are turning color two weeks later than they did 30 years ago, but future effects may be more than a mere change in schedule.
Kaua'i has passed the law requiring information about pesticide use.
The EFF is suing to uncover hidden government use of telephone metadata surveillance which was concealed when people were put on trial.
Obama has given weapons manufacturers a big gift by eliminating limits on arms exports.
The corruption of the UK government by banks is being extended to Chinese banks.
The UK needs to recover its sovereignty from these banks, which would include abolishing the City of London which serves as their political instrument.
10 reasons not to trust claims national security is threatened by leaks.
Besides, we can't trust anything they say. We know they are ready to lie whenever it suits them.
Republicans appear to have caved in and allowed the US government to resume operations.
The ability of Democrats to face them down is potentially good. Now all we need is to elect Democrats that stand for most people's interests and freedom, unlike Obama.
In the US:
demand
that US fast food chains pay their workers $15 an hour.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell your senators to oppose CISPA.
Yes, that monster has come back to life. Politicians such as Senator Feinstein, that want total surveillance, are pushing it again.
The US is harassing the friends of Ibragim Todashev, who was shot dead by an FBI agent while several agents were interrogating him in his home.
The false accusation that he tried to attack them (he'd have to have been crazy to try, under the circumstances, unless he had super powers) is standard practice for thugs.
We have no way of knowing whether Todashev really confessed to involvement in murder. It might be true, or it might be another lie. If it's true, he deserved a trial, not summary execution.
The US had no obligation to extend his girlfriend's visa; deporting her straightaway for overstaying would have been legitimate. However, to extend the visa, then cancel it because she gave an interview to a magazine, is dangerous injustice. Never mind whether it is fair to her: it attacks journalism, and that threatens all Americans,
Perhaps Todashev revealed, when interrogated, some sort of knowledge that the US government did not want us to find out, and killing him was a way to suppress it. Perhaps an FBI agent felt insulted, lost his head, and shot Todashev in the heat of anger. Perhaps the agents wanted to pin a murder on him and did not want him around to deny it. We have no way of knowing, but it's clear that that agent must be prosecuted.
The FBI has a "time-tested" procedure for investigating shootings by its agents, which always concludes they were justified.
The plutocratist extremists of "Fix the Debt" are now trying to use the government shutdown (engineered by plutocratist extremists) to justify their attack on Americans' retirement funds.
Plutocratist extremists in Congress are attacking them too.
Under public pressure, Israel cancelled a plan to force Palestinians to leave their homes for a military training exercise.
BMW and Daimler used the complicit German government to
block
an EU requirement to limit the CO2 emissions of cars.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Half the fast food workers in the US depend on public assistance.
Many other low-paid workers are in the same boat. We need a higher minimum wage, and it must include all workers.
But more change is needed: businesses should not be taxed more for employing more workers.
The UK spy agencies misled Parliament when they wanted a law to allow broad surveillance, concealing the fact that they were already doing it.
A couple of state departments in Illinois are getting into hot water for trying to teach kids to love coal.
Dear President Obama, What Have You Fixed by Meeting Malala?
What Obama can't stand about Snowden is Snowden's patriotism. It's the same patriotism that compelled other whistleblowers to act.
Colombian farmers trying to recover land that was extorted from them by the paramilitaries face threats, even murder.
The paramilitaries are right-wing thugs that were linked to cronies of former president Alvaro Horrible. They were the worst terrorists in Colombia, and maybe still are.
Russian opposition politician Navalny will
be barred
from elections for many years.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Real wages in the UK continue falling due to austerity policies.
The UK government is pushing for an investigation of the Guardian for publishing Snowden's disclosures.
The principal threat to the freedom and well-being of Britons is the UK government, with its austerity and its total surveillance.
Related wild plants and forgotten crops offer a way to achieve the results that some hoped to get from genetic engineering.
Iran has proposed a plausible framework for an agreement on uranium enrichment.
Ireland will prohibit one form of tax avoidance scheme.
If you come across an analysis of how much effect this will or won't have, I'd be glad to see it.
A Tamil refugee in Australia, imprisoned on suspicion without a hearing, tried to commit suicide.
If I understand the article right, he despaired because the new government cancelled plans to give hearings in such these cases.
The Sandy Hook elementary school is being demolished under tight security.
This seems like a silly waste of money to me. It can't help the people who were shot; nothing can help the dead. As for their families, it doesn't really help them either; it only encourages them not to recover.
The constructive thing would be to repair the building and put it back to use, or turn it into a memorial to campaign for better gun control.
Google+ users are protesting Google's plan to use their names and faces in advertisements by putting Eric Schmidt's photo in their profiles.
I post this because I find it a good hack; but if you use Google+, I suggest that rather than joining this hack, you stop using it. Communications services that require users to give their real names are a threat to privacy. I urge you to join me in rejecting Google+ until they change that policy.
Everyone: tell Yelp's CEO to stop supporting ALEC.
ALEC is a right-wing scheme by which businesses twist state legislators to pass the bills those businesses want.
US citizens: campaign to protect Washington State and the Earth's atmosphere from a planned giant coal export terminal.
Everyone: sign this campaign to abolish weapons of mass destruction world wide.
Unregulated US chemical plants keep exploding, sometimes killing bystanders. There are 500 plants in which one accident could threaten 100,000 people.
This dwarfs the danger of terrorism. So why does the US spend so much on the Committee for Public Safety (better known as the Department of Homeland Security), and hardly anything on inspecting and regulating chemical plants? I suspect a few reasons:
The level of soot pollution correlates with low birth weight.
Japan pressured Indonesian tyrant Suharto
to ban
an Indonesian book about the Indonesian "comfort women".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
I read about 1/3 of the book, as part of practicing Indonesian. Many of these women were so ashamed of how they had been treated that after the war they didn't try to contact their families, which simply regard them as lost.
How absurd it is to be ashamed because someone else did wrong to you! But that's the twisted idea that patriarchal society teaches to women.
The NSA has collected millions of email address books, buddy lists, etc.
Mistakes at Fukushima may be the result of poor morale of workers.
TEPCO could fix the problem by paying them more and giving them good benefits. Hiring through contractors is generally going to lead to bad morale.
Americans parents have stopped insisting that their children contribute to household chores.
A sonar system used to map the ocean floor seems responsible for causing 100 whales to strand themselves on Madagascar.
Some sonar systems produce extremely loud sound that can deafen whales or drive them frantic to escape. The sound does not penetrate the air, so I suspect that stranding themselves is a way to escape the sound. However, when whales strand themselves, it is usually fatal.
The threat to democracy is not subversion but superversion by the plutocrat class that has seceded from all countries.
The UN Committee on World Food Security has sold out to biofuel interests.
Specifically, the kind of biofuels that substitute for growing food, and use so much fertilizer that they don't reduce fossil fuels.
Other biofuels that don't compete with crops might be a good thing, but they aren't ready for production yet.
China conscripts students to work under inhumane conditions in factories making Apple products, Playstations, and other computer products.
A freak early blizzard killed tens of thousands of cattle in South Dakota.
I wonder if global heating had something to do with it.
Qatar arrested two German journalists who took video of the working conditions of migrant workers.
At least they were released later. Obama is not so forgiving to whistleblowers, and compare this also with the ag-gag laws of some US states.
The London riots were set off when thugs shot and killed Mark Duggan, whom they had found in a taxi. They say he was holding a gun and looked threatening. The taxi driver says Duggan had no gun, and was running away.
The driver also said that a thug threatened to shoot him if he kept looking at Duggan. It looks sounds like the thugs are testilying again.
The rioters were imprisoned for their rather small physical looting. The big looters, the companies that pay no taxes, have been left alone. Will the thugs be prosecuted at all?
José Bustani, former head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, says Dubya engineered his ouster because he wanted to investigate Iraq to see if it had chemical weapons.
Clearly Bush did not want any facts getting in the way of his fictions. This will add to the case to convict Dubya of the crime of aggressive war, following the Nuremberg example.
40,000 anti-nuclear protesters marched in Tokyo demanding the end of nuclear power in Japan.
General Electric repeatedly gives the US the shaft, but the US government still panders to it.
Republicans have changed the reasons for their extorsionism; now it's budget cuts.
The US needs to increase government spending in order to get out of recession. For the past decade, spending has focused on war, which produces nothing that people really need, and isn't even good at creating jobs. Spending on clean energy would do wonders.
However, Obama has been weak on this front, and even adopted budget cuts as a goal, which is why we have the destructive sequester.
Egypt and Israel are combining to starve Gaza. Food, water, and electricity are scarce, and construction has nearly stopped.
Hu Jintao, former president of China,
faces
prosecution in Spain for genocide in Tibet.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The actions of the Chinese government in Tibet qualify as tyranny and oppression. To call them "genocide" seems like a stretch, since they are not aimed at exterminating the Tibetan people or anything close to that. They are somewhat comparable to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Obama met Malala Yousafzai, and she told him that drone attacks are fueling terrorism.
What it's like working in a Bangladeshi sweatshop with a 9-year-old mentor.
If we organize to force wages and safety conditions up, the parents will make enough money without sending children to work. And if we distribute gratis contraception, that too will help a lot.
The TSA has it in for passengers with medical devices attached to their bodies.
Journalists note the chilling effect of Obama's War on Journalism.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports on the danger to press freedom around the world — and now, thanks to Obama, in the US as well.
In New York City, undercover thugs infiltrate just about every dissident activity — even Occupy Sandy, which helped people who had been rendered homeless by Hurricane Sandy.
An undercover thug in California bullied vulnerable students with "special needs" into buying pot, then got them expelled and even jailed.
This is part of the school-to-prison pipeline. A school should not allow undercover thugs to prey on students.
The NSA head has effectively admitted that the US gains no real security against terrorist attacks from massive general surveillance.
Posing the question in terms of whether massive surveillance has ever prevented any violence in the US is a gratuitous concession to the NSA.
The suppression of leaks is extremely dangerous, in the same way a nuclear power plant is dangerous: there's a small but substantial chance it will cause a massive catastrophe (fallout, for the nuclear plant; tyranny, for the War on Journalism). The September 2001 attacks were a pinprick compared with this.
Even if massive surveillance prevented one attack on that scale each decade, that would not justify massive surveillance. 300 additional deaths per year, set against the population of the US, is a tiny risk. In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, we can pay that price to maintain our freedom.
The CDC was unable to track an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella because part of its operations were shut down.
Irreplaceable transgenic mice will die if they are not fed, dealing a setback to medical research.
Most of the US military is less essential to our safety than the CDC and those mice. In fact, most of it isn't necessary at all.
The Japanese government pledged to investigate the complaints of WWII
"comfort women" (foreign women forced into prostitution for the
Japanese
army), then
decided not to do it.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
When the Indonesian government complained, a Japanese official said this was "tantamount to saying that Japan was not trustworthy". Indeed.
Companies working on the Fukushima nuclear reactors
are disregarding
requirements for medical tests for the workers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
An opposition politician in Ecuador has been sentenced to prison for making a harsh accusation against President Correa.
For the most part I admire Correa; this is the one exception. Respecting freedom of speech means, above all, respecting the right to say things we dislike. Freedom of speech includes the right to condemn any person, any activity, and any belief — even Correa, even me, even you.
How to prepare for future global heating in the future in the UK.
It will be different in other places. In many parts of the US, you should prepare for drought, extreme heat and lots of fires.
The Gates Foundation's newest gift to American students: collecting lots of their personal data to help market nonfree software to them.
They also envisage recommending e-books, some of them surely covered by DRM and/or unjust contracts.
The InBloom software is described as "open source". I suppose this refers to some software used to access the site, and I also suppose this software is free but not copylefted so as to encourage using it in nonfree programs to foist onto schools and students.
A free, noncopylefted program is not an injustice in itself, but it is a weak point, making society prone to injustices.
Teachers don't need fancy software to "customize lessons in real time". They just need to listen to their students. But such adaptation is only possible if the class is small enough, and that would cost money. You'd have to start taxing the rich again.
The US is returning to 19th century in politics, human rights, and work.
The lawyers for Libyan dissidents, who are suing the UK for handing them over to Gaddafy, say that GCHQ is spying on their privileged emails with their clients.
Who should decide whether spy agencies' dirty work should be published? The state which runs them, or newspapers?
US citizens: tell Congress you will work to replace anyone that votes to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
The UK and would-be-independent Scotland are competing to pander to oil companies extracting what's left of oil in the North Sea.
I speculate that each of them wants the oil companies to help buy votes in the coming referendum about independence for Scotland. I think the question of Scottish independence from the UK is a side issue; what matters in Scotland, and everywhere else, is independence from corporate power. If I were a citizen of Scotland I'd probably vote for whichever side the oil companies don't support.
Kalaya'an Medoza of Amnesty International writes about US drone attacks and the "Game of Drones" campaign to end them.
Regulation of the UK press, proposed to deal with reporters' snooping in people's answering machines, may be used to censor reports about government snooping instead.
US whistleblowers who brought Edward Snowden an award for integrity praise his heroism.
Illegal tree cutting is creating a catastrophe in Aceh.
It is mostly for producing palm oil, which does harm world-wide.
By 2050, "normal" weather will be outside today's normal range.
Oppressive Canadian copyright law will wipe out VPNs in Canada.
Hollywood and the music factories would like to eliminate VPNs as part of their goal to monitor all communications.
Microsoft proposes having the government protect our privacy by imposing DRM to control companies' use of it.
There are just two gaping flaws in this plan. First, the DRM is a gratuitous part of the scheme. If we have regulations on what companies can do with the data, the threat to punish them for violations would be why they obey the regulations. The DRM really changes nothing.
More fundamentally, this would do nothing to protect us from abuse by the government or its agents, which are the most dangerous abuser of personal data because their abuse threatens democracy itself.
US house builders keep the mineral/fracking rights for the ground underneath the houses, and try to lull buyers into failing to notice.
US citizens: call on the US government to tell Honduras to drop the absurd charges against Honduran activists.
The US government supported the coup that put this right-wing government in power in Honduras, so it is a proper place to put pressure on about this.
UK austerity will make the next generations of middle class people and the poorest suffer lives that are worse than their parents'.
Not everyone will suffer — the 1% are doing quite well.
The elections in Azerbaijan were rigged to the point of being a joke.
Thugs
attacked the protesters.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
US forces in Afghanistan arrested a Talib while he was talking with Afghan intelligence agents who were trying to recruit him.
So are they incompetent, or trying to keep their enemy around to justify fighting?
Citizens of Kaua'i are campaigning to
require
companies to tell the public what pesticides they use.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Congress and the President: Just Because You Were Bullied, Don't Take It Out on Our Seniors.
Atomic Energy Unnecessary, Uneconomic, Uninsurable, Unevacuable and Unsafe.
I'm currently reading Normal Accidents, by Charles Perrow. You might think that accidents involving several independent things going wrong in combination would be so unlikely as to be negligible. That's if you expect nuclear power plants to be maintained at a very high standard. The book explains that it is usual for various valves and devices and meters to be broken. To have just one thing wrong is normal; for several to combine is not rare.
A right-wing strategy to crush people's spirit: say government can't do anything good, paralyze government so it really can't, then convince people to give up on trying.
The US government has done great things: for example, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the Endangered Species Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Voting Rights Act, and many more.
What's broken is not the government itself, but rather our political system, and the fault is that people give credence to what the right wing says. That's because they've found ways to buy officials and the media with plutocrats' money.
The UK Labour Party pledges to be almost as harsh towards the unemployed as the Tory Party is.
Punishing all those non-workers is a convenient way to distract people from the reason so many people in the UK don't work: not enough jobs. Boost the economy, tax the offshorers, and spend the money on useful activities; soon there will be plenty of jobs. Most of the unemployed eagerly go back to work, because they'd really like to get more income than benefits provide, and only the disabled will remain unemployed.
What can justify tasering an 8-year-old?
Or prosecuting a 10-year-old for sexual abuse?
Or punishing a 15-year-old for life, for streaking?
Here's chutspah: "Guns Save Lives Day" celebrates the anniversary of the Newtown shootings.
They're wrong, though: the facts show that more guns means more deaths.
Let's stop saying that Columbus "discovered" the Americas — they were inhabited, not "empty", and their inhabitants knew about them.
Much of the Americas was, in fact, nearly empty a short while after the Europeans came, but that was because smallpox killed 90% of the inhabitants.
John Greyson and Tarek Loubani have been released from the Egyptian prison where they were imprisoned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and subject to beatings.
They were freed, eventually, because they are Canadians — thousands of Egyptians are suffering in similar conditions for similar non-reasons, and with little hope of escape.
Once freed from prison, they were blocked from returning to Canada by the Egyptian no-fly list. These lists represent punishment without trial; the US uses its no-fly list as an excuse to bully and intimidate. For justice's sake, the US must abolish the no-fly list.
US citizens: Rep. Ribble wants to convert retired Americans' lives to Rubble. Sign this petition calling on Congress to resist.
We could also send Ribble a Ribble'd suggestion for what he can go and do with himself.
Ten thousands Dalits will meet to convert to Buddhism.
In India, this requires filling out a form for the state, which records each person's religious identity.
My contact says that many of them will practice Dr. Ambedkar's rationalist Navayana form of Buddhism.
Indian Dalits face violent oppression. Uppercaste Hindus who murdered 26 Dalits inhabitants of the same village were recently acquitted in court, and the survivors fear they will now be attacked with impunity.
The US is using grand juries to destroy dissident movements, questioning dissidents suspected of nothing but dissent, demanding information about other dissidents suspected of nothing but dissent, and them with threatening potential life imprisonment.
Everyone: call on Warren Buffett to make POSCO Steel respect human rights in India.
Even 3-month-old babies display ideas of right and wrong.
Researchers accuse WHO of politicizing research to deny the effects of US depleted uranium in Iraq.
There is plenty of evidence of the birth defects that the WHO report denies, and reasons to associate them with DU.
Austerity's effects can be seen in both wealthier and poorer countries, in the form of squeezed wages and unhealthy conditions for everyone.
Four the fourth time in a month, apparent Afghan soldiers shot at US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Eating popcorn in a movie theater makes advertising ineffective.
If their explanation is correct, eating anything would do the job, even carrot sticks or celery. And perhaps just thinking and subvocalizing something else, such as "No" or "I don't need this", would also do the job, as long as you don't forget to do it. These methods might be effective against advertising in other situations such as watching TV. It would be interesting to test these conjectures.
"The nation has been modified…"
Mary writes about being homeless in New York City.
She lost her job, then her apartment. Without an apartment, she can't possibly get either a job or an apartment. Our right-wing government, that doesn't dare tax the rich, won't do anything for her. Republicans say her homelessness is proof she deserves it, and Democrats don't face the issue.
Sri Lanka's ruler is protecting a crony who appears to have shot and killed a British Red Cross worker.
The tyrant has had dissidents and journalists killed, so he must use his cronies to do this; protecting them from accusations must be normal practice.
When banks generate loan offers for individual applicants, that opens the door for them to do redlining indirectly and avoid punishment.
A new NIST hash code standard now being developed is suspected of NSA corruption.
Google and Microsoft are developing new systems for tracking users from one device to another.
Facebook cancelled the search opt-out for users that had it enabled.
Unfriend Facebook today!
The US broke the Guantanamo hunger strike with harassment and torture.
India's Supreme Court ruled that the national identity card cannot be mandatory for government services.
This is because the Indian constitution provides a right of privacy.
US citizens: demand that the Border Patrol free the protesters it arrested.
US citizens:
tell
congressional Republicans to stop playing games and putting our
country at stake.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The Committee for Public Safety (officially, Department of Homeland Security) is preparing for armed repression in the US — perhaps the next time there is a financial crisis. The US has not taken the necessary steps to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2008.
In the US:
tell
major newspapers to follow the LA Times and stop publishing
letters that deny known facts such as global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
A study of smokers' health records found that even 10 cigarettes a day is very dangerous. On the average, smoking costs 10 years of life.
The Red Cross will resume food distribution in the UK. Evidently right-wing austerity policies are very effective.
Insurance companies pay drivers to report the car's location all the time.
This is typical of the sleazy ways that surveillance technology is foisted upon those not determined to reject it.
US citizens: tell
Congress, "No
fast track for the TPP."
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
"Fast track" would amount to putting Congress in a trance.
Seriously, here's why "fast track" is dangerous.
Israeli colonists in Palestine continue their violence, this time setting fire to cars.
Rio Blanco
Dam: Honduran
Rights Defenders to be Jailed while Transnational Investors are
Above the Law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Obama's War on Journalism is making officials scared to talk to the press.
The main US media "experts" asked about whether the US should attack Syria had a financial stake in it, which the media usually did not disclose.
The "gay testing" proposed by Kuwait is meant only for migrant workers, but it's proposed for several neighboring countries too.
Either way, it is medically impossible.
Everyone: call on Louisiana
to free
Albert Woodfox from prison unless/until he is convicted in a
proper trial.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
South Africa's Department of Basic Education seems to have been bought out by Microsoft: use of free software in school is banned.
The Russian
state pays
Internet trolls to pounce on dissent and criticism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Fracking hurts US climate change credibility
NASA says that Chinese nationals are treated no differently from other foreigners, and are not banned from the coming conference, but they were told by mistake that they were banned.
Now they know they are not arbitrarily banned, but it is too late now for them to get security checks before the conference.
France's ban on fracking is now fully legislated.
Who's responsible for the government shutdown? Who was responsible
for the financial
crisis? Randian
plutocrats, says Slavoj Žižek
How right-wing
media disproportionately
cover the few scientists that deny anthropogenic global heating,
and supplement them with nonscientists and by misrepresenting real
scientists, to present a false impression of balance.
They are doing something
similar with
the US government shutdown.
The reason is clear: the same right-wing machine is at work, first
creating bogus arguments that sound reasonable in a sound bite, second
giving the spokesmen lots of air time.
Skype is
being investigated
in Luxemburg for snooping for the NSA.
The Oakland thugs, already guilty of repeated
violence, tricked
the city council into approving funds for an exercise for SWAT
teams from around the US and the world.
The US government encourages the creation of SWAT teams by offering
funds for them. Thus, the US has far too many of them. But once the
team exists, it needs practice, so cities give them practice by
sending them on a routine basis to apply shock and awe to people
asleep in their homes. If they don't shoot you dead, they can give
you a fatal heart attack.
The rate of non-police violence in the US has gone way down since 20
years ago. The US does need some SWAT teams, but I think 40 of them
would suffice if each could travel by helicopter: one each in the
biggest 30 urban areas, one in Hawaii, one in Alaska, and 8 more to
scatter around the less populated parts of the country.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled
that web
site operators are responsible for defamation in anonymous
comments, and maybe all comments.
If this is not reversed, it will stop most sites from allowing
comments.
"Free countries" around the world are suppressing protests. This
article presents
9
examples including the US.
European austerity, and the unwillingness of the left to defy it, is
boosting
support for right-wing extremists across Europe.
Chomsky summarizes
US
dishonesty in dealing with Iran, with Syria's chemical weapons,
and massive NSA snooping.
The UK government wants to restrict the rights of supposed potential
"sexual risk to the public" even
without charging them
with a crime.
The governments of the US and Canada are censoring and corrupting science
for
the sake of the fossil fuel industry.
The Virginia State Thugs made a data base about millions of cars using
license plate cameras, and
specifically
recorded everyone that went to political rallies.
India's Supreme Court ruled that electronic voting machines
must
generate voter-verified paper ballots.
3,000 US companies have promised to handle EU citizens' data following
EU data protection rules, but 30% of them are not following these
rules … and
neither is the NSA.
Libyan premier Ali Zeidan was
kidnaped
by men among his own guards, who said they had "arrested" him.
Baby formula in the UK has a
substantial
concentration of aluminum; a group of scientists says this is
dangerous.
I wonder if US baby formula has a similar amount of aluminum.
Iranian thugs arrested at least 17 partygoers and
accused
them of being "homosexuals and satanists".
Special gyms for members of Congress are
considered
"essential" during the shutdown, but
experimental
cancer treatments are not.
When the company being audited pays for the audit, and selects the
auditor, that's a conflict of interest. Redesigning the system
works
wonders for catching violations.
This conflict of interest is comparable to the one involved in
having
would-be drug manufacturers pay for experiments to test the drug.
This also shows why the current US plan to let chicken farms do their
own inspection is really stupid.
The trial of BP (Billionaire Polluters) for the Big Spill shows
points
where federal regulations need to be tightened, and have not been.
AT&T wants to convert all residential phone lines to VOIP, and
take the opportunity to abolish the
regulations
that protect subscribers from abuses.
Using a technical advance as an opportunity to deal people a legal
setback is an instance of
Stallman's
Law.
Most Americans have very few choices of ISPs. We should take the
regulations for phone companies and apply them directly to ISPs. If
we make ISPs common carriers, they won't be allowed to discriminate in
any way.
The death of 363 boat people near Lampedusa was no accident, but
the result of
intentional policies, including past prosecution of fishermen for
rescuing drowning migrants.
I don't think any country has an obligation to admit any and all
people that wish to move there. But every country has an obligation
to overcome the plutocratic system that is responsible for driving so
many people to flee their homes.
How
the NSA deploys malware. Its much like the way other attackers do
it.
The article treats Flash Player as legitimate, but in
fact it
too is malware, with a surveillance feature and digital handcuffs.
This should be no surprise, since commonly used proprietary software
is often malware. The fact that the program is proprietary means it
is controlled
by one "owner" and not by the users — which is reason aplenty to
refuse to run it.
Republicans and Democrats
again threaten
a "grand bargain": trading retired Americans' pensions and medical
care to the plutocrats in exchange for campaign support and other
favors.
The UK construction workers who
were illegally
blacklisted (with state help) will receive compensation.
Libya's prime minister
was kidnapped
by armed men, who released him a short while later.
This reflects
the general
weakness of the Libyan state.
Resistance to US demands
is intensifying
across Latin America.
Everyone: call on African governments
to uphold
the International Criminal Court.
Yelling insults at children and
teenagers can
do lasting harm, much like striking them.
A California law
requires notifying
reporters when their records or data are subpoena'd from third
parties.
This should apply to everyone. Storage that a company provides to you
or holds about you should be treated, in regard to searches, like your
property, just as an apartment you rent is treated as your property.
But that alone is not enough to protect whistleblowers. We need the
right, and the practical opportunity, to communicate, without being
systematically tracked unless there is a prior court order to justify
it.
Red Cross: austerity in Europe is
creating protracted
poverty, unemployment, and despair.
Stiglitz: the US and European financial system
is still
badly broken and fails to serve the needs of most people.
I'm a Keynesian all the time — and you can be, too. It just
takes recognizing that the anti-Keynesians are the plutocrats.
Obama will punish Vietnam for its arrest of dissidents with
a deal
to build nuclear power plants there.
It is a clever scheme, but has a big flaw: the Vietnamese who will
suffer from future accidents and wastes won't be the elite that order
the arrests.
The US
left some chemical bombs in Panama, and Panama wants the US to get
rid of them.
"Revitalizing" cities through
gentrification does
not help the poor inhabitants — rather, it pushes them out
to someplace further away.
I like it when cities are pretty and safe, and have lot of places to
buy little luxuries such as cupcakes, but that must not erase the
issue of poverty from our minds. We need a society where everyone can
enjoy those treats. We need to tax the rich more, and use the money
to lift people out of poverty.
Bangladesh has installed
a
million solar power systems, and is installing hundreds of
thousands of new ones per year.
"One solar energy system every four minutes" in the US sounds
impressive, but it amounts to only some 130,000 a year — far
below what we could achieve if policies were set up to encourage it
instead of obstructing it.
California electric utilities are
trying to
obstruct local solar electric generation.
The excuse that the utilities give is incoherent. Suppose someone did
get energy from the grid to charge a battery, and sold it back later.
If the prices are unvarying, he'd lose money on the deal, because the
utility would sell it at a higher price and buy it back at a lower
price. Therefore, the systems would be designed to avoid this.
If, however, the price of electricity varies from moment to moment
according to usage and availability (which is a recommended practice),
people would have an incentive to charge their batteries when
electricity is cheap and sell the electricity back to the grid when
electricity is expensive. And this is exactly what society needs to
reduce the problem of peak demand.
Members of Congress were
arrested
along with other protesters supporting immigration reform.
I support most of these immigration reforms in principle, but part of
the plan is something I oppose: an increased surveillance requirement
placed on employers.
Haitian cholera victims and relatives have
sued the
United Nations, which was responsible for introducing cholera to
Haiti.
They are suing in the US. I fear that the US court will find an
excuse to dismiss the case.
A school in Wales punished a student who shaved his head to raise
money for charity, until
250
other students went on strike to defend him.
Bravo for all these students.
The school head claims that this punishment was a matter of
maintaining "high standards". He said nothing to explain how a shaven
head is less "high" than an unshaven one. Is he measuring "height of
standards" based on the height of the student's hair? Perhaps that
school would be better off if its head were shorn.
Miriam Carey, who was
shot
dead in a car chase in Washington DC, believed President Obama was
electronically monitoring her home.
If she had a cell phone in the home, or a "smart meter", that
particular belief was true! She may well have been insane anyway.
An
interview
with a religious lunatic who is, alas for us, on the US Supreme
Court.
Some kinds of prions (infectious proteins that cause brain degradation)
can be taken up in plants, and then
infect animals that eat
those plants.
Kuwait says it has a
medical
test to detect gays, and will use this to prevent gays from
entering the country.
The US National Football League has
concealed
for 15 years the knowledge that the head impacts football players
undergo cause brain damage.
If even an 18-year-old high school player shows signs of this brain
damage, high schools should not have football teams.
If you are worried about the small danger that your child might be
shot in a school, but you're not worried your child might play
football and suffer brain damage, maybe you played too much football
yourself.
Obama has
cut
military aid to Egypt, recognizing that the military has set up a
repressive regime.
Putin's men
claim
that the Greenpeace protesters are guilty of piracy because they
had recreational drugs on the Greenpeace ship.
Aside from apparently being a falsehood, this claim is also absurd.
Possession of recreational drugs is not be piracy. And since the
Greenpeace protesters had no intention of talking their ship into
Russia, it would be none of Russia's business.
Putin defies logic openly, as a form of intimidation: "See, when I
feel like putting you in prison, I won't hesitate to do so based on
claims that are obviously false."
Although many western clothing retailers have signed up to require
inspection of clothing factories in Bangladesh, the
fabric
factories have fatal fires too.
US citizens:
tell the Supreme Court you
are incensed about giving more political power to businesses.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to extend clean water rules to smaller waterways.
Greek fascists' did the killing, but those really responsible are
plutocratist officials.
Keeping Abu Anas al-Liby prisoner on a ship
violates
Geneva conventions; it is not as bad as other recent US treatment
of prisoners, but still not right.
If Abu Anas is not a prisoner of war, then he can only be a criminal
suspect under arrest. Was he informed of his Miranda rights before
questioning?
The interest in the state health coverages exchanges set up by Obama's
health care bill exceeded expectations, and the
servers
in many states could not cope.
The CDC can't track down an outbreak of salmonella because its
employees have been
furloughed.
Nelson Kanuk is suing Alaska for
failing
to cope with global heating.
Harvard Business School outrageously says its restrictive
subscriptions for university
licenses don't
allow classroom use.
Librarians, you must organize to fight back against nasty terms with a
boycott.
Profiting from the
Poor: Outsourcing
Social Services Puts Most Vulnerable at Risk.
Nestlé pumps water out of the ground in places where water is
scarce,
forcing
inhabitants to buy their water back.
In Pakistan, it is not safe to drink water straight from the faucet
But you can boil it or filter it, and that's much cheaper than buying
it bottled.
World Bank
Admits: 'Economic
Growth' in Africa = Resource Extraction, Inequality, Poverty.
Taiji, Japan, invites tourists
to swim
with dolphins then eat them.
Faux News tries to condemn Obama for the shutdown while claiming
we'd
be better off with much less government.
I am not an anarchist, and it's not merely because I have a pro-state
gland. It's because there are many important things we need
governments to do. For instance, to provide food and shelter to the
poor. To fund scientific research and tests of new drugs. To provide
education and health care to all. To build roads and passenger
trains. To take care of national parks. To inspect many sorts of
businesses to make sure they don't injure their employees, their
customers, or bystanders. To impose a decent minimum wage and help
workers form unions.
Of course, the state needs to pay for this, and that requires taxing
the rich, as we used to do.
Everyone:
demand
that the World Food Prize Organization stop giving its prizes to
dangerous biotech.
Proposing a carbon tax to raise
money to
pay for the cost of weather disasters caused by global heating.
Hundreds of would-be
migrants drowned
in a boat trying to reach Italy. What are the implications of
this?
Bills Offer Clear
Choice: End
Bulk Collection of Americans Data or Endorse It.
A nonviolent Moscow protester
was convicted
of "calling for mass riots" and sentenced to indefinite
imprisonment in a mental hospital.
Russia bans books by labeling them "extremist", and
even imprisons
people for having copies.
The UK
also imprisons people for having copies of books, but in the UK
there is no list of which books are banned, so one can't tell.
20% of the world's cities now have plans for monumental and expensive
adaptations
to protect
themselves from the effects of global heating.
This won't protect our food supply from global heating. We ought to
be cutting down CO2 emissions so that we never reach that disastrous
point.
Malala Yousafzai reminds Obama that he needs
to negotiate
with the Taliban.
US citizens:
call
on the US government to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan soon.
US citizens:
tell
the government to stop treating mining in public lands as more
important than visitors.
Washington's Warring Brothers: the
Republican
and Democratic Parties.
Karzai demands respect for
Afghan
sovereignty over military action as a condition for letting
foreign troops stay any longer.
A divestment
campaign is putting pressure on fossil fuel companies.
UK boy and girl scouts will
no
longer have to take a religious oath.
The Boy Scouts of America still requires that.
The Catholic Church supports the shutdown of the US government in
order to
attack
birth control.
Lunatic Texas right-wingers plan to
make
textbooks teach that the Garden of Eden story is science.
Turkey is considering a law to allow pre-emptive arrests of suspected
protesters,
without a
trial.
That would be an overt rejection of human rights. It reflects the
fact that the Islamist party feels it can get away with absolutely
anything.
UK thugs are accused of
editing
their video footage of the Hillsborough disaster, presumably as
part of their
campaign
to put the blame on the victims.
Brazil has
accused
Canada of spying on Brazil's Mining and Energy Ministry.
That ministry probably does not engage in "terrorism" in the usual
sense, but it does something worse: pouring CO2 into the air.
However, Canada's government is not trying to stop that, rather to
compete to fry our planet even faster. This would be industrial
espionage, pure and simple.
"Advances" in profiling users enable surveillance companies to
determine
that several computers belong to the same person.
Netanyahu's latest speech
claims
that Israel's colonies in Palestine are not an issue. This shows
that he has no intention of making peace with Palestine, and that
Israel's participation in peace talks is only a pretense to continue
the slow ethnic cleansing and land theft.
I think Netanyahu calculates that he will lose nothing from displaying
the truth, because his political control over the US government is too
strong for it to resist in any way.
For several years, manta rays in the Maldives have
hardly
ever tried to reproduce.
Violent
Islamist rebellion is spreading in Egypt.
This is a natural response to banning the Islamist political party.
When the Army says that all protesters will be treated as foreign
agents (i.e., put on trial), they are likely to rebel.
Most Egyptians had come to oppose Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The army could have rebooted democracy by allowing the Muslim
Brotherhood to compete in new elections (and win seats in parliament
but without controlling the government). Instead it chose to exclude
them from democracy, setting up what is effectively military rule.
The central point of the IPCC report is the carbon budget:
how
much more carbon we can burn without provoking disaster.
Some Greenpeace protesters
are being
kept isolated 23 hours a day.
Prisoners in
California went
on hunger strike over such treatment.
The thugs in the US
are increasingly
equipped like an occupying army.
Joe Nacchio as CEO of
Qwest resisted
government pressure to spy on customers. So the government denied
Qwest other contracts, which may have created the pretext to prosecute
him. And he was forbidden to mention this in his trial.
Going tipless enabled the Linkery to
provide better
service for a lower price and pay its staff well.
I am entirely in favor of eliminating tips and paying the staff a
decent wage.
More
explanation, including how the system of tipping is racist and
sexist.
The story has 6 parts; I think the last two are most important.
Government policies to redistribute income and wealth
are extremely
effective, as demonstrated by the US.
Since the start of this century, the Nobel Peace Prize committee
does not dare
to displease the US.
The World Bank
is promoting
privatization of water supply.
Neural stimulation research is approaching the point where
it may
be used on soldiers and prisoners, perhaps even brainwashing
soldiers not to tell the public about government crimes.
The Sudanese dictatorship is confiscating newspapers in bulk, thus
driving
the papers out of business.
The history of conflict
between Haiti
and the Dominican Republic.
This article argues that the details of Richmond's eminent domain plan
are
a profit
scheme for an "advisor" company.
If this is true, it ought to be corrected, but it does not invalidate
the basic idea.
Former minister Chris Huhne, who was in the UK's National Security
Council, says he
was kept
in the dark about GCHQ massive surveillance.
Afghanistan's voter registration system is a
shambles, ideal
for fraud.
Companies are cutting workers to part
time, to
exploit a loophole in Obama's health care law.
This is because the law does not go far enough. The state should
provide health care for everyone, employed or not, and get the money
(which will be much less than it costs now) by taxes that have nothing
to do with employment.
Social Security should also be handled this way. Taxing businesses
based on employment in the US gives them an incentive to employ fewer
people in the US.
Once Obama won the 2008 election, he ditched his progressive economic
advisors
and appointed a new
team of the banksters' men. They then made sure Obama did nothing
to protect us from the banksters.
US citizens:
call on
the US Trade Representative to stop pressuring Europe to deny the
dirtiness of tar sands oil.
US citizens:
call on Congress
to resist Republican demands to approve Keystone XL in exchange for
release of hostages.
In the Boston area:
call
on WGBH to show Citizen Koch.
US citizens:
call on Republican
congresscritters to support a motion to end the shutdown.
The Democratic Party joined the Republican Party in opposing a plan
to make an
independent
documentary about Hillary Clinton.
US citizens:
put
pressure on the renegade Democrats that voted with the Republicans
to shut down the government.
The UK's zero-tolerance policy on racist statements has
collided
with soccer fans that insist on chanting "Yid army" as an
expression of pro-semitism.
I call it "zero-tolerance" because it resembles, in its gratuitous
harshness, the "zero-tolerance" policies of US schools that form the
entry valve of the
school-to-prison
pipeline.
Campaigning for
single-payer universal
health care in the US.
Russia is installing NSA-like
Internet
surveillance facilities. Sochi, where the Olympic games will be
held, is getting the new facilities first.
The Olympic games have a pattern of imposing surveillance that does
not go away afterward.
US Inequality
Is Simply a Function of Political Power.
Thus, no policy is likely to benefit the non-rich, while the rich keep
taking ever more away from us.
In the UK, any joke that refers to a group of people can be labeled as
a
"hate
incident".
That's where it leads when people are prosecuted for expressing
opinions. Even odious opinions must not be censored.
Jailing people for sharing
has
not boosted music sales in Japan.
Even if it had done so, that would not justify it. Sharing is good,
and sharing is our right; if the copyright industry tries to deny
this right, we must crush it so it can no longer threaten us.
However, the fact that this did not achieve its supposed goal
might be useful in convincing politicians that care more about
the copyright industry's money than about people.
On the other hand, they might instead try executing anyone that
shares.
A foreign student in Florida faces prosecution for
running
onto a soccer field to embrace the victorious player he admires.
He could be kicked out of school and deported.
The player begged the prosecutor to drop the charges, but the
prosecutor does not care. He has an opportunity to ruin someone's
life, legally, and he's not going to let it go to waste.
However, this power-tripping prosecutor
(remember
Aaron Swartz?) is only the trigger for a much larger standing
injustice: that many systems are designed to further and permanently
punish anyone who has ever been convicted of any crime.
The tyrannical government of Sudan is
buying
up all the newspapers so as to control them.
Sad to say, unauthorized sharing is
not
destroying the copyright industry.
These companies lobby for nasty laws, while paying a pittance to the
artists (aside from a few stars). I hope we do away with them.
Meanwhile, I've proposed
new
systems for supporting artists better than the current system
does.
The freedom to criticize officials is
threatened
in some countries in South America.
Obama has decided to end the US intervention in Afghanistan, aside
from thousands of troops that will remain. The supposed benefits
for Afghanistan turn out to be
mostly
fictitious, but the dead will stay dead.
In the US: protest against massive
surveillance in Washington DC on Oct 26.
The Naming
the Dead project aims to identify and describe all the people
killed by drone attacks in Pakistan.
Republicans use bullying tactics because this
has worked for
them over and over.
Edward Snowden thanks the European Parliament for addressing the issue
of massive surveillance,
saying "The
work of a generation is beginning here."
The NSA's bogus claims that massive surveillance thwarts lots terror
plots
get
coverage in the mainstream media. Refutations get ignored.
Even if massive surveillance did thwart some terrorist plots, they
would be those of the small, minor terrorists. The biggest terrorist
is the US government, and to put a stop to its terrorism we need
whistleblowers and protests — which means, no massive
surveillance.
US citizens: Tell Congress
to pass
the farm bill.
Celebrities, the Police,
and Surreptitious
DNA Collection.
Piracy in Somalia has been
mostly
suppressed, through the use of the method I suggested:
armed
guards on ships.
The
Scary Truth About Antibiotic Overprescription.
The funded global heating denial campaign is
rampaging
through the mainstream media.
Let's
Be Honest — the Global Warming Debate Isn't About Science.
US media pay little attention to the
50
million Americans that live in poverty.
This is what suits the plutocrats who more or less control the
mainstream media.
The head ayatollah said President Ruhani
went
too far in reaching out to the US.
He's right that the US can't be trusted, and right that US policy
towards Iran is largely
controlled
by the lobby that backs the Israeli government. What he has done
in Iran is
even
worse, but his point is true nonetheless. The onus is on the US
government, to show it can be trusted and can defy the lobby.
Anti-fracking protesters drove away frackers from one site after a
persistent
campaign.
The UK's safeguardless, automatic extradition treaty with the US
is still causing
injustice.
More
about what's wrong with it.
The US is now
#1
in oil and gas extraction. Is each country to compete in pushing
the ecosphere off the climate cliff?
(Why does the article call it "production"? We're not making
these fossil fuels.)
An absurd US law forbids Chinese people from entering any NASA
building, and many US scientists are
boycotting
a NASA conference about exoplanets because of its exclusion of
Chinese scientists.
US citizens:
Call
on Kerry to dismiss ERM, the company responsible for the attempted
whitewash of the Keystone XL pipeline's dangers.
US citizens:
oppose
the plan for a large fracked gas storage facility near Seneca Lake in
New York State.
A study finds that widespread sharing of copies has not harmed
publishing businesses and in some cases
benefits
them.
Getting our sold-out governments to pay attention to this
rather than obey the copyright industry will take a big fight.
Fracking is already causing
tremendous
environmental damage in the US.
The
NSA's
attacks on the internet must be made public — that is the
only way to make it secure.
We
Are Terrifyingly Close to the Climate's 'Point of No Return'.
How US mainstream media would report on the government shutdown
if
it were happening in some other country.
The Japanese government is drawing up a state secrecy bill.
It published a draft —
entirely
blacked out.
Dissidents in the US face imprisonment for 30 years for a
symbolic
act of protest.
A revised constitution in the Dominican Republic
threatens
to leave many inhabitants of Haitian descent stateless.
A bogus scientific paper served as an experimental apparatus to test
the effectiveness of peer review. It
did
not show up very well.
The article uses the term "open access". I think that term tends to
lead to bad results, and we should campaign instead for
free/libre
scientific publishing.
Snowden's papers say that the NSA
can't
generally break the Tor network, but it has attacked the
Tor
browser bundle.
The US has blocked military aid to Rwanda because of its support
for a rebel group in the Congo which
uses
child soldiers.
Rwanda's president has done a good job in many ways, but he
persistently
intervenes in the Congo causing bloody instability there.
In addition, he
interferes
with dissent.
Thousands protested in Cairo support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and
soldiers
shot at them.
I totally disagree with the Muslim Brotherhood's political ideas, but
I defend their right to protest peacefully for them.
The NSA is
Making Us All Less Safe.
Remember where al-Shabaab came from:
Bush
decided to wipe out the new Islamist government that had established a
modicum of control over Somalia.
At the time, it was described as an Ethiopian intervention, but I
reported the
evidence
that it was backed by the US.
The US
continues militarizing Africa and this could cause cause more
such blowback.
Xi Jinping, the new head of the Chinese Communist Party, has turned
out to be
a stricter
and nastier tyrant than the previous one.
An imam in Kenya with indirect links to
al-Shabaab was
shot, and Muslims say the thugs shot him.
Progressive Americans have
gained two
significant victories recently over Obama: Summers and Syria.
Non-orthodox Jewish women in Israel face oppression from orthodox
sexists that try
to impose
segregation on public buses.
Farming flies on waste
products, to
make food for farming fish.
Amnesty International concludes the Turkish
govt committed
gross and even deadly human rights violations against protesters.
A surveillance state is one in which
the surveillance
establishment can look at anything it wants to. Do we want to
live in a surveillance state?
French wineries are
already planning
to move production to cooler areas to flee global heating.
The US
is prosecuting
13 members of Anonymous for participating
in Internet
protests, which the government calls "attacks".
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to
support
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
Everyone: tell US mass media
to stop
pretending that both major parties' are equally to blame for the
government shutdown.
Everyone: urge the Burlington VT city council
to reject
stationing the expensive and non-functional F-35 fighter plane
there.
Journalist Raymond Bonner knows
the FBI
got his phone call records from when he was in Indonesia from some
US company, trying to track down a minor detail he got from some US
official.
Everyone:
hold a vigil
at sundown on Oct 5 in support of the Arctic 30, nonviolent
protesters charged with "piracy".
US citizens: call for dropping the false charges against protesting
CUNY students and
investigating
the thugs who falsely accused them.
Everyone:
call on
Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Associated British Foods to make sure their
sugar doesn't come from land grabs.
Private "virtual schools" in the US do a bad job of education, but
claim
lots of money from US cities for students who are not even
attending.
I suspect that they are also teaching the kids to use nonfree malware
such as Windows or MacOS. This is wrong —
no school
should teach nonfree software.
Everyone:
call on
Google to stop listing sales of ivory.
Court papers show that the FBI
demanded
to attach its own computer to collect data from Lavabit.
The closure of the Silk Road site will
mainly
benefit narcotrafficker gangs.
In Thailand, even quoting and rebuking a statement that criticizes the
king is a
crime.
Angola has imprisoned a teenage dissident for
trying
to make t-shirts that criticize the regime.
UK surveillance faces a court challenge at the
European
level.
The Hyde Amendment, which banned Medicaid from covering abortions, was
the
initial
wedge of the right-wing campaign to abolish abortion rights (and
contraception, and then other sex-related rights).
Democrats in the Senate are in the position of defending the status
quo against a persistent enemy. That is always a weak position
because the enemy can always suggest, "Meet us half way today (and
tomorrow we'll demand more)." It is stronger to make a
counter-demand. They have already got too much.
Senate Democrats should stop passing bills to resume government
spending and do nothing else. Rather, they should put repeal of the
Hyde amendment into these bills — and offer to compromise on
just extending the spending limit.
A dissident Iranian filmmaker's passport was
confiscated,
so he cannot go to Europe to collect an award.
He faces a future sentence of imprisonment already.
I would guess that this part of the state is controlled by the
ayatollahs and not by the president.
Vehicle exhaust fumes react with chemicals in some flowers,
so that
honeybees
can't smell them.
Heat waves can kill, and they are
occurring
in places that rarely had them before.
People in poor countries will be unable to much to cope with the
problem. This is why
100
million deaths due to global heating are predicted by 2030.
Global heating on one side, and logging on the other, threaten the
survival
of wild koalas.
Koalas are worth a lot of money to Australia, but the rich will figure
out how to preserve them in captivity for the tourists while wiping
them out everywhere else.
The US barred entry to German citizen Iliya Troyanov, apparently
because he
launched a
petition condemning NSA surveillance.
For-profit prisons
gouge in
myriad ways, from prisoners' phone calls to medical care.
The NSA stores
everyone's
metadata for up to a year.
The War on Drugs has failed, if
judged by
its ostensible goals.
However, it seems to have done a good job of enabling politicians to
say "Look how tough I am!"
Greenpeace protesters and a journalist have been
charged
with piracy even though Putin recognized that these charges are
absurd.
Our CO2 emissions have made the ocean
more
acidic than ever in the past 300 million years (or more).
The article does not make it clear whether the ocean was more acidic
300 million years ago, or it's merely that our data go back only 300
million years.
New Puns in Spanish.
Wastewater from
fracking sometimes
contains a lot of radium, and it can make fish dangerous to eat.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers say he
is being
held in total isolation except for lawyers' visits.
This is clearly cruel and unusual punishment, except that quibble that
it isn't a punishment.
Canadian activists are doing a great job
of blocking
the Keystone XL pipeline and out-PR'ing its would-be constructor.
Vietnamese dissident Le Quoc Quan
was convicted
of tax evasion after an unfair trial.
Some of Assad's troops report
that rebels
massacred Alawite civilians after capturing their home villages.
Republican attempts to cut Americans' retirement aid are spread by
NGOs
that falsely
claim there is a shortage of funds for it.
Hundreds or thousands of
Chinese rushed
into Tienanmen Square with petitions for the government, and were
arrested.
80,000
Ethiopians protested
publicly against the "anti-terrorism" law which has (naturally)
been used to imprison journalists and dissidents.
WTO negotiations are heading
towards penalizing
the farmers of poor countries.
The Greek government says it has
proof linking
Greek fascists to violence and threats. The testimony of people
who tried to leave the party and were then threatened would constitute
real proof.
Greeks have every reason to hate some foreigners —
foreign banksters and eurocrats. Rather than hating a poor immigrant
who would like nothing better than to take a job, they should hate the
rich plutocrat who takes away thousands of jobs.
Obama's health care law is expected
to extend
medical coverage to 25 million Americans, but leave 31 million still
without it.
This is part of why we need a national health system. The other part
is that single-payer would save a large fraction of the cost —
as much as half.
Some of the people injured by the Boston bombers were given gifts that
they can't accept because they
would lose
their public health care.
Many large environmentalist NGOs have been
partly corrupted
by working with companies.
The Egyptian government continues
to support
businesses against workers.
Hungary's government has allowed localities to
make homelessness
a crime.
Many US cities do something more or less like this.
New song - Poppycock
With the accelerating rate of
poaching, wild
rhinos could be extinct within a decade.
22,000
Indians face
eviction for a new steel plant, and a forest would be cut down for
it.
Destroying mosquitoes and preventing
diseases by
means of tilapia.
A Kiribati man seeks asylum in New Zealand from
the inevitable
slow inundation of his home, caused by global heating.
Sooner or later, it will be impossible for anyone to live in Kiribati.
This will be the fault of the rest of the world. What will we do?
More fraudulent
arguments of global heating denialists.
Curiously, economists whose theories have much weaker scientific
support don't
face similar opposition.
Perhaps those who fund global heating denialism in the mainstream
media are happy with those economic theories.
Nuclear power reactors in Sweden were shut down
by jellyfish
in the coolant pipes.
Various human activities contribute to causing jellyfish blooms.
Overfishing can do it.
Republicans have forced
the shutdown
of the US government, if they don't get their demands to keep some
20 million poor working Americans from getting heath care.
Mexico suffers
from widespread
and continuing violence and threats against journalists. The
government gives the matter low priority.
ACLU: several FBI activities that should
be cancelled
entirely.
The Boston Thug
Department investigated
nonviolent anti-war groups for no valid reason, and still has not
come clean about the practice.
US citizens: phone and email your congresscritter, if he's Republican,
saying
to stop
trying to hold the US hostage.
The NSA is cagey when asked whether it collects
Americans' cell
phone location data in bulk. Apparently it does this and wants to
pretend it does not.
Everyone: demand that Wendy's sign up
to decent
working conditions in tomato farms.
Netanyahu asked Obama
to reject
any deal with Iran.
No surprise there. Will Obama have the strength to disobey?
EFF to standards
organizations: The
Law Belongs To Everyone.
The NSA keeps every person's metadata for at least a year, and uses it
to profile the person's
"pattern
of life".
A Chinese teenager faced
prosecution
for his microblog postings, but was freed in response to public
protest
If he has learned to check the facts before posting, that's not a bad
lesson. But under a government that doesn't value truth, annoying
facts may be labeled as
"malicious
propaganda".
The article leaves me wondering whether the man who was found dead
really committed suicide, and whether there will be an investigation
to determine this.
More casualties of the War on Drugs: they thought they were buying
MDMA but
it
wasn't
Protesters
in Sudan demand the resignation of the tyrannical ruler.
The world's governments must agree on a
"carbon
budget", dividing up the amount of additional greenhouse gas
emissions that the world can stand.
An
audio
recording pretends to be Chavez saying he is still alive.
I can readily believe this is part of a US-lead destabilization
campaign, since it
would
not be the first.
A UN team will soon go to Syria to
identify
and then destroy Assad's chemical weapons.
The Colombian farmers' strike was provoked by the treaty with the US
that
required
them to use only GMO seeds.
CUNY students
protested
against hiring General Petraeus as a professor, so New York City
thugs attacked them and made false charges against them.
NSA documents describe political opposition to US drone attacks as a
kind of
enemy
action.
The idea that people deserve "due process of law" before they are
assassinated is described as enemy propaganda. The list of "adversary
propaganda themes" also includes several points I've made: that
terrorism is a small danger compared with others (including that of a
rogue state such as the US), that drone attacks stimulate hostility to
the US, and that drones kill lots of noncombatants. According to the
NSA, reality is the enemy.
RSA warns users to stop using certain pseudo-random number generators
in its products, concerned that the NSA may have deliberately made the
standard weak.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to redirect the loan funds for new nuclear power plants
into the cleanup of the Fukushima disaster.
US citizens:
call
on Senators Warren and Udall to change their stand regarding FDA
rules on GMO labelling.
The repression of abortion rights in the US has created demand for
underground
distributors of abortion pills.
I do endorse these activities. If women can't get safe and legal
abortion, at least they should be able to get this kind of help.
In the US, non-rich people accused of any sort of sexual crime get
advice to make a plea bargain for "civil commitment", which in
practice means
indefinite
imprisonment.
The US Joint Strike Fighter is tremendously behind schedule with
big
cost overruns, partly due to being ill-conceived at several
levels. And it is not what the American people really need.
Thousands of Egyptians — protesters, journalists and bystanders
— have been
imprisoned
without charges for months, and some foreigners too.
Yale
had a Brazilian reporter arrested. She sought to speak to a
Brazilian judge, who was in a seminar there, and who did not want to
talk with her.
He doesn't have an obligation to talk with her, and Yale has no
obligation to let her into a private event. But she did not try to go
into the event; she only entered a building which the public was
apparently welcome to enter. That was no reason to arrest her.
Two Saudi Arabian women
will
be imprisoned for trying to bring food to a woman who (they had
been told) was locked up with her children and had run out of food.
Giving food to the needy is banned in some parts of the US, too.
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/08/26-1
gives a recent example from South Carolina. Members of Food Not Bombs
faced felony charges in San Francisco in the 90s for distributing
food, and one was in danger of imprisonment under the "three strikes"
law.
These US laws are not meant to protect patriarchal power, but rather
business profits. Homeless people are unsightly, but feeding them
would cost something, so businesses try to sweep them away, so they
will starve where people can't see them or boost the profits of
privatized prisons.
The US should stop leaving it up to people to volunteer for organ
donation in the event of their death.
Over
6000 Americans die every year for lack of an organ to transplant.
I criticize Rall's decision to protest the inequities of the US organ
transplant system by refusing to donate. Such refusal exacerbates the
lack of organs which causes those inequities. I signed up as an organ
donor when I first got a driver's license.
I disagree with one of his statements. That someone believes in a
religion does not imply the person is an idiot. What these people
lack is not intelligence, but rather the moral courage to face the
painful likely truths. Some of them go to extreme lengths of
cleverness to construct arguments that bury the fallacy where it is
hard to see.
However, I agree with his conclusion, and with the point that we
should stop being superstitious about corpses. This means, in
particular, that we should stop making a fuss over the corpses of the
deceased. This fuss is strongly encouraged by the mainstream media,
and that could lap over into the issue of organ donation.
Tunisia's Islamist government
will
resign so new elections can be held.
Pre-teen Indian girls are sold, tricked or kidnaped into prostitution,
then
kept
in small cages until they are broken.
I post this link because the issue is important — but don't get
the "interactive e-book" that it advertises! That is nonfree software
combined with DRM. It requires using an iThing! This attacks the
freedom of whoever reads it.
Using an iThing is not as bad as being kidnaped and raped, but since
it's
easy to avoid, you'd be a
fool not to avoid it.
Bank holding companies such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are
not
allowed to own ordinary businesses, so why doesn't the US make
them sell those?
Solar and wind power vary, sometimes unpredictably, and this requires
cycling fossil-fuel generators on and off more often. Modeling shows
the costs of doing this
are just
a few percent of the savings in fuel costs.
The US uses the no-fly list
to bully
people into giving information, offering to take them off the list
if they report on some enemies.
This demonstrates that it has nothing to do with suspecting that those
people would attack an airplane. The no-fly list is not being used to
flights, merely as a handy way to harass people.
The drug mix called "krokodil"
reportedly damages
the user's body and brain, but feels like heroin and is cheaper,
so desperate users turn to it.
From what I've read, people can use heroin for decades, fairly safely,
if they can get it in a pure and reliable form: the danger comes from
impurities. If registered heroin addicts could get their supply from
doctors, they would be safe and nobody would use krokodil.
The FBI
has been flying drones for surveillance since 2006.
It is true that they are not qualitatively different from looking at
people from aircraft. They are a big quantitative increase in the
amount of surveillance that is feasible.
US insurance companies have no doubt about the danger of global
heating, and
are starting
to lobby for a carbon tax.
The "independent" panel that will supposedly investigate the NSA's
civil liberties violations is a swindle: it is
effectively controlled
by the same office that the NSA reports to.
Certain kinds of US corporate
welfare amounts
to $6000 per family.
I don't think this includes all the forms of corporate welfare.
As Senator Cruz carried out his mini-filibuster against Obama's
imperfect health care
plan, 200 or
so Americans died from lack of health coverage. If Obama's health
care plan were in effect, it would have saved many of them. But
single-player health care, a national health system, would save them
all and save money too.
Another improvised piece
of containment
technology at Fukushima has failed.
Senator Wyden and others have proposed a
bill
to limit NSA massive collection of phone and email records.
However,
Senator
Feinstein is pushing to continue the massive surveillance.
The NSA
tracks
Americans' social networks, and Facebook is just one of its
sources.
Thus, if you talk about your friends in Facebook, you're ratting on
them. If you say that you saw John and Arthur, you tell the NSA that
John knows Arthur. If John and Arthur are dissidents, or journalists,
your information will help the government suppress dissent or
journalism.
Don't do it!
NRA
Tried To Stifle Study Showing Gun Retailers Support Background
Checks.
Any little twerp can use the DMCA to shut down a web site he does not
like with an invalid
takedown
demand.
If scientists had said that an asteroid had a 90% chance of hitting
the Earth in a few decades, we'd be going all-out to deflect it.
Contrast
that with humanity's weak response to global heating.
Part of the difference is that no big companies would profit by
keeping the asteroid on its collision course.
The Haitian government is painting the houses in a shantytown
to improve
the view from an expensive new hotel.
Global heating changes some plants such that
their flowers
can't be pollinated.
US Republicans are considering
making abolition
of network neutrality one of the goals of their extortion
campaign.
Google will be fined in France
for not
telling users how it uses their personal data.
A study concludes global heating
will increase
the number of severe thunderstorms in the US.
Record heat in China
is enabling
deadly hornets to spread.
In Fragmented
Forests, Rapid
Mammal Extinctions.
So if we don't maintain large tropical forests, we will wipe out many
species.
The New IPPC Climate Change
Report Makes
Deniers Overheat.
Schools in the US and elsewhere
are tying
themselves in knots for useless "safety" measures.
These foolish measures only waste time and scare children. Having a
thug in the school tends
to ruin
children's lives.
Mainstream media found
an excuse
to lump heroic whistleblowers together with mass murderers.
China's move from burning coal to burning natural gas won't reduce CO2
emissions, because
the gas
will be obtained from coal.
US citizens: tell
Congress not
to spoil the possibility for accord with Iran.
Everywhere: support the
Global Frackdown on Oct 19.
Everyone: tell Barilla you
will boycott
its products until the owner takes back what he said about gay
people.
Everyone: call on Verizon
to clean
up its act in regard to Internet freedom, and help send it soap to
do this with.
Detailing the effect of climate disaster on
Australia: the
Kakadu wetlands will cease to exist, being inundated, and so will many
species.
Since Australia has already experienced temperatures of 50C, it can
expect to experience temperatures of 56C by the end of the century.
That is 132F. It's almost as high as the highest air temperature ever
measured on Earth (in Death Valley: 57 degrees).
US citizens:
call on the
US Trade Representative to stop pressuring other countries to
import tar sands oil.
Everyone:
tell
Facebook, Google and Yelp to quit ALEC.
ALEC is a right-wing scheme by which businesses twist state
legislators to pass the bills those businesses want.
Farmers around the world see the effects of global heating,
in
weather, in water supplies, and in pests.
Global heating
will
hit poor countries hardest, with floods here and droughts there.
The h-bomb accidentally dropped over North Carolina got ready to fire,
and only
one
unreliable switch stopped it from detonating.
Migrant workers in Qatar are worked to death —
400
die every year, and it could rise to 600 a year due to
construction for the soccer world cup.
The International Labor Organisation says that the Qatar government
allows this to happen, because it
does
not properly inspect the working conditions of migrant workers.
The deadly heat of today's Qatar will be found in many more parts of the
world if we don't limit our CO2 emissions.
Todd Ashker, California hunger strike organizer, says the prisoners
will
resume their hunger strike if they don't get humane treatment.
He managed to unite prisoners of different races, overcoming the
foolish racism that divides them and makes them easy to manipulate.
The guards say that solitary confinement is a punishment for belonging
to a gang, but they label someone a gang member on the flimsiest
pretexts, and the only way to get out of solitary is to
accuse
others (truly or not).
The IPCC report concludes that human-caused global heating is
virtually a certainty.
Here are the
main
points.
Melting sea ice means that traditional travel routes in the Arctic are
now
unsafe.
How
human
greenhouse gas emissions relate to the heating.
Why the deniers' arguments are
bogus.
It comes down to, how big does a danger have to be before you try to
save yourself?
The leaders of the Greek fascist party have
been arrested
and charged with "founding a criminal organization".
These charges may be true, if they planned to provoke the violence
that their followers have carried out. However, political views in
and of themselves, even fascist views, can't justify labeling a
political party a "criminal organization". If they could, the
Republican Party would qualify, since its purpose is to help
businesses rip off most Americans.
30
years to global heating disaster, says the IPCC.
Mocking the need to cut back on fossil
fuels, governments
continue to push to extract more.
Here's an example of
the stupid
short-term thinking.
If every government says "We don't want to be in the lead", none will
go anywhere.
Rouhani is making every possible effort for
a reconciliation
with the US.
Uri Avnery: for Netanyahu, Rouhani is the most horrible possible
president of
Iran, because
he doesn't do or say anything hostile.
An additional reason to reject non-cash payment:
it encourages
spending without realizing how much you're spending.
This is in addition to avoiding being tracked.
US citizens: support the congresscritters
that joined
a protest to defend Social Security.
On October 8: join a protest in the
US against
the attempt to further undermine US campaign contribution limits.
When government activities are privatized, the company has to squeeze
somewhere to make its big
bucks. Here's
how private prisons do it.
US
citizens: oppose
the TPP plans to impose tyranny on the Internet.
Why
would anyone sign such a thing?
Two Democratic Senators have asked the FDA to finalize
a deceptive
plan for "voluntary" labeling of GMO foods — one that would
block state requirements for mandatory labeling.
The copyright industry
is designing
a massive propaganda campaign for US schools.
Thousands of Turkish protesters
are still
suffering from the tear gas.
11 were maimed by tear gas canisters shot at their faces by thugs that
sought to cause bodily harm.
The tyrannical Turkish government is not content with this. It plans
to make it a crime for doctors to treat wounded protesters.
Texas's voter ID law
is disenfranchising
people because of bureaucratic hoops they can't jump through.
Rich people can solve such problems; it's the poor who get blocked.
In the US: call on the US government
to stop to
recording absurd suspicions reported by people made paranoid by "If
you see something, say something."
That campaign should be stopped, because its main effect is to provoke
an inordinate fear of terrorists — inordinate given the real
risk of being harmed by terrorists compared with other real dangers.
Obama's health care law
has improved
US women's access to birth control, but schools often mislead
teenagers about it.
In the US: tell NBC news that its job is
to correct
politicians' lies, not just repeat them.
Everyone: give Yelp a bad review for
supporting ALEC, the business-driven machine for right-wing state
laws in the US.
The new right-wing government of Australia is so beholden to coal
companies that it is rushing illegally
to shut
down a successful initiative that has boosted investment in clean
energy.
Australia's targets for greenhouse gas reduction
are hopelessly
inadequate.
Any target set for 7 years in the future, not accompanied by a
specific implementation plan, is an excuse for doing nothing.
US citizens:
email
your congresscritter to oppose the Monsanto
Protection Act.
The Senate just rejected it, so we have a great chance of winning, but
it isn't automatic.
Sudan's cruel government responded to protests by
shutting
off the Internet and then killing protesters.
A Malaysian artist's works were
seized
because they criticized various politicians.
Many states in the US are
running
out of drugs for executions.
The UK government did a study on
how
to make the public feel good about wars.
Breaking
the link between palm oil and deforestation.
If
We Fear an Iranian Bomb, We Should Back Hassan Rouhani.
Ahmed Ben Ahmed, Tunisian rapper, has been
sentenced
to prison for a song that criticized thugs.
Somalis in Kenya
fear
reprisals for the terrorist attack.
There must be some way for Somalis in Kenya to organize against
al-Shabaab, thus both demonstrating their opposition to terrorism and
helping to defeat al-Shabaab.
Japan's government is rushing a harsh secrecy bill that would
punish
reporters and their sources.
US citizens: call on the US to require all states
to recognize
spousal benefits for same-sex couples involving National Guard
members.
US
citizens: oppose
a hasty plan to allow mining in Oak Flat without public hearings.
The US
spied on the phone calls of the highest Greek officials in
2004-2005.
The US could solve several financial problems at once by having
the post
office become a savings bank too.
The NSA
spied in the 60s on phone calls of Martin Luther King Jr, as well
as other political activists and journalists.
The EU
proposes relaxing
rules designed to make sure pilots don't fall asleep at the wheel,
but the existing rules don't always prevent it.
Facebook
censored an ACLU post about censorship.
This is a further reason why Facebook is the wrong place for your
posting.
The DEA Thinks You Have No Constitutionally Protected Privacy Interest
in Your
Confidential Prescription Records.
We
Live Under a Total Surveillance State in America — Can We
Prevent It from Evolving into a Full-Blown Police State?
Surveillance
devices can
track all the phone calls in an area, even thousands. Some just
get the identifying numbers while others record conversations.
"If you see something, say something" turns out to mean, in practice,
"Help
build a database about anything vaguely suspect about everyone."
Playboy is making legal threats
to shut
down a parody campaign that criticizes it.
US citizens: sign
this
petition to oppose all cuts in food stamps.
The imaginary voices that schizophrenics hear are different in
different cultures — and one study found it is
possible
to influence the voices so that they become gentler.
Time Warner is signing up building superintendents to
rat
on building residents as the price of a cable hookup, instead of
money.
I have a suspicion that cable boxes nowadays snoop on their users.
Nowadays, they talk over the Internet. Any computer that is inside
your home and not yours is a possible snooping point.
An Australian politician from the party that controls the state
proposes
to ban boycott campaigns.
It shows the true colors of the right wing: "All power to the rich".
The UK's Green Party MP faces criminal charges for a
nonviolent
protest.
Perhaps she will be accused of "piracy".
Facebook is designed to get users
addicted
to vanity.
Mines in South Africa will have to pay compensation to
miners
who got lung disease from their work.
This will not only pay for their medical treatment, but compel the
mines to take precautions for the health of other miners in the
future.
Putin says that the Greenpeace activists are
not
pirates after all.
However, he
has
not told the prosecutors not to charge them with piracy.
US citizens:
call
on Attorney General Holder to fight hard against voter suppression
laws.
Everyone:
call
on Utah not to permit strip mining for shale oil in a wilderness
area.
US citizens:
Tell
Obama you support his refusal to bow to Republican threats over
the debt ceiling.
A double-blind study found that
wearing
magnets fails to reduce the pain of arthritis.
The fact that so many people believe the magnets help them testifies
to people's tendency to be misled by cures. I suppose ancient
Egyptians were quite convinced that their magic amulets reduced the
pain of arthritis.
Two FISA court judges separately asked the Department of Justice to
investigate NSA officials for misleading the court. But there was
no
investigation.
I suppose they used their influence to avoid one.
Subcontracting food service to Sodexo cheats students, soldiers, whoever has
to eat it — and
the
public too.
Some shoppers waiting in checkout lines are so
absorbed
with smartphones that they become resistant to manipulation aimed
at provoking impulse buying.
The article insults our intelligence by pretending that we are all
suckers both for marketing and for portable phones. I don't know
about you, but I resist them both pretty well. Nonetheless, I linked
to the article because it has an interesting point about advertising.
Let's pass laws to ban retail stores (and hotels) from using computers
from using sensors to recognize anything about their customers except
that they are shoplifting, and from interfering in any way with
communication to their computers. There is no reason these companies
should be allowed to do whatever they wish to people.
In negotiations about chemical weapons in Syria and possible future
Iranian nuclear weapons, the US must recognize
chemical
weapons in Israel and Egypt, and real Israeli nuclear weapons.
The Israeli army destroyed a
Bedouin
camp; previously it had destroyed the village that they lived in
before 1967.
UK border thugs
interrogated
a Yemeni human rights activist who was coming to give a speech at
a conference. This is apparently because he helps to represent
victims of drone attacks.
The supposed reason for the interrogation was suspicion of terrorism,
but what they actually asked him about were the plans of the British
human rights organization Reprieve that he works for. This is prima
facie evidence that the UK government dishonestly abuses this power.
Although Rouhani refused to talk with Obama at the UN, his speech was a move
towards
future negotiation, which will begin between
foreign ministers.
Putin
threatens
to declare Greenpeace activists guilty of "piracy" and imprison
them for 15 years.
The excuse for this charge, that Russian troops chose to imagine that
the Greenpeace protesters carried a bomb, is ridiculous, but it is
also irrelevant. Under Putin, show trials issue whatever verdict
Putin tells them to.
I expect Putin will try to use the threat to negotiate for some sort
of concession from Greenpeace which would corrupt its spirit for the
long term. That would be a much bigger victory for him than putting
some activists in prison. I hope Greenpeace has the firmness to
refuse any long-term concession.
The Greenpeace protesters were nonviolent, but when a tyrant puts
nonviolent protesters in prison, violent action against the tyrant
ceases to be wrong.
Fazıl Say was retried and again
sentenced
to prison for "blasphemy".
Evil religious tyrants!
Egypt
has banned
the Muslim Brotherhood.
The US
puts drug addicts in prison and offers them nothing to do except take
drugs, for which they get sentenced to more time in prison.
Over 700,000 people were arrested in the US last year
for possession
of marijuana.
Economic
conditions have
made US nuclear plants close, and more may follow.
Cruel right-wing Americans
say people
who get food stamps should get a job. Alas, many of them already
have a job and they can't live on the low pay.
So how
about raising
the minimum wage?
Victims of drone attacks in Pakistan are coming to testify in
Congress, but their lawyer seems to have
been intentionally
blocked from accompanying them. The victims are reluctant to come
without their lawyer.
Obama asked Kerry
to lead
nuclear negotiations with Iran.
This opens the possibility of a negotiated end to Syria's civil war. I
am glad Obama has recognized the US wrong in overthrowing Iran's
democratic government in 1953. I hope this will lead to apologizing.
Playwright pursued
by Lebanese authorities for his play on censorship.
US citizens: call on the "Defense" Department
to change
Navy plans to avoid killing an estimated thousand whales by deafening
them.
Angolan
thugs beat
up and arrested journalists who covered the release of protesters
who had been arrested.
Department of Homeland
Security funding
surveillance on the local level.
Everyone: call on Israel
to free
human rights lawyer Anas Barghouti.
Whistleblower Donald Sachtleben has
been convicted
of giving information to journalists. He was identified through
the seizure of the phone records for 20 staff of the Associated Press.
He was also convicted of possessing "child" pornography, which is
defined to include images of anyone under 18. You shouldn't assume
that having those images is in any way wrong — but even if in
his case it were wrong, it would not justify prosecuting him for
giving information to the public.
Leena Jawabreh writes about
the treatment
she and other Palestinian prisoners encounter in Israeli prisons.
Pakistani
Taliban killed
85 Christians leaving church, saying this it was a reprisal
against US drone attacks.
The drone attacks ought to be stopped, because they kill many innocent
civilians. However, what these fanatics do is no better.
US citizens: phone your senators
to oppose
the Monsanto Protection Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
Merkel
Victory a Blow to Europe Reeling Under Austerity's Thumb.
Planned coal mines in Queensland, Australia, would suck up so much
water that they would
devastate
local agriculture.
Burning the coal would devastate agriculture world-wide, but that
would take more time.
A Palestinian shot an Israeli soldier, so as punishment, Netanyahu
sent
colonists back into a disputed house in Hebron (where Israelis
have
pushed
Palestinians out of important parts of the city).
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot says that that women in her
prison are
forced
to work 17 hours a day and get only 4 hours of sleep.
Microrefuges may enable some cold-adapted plant species to
avoid
extinction due to global heating.
Whether they can hang on depends on how much global heating occurs.
If the Earth heats up by 8C on the average, in the Arctic it will be
more.
A UN agency urges decriminalization of sex work so as to end
transmission
of diseases.
In principle, I see nothing wrong with requiring use of condoms or
requiring that sex workers get regular tests for diseases they might
spread. It is normal to have safety standards on various kinds of
work, including food preparation, for the sake of public health.
How could this do any harm? Only if there are people who desperately
need to do sex work; but that implies the state is failing to take
care of people who are poor and ill.
An EU
diplomat tried
to deliver tents to Palestinians whose homes had been demolished
by Israeli soldiers. More soldiers attacked them, and took away the
tents and the truck they were brought in.
Incredibly, the Israeli government condemns the diplomat for punching
a soldier in the face after they had
thrown
her to the ground.
And they did the same thing again to a group of other diplomats, and
to the Red Cross.
These arrogant bastards think they are entitled to do anything they
like to anyone, then condemn even the slightest resistance.
Here's
what
Gush Shalom has to say about it.
Americans are recognizing that their lives are getting worse and that
government
policies are responsible.
Obama's chosen "trade advisors" continue to tell him that unjust trade
treaties will boost US exports, though the
facts
say otherwise.
They say this because they represent the businesses that want these
treaties, as Obama well knows.
How the treaties affect US exports is a side issue — what's
important is that these treaties give companies
more power
to hurt people.
Users are suing LinkedIn for
surreptitiously
collecting their email address lists for spamming.
LinkedIn can figure out the name to associate with your email address
by finding it
in other people's address lists, where they may have associated it
with your name.
Note that if they get this data from Gmail, then your correspondents
have already told Google to associate that address with your name, and
that's bad too.
Cutting fossil fuel combustion would save
millions
of lives, over the course of the century, from reduction in air
pollution — over and above avoiding global heating disaster.
US citizens:
call
for prosecution of the Halliburton employee that destroyed
evidence about the Big Spill.
This is
not
enough but it is better than not prosecuting him.
The billionaire bailout society, and
how
to get rid of it.
I think that a tax on gross income of the big banks might also help.
The US Green Party
praises
the whistleblowers Manning and Snowden.
The mayor of Chicago apologized for a police unit that
tortured
many suspects to frame them.
Journalist Michael Hastings
said
he was afraid to drive his car, but he did anyway, and promptly
got killed in what looked like a car accident.
A declassified US document says that an h-bomb that fell from a
disintegrating B-52 bomber was
one
switch away from exploding, and that switch could have triggered
accidentally too.
For those who won't run the nonfree Javascript in this page, I have
posted two screenshots:
page
1,
page
2.
The right-wing tax on anyone who gets welfare support and has an
"extra" bedroom is theoretically supposed to make housing more
efficient, but in some cases it
forces
people to move far away from their families and leave their houses
empty.
Working people that vote for a plutocratic party such as the
Conservatives are asking for suffering, but they still don't deserve
it.
A
list
of arguments we can use to overcome the idiotic position of those
who want total surveillance.
The UK government has imposed a
prohibitive
fee to stop women illegally denied their jobs after maternity
leave from defending their rights.
Health workers in Syria are
in
danger from Assad's army.
"Pink
pork" often carries the hepatitis E virus, which can be fatal to
humans.
The Senate's bill to shield journalists has become
a
little closer to adequate.
But it is still
far
short of what is required.
The latest iThings are
a
step back in terms of environmental friendliness and
recyclability.
The UK tried to take over the computers of
Belgium's
national telecommunications infrastructure.
Belgium is supposed to be an ally of the UK. The Belgian government
is now
very
angry.
House Republicans voted to
cut
food stamps drastically, and to
eliminate
funds for health care.
Cleaning workers in the London subways
went
on strike to block fingerprint-checking timeclocks, and defeated
the plan.
Children working on farms in North Carolina have to work for
10
hours a day, without protection from pesticides.
Gangs
kidnap
poor children and teenagers in Delhi, and sell them into slavery
in nearby rural areas.
The thugs' lack of interest suggests to me that they are getting
bribed.
The US uses
"military
cooperation" programs to get around human rights laws and
encourage military coups and militarist regimes in Latin America.
Colombia
and
Honduras
are the clearest examples.
The IPCC will warn governments that
it's getting
too late to save Earth from over 2C of heating.
The other explanations advanced by
denialists have
been refuted.
To have a good chance of avoiding
catastrophe, we
need to fight hard to defeat the denialists.
The anti-sharing industry is trying
to push
search engines into "voluntary agreements" to censor links to sharing
sites.
How
Spain forgets Franco's atrocities.
The Shabaab, Somalian
Islamists, took
over a shopping mall in Nairobi and shot many of the shoppers,
after letting Muslims go.
The "spent
fuel" pool at Fukushima 4 is a time bomb, and how to defuse it is
not clear.
Covering fuel rods with a flammable material strikes me as criminally
negligent.
US citizens: call on
Obama not
to allow drilling in Arctic waters.
The US violates a labor treaty
by denying
farm workers the rights that most workers are entitled to.
This article claims that videos of victims the chemical attack in
Ghouta,
Syria, were
falsified.
I have not seen the videos — that would be a lot of work. So I
have not judged these claims — I only pass them on.
The US mainstream media talked a lot about the chemical weapons treaty
as a reason to attack Syria,
and very
little about the UN charter as a reason not to do it without UN
approval.
I don't judge issues of right and wrong, generally speaking, based on
laws. Making a law against sharing copies of works doesn't make
sharing wrong. Having a treaty against going to war doesn't
necessarily make war wrong. But since war tends to kill lots of
people, it generally is wrong, and only very strong reasons can make
it right, in this comparison points out a weakness in the arguments in
favor.
In another cowardly surrender to the
US, Spain
is considering amendments to criminalize commercially making links to
torrents.
"Naming the Dead" aims
to identify
the people killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan.
The UK government
will destroy
centuries-old forests for the sake of business interests, and uses
legal bullying to get its way.
Nearly half of US jobs could
be eliminated
by computerization in the next two decades.
Textile manufacturing is returning to the US, but it makes little
difference; it
is so automated that it provides few jobs.
The improved efficiency of automation would be good if we all shared
in the benefits. But the plutocrats won't allow that. There will be
no new jobs for most of these Americans; they will be driven into
poverty, and death when they get sick.
Plutocratic politicians will try to prevent the tens of millions of
unemployed from voting, while provoking the other Americans to sneer
at them.
Facebook hopes to use AI
to learn
even more about its useds.
I think the word "users" is misleading in this case: Facebook uses
them more than they use Facebook.
In our computing security, the sky is not falling
— it
s fallen.
The
Poorest Americans are Children and the Poorest Children are Black,
Hispanic and Under Six.
US citizens:
call
on your state legislature to move your state from military
industry to civilian.
Everyone: tell TV "journalist" Chuck Todd that
journalism
does not mean treating Republican lies as the equal of facts.
As the rate of non-bankster crime falls, US states are
bound
by contract to keep the private prisons full.
Here's
more
detail.
Since the
banks
and the banksters are not prosecuted, this policy is ineffective
against the most harmful crimes.
I think privately run prisons should be banned entirely.
Prison guards must be accountable to the state.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau caught JP Morgan cheating
customers and made it pay them back
$300 million, plus a fine.
The fine was not large enough; it should have equaled the restitution.
Opposition newspapers in Venezuela say they are going to be shut down
by a
shortage
of newsprint, which has to be imported, because they are not
allowed to buy dollars to buy it with.
It would wrong to shut down opposition this way, but it may not be
political, because even the government is running into the
paper
shortage. Venezuela has stopped issuing passports because it has
no paper to make them with.
I went to Venezuela in June and observed peculiar shortages. For
instance, there was no butter, though cream cheese was available.
There was no short pasta, but there was spaghetti. I can't understand
what could make it possible to import or make spaghetti but impossible
to import or make penne, but that's how it was.
Why can't all forms of paper be made in Venezuela? It has plenty of
trees and land for tree farms.
Citizens of Cambridge, Mass:
come to the
hearing Sep 26 to oppose increased surveillance on Cambridge
streets.
In the US:
tell
the Russian ambassador you demand release of the Greenpeace
activists and their ship, and an end to drilling in Arctic waters.
Putting
Leash on World's Private Armies No Easy Task.
A former minister in the Taliban's government
says
that Mullah Omar wants to negotiate peace, but is unable to say so
because the threat of assassination by drone has forced him into
hiding and isolation, and a few extremists issue statements in Omar's
name.
It might be partly true, but there is a part I find implausible. Omar
surely sees the statements that are issued in his name, and if he
found them to be lies, he would do something to change the situation.
After four years of squeezing by the banksters, Greece is on the brink
of a
military
coup, a civil war, or a revolution.
This is what Naomi Klein describes as "shock capitalism" at work.
A mass shooting in Chicago used a
high-capacity
magazine.
Making these magazines hard to get would have hindered it.
The EPA has proposed
limits
for CO2 pollution for new fossil-fuel power plants.
New coal-burning plants will have to use carbon capture. It will be
difficult to do that at the scale required to make a difference.
I wonder whether the rules count greenhouse gas emissions from
extraction or the fuel. This is important because fracked gas
involves
substantial
carbon emissions, and
leaks
methane.
The argument that this won't do any good while India and China
increase their emissions is fallacious. The US (like every country)
needs to set an example to convince other countries to do more.
As for putting coal miners out of work, that's simply necessary in
order to use less coal. The mining companies, by using mountaintop
removal, put far more miners out of work.
The Arctic Ocean is still
on
track to have no ice in the summer, in a few decades.
The decrease in sea ice is harmful not only to species such as polar
bears and seals, but especially because it increases the amount of
sunlight that is absorbed and thus advances heating even further.
14 UK thugs face charges of
"serious
perversion of the course of justice".
US Republicans demonstrated their hostility to science by
blocking
a vote on a US science laureate.
Two French thugs face prosecution for chasing two youths who then got
electrocuted.
The charges are that the thugs failed to aid the youths who were
hiding in an electric substation. Maybe the thugs were innocent of
this. What strikes me as culpable is that they chased those youths
merely because they ran away when they saw a thug van coming. People
in groups that are the object of prejudice have good reason to fear
thugs regardless of whether they have done anything wrong.
Downsizing the US military and
boosting
spending on people's real needs.
The WHO commissioned a report about the health dangers of dirty
depleted uranium in 2001, but has never published it. The report's
main
author alleged
that the WHO suppressed the report due to political pressure.
The privilege given to derivatives in US bankruptcy
law can
force companies into bankruptcy when they might have avoided it.
There is a possibility this could cause another crash.
The California law requiring companies to verify working conditions in
their subcontractors has had
only limited
effect.
It turns out that sweatshops and slavery are not occasional
"excesses", but rather the basis of the globalized system of
outsourced production.
Argentina has asked
for extradition
of Spanish fascist torturers.
Spanish friends have told me that it is hard to draw attention to the
crimes of Franco's dictatorship (even if it is not a matter of
prosecuting them) because some of his lieutenants still have political
or military power.
There is a plan to exclude problem customers from clubs in Sydney
by tracking
everyone that enters.
The goal might be ok, if people are put on the exclusion list by court
order. The proposed means are intolerable, and unnecessary. The
system could be set up so it doesn't record seeing anyone who is not
on the list.
Especially laughable is the idea that the system is ok because
only the state will see the personal data that the system
collects.
The right-wing government in Australia
has abolished
the Climate Commission, to deny the public honest information
about the danger of its plans to increase coal exports.
Everyone:
send a message of
support for the Greenpeace activists that have been captured by
Russian troops.
Rarely cited experiments from the 70s found that
rats
given plenty of space and things to do did not get addicted to
morphine as rats in small cages do.
Experiments on rats don't prove anything about humans, but there are
results about humans that suggest similar conclusions.
80 to 90%
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
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This suggests that the pressure and pain of being poor in modern society, made worse by the impoverishment of plutocratic rule, are a big factor in the heavy use of narcotics.
The ACLU has obtained files showing that US "fusion centers" keep records on people for the flimsiest of reasons, such as being middle-eastern, or taking photos on the street.
Russian soldiers have boarded a Greenpeace ship protesting oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
This drilling risks an oil spill that would poison the coast and take decades or centuries to dissipate.
Naturally, the Russians said the Greenpeace protesters were terrorist suspects.
The US also treats protesters as terrorist suspects.
Islamists in Syria are now occasionally fighting and defeating the non-Islamist enemies of Assad.
Republicans threaten again to shut down the US government if they can't kill Obama's health care plan.
US citizens: Call on EPA administrator Gina McCarthy and Obama to reopen the investigations into environmental damage from fracking.
The funded campaign to deny global heating is spreading lies pre-emptively, to undermine the coming IPCC report.
It is erroneous to call these denialists "skeptics", because they cling stubbornly to their pre-chosen conclusion in the teeth of the facts. Many of them do this because they are paid to.
Russia's official in charge of protecting children wants to ban sex education and expose them to AIDS.
Defending the legality of sex-selective abortion.
An underground newspaper dares challenge the censorship of Eritrea, where all private newspapers are banned.
After three months of penalizing poor Britons (mostly disabled) who live in apartments bigger than the state considers they "really need", half of those families are in debt.
They can't move to smaller apartments anyway, because those are not available.
Studies measuring Arctic sea ice for in the past few thousands of years find it was never, during that period, as little as it is now.
The relentless destruction of sharks by humans damages coral reefs too, indirectly.
As much as 40% of the fruit and vegetables in the UK is wasted because it is "ugly".
They could be required to give it to the poor.
UK undercover thug Peter Francis wants to testify about thug wrongdoing, but faces the threat of prosecution if he does.
Libya remains divided into fractious local enclaves.
Egypt is convulsed with xenophobia, and the military regime seems to promote it.
US phone companies are citing general policies of secrecy rather than confronting their failure to oppose PAT RIOT Act collection of phone call records.
People find all sorts of excuses to sneer at people who get welfare payments, often they are based on questionable suppositions.
Right-wing media encourage people to blame real or imaginary "welfare cheats" to distract people from the big cheaters: rich people that pay to change laws so they can leave the rest with an ever-shrinking fraction of society's wealth.
10% fewer births are being recorded in Greece now than 4 years ago.
To some extent, this is because poor women can't afford the fee for registering a birth. How self-defeating it is for a country to charge for that! To some extent, the lack of prenatal care causes miscarriages. To some extent, people are deciding not to have children.
It is generally good when people have fewer children, but inducing that decision by imposing general poverty is horrible.
Some "slow" forms of greenhouse gas feedback, disregarded in IPCC models, could have a substantial impact during this century. The IPCC's worst case (continuing to increase fossil fuel usage as now) could lead to 8C of heating instead of 6C, by 2100.
Obama has taken the side of the vulture capitalists against Argentina and all indebted countries.
The sequester is mainly hurting non-rich Americans, and will continue to do so until it is eliminated.
The sequester was a bipartisan initiative. So much for the supposed virtue of bipartisanship.
Overfishing is reducing the numbers of sea bass; protection is urgent.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation challenges the US government to promise it won't digitally search, subpoena or arrest journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras if they return to the US.
Greek fascists murdered a well-known Greek rapper.
Countries with more guns have more gun deaths.
This demonstrates that guns don't make people safe from violence.
The Israeli army closed off a region of Palestine, blocking all
travel, for several days and
ordered
100 families to leave their homes.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Executives whose companies caused the financial crisis are doing very well.
Limited diets based on diet fads can cause real disease. Some parents impose these on their children.
Milgram's famous experiment, claimed to show most people would obey orders to punish another person horribly, may not have been reliable.
The proper response to doubts about the validity of those results is to try to reproduce them, and to do other related experiments. It is a shame that the APA has declared them unethical. Maybe this can be done in some other country.
The FBI makes a practice of asking companies to put back doors in proprietary software.
In Guantanamo, visiting journalists are brought on tours of show-cells, the guards say that force-feeding is voluntary, prisoners are called "detainees", and even sketches of them are forbidding.
I see more Orwell than Kafka in this. It is the most horrible evil, disguised with all the ability of the modern PR industry.
Released government documents show that the US uses "border protection" as an excuse to search people's laptops when it wants to investigate them for other reasons but has no legal grounds.
A Colombian radio journalist who attacked corruption was assassinated.
Reporters Without Borders has criticized the gag order placed on Barrett Brown.
The main charges against Brown are for his journalistic activity: posting a link to a web site where data obtained from Stratfor had been published.
"Holy water" in many sites in Austria
is contaminated
with bacteria and excrement.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
In other words, it's not wholly water.
This year's Arctic ice minimum is not as low as in 2012; it is back to the 2009 level. Nonetheless, the last 7 years have all shown less ice than ever before them, reflecting the long-term trend that the ice is gradually disappearing due to global heating.
The Papuan hosts of the Freedom Flotilla have been threatened by the Indonesian military.
Palestinians in Jenin say Israeli
soldiers shot
a sleeping Palestinian in cold blood.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: ask Obama to appoint Janet Yellen as head of the Federal Reserve.
Senator Warren supports her.
No US phone company has tried to resist orders for massive collection of phone call records.
The Palestinian village of Beitin has been economically wiped out by barriers that make it accessible only by a roundabout route.
It's an indirect consequence of Israeli colonies established in the vicinity.
Larry Summers' refrain, as an official, was "What would Goldman say?" By proposing to appoint him, Obama shows he was listening to Goldman Sachs.
The Israeli supreme court gave some Palestinians their confiscated land back, after the colony built on it was officially eliminated. But some colonists still occupy the site.
The Colorado floods may spread pollution from oil wells and fracking wells.
Aaron Alexis had no difficulty buying a gun and getting a "concealed carry" permit in Texas.
The ACLU says that the FBI has become an unconstitutional surveillance machine after stretching its powers on many dimensions.
The UN inspectors affirm that chemical weapons were used in Syria. An expert from Human Rights Watch says they could only have been used by Assad's men.
Gemma O'Doherty, a leading Irish investigative journalist, was fired, apparently because her reporting made some important people uncomfortable.
A censorship filter imposed by court order on isoHunt.com blocks lots of authorized redistribution too.
Obama has waived legal requirements in order to arm Syrian rebels.
To be fair, if a country's government supports terrorism, that is no rational reason not to arm rebels against that government. What matters in that case is whether said rebels are connected with terrorism — but these are!
The head of the doctors that treated the victims of the navy yard shooting please with Americans to put her trauma center "out of business" — with gun control.
In Australia, an Uphill Battle to Rein in the Power of Coal.
The NSA spies on credit card payments outside the US.
This is in violation of an agreement made between the US and the EU.
Australia's policy of towing boats of refugees back to their point of origin will be brought to the UN Human Rights Council. For refugees that are in fact fleeing persecution, it means delivering them back to the persecutors.
An investigation reports that North Korea is guilty
of systematic
execution and torture of prisoners.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
I am all in favor of taking action against this, but let's not limit it to North Korea. The US systematically executes and tortures prisoners too.
The DEA has rehired a highly paid informant who confessed to perjury in previous operations.
A US judge ruled that the TSA is allowed to lie in response to FOIA requests.
A killer pleads self-defense, arguing that the US government has stretched the meaning of "imminent threat" for everyone.
The Occupy protests were crushed, but their impact continues.
I applaud Bill Blasio for saying that he as mayor would not have shut down Occupy Wall Street, but the right to protest must not depend on sympathy from the officials of the day. The Plutocratic Party used the protest camps to damage the right to protest in the US. Now we must demand laws to restore it.
After two weeks, protests in Romania against a proposed gold mine are getting even stronger.
US citizens: Phone your congresscritter to oppose bills such as HR 3102 that would cut food stamps.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose renewal of the Monsanto Protection Act. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your senators and congresscritter saying to expand Social Security, not cut it.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on Obama to negotiate with Rouhani.
In the US:
call
on WGBH to remove David Koch from its board of directors.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Resistance to antibiotics kills 37,000 Americans per year.
That's almost as many as automobile accidents. The loss of years of life due to antibiotics is going to be less, since many victims are old, while the victims of car accidents tend to be young. Still, it is a lot of people. Both of them dwarf the effects of terrorism.
So when are we going to ban the foolish practices that generate antibiotic resistance? For instance, regularly giving antibiotics to farm animals.
A WTO judge who ruled against the US Clean Air Act said that almost any law to reduce global heating can be challenged in the WTO.
Greenpeace reports on the
organized
and heavily funded denial of global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The Taliban are systematically killing Afghan policewomen. The government doesn't seem to be trying hard to protect them.
We have won a major victory over the Pebble Mine plan, but it isn't dead yet.
The campaign against Larry Summers succeeded.
The 5 stages of global heating denial, starting with "it's not happening" and ending with "it's too late to stop it."
The focus of the denial is not on global heating itself, but rather against taking action to stop it. That's probably because the activity gets funding and media platforms thanks to the fossil fuel companies, and their goal is to keep on selling fossil fuels as fast as possible regardless of the consequences.
Government scientists are protesting across Canada against the ban on talking publicly about their work.
In Gabon, people are regularly killed or mutilated to get body parts to use in rituals.
In Ghana, people are accused of witchcraft based on other people's dreams, and driven out of their homes.
Germany will allow registration of a baby's sex as indeterminate.
US citizens: stand up for credit unions — the banksters want to wipe them out.
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service to hold more public hearings about the plan to end protection for wolves.
Everyone: call on McDonald's to pay workers a living wage.
The NSA is using fake HTTPS security certificates to masquerade as Google servers in a man-in-the-middle attack.
Texas has restricted use of photography drones by citizens, but left it
wide
open for the state.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Texas set up a phony "conservation plan" for the dunes sagebrush lizard, which consists of letting oil companies lie about ongoing threats.
Egyptian Islamists took control of a remote town and carried out repression against Christians.
A teenager who posted a fantasy video of shooting his classmates
faces
charges of "terrorism".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Fukushima radioisotopes leaking into the ocean: how significant?
Caesium-137 from the Fukushima meltdowns can make fish in the region near Fukushima dangerous to eat, but when it disperses into the larger ocean, it is diluted to insignificance. The total amount is trivial beside the amounts released by nuclear weapons tests and previous accidents.
Strontium-90 is potentially worse. It accumulated in bones, including fish bones. It could make small fish such as sardines, commonly eaten with the bones, dangerous to eat.
I have found no information on the level of strontium-90 in the ocean off Fukushima or in fish there.
Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons.
Force-feeding hunger strikers is torture too.
AT&T threatens to cut off ISP services to people if they are accused of forbidden sharing.
It is a shame that this article repeats the propaganda term "pirate" for people who share copies.
E-Z Pass toll payment RFIDs get read at lots of places other than toll booths, for a scheme to measure traffic flow.
Ironically, the readers in this scheme are (according to the reports) designed not to save any personal data — an example for all digital systems (assuming the reports are telling the truth). The invasion of privacy from E-Z Pass comes when it is used to pay tolls. The information about people's movements that this records is available not only to the government but to anyone that wants to sue.
Although Amy Webb intended not to post any photos of her daughter, she made the mistake of using SaaSS to edit photos, and they eventually leaked out.
The lesson is, don't use SaaSS to do your computing tasks (such as photo editing).
Reporter Domenico Quirico describes being the hostage of Islamist bandits in Syria.
Obama has accepted Bush's legacy of war and made it his own.
Richmond, California, has approved its plan to use eminent domain to seize homes with "underwater" mortgages.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is on the wrong side. Obama is in charge of that, and he could reverse the policy. Perhaps a citizens' campaign could make him do so.
The rich in the US have taken a bigger share than ever before.
In the US: call on the CEOs of Home Depot and Lowes stores to stop selling neonicotinoid pesticides, and plants that have been treated with them.
There is a revolving door for staff between US government propaganda agencies and corporate media that repeat the propaganda.
The record-breaking flood in Boulder is in line with what is expected from global heating. The prediction is that the average level of rain will decrease, but that it will also occur in bigger bursts (which would further decrease the effective availability of water for agriculture).
Winter nights in Norway and Sweden are warmer by 2C than they were 60 years ago.
Global heating will upset the balance of algae in the ocean, promoting cyanobacteria.
Pakistan's censorship now extends to a ban on phone chat for men and women to meet.
The European Commission has modified its draft Internet regulations to
weaken
network neutrality.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Bill Maher: The US: World's Policeman Or Schoolyard Bully?
A school revoked an art history assignment because students restaged a performance that included walking on a US flag.
I side with the courts that have insisted on respecting the freedom to do this. The freedom to condemn the US is part of the American ideals that I love.
The US and Russia have agreed on a deal to take control of Syria's chemical weapons stocks.
A lot of things could still go wrong.
US nuclear weapons are vulnerable to being set off by collisions or fire, which means they could explode in the base where they are kept.
Chomsky: Instead of "Illegal" Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter not to block the Interior department from regulating fracking.
US citizens: call for network neutrality to preserve what is good about the Internet.
Everyone:
pressure
Texas not to put creationism into science textbooks.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone:
call
on the Washington, DC, city council to override the mayor's veto
of the bill requiring large companies to pay higher wages.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
The sequester has cut the
rental
assistance that enables some poor US families to have a place to
live.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
In Thailand, anyone could get you jailed by claiming that you insulted the king in a private conversation.
Even when applied to public statements, this law is fundamentally unjust.
A study predicts how much US workers' incomes would decline due to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The treaty's proponents claim it will make tiny increase in the US GDP, but the loss for workers as their wages are transferred to the rich would more than wipe that out.
The article uses an iThing as a standard of contribution to the GDP. This demonstrates how the GDP is a misleading measure of benefit: it does not count the oppression of the iThings.
The US-Korea "free trade" treaty has worked out badly for the US.
Considered in non-nationalist terms, however, a bigger wrong is that it benefits the rich in both countries while cutting the incomes of everyone else. And the even worse wrong is the way it attacks democracy.
A mob of Greek fascists attacked Communists who were handing out papers, and left them gravely injured.
The fascists seem to be trying to terrorizing various "enemies" in order to look strong. The thugs generally support them by letting them get away with it.
A FISA court ruling has moved the ACLU closer to winning release of various documents about surveillance, and grudgingly credited Snowden with launching necessary debate about the issue.
A survey found people are affected in many parts of Asia by the effects of global heating.
The anti-worker right-wing Polish ruling party has to love Solidarity, which helped bring down the Soviet empire, but finds it embarrassing that Solidarity is a real union and defends workers' rights today.
To make drugs safer, teach kids how to use them safely.
It would also help to legalize and regulate their sale, so that they are not unpredictable in strength, mixed with poison, etc.
Juan Garces, who organized pressure on Chilean dictator Pinochet
from outside Chile, says that the US today uses
methods of
oppression that resemble those of Pinochet.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to preserve the Lifeline program that allows millions of
poor Americans to have telephone service.
The UN warns poor countries to
stop
focusing on competing to export to the less-poor countries.
Greenpeace reports on the
organization,
history and methods of the funded denial of global heating.
International
cartoon exhibition shut down by Turkish authorities.
The
Demise of Unions [in the US] and Why We Need to Revive Them.
Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam
are attacking
Internet freedom.
Nguyen Bac Truyen told FIDH about
how Vietnamese
thugs attack bloggers.
How the NSA uses a weakness in its surveillance schemes as
an excuse
to keep more data about more people.
Obama's insider panel which will supposedly consider changes in NSA
surveillance held
its first meeting.
It did not even broach the subject of limiting surveillance.
The FCC's failure to declare ISPs "common
carriers" may
undermine its weak network neutrality policy.
IANAL, but I suspect that this failure is also what makes possible the
deal that major ISPs made with the copyright industry to punish their
customers on mere accusation.
Using fingerprints as passwords could have a devastating legal
byproduct in the
US: people
could be required to use their fingers to unlock their data.
This is because the fifth amendment, which forbids requiring people to
incriminate themselves, does not apply to biometrics.
In Mauritania, the blacks were traditionally slaves of the Arabs.
Theoretically this has stopped,
but in
practice it continues.
Washington DC's
mayor vetoed
the bill to make large companies pay a higher minimum wage.
DC workers will suffer twice from this decision: they won't get a
raise, and some will lose their jobs. Walmart brings a decrease in
jobs because it replaces other stores that employ more people.
Furthermore, most of its employees are temps and get no benefits.
South Africa's
president vetoed
a dangerous secrecy bill.
UK thugs interfere with journalism
by accusing
unarmed journalists of "intimidating" men with rifles.
The journalist in question was trying to report on the badger cull. I
have no opinion about the badger cull. I don't know whether the cull
will help prevent bovine tuberculosis (its stated purpose), but it
clearly won't drive badgers or any other species extinct.
I have no special feeling about badgers, but I smell a rat when thugs
make false accusations against journalists.
Analyzing Putin's
article: insults
to Obama, presented as support.
Some "open source" supporters used to offer me similar "support".
Most of Putin's points, as described in this article, are valid.
Ironically, its points against him are valid too; Putin is a bigger
enemy of democracy than Obama. But that doesn't make his points
wrong.
If only the US and Obama were a good example to contrast such tyrants
with.
Officials responsible for the Hillsborough disaster may
be prosecuted
for manslaughter.
I think it is even more important to prosecute the thugs that covered
up their wrongs by falsely accusing the spectators. That was a
separate act, and a worse one in my opinion. Whoever were responsible
for the conditions that resulted in the death of spectators surely did
not intend to kill; their misdeed was one of negligence. By contrast,
those who carried out the cover-up acted with full knowledge and
intent.
The non-prosecution of the killers of Baba Mousa, and those who helped
cover them up, shows that
the army
can't be trusted to investigate war criminals.
The principal charges against Barrett Brown
are meant
to attack the whole Internet.
The article quotes someone using the word "hacking" to mean "breaking
security". Please don't use the word that way — it is unfair to
us hackers. Hacking is playful cleverness. When you're talking about
breaking security, whether you think it is right or wrong in the given
instance, please call it "cracking".
US citizens:
phone
the White House and demand Obama reverse the USDA's plans to let
chicken factories inspect their own chickens.
To trust these companies is as silly as trusting teenage delinquents
with an attitude.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
Oxfam warns that EU austerity will
"entrench
poverty for a generation".
But it won't end with this generation, because by the 2025 global
heating will cause much bigger losses.
The NSA disobeyed the FISA court's requirements
for
3 years.
It took 3 years for the court to find out, because the NSA kept it
secret.
A former Microsoft employee says the FBI asked him to put a back door
in a Microsoft local encryption program, and he
refused.
We cannot verify whether his successor was more compliant.
We can't
trust proprietary software because we can't tell whether it is
malicious. Some proprietary programs are malicious, and some are not,
but we usually can't tell which is which. (The exception is when we
find out some program is malicious.)
UK conservatives say that if you're poor and can't afford food, it's
your own fault. Look at
some
examples.
The EU approved a
very
weak biofuels bill.
UK thugs altered the statements of witnesses to the
Hillsborough
disaster. This was to cover up their own responsibility.
It's still winter in Australia, but bush fires have already started
because winter has been
unusually
warm.
US citizens:
call
on your senators to reject any amendments to weaken the
Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency and antipollution bill.
US citizens:
call
on your senators to support legislation to stop the US government
from interfering in state-legal marijuana use.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
oppose
warrantless surveillance at the state level.
Egypt and Israel are now
working
together to besiege Gaza, leading to many shortages.
Hamas, which won the last Palestinian election that could be held, has
imposed some
oppressive
policies in Gaza, but starving people and blocking them from
traveling for education or medical care is not going to weaken Hamas.
The Indonesian forestry minister wants Harrison Ford deported for
raising
embarrassing questions in an interview.
Enforcing forestry laws in Indonesia is surely quite complicated. So
many rich companies that object, so many bribes one might have to
return.
Exposing
falsehoods and
manipulation in Susan Rice's speech trying to build support for
bombing Syria.
Dennis Kucinich exposes other
manipulative
war propaganda.
Although cameras showed that protester Bassem Abu Rahmeh was
hit
by a tear gas canister, Israel decided there is "no evidence" for
any action against his killer.
Things like this don't happen by accident. Soldiers are trained to
aim their tear gas weapons at the ground, not at people; when the
canisters hit people, that's not a minor error but gross misconduct.
Deadly misconduct, in this case. The army investigators know that and
choose repeatedly to disregard it.
A former US marine, imprisoned as a spy in Iran, says in a letter that
he was
tortured
into making a false confession.
The horrible thing, for an American, is that the US
often
does that to prisoners.
The NRA
removed
gun-control state senators through a referendum in Colorado.
American reporter Charles Horman was killed by Pinochet's men shortly
after the US-backed September 11 coup in Chile. Horman he had
witnessed
the involvement of US ships and men in the coup.
Since only US officers knew this, they must have played a role in his
execution too.
After coup, the right-wing UK government infiltrated anti-Pinochet
solidarity groups and tried to
manipulate
the media in favor of Pinochet.
Thousands
Attend Anti-War Vigils in 165 Cities, Urge Congress to Oppose Syria
Strikes.
The US-imposed "peace talks" between Israel and Palestine are a
sham, as
predicted;
a smokescreen for Israel to steal more land in Palestine.
Israel's defense minister
ridiculed
the talks.
UK
thugs arrested
hundreds of peaceful anti-fascist protesters on tiny pretexts,
demonstrating their intention to make peaceful protest impossible.
A plan
to disguise
spy drones as birds of prey.
This should be forbidden by treaty, as it will lead soldiers to shoot
down real birds of prey, which may be endangered.
On
the implications
of the Johns Hopkins censorship scandal, in which the university
ordered Matthew Green to delete his blog post from the university
server or face legal action.
Kerry and the US
have embraced
Putin's proposal of putting Assad's chemical weapons under
international control.
Kerry mentioned the idea, not as a suggestion, but as a hoop that
surely Assad would not jump through. Putin then proposed it for real.
(I wanted to say he made it a "serious proposal", but the pun seems
distracting.)
Obama's insistence on attacking created the situation where this
proposal could be supported by the Security Council. But I see no
sign that Obama aimed for this result. It was a fluke.
If Congress had not resisted Obama's demand for
war, he
would have attacked already and this diplomatic solution would not
have been considered.
Obama deserves a little praise for being willing to switch from war to
diplomacy when diplomacy shows a good chance of success. But he and
his supporters are trying
to badmouth
the plan even while accepting it.
Naomi Klein explains how some environmental groups responded to
Reagan's attack
by "partnering"
with companies, and ended up becoming their tools.
George Monbiot: Obama's rogue
state tramples
over every law it demands others uphold.
Grenada has passed a law making it a
crime
to offend anyone on the Internet.
If you have children, protect their digital privacy:
don't
post any photos of them on Internet sites.
Everyone:
Call
on Indonesia not to demand that high school students pass
"virginity tests" or be excluded from school.
In the US:
participate in a protest on Sep
21 against the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
In a survey, nearly 25% of men in some Asian countries, including
China and Indonesia,
said
they have committed rape. This includes rape of a spouse.
Nearly
25% of Indian men also say they have committed rape.
Many girls of Asian origin in the UK are raped, and keep it secret
because their
relatives
would punish them if they knew. Sometimes relatives force them
into an unwanted marriage to get them out of the family.
The condemnation of females who have sex, even involuntarily, reflects
the patriarchal idea of females as valuable property of the family,
rather then as persons who matter for their own sake.
Human Rights Watch reports
evidence
that Assad's army fired rockets with chemical weapons.
I'm linking to
Naomi
Klein's speech again to urge you to read it. It is brilliant.
Klein identifies the "extractivist" regime that oppresses us, and
shows how all the traditional battles that progressives fight tie
together with the fight against global heating.
Commercial baby foods are full of sugar and
low
on other nutrients.
Cigarette butts left on the beach are
toxic
to wildlife.
The NSA and GCHQ, apparently in parallel, have named surveillance
programs after
battles
in the civil war.
Specifically, they are named after the first battle in the American
civil war, and the first battle in the English civil war.
Code names for secret activities are usually chosen to be meaningless.
For them to be chosen for a meaning, in the spy agencies of two
countries, is definitely significant.
Others interpreted this as declaring war on the people. In other
ways, such as in the prosecution of Chelsea (née Bradley)
Manning, that's what the Obama regime seems to have done. However,
the meaning I see in these names is that one part of the country is
fighting another.
A strange attitude, given these agencies are supposed to be defending
the country against foreign threats.
Johns Hopkins ordered a teacher to delete a
blog
post speculating about what the NSA might be able to do in the
area of decryption.
Tens of
thousands protested in Mexico City to oppose the president's tax
plans.
I support parts of this plan, including making gasoline more
expensive. Taxing the middle class more is not necessarily bad,
but they should focus on taxing the rich more.
However, allowing foreign investment in oil is very bad.
Thousands
of Romanians have been protesting for a week against a planned
gold mine that could poison them.
They convinced the prime minister to
cancel
the plan.
Note how the mining company threatens to use trade treaties to attack
Romania. These treaties are
tools
of plutocrats and must be abolished.
The opposition in Cambodia accuses the government of
rigging
the latest election.
China has
arrested
hundreds of people recently for statements on the Internet.
20,000
protested in Berlin against massive surveillance.
Putin proposes to insist
that Assad
hand over all chemical weapons to "international control".
This would deal with the problem, if it works. And if it doesn't
work, all the other responses that are available now would still be
available. So why is Kerry trying to talk it down? The reason,
whatever it is, can't be good.
If Obama does accept this, his war-talk will have had a good result by
getting Putin to agree to this.
China plans a
tremendous increase
in coal-fired electric generation, but a lack of available water
might stop it.
That's good, because this coal-burning would cause global disaster.
Snowden files show that
the NSA
is spying on the Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras.
This is scandalous because it is clearly meant for commercial
advantage, not for defending the US against attack.
Many products such as facial cleansers contain plastic microbeads.
After
use, they
end up in waterways and harm various forms of life.
I don't think they degrade in any short time.
Citizens of Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Ohio,
Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Minnesota and
Wisconsin: remind
your progressive senators that attacking Syria is not progressive.
About 500 Americans die per year due to
the unpleasantness
of TSA airport security.
US citizens: call on Obama to have the EPA pressure chemical plants
to convert
to safer processes that won't explode.
German intelligence reports say the chemical attacks in Syria were
made
by Assad's army but without his approval.
We must not put much confidence in these reports, nor in the
vague
reports from the Obama regime, nor in the
reports
cited by Thomas Drake & friends saying that rebels are
responsible. We are not really in a position to know.
Many Tor nodes are still using 1000-bit keys that the NSA can
very
likely crack.
John Gilmore, a GNU developer, describes the
NSA
meddling he observed in the IPSEC standardization process and the
cell phone encryption spec design.
2013 might not set a new record in loss of Arctic sea ice, because the
process is not steady; but it is
continuing.
The NSA
can
tap data in smart phones, including iPhones, Android, and
BlackBerry.
While there is not much detail here, the fact that BlackBerry was
temporarily not accessible suggests that this is not done using the
universal back door that nearly all portable phones have. It may
involve exploiting various bugs.
Once again, the Afghan government and locals say a bomb killed mostly
civilians, while
NATO says
it killed only enemy fighters.
Civilian casualties are inevitable in a war. You can try to avoid
them but it is impossible to succeed completely. Deciding to fight a
war implies accepting these casualties. Sometimes that is justified,
but the reason needs to be very strong.
The Taliban
kill a
lot more civilians than NATO does, but the Afghan people don't
resent it as much. Either they support the Taliban at some level, or
they are not strongly motivated to fight them. As long as that is the
case, defeating the Taliban militarily is almost impossible.
The UK
officially
approves of pre-emptively arresting suspected protesters.
The arrests were made on
dishonest
pretexts.
Phone your elected representatives via 1-STOP-323-NSA and say you
want them to stop the government from snooping on us.
Phillip Morris has hired
160
people to lobby to delay and thus kill regulation of tobacco
marketing.
Morsi will face charges on the crime of
"insulting
the judiciary".
To make it a crime to insult someone — no matter who! —
is in itself injustice.
However, jailing journalists is even worse.
A prize-winning Egyptian journalist has been
arrested
for "publishing false information".
The jailing of Abu-Deraa shows there is every reason to
distrust what the Egyptian government says about its attacks in the
Sinai, just as we distrust what the US says about drone attacks in
Pakistan. There may be some real Islamist terrorists there, but that
doesn't mean the government's story is true. We can't be sure that
the shells allegedly found on railroad tracks really existed. If they
did, they might have been planted by the army to be "found".
Meanwhile, this article also shows that Egypt is now joining Israel to
besiege Gaza.
The US government deficit is now
back to
normal levels, which is bad since what we need now is deficit
spending to get people back to work.
Rep. Grayson says the US government has shown him
nothing
that ties chemical attacks in Syria to Assad's men.
Kerry and McCain are citing an "expert" who is a
paid lobbyist
for the anti-Assad forces, and connected with a right-wing think
tank that generally wants military escalation.
What Obama and Kerry say now is "just trust me", but former US
intelligence professionals say they are misleading us.
Here's
why.
I will trust Thomas Drake,
a
heroic whistleblower, over Obama or Kerry
on anything at any time.
In the US, it's
easier
to buy an assault weapon than to vote.
Prize-winning Swiss journalist Ludovic Rocchi has been
arrested
for writing about plagiarism in a Swiss university.
Independent of the facts of this case, for "defamation" to be a crime
is injustice in itself.
The Lord's Resistance Army is
killing
elephants for ivory.
It used to
kidnap
children and conscript them.
Public
Radio Journalists in Tunisia Go on Strike to Protest Political
Interference.
Tunisian rappers were
sentenced
to prison for a song that criticized the thugs. Before arresting
them, the thugs beat them up. Whatever the criticism was, the thugs
probably deserve it.
Snowden's disclosures underscore the importance of correcting some
flaws in the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act, even though it is not
enough to make email respect our privacy.
Poor people lack more than money — they lack bandwidth to
confront all the stressful problems of their lives, and that
leads
systematically to bad thinking.
The US has
failed to
show valid arguments to conclude that attacking Syria is
"necessary" to avoid a worse evil.
If "big data" surveillance records become available to everyone,
many
people will misuse them much as the US government does now.
When trafficked children in the UK are "rescued", they
often
run away with their slavemasters within a couple of days.
It seems to be because they don't think they are safe once "rescued".
Some of them experience being jailed — not likely to make them
feel the state will protect them.
Rush Holt has proposed a bill to
forbid
the NSA to introduce back doors into encryption systems.
It is a good first step, but it must apply to all parts of the
government and their contractors. If it applies only to the NSA, the
activity will be shifted elsewhere.
Glenn Greenwald: One big problem the NSA and US government generally
have had since our reporting began is that
their
defenses offered in response to each individual story are quickly
proven to be false by the next story, which just further
undermines their credibility around the world.
An
Egyptian labor lawyer was arrested and released.
Other liberals suspect this was a trial balloon to gauge public
support for imprisoning activists.
A man in Kentucky is likely to
be charged
with murder, after he shot his wife at her request. She couldn't
bear the pain of terminal cancer any longer.
I wish she could have asked for a gentler sort of death, but since the
state forbade her that, I think he was right to grant her request.
This article talks
about Syrian
rebels that were attacked with poison gas.
Here's a suggestion: the US should give the Syrian rebels plenty of
gas masks and systems to detect poison gas.
If Assad's men are using poison gas, this will thwart them somewhat.
If they aren't using poison gas, this will do nothing.
The US
destabilized Syria and Iraq starting in the 1940s, which led to
the dictatorships of Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad.
The article links to a number of things (videos?) and encourages you
to enable JavaScript and load Flash Player in order to view them. I
hope you know better than to do either of those things!
Is there any way to see the videos without doing that?
27
states are doing face recognition using the data base of drivers
licenses and similar state IDs.
Thus, the march of laws requiring state IDs for more and more
activities — boarding a flight, opening a bank account, buying
sleeping pills and pain killers — is, in effect, pressure to
subject people to face recognition.
US citizens: call on OHSA
to inspect the Texas
chemical factories that refused fire inspections.
The
Wealthy "Make Mistakes", the Poor Go to Jail.
The government of
Azerbaijan threatens and
jails journalists and dissidents, like many others. What's
unusual is that it gave apartments to 150 journalists to buy their
favorable reporting.
Fiji's government is planning a constitution
that doesn't
uphold human rights.
Experts
Warn NSA Has Compromised the Entirety of Internet.
In my view, corporate data-collection on users, and data retention by
ISPs and phone companies, and deep packet inspection encouraged by the
copyright industry, took big steps to compromise the Internet.
Everyone: call on major Internet companies
to demand
a full public investigation of US Internet surveillance.
Everyone: tell
Gerber not to allow GMO apples in baby food.
Naomi
Klein proposes a
new agenda for the left, based on stopping global heating, and
fighting all the other abuses that interfere with doing so.
The UN's climate study says we
have little
time left to avert a mass extinction of species and the danger of
destroying civilization.
By ignoring what global heating is going to do, our society is living
a lie. This lie
has various
psychological manifestations.
1/5 of the workers in British companies are
on zero-hour
contracts.
Are there similar employment schemes in the US?
Tens of thousands protested in
Tunisia, demanding
that the Ennahda (Islamist) party step down.
Tokyo was elected to bear
the burden
and harm of the 2020 Olympics. Madrid and Istanbul have escaped,
for now.
The Olympic games leave behind nasty surveillance, unjust laws, and
huge debts. Large companies get the profits
while keeping
local small businesses and street vendors out.
A US soldier
reported
a security hole to the army, and the response was to tell him not
to talk about it, since the army does not intend to fix it.
This same attitude appears whenever someone reveals US government
dirty deeds. Rather than concluding, "We should have thought twice
before doing something like this," the state concludes, "Anyone who
talks about this is our enemy and should be punished."
86%
of US internauts do something to cover up their Internet use from
snoopers.
Attacking Syria is
likely to
cost a billion dollars, and could cost far more.
If we could expect it to result in an important change for the better,
it might be worth that cost — but we can't expect that.
Intervention in Syria against a tyrant could be justified if
Citing the US as an example, Kenya's parliament
voted
to withdraw from the International Criminal Court.
The US has
broken
the Internet's social contract. Internet and software engineers:
if you have helped corrupt the Internet, tell Bruce Schneier about it.
More
information about the NSA's corruption of encryption software
world-wide.
Production of iThings is
using
a sweatshop again.
The right-wing UK solution to a lack of jobs is
to punish
people that don't work enough hours.
Perhaps some of them have zero-hours contracts
which don't
give them enough hours and forbid them to work for anyone else.
Fruit juices and fruit drinks appear healthful but
the fructose
can be bad for your health.
Some Internet censors in the UK block VPNs
because "they
are a way to evade censorship".
The New York Times reported on the horror of cluster
bombs, "maiming
and destroying indiscriminately", when dropped by Assad's men.
It doesn't talk about how bad they are when used by the US.
Six
alternatives to military action in Syria.
These are in addition to the alternative I've asked everyone to
support, which is
for Obama
and Rouhani to negotiate.
Kerry is
pretending he did not support the invasion of Iraq.
With "free trade" treaties,
the US
government aims to policies resembling the British ones that provoked
the American Revolution.
The difference is that this time the whole world is colonized by the
rich.
The
Startling Size of US Military Operations in Africa.
Obama's claims about the use of chemical weapons in Syria need to be
probed to check their validity, just like Bush's claims that Saddam
Hussein had such
weapons. Here
are many specific points of doubt that members of Congress should
demand answers for.
An analysis of
the possible results of attacking Syria, showing how it could go
very wrong.
The US "unemployment rate" fell, but
the number
of Americans not in the work force increased by half a million.
The Federal Reserve has tried to boost the economy by buying bonds,
but it
is not
clear this does any good for the economy of most people.
The right way to stimulate the economy is
with deficit
spending; but with Republicans and Obama accepting the harmful
goal of deficit reduction, nothing can be done about unemployment.
Israel charges the inhabitants of Shu'fat refugee camp taxes
but gives
them nothing, not even sanitation.
Victims of undercover thug infiltrators in the UK
are boycotting
an internal inquiry run by the thug department, and demand a
public inquiry.
Floor tiles that generate electricity
also track
where people are walking.
I think these are acceptable in heavily trafficked areas, but they
should be designed so they cannot distinguish one person's step from
another's.
South
Korea banned
fish imports from a large section of the Japanese coast due to
fears over radioactive contamination.
The fears may be exaggerated, but Japan is paying for its failure to
provide good information about the extent of contamination, which
might be due to a desire to cover it up.
US citizens:
call
on the US
to insist on full abortion coverage
in the health care for congressional staff.
Everyone:
call
on presidents Obama and Rouhani to negotiate
peace in Syria.
Everyone:
call
on Eritrea
to identify all the prisoners in its secret
prisons, and charge them with real crimes or release them.
University presidents
are demanding
skyrocketing rates of pay, like business CEOs.
Collecting
the voices of anti-fundamentalists Muslims.
Some things Obama should do if he were serious
about reform
of massive government snooping.
Genetically engineered rice, touted as a supposed solution to Vitamin
A shortage in parts of the world,
has not
been tested enough to be sure it really helps, or even is safe.
US
citizens: support
reform of the US mining law, to reduce pollution and make mining
companies pay.
In the Majuro declaration, Australia and New Zealand agreed to the
need
to end
greenhouse gas emissions.
There is no way to eliminate them completely; we breathe out
CO2. (The biosphere can absorb a certain rate of
emissions.) However, the goal of eliminating the emissions is correct
as a first approximation.
The US
continues to protect right-wing murderers, including the man
accused of murdering singer Victor Jara in Chile as part of the
US-organized coup.
The US does not mention this when it criticizes countries that protect
Edward Snowden.
Some countries
have banned
selective abortion based on the sex of the fetus. They mean well,
but this is as bad as any other attack on abortion rights.
When women decide on abortion based on the sex of the fetus, that
usually reflects bigotry against women, which we should oppose.
However, the worldwide conservative assault against abortion rights
(and, beyond that, contraception, homosexual rights, and more) must be
opposed too. To support any plan to restrict abortions supports that
assault and puts all sorts of sexual freedoms in danger. If intended
as a way to oppose bigotry, it may backfire, since the religious
groups that oppose abortion tend to be very sexist.
We should denounce and oppose sexist bigotry in other ways, not this
way.
There
is no
way to prevent the FinFisher repression software from falling into the
hands of repressive states such as Bahrain.
The article says that FinFly can attack "any" computer, but in fact
that depends on what system is running. Perhaps it attacks mobile
phones through
the universal
back door that they all have.
Republicans still pretend that the poor in the US are "unwilling to
work" as
an excuse
to cut the food stamps that they depend on.
Of course, they are responsible for the policies that result in not
enough jobs and low pay. They kick Americans coming and going.
Nigeria plans to follow the US example
with unlimited
snooping on portable phones.
Taliban
murdered an Indian woman who wrote about her escape from
Afghanistan in the 90s. She returned to Afghanistan later.
The Taliban's oppression of women is the reason that I supported the
conquest of Afghanistan in 2001. If I could snap my fingers and kill
all the Taliban, I would do it immediately — but there is no way
to do that, and with no better leader than Karzai to oppose them, it
is impossible to defeat them in Afghanistan. Defeating them would
require many Afghans to be determined to fight them, not just to
dislike them.
An army of Afghan women, who would prefer death to surrendering to the
Taliban, might have been able to defeat them.
Forget Red
Lines: Obama Should Eat His Words on Syria.
US public libraries are under government pressure
to install
filters, and these filters often block quite a lot. You can push
back against this.
The NSA has worked with companies to
introduce
weaknesses into commercial encryption software.
If the US government stood for the American people, and this coup had
been achieved against enemy governments, I'd congratulate the NSA in
principle (and I'd be glad if we did not find out about it). But the
US government works for the plutocrats, and the victims of this are
us.
This
article covers the same issue but has some different information.
The UN inspectors
will
do a more thorough job of testing for use of chemical weapons.
Accepting
Whistleblower Prize, Snowden Declares This Belongs to the Public'.
China has introduced
extremely
strict measures to cut air pollution in Beijing.
Prof
Séralini's study found that rats exposed for two years to
Roundup, or to Roundup-ready corn, die younger.
The studies used as the basis for approving GMOs last too short a time
to test for this effect.
Pat Robertson is accused of a massive fraud: raising millions for a
nonexistent
medical aid campaign for Zaire.
With help from from the US, the organization that regulates airlines
has
mostly
defeated the European attempt to make them pay for CO2
emissions.
This is in exchange for a small step towards a weak tax that may never
even go into effect.
This shows that Obama is on the side of the companies that want to fry
our planet.
Air pollution
kills
200,000 people a year in the US, and they lose around 10 years of
their lives.
In the US:
call
on investors to drop private prison companies.
US citizens:
oppose
Obama's plan to bring back SOPA.
A right-wing Republican billionaire wants Obama to attack Syria,
apparently because he's a supporter of
Israeli
expansionism.
All countries should ratify the Domestic Workers Treaty, which
gives
domestic workers the same rights that other workers get.
Are
other European countries surveilling the Internet like the US and
UK?
The president of China called for an
aggressive
campaign to have people spread stories that support the
government.
Global heating is making the Great Lakes
shrink.
Travis McCrea of the Canadian Pirate Party
apologizes
to the US border guards agency for misunderstanding them, over and
over, while they held him prisoner for two hours.
Would
Bombing Syria Deter the Use of Chemical Weapons?
US citizens: call on US officials
to pressure
Iceland to stop killing whales.
Assange has filed a complaint
against illegal
US espionage and perhaps theft carried out in Europe.
Kerry, Should
We Fall Again for "Trust Me"?
There seem to
be many
leaks of radioactive water at Fukushima, and only straws to grasp
at to stop it from leaking into the ocean.
Iowa has interfered with attacked abortion rights
by banning
use of telemedicine — only in regard to abortions.
US citizens:
Support
government measures to limit "for-profit colleges" from driving
students into debt.
The Obama regime is
trying
to forbid journalist Barrett Brown (and his lawyers) from talking to
the media.
Brown's charges mainly have to do with
posting
a link to a web page where data obtained from Stratfor had been
posted by others.
He also posted a page of violent threats against a US agent who was
hounding him. Brown he seems to be guilty on this one point, so I
cannot claim he has done nothing wrong. However, the other charges
raise a more important issue — Obama, as usual, is attacking
freedom of the press.
Even if they gag Barrett Brown, others including me will continue
informing Americans about the injustice of this case, and that Obama
is the enemy of journalism and democracy in the US.
Later:
the gag
order was issued.
We can make the US government regret this
by talking about the case even more.
The US is
using
a manipulable international organization to stop the EU from
taxing airlines for their CO2 emissions.
A US appeals court decided in favor of vulture funds that are betting
they can
destroy
plans to restructure the debt of bankrupt countries.
The Egyptian military government arrests
any
sort of dissidents, even leftist, and people who get in their way,
on the pretext that they are "Islamists".
The tanks holding contaminated water at Fukushima were
built
in a hurry, with quality control set aside.
Maybe the haste was necessary at the time — but, if so, they
should have built more solid replacement tanks once the water was
initially contained.
Even
higher
radiation levels have been found near the tanks.
It is impossible to keep the cost of nuclear power down, given
all
the risks.
It is an exaggeration to describe a nuclear reactor as a "slow motion
detonation", like describing your metabolism as a "slow motion fire".
But that doesn't invalidate the conclusions.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is
suing for
release of US videotapes of the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani.
The EU is considering a
plan
to put speed limiters on all cars.
Making the system warn the driver could be a good thing; making it a
hard limit would be nasty, as speed limits on some roads are too low.
I worry also about whether this system would do surveillance. Having
a camera recognize speed limit signs would not inherently imply
surveillance, but if the system keeps a history of the signs it sees
or the speed of the car at each time, that would effectively add up to
surveillance. As for the vaguely described satellite-based system,
that might involve surveillance depending on details.
Israel is cheating the Palestinian Authority of
300
million dollars a year.
Don't believe the whitewash of Larry Summers — here's a
series
of times when he supported harmful or unjust economic policies.
Richard Falkvinge: "child porn" laws aren't as bad as you think
— they're
much
much worse. They cause a litany of injustices, including
interference with journalism of the most socially important kind.
The complexity of the
parallel
Syrian conflicts, and why US intervention could not thread the
maze.
In December 2012, Israeli troops killed Palestinian journalists
(noncombattants) with a missile. Israel still
refuses
to explain why.
A Palestinian family in a suburb annexed to East Jerusalem has
moved
to a cave which used to be their stable, after soldiers demolished
their house.
Israelis
protested against the government's plan to destroy Bedouin
villages in the Negev.
Israeli human rights groups call for an end to
shooting
rubber-coated metal bullets at protests. These bullets, while
promoted as nonlethal, have killed many people and a sharpshooter can
maximize that chance.
Uri Avnery discusses
what
is needed for peace between Israel and Palestine, including most
controversially that Israel must apologize for the catastrophe that
Zionism caused for Palestinians.
Jeff Cohen:
My
Surprisingly Inspiring Trip to the West Bank.
In 2009, Sri Lanka's forces killed perhaps 70,000 Tamil civilians;
then they massacred captured rebels. The government is
stepping
up the repression of Tamils and dissidents.
The article mentions the assassination of Lasantha Wickrematunge, whose
posthumous
last editorial accused the state of killing him.
Global heating is predicted to change rainfall in Brazil and
damage
agriculture.
Obama is
proposing
a larger intervention in Syria to win Republican support.
I would support intervention to topple Assad if his likely replacement
were not Islamists.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to
oppose
attacking Syria.
Also use
this
page to write to your congresscritter about it.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
People should have a chance to value work itself,
not
only as a way to get money.
The chronic stress in the lives of poor people makes them
vulnerable
to predatory lending with enormous interest rates.
The slowdown in atmospheric heating since 2000 fits a model based on a
climatic
oscillation in the Pacific Ocean with a period of a few decades.
This oscillation drives the extra heat down into the ocean so that it doesn't
all remain in the air. This half of the cycle won't last forever.
Serious negotiations with Iran
might
help make peace in Syria.
Afghan government forces are taking
heavy
casualties as the Taliban attack.
To defeat the Taliban would require a determination to win, which I
don't think that Karzai's corrupt government can ever inspire.
Assad is moving forces into schools to
shield
them from a possible US attack.
I think this violates the Geneva conventions.
Some reports attribute chemical weapons to Assad's men and others to
the Sa'udi-supported al-Nusra Islamist group.
Neither can be
proved.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to oppose bombing Syria.
Facebook will
no longer allow users to decline to let their names be used in
advertisements. More than ever, Facebook is really Suckerberg.
In addition, Facebook secretly collects users' phone numbers. The
article says it is not clear why. Perhaps it's a favor for the NSA.
Egypt is
jamming
al-Jazeera transmissions.
This is in addition to
impeding
al-Jazeera from broadcasting.
Explaining to
Francois
Hollande what it means to be Obama's new poodle.
A study of 600 crop pests finds they have been spreading away from the
equator at
almost
2 miles a year, on the average.
The spread is not uniform. Some pests, in some regions, have spread
hundreds of miles northward.
AT&T maintains a complete database of cell phone call records
going
back to 1987 for the US government to examine at will.
Hundreds
of thousands protested government corruption in the Philippines.
The US government is fundamentally corrupt too, selling laws to the
businesses that bid the most.
In Germany, a newspaper faces prosecution for mentioning the
name
of a web site that facilitates unauthorized copying.
The Greek fascist party has put a Jewish communist
on
trial for a violent-sounding statement, but the fascists are not
tried even when they commit violence.
The leader of a Burmese protest against imposition of a mine has been
sentenced to
two
years in prison. The charges amount to "protesting", under other
names.
In Burma, the mine is Chinese-owned, but similar protests are
occurring in
South
Africa and Peru
(and elsewhere) against mines owned by Western companies.
The Indonesian
regime forced
indigenous leaders in West Papua to sign away land to a large
agribusiness, threatening to label them as "separatists" and
punish them otherwise.
I don't know whether they are separatists, but they have every right
to be. The inhabitants of West Papua have no cultural or historical
relationship with Indonesia, which took over the region by force.
Subsequently
it sent
large numbers of Javanese to colonize the area.
GCHQ
snoops on nearly all of Europe's Internet traffic.
A video made inside an Angolan prison
shows guards
kicking and beating prisoners who were sitting on the ground,
perhaps as a nonviolent protest.
Prisoners in California
are protesting
against long-term solitary confinement which is effectively equivalent
to torture.
Neelie
Kroes Pushing Telcos' Agenda to End Net Neutrality.
Even before 2009,
the rich in
the US increased their wealth while most Americans lost. (Since
2009, this process has gone even further.)
High
radiation levels have been found near a water tank at Fukushima,
and it is not clear where the radiation came from.
The company failed to notice this high level of radiation before
because
the measurements
maxed out the meter that was used.
Budget
cuts prevented
measures that might have retarded the spread of the fire near
Yosemite.
Obama's men say that
he refuses
to treat Congress's vote on whether to attack Syria as binding.
If Congressional opposition is strong enough, he may give way to it.
The essential point:
In the US: insist that schools and teachers
should not
promote (let alone require) specific brands of products to their
students.
US citizens: call on the Japanese government
to apologize to the
women who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Army, and
give them compensation for this crime.
You'll note that I call for prostitution and associated activities to
be legal, when they are done voluntarily. This is basically because
there are no grounds to ban them, but the change would also help
protect prostitutes from various wrongs, including the wrong of being
forced into prostitution.
As Roman emperors managed the people with bread and circuses,
the modern
state distracts people with rooting for sports teams.
Uri
Avnery comments on Obama and Syria.
Avnery's arguments that Assad's men would not have used poison gas at
this time seem valid. However, it seems rather unlikely that the
rebels have poison gas rockets, and somewhat unlikely they would have
been so unscrupulous as to kill lots of civilians on their own side.
This leaves me unable to attribute the attack to either side.
I also can't envision what a good outcome in Syria would consist of.
Assad is an oppressor and the Islamists would be oppressors; Syria
should not be ruled by either of them, but I don't see how any other
government could arise. The unending war between them is horrible,
but fighting to help one oppressor beat another is horrible too.
Perhaps in time the two camps will divide Syria and the fighting will
taper off.
The example of sea otters demonstrates
how eliminating
one species can have disastrous results on an entire ecosystem.
Humans change ecosystems in many ways. When Europeans first visited
what is now Sydney, the forest was sparse — because the
aborigines kept burning it. Large trees lived through the fires, but
bushes burnt up. The Europeans did not allow fires, and this led to
dense forests.
The people of endangered islands in the Pacific Ocean
are converting
to renewable energy, hoping the rest of the world will follow this
example before their homes are underwater.
Journalist Anabel Hernandez braves threats
to document
how the Mexican state is tied to the drug cartels.
If they legalize the drug trade, this will become only as bad as the
domination of the US by businesses.
The US shift towards low-pay dead-end jobs is triggered by
technological
"advances" that we might be better off without, combines with
government
policies that serve the rich.
Ukrainian thugs
planted
an old gun and grenade in the headquarters of Femen.
Terrorists can kill people, but to threaten the survival of a free
nation as the US or UK requires
"anti-terror"
measures.
J Edgar Hoover's
persistent
surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.
Dissidents
and human rights lawyers in the United Arab Emirates have been
sentenced to long prison terms.
As Obama talks about punishing Assad for using toxic weapons, we
should not forget that the US has done this too,
repeatedly.
Assad cannot excuse use of chemical weapons by saying "The US did it
too." Both Assad and the US are wrong. If we put Assad on a list to
be "sent a message", the US government should be at the top of the
list.
1000
Iraqis were killed by terrorist attacks in July.
The US and UK directly aided Saddam Hussein's
biological
and chemical weapons programs.
The Finnish supreme court ruled in favor of
censoring
a site that published a list of the sites that are censored in
Finland.
Tobacco companies will be able to use the Trans-Pacific Partnership to
block
measures to reduce tobacco addiction.
Americans, let's defeat this treaty now, so that we don't have to
protest like Colombians.
https://stallman.org/trance-pacific-partnership.html
The claim that North Dakota has benefited from fracking is mostly
hot
exhaust gas.
The Colombian people have been devastated by the unjust trade treaty
with the US, and
massive
protests continue despite government repression.
"Free trade" treaties
systematically
weaken democracy; they are generally good for some businesses, and
bad for everyone else.
US citizens: sign
this
petition to raise taxes on business and protect social security.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse displays
total
ignorance about marijuana.
What drugs are they taking?
Ralph Nader:
Obama,
You Cannot Start a War by Yourself.
Obama said he will
consult
Congress before attacking Syria, but did not say he will abide by
Congress's decision.
Assad
Is a War Criminal, But an Attack Will Do Nothing for the People of
Syria.
In Saudi Arabia, operating an "unregistered organization" is a crime.
This evidently unjust law is used to
attack
human rights groups.
A Pakistani TV network faces prosecution for
broadcasting
pictures of a rebel attack.
Google
deleted
two anti-oil videos from YouTube.
I would guess that both removals were based on strained, invalid
copyright claims.
A Tunisian journalist faces five years in jail for
filming
when someone threw eggs at a minister.
A proposed
law in Bangladesh might threaten human rights defenders.
Relating US intervention in Syria to
oil.
Anti-trade-treaty
protests in Bogota were crushed by soldiers sent by Colombian
President Non-santos*. He cited the usual pretexts.
UK thugs had no time to listen to Nazim Din explain that they had
arrested the wrong one of his sons, so one pushed him and knocked him
down. (This was easy as he was on crutches.)
Mr Din died of a heart
attack.
Are Chemical Weapons
Reason Enough to Go to War?
Iran, Not Syria, Is the West's
Real Target.
The US tacitly helped Saddam Hussein use
chemical
weapons against Iran.
New Zealand has adopted a law that intends to prevent issuance of new
patents covering computer programs
"as
such".
I have not seen the exact text of this law. I hope that it is
airtight. The European Patent Office is operating under a treaty
which excludes "computer programs as such" from patentability, but has
issued thousands of computational technique patents despite the words
of the treaty on the grounds that they cover techniques, not programs
as such. Meanwhile, they failed to protect programs from lawsuits under the
existing patents,
as
I've recommended, so it will take around 20 years for this to
eliminate the problem.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
It's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire
than having one's national "credibility" depend upon periodically
bombing other countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Data brokers are collecting and correlating a lot more data about people than you may realize.
If this sort of snooping is "essential" for the success of some business, we must make that business fail! Meanwhile, it is possible to keep most of our lives out of their data bases, and I do so.
In a setback for journalism, UK thugs were given court approval to seize and search people's memories for "communication of material to an enemy". This is meant to refer to leaked information about dirty deeds that the government is keeping secret from its principal enemy, the people. Naturally, knowledge of these dirty deeds might help other enemies too, so this is a pretext for the state to attack all the enemies at once.
This is in addition to material that "could be useful to terrorists", which covers almost anything when applied to someone assumed to be inclined towards terrorism.
The UK laws invoked are blatant disrespect for human rights, as are many of the "anti-terror" laws there and in other countries. Terrorism exists, but it is a minor danger compared with the deadly practices these laws are used to cover up.
Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of rigging the Zimbabwe election in several ways including manipulating the voters' rolls.
Argentina's government has made a secret fracking deal with Chevron.
Businesses are pushing states to ban adherence to the LEED environmental construction standards, and substitute lax greenwash standards.
US citizens: support Senator Merkley's plan for students to pay for college based on their earnings.
US citizens: call on Secretary of State Kerry to launch an honest environmental review of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
West Papuans face charges of treason for saying they advocate independence from Indonesia.
Indonesia took over West Papua by force.
Evidence does not support claims that pornography promotes violence or sexism.
Since censorship is always dangerous, censorship of pornography cannot be excused.
The rape of middle-class women in India spurs indignation, but when poor low-caste women are raped, they face contempt and intimidation.
CEOs claim they deserve their enormous pay because they do such a great job. Of those that got the most money in the past 20 years, 40% got fired for failure, led their companies into trouble for fraud, or helped cause the financial crisis.
A lawsuit
demands
the publication of the formal legal opinions used by the US
government as the basis for its actions and to shield officials from
prosecution. They are, effectively, secret law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In the
US: sign
this petition demanding fast food companies give workers a raise
and this
one demanding they not retaliate against workers who strike.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
China is accelerating the arrests of people who criticize the state.
The UK parliament voted not to attack Syria. Thus, Obama won't have UK support.
The "discreet and limited" attack on Syria that Obama is considering would not have much effect on Assad's military capability.
There are other ways to deter further use of chemical weapons, either by Assad or by other countries.
It Takes More Courage To Say There Is Nothing Outsiders Can Do.
Stand
With Colombian Protests Against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
(FTA)
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It's not clear what the Obama regime's policy on state-legalized marijuana will really mean in practice.
The US turns readily to war and to military "aid"
because it
supports the military-industrial complex.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to kill the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline now.
The Japanese government has sued anti-nuclear sit-in protesters, demanding the equivalent of $100,000 from each leader.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff listed several options for US intervention in Syria — all with big downsides.
The UK's published intelligence report adds nothing to previous speculation about chemical weapons in Syria.
US intelligence officials say
the US
does not know where chemical weapons are stored now in Syria, or
who controls them, and that it does not have firm evidence that Assad
ordered their use.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I wonder if Obama will prosecute the officials for this leak.
Fast food workers held a strike and protest across the US.
Poverty's consequences, such as preoccupation with short-term difficulties, effectively cut people's intelligence.
Egypt has arrested al-Jazeera reporters, accusing them of threatening national security and supporting Morsi.
I do not support Morsi, but no one should be arrested or banned from reporting based on who they support.
The US says it won't prosecute marijuana dealers that sell "small amounts" to adults, in states which have legalized it.
Secret US government programs amount to at least 75 billion dollars a year.
Fukushima showed us the intolerable costs of nuclear power. The citizens of Vermont show us the benefits of shutting it down.
America's next president had better believe in restoring liberty.
Israeli soldiers danced with Palestinians at a wedding in Hebron. The Israeli government says it will punish them for this act of fraternization with people who are supposed to be "the enemy".
One Year After Drone Strike on Anti-Terrorist Yemeni Preacher, Still No Apology From Obama.
Teacher Uprisings in Mexico a Lesson in Defending Public Education.
US citizens: Tell Obama not to bomb Syria.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter not to support attacking Syria. "The choice is not between doing nothing and bombing the Syrian people."
US citizens: call on the US to restore the "stream buffer" limitations on mountaintop removal coal mining.
A painting showing Putin and Medvedyev in female clothing has been
seized in Russia and
called
illegal with no explanation.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I understand the logic. In Russia, Putin is the ultimate standard of good. To show Putin doing something is to say it is good. To show Putin in homosexual guise is therefore propaganda for homosexuality. ;-}
A church group that feeds homeless people in Raleigh, North Carolina, was told they'd be arrested if they did not stop. It is illegal to feed the homeless there.
The Republicans who voted for this law probably claim to be Christians, but they'd put Jesus in prison too. When they talk about "family values" they mean "Walton and Koch family values".
Envisioning what Martin Luther King Jr. might say today in the age of plutocracy.
The public deserves answers to the questions about what would happen after a US attack on Syria — and why possible paths for peace are not being pursued instead.
AT&T can use King's "I have a dream" speech to sell phones, but you can't post it.
Whistleblower Russell Tice says that the NSA's data is regularly used to blackmail officials including members of Congress.
NSA sysadmins can access any data about anyone. Snowden used this to inform us all, but a criminal-minded sysadmin could use this to get data to blackmail someone.
Aside from blackmail, here are some bad things that could happen to you thanks to massive surveillance.
California will expand access to early abortions.
A wide range of sea animals face disaster from CO2 in the water.
They evolved to live in water, not seltzer.
India bans shark finning.
Walmart is trying to pretend that it supports manufacturing in the US.
Any company that has 25% of the grocery sales in the US ought to be split up just for that.
A company monitors students' public postings on behalf of schools.
Since they are public, the company has a right to do this. It would become wrong if the school starts punishing students for things they say (such as criticism of the school, dissident views, etc).
Given your metadata, people can find out about addictions, sex, and accusations.
Free Speech for People reviews the various bills to amend the Constitution to reverse the Corporations United* decision.
Israel uses many
schemes in parallel to take Palestinian land.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
And now that "peace negotiations" have been announced, Netanyahu has sped up construction in Palestine.
Israeli "settlers" in Palestinian territory attacked a Palestinian shepherd with an iron rod.
They killed and injured sheep, too.
The Israeli administration bends over backwards to help "settlers" harass Palestinians and drive them off their land.
B'tselem documents the systematic Israeli torture of Palestinian minors.
Israeli Arabs are trying to return to lands from which they were ordered to leave, a few weeks after Israel was established.
Israel demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib for the 54th time. Jailed residents, offered release on the condition that they not return there, said they'd rather stay in prison.
The Leveraged Buyout of America.
Wisconsin has arranged to give half a million dollars to a right-wing lobbying organization.
After all the budget cuts and union-busting, the state has a little cash on hand.
Vandana Shiva: Seed freedom is the answer to hunger and malnutrition.
Former UK military high commanders warn against attacking Syria.
Using a military attack to "send a message" is a rather inarticulate form of communication, as the US found out when it tried "graduated response" in the Vietnam War.
A woman in Kenya wants to marry two willing men, but the state is sexist and won't allow polygamy to go in that direction.
In Russia,
satirizing
Putin is now forbidden.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The heroism of Manning and Snowden will mean
nothing if
the debate about how to judge them distracts us from the central
issue: our government is trashing the constitution with massive
surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Egypt's military rulers seem to be framing arrested protesters in order to "prove" that the Muslim Brotherhood is terrorist.
An imprisoned Iranian blogger on hunger strike is getting ill.
The New York Thug Department arbitrarily labels some mosques as "terrorist" and investigates anyone who goes into them.
Now that the CIA has admitted responsibility for the coup in Iran that toppled it democratic government in 1953, the Iranian Parliament has voted to sue the US.
There is plenty of justification for this suit, in the abstract; but Iran's current theocratic tyranny is part of the damage, and a suit is not going to fix that. Meanwhile, is there any court where such a suit could be heard and a judgment enforced?
Why military intervention in Syria would be wrong.
It is hard to demonstrate what happened well enough for the purposes of justice.
A measured attack against Syria would change nothing.
On the other hand, an attack powerful enough to make Assad really notice would have unpredictable effects.
If the goal is to deter other dictators from using chemical weapons, it would be more effective to wait for a chance to punish Assad cleanly.
Hans Blix believes the military sponsors of both sides could make them agree to peace.
In the US: support an action on Sep 5 against Walmart's low wages.
A New York City thug faces criminal charges for trying to frame a press photographer.
It's about time — but it will take more than one thug on trial to make thugs stop testilying.
Barry Eisler suggests the arrest of David Miranda indicates that surveillance state is trying to make journalism harder, slower and less secure.
He may well be right; this does not contradict my theory, that it is trying to declare journalism criminal.
US citizens: call on Obama not to attack Syria without consulting Congress.
The US
is planning to
fight in Syria on the side of al Qa'ida.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Obama's intended attack might
be meant to
keep Iran isolated (i.e., scupper the opportunity for a peace
deal).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The evidence that Assad's men used chemical weapons came from an Israeli signal interception unit.
Israel has been trying to get the US to fight Syria for a year or two. Thus, I have to wonder whether this "intelligence" was fabricated for the purpose.
The Federal Crop Insurance Program paid for 17 billion dollars in crop losses in 2012, far more than normal, due to extreme weather that will keep getting worse.
What the Assault on Whistleblowers Has to Do With War on Syria.
US citizens: support Senator Merkley's plan for paying for college.
The South African equivalent of the NSA is explicitly meant for spying on South Africans, so it doesn't need to stretch the rules repeatedly — it monitors everything.
Three bogus investigations of the NSA are designed to reassure us that no major change is needed.
Colleges say Obama's plan to link student aid to college tuition could motivate colleges to reject students that need aid.
Overall, the Oregon solution looks better. It could be used to put pressure to cut costs.
The newspaper FrontPageAfrica has been closed, and its publisher jailed, for reporting on corruption in Liberia.
Australia's right-wing party says it will cater to fishermen by eliminating recently established marine reserves.
There is no one less concerned with the long term health of fisheries than the fishermen. They have a culture of short-term thinking, which is why they object to marine reserves; that reserves increase fish stocks outside, and lead to higher catches a few years later, is too long-term for them to appreciate.
Anti-gun-control forces are concentrating their money to defeat Colorado legislators who voted for gun control.
Japan is demonstrating that stimulating the economy still works.
We knew that in the US, too; but the plutocrats arranged for lots of economists to say that we need to cut the deficit.
US citizens: phone the White House at 202-456-1111 to oppose military involvement in Syria.
Also, sign this petition.
Many poor people are logistically compelled to eat expensively; to eat cheap and healthy food, that theoretically would save them money, is out of practical range for them.
A Tunisian group has been banned, accused of responsibility for
assassinating
two politicians.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The group might be guilty for all I know, but that should be proved in court, not decided by an official.
Greece should refuse to be "rescued" again, since the previous "rescues" have only made things worse.
Jail Becomes Home for Husband Stuck With Lifetime Alimony.
A professor told me he had been ordered to pay alimony and child support exceeding his salary. The sad thing is, he had a way to get that money. An evil way: proprietary software. It would have been more ethical to go to jail.
The former mayor of Salt Lake City plans to sue the NSA for spying on all communications there prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics there.
Entrepreneur Chris Kitze says that in 1997 the NSA had already stuck computers into his company to tap all emails.
Julian Assange: Google has become intimately involved with the US government.
The NSA systematically spies on the EU, the UN, and the IAEA. It has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, or even dissidents.
In the US,
"support
the troops" is the slogan of unthinking patriotism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
UN inspectors in Syria are only supposed to determine whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them.
However, the latter is the crucial question.
Zurich will provide a safe facility for prostitutes to work in.
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers rebuked the UK for its threats to the Guardian.
The damage of privatization in Britain, illustrated by taking a seaside holiday.
General monitoring of people causes various kinds of psychological harm.
Reportedly Cuba ceded to US pressure to
bar
Snowden from travelling.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This despite the fact that the US protects terrorists that made attacks in Cuba and imprisoned the Cuban 5 for infiltrating anti-Cuban terrorist groups and warning when they were going to attack.
200,000 Colombians protested the US-Colombia free trade treaty, as part of a national strike.
Of course, the government said the strikers are controlled by the FARC and called them "terrorists". The FARC are terrorists, but not the biggest and worst terrorists in Colombia. That honor goes to the state-sponsored paramilitaries.
California is considering putting RFIDs for tracking into drivers' licenses.
Greg Palast: How Larry Summers and Geithner bullied 165 countries into eliminating their equivalents of Glass-Steagall through the WTO.
And Obama is closely connected to their gang.
Google Play deleted a man's whole collection of downloaded books because it saw he was in Singapore.
Android normally comes with Google Play, which is nonfree, so it's no surprise that it is malware too. Replicant, the free version of Android, does not contain Google Play.
The college loan racket screws all young Americans unless they are rich. If you go to college, you'll spend your life in debt; otherwise you can't get a job except at McDonalds.
Even if you're really smart and get a good job after college, you're not safe; you will be ruined permanently if you get fired or disabled.
Oregon's plan might be a solution: paying students' tuition in exchange for a share of their income.
However, people with poverty level incomes, or living on disability or other assistance, should not have to pay anything. They can barely get by anyway.
The Boy Scouts of America are
bullying
the Hacker Scouts, an organization which is very different in spirit
and purpose.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The BSA bans Atheists as members, which makes it discreditable in substance too.
1983: the power of the NSA was already dangerous.
Religious fanatics in Russia, encouraged by the dictatorship, attacked a small parade of Pastafarians.
Ecuador is considering a law to ban publication of secret documents, even if they have been published elsewhere.
The Obama regime makes itself a laughingstock for pretending that Wikileaks and Snowden material are still secrets; this law would do the same.
A Hindu man was taken for Muslim after he (not knowing why) set off the explosive detector in an airport, and his answers were misunderstood. But even after the TSA cleared him to fly, Jet Blue still refused to let him board.
Apparently someone on the flight crew exercised the despotic power kick anyone off, for no reason.
He thinks his home was subsequently searched and a photograph stolen.
American teens do care about being tracked through portable phones. Over half of teenage girls have turned off location tracking — by their parents.
However, there is no way to stop Big Brother from tracking them, except to take the batteries out.
Beyond Intimidation of Journalists
Internet companies that put their users in PRISM did so knowingly and got paid for the work.
Archeologists are
using
drones to detect looting of ancient ruins in Peru.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A treaty like this can't do anything good, except for the plutocrats.
Having Obama speak at the anniversary of MLK's March on Washington is a sacrilege.
The UK imprisoned Syrian dissident Roudi Chikhi for using false papers to flee Syria to ask for asylum, and stole all his money too.
Progress in solar-powered vehicles demonstrates that we ought to be putting hundreds of millions into research, rather than leaving the matter to a few enthusiasts.
Growing up in poverty tends to stunt children's development permanently.
I'm sure it is true in the US too, though I don't have a study to point to. This is why we need a strong welfare system that lifts children out of poverty, not one that does only the bare minimum such as Clinton gave the US.
Of course, we also need to make it easy for poor people to avoid having children they can't afford to raise, by providing reliable contraception and abortion gratis to all women.
Assad has agreed to cooperate with UN inspectors who are investigating use of chemical weapons.
If it is too late to detect the gas on the site, maybe autopsies can confirm that gas was used. The crucial question is who used it, and maybe some evidence about that can be found.
Assad and his supporters claim it was a false-flag operation by the rebels. I can't put it past them, but I think it is more likely that Assad's forces attacked with gas.
Obama hates our freedoms — he wants the Supreme Court to rule that thugs can search people's phones without a warrant.
The EPA buried its own evidence that fracking was dangerous, and Americans are increasingly organizing to block it — and now it turns out that the amount of gas that can be retrieved is much less than was thought.
In other words, we have to launch a massive program for renewable energy.
A 2011 FISA court decision, published in fragmentary form, rebuked the NSA for unconstitutionally stretching its surveillance powers.
Manning has asked Obama for a pardon, and in the process, has taken back the ill-conceived apology.
Amnesty International says Obama should commute Manning's sentence and investigate the abuses he exposed.
I think Amnesty's stand is too weak. It should ask for a pardon, not a commutation.
Some NSA agents snoop on people they are attracted to.
Thugs have done this for ages ("running a plate for a date"), so it does not surprise me at all that NSA agents do it too. The crucial point is that there is nothing in the system to stop them from snooping on anyone they wish.
This validates Snowden's point that he could snoop on anyone. He wasn't "authorized" to do so, but he could do it.
The NSA staff call it "loveint", and the NSA punishes it, but only when it finds out. If a few cases have been discovered, there were probably many more that the NSA doesn't know about.
US citizens: call on Congress not to
allow "fast
track" for the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-11 because the old link was broken.]
In the US: tell the US and UK to stop equating journalism with terrorism.
In the US: tell Forever 21 you insist it treat workers decently.
"Big
Data" often means "Big Intrusion".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US is selling 1300 cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia.
When cluster bombs are used, they kill children long after the war is over.
Global heating is good for some things, such as the mosquito that spreads Dengue fever.
In countries where Walmart operates:
tell
Walmart to respect their workers and pay a decent wage.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: Call on Western Union to stop blocking funds transfers to China Labor Watch investigators that expose sweatshop practices in China.
Obama viewed against the background of the March on Washington 50 years ago.
Xu Zhiyong has been imprisoned for suggesting that Chinese have dinner parties to discuss political issues.
The US is running into stiff opposition in the Trance Pacific Partnership negotiations.
Apparently the other countries' negotiators are not entirely in a trance yet.
The
lesson of Fukushima: nuclear reactors can explode. And there are
dozens of reactors in the US which use the same design.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government's demand to destroy the Guardian's files was a direct attack against the foundation of democracy: freedom of the press to report how the state treats the people.
A 165-sq-mile
forest fire in California is threatening to contaminate a
reservoir for San Francisco as well as to destroy power lines that
bring electricity there.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Saudi censorship is suppressing knowledge about MERS, which has killed half the people known to have contracted it. As a result, 3 million pilgrims to Mecca could get exposed to it and take it home with them.
Egypt after the revolution: curfew nights and blood-stained days.
The Koch brothers have reportedly given up on trying to buy the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers.
This avoided an immediate defeat but may not be a lasting victory.
Did the US or UK make a damaging leak pretending it came from Snowden?
A journalist in Kazakhstan was hit on the head with a crowbar.
In the US they just get threatened with imprisonment.
Apple is designing a new product to do surveillance on people's movements even more than mobile phones.
The idea of a "trust" to protect the use of the data is ridiculous. It won't be able to withhold anything from the NSA or GCHQ. It would be hard pressed to withhold anything from subpoenas for private lawsuits. Digital toll collection records are often subpoena'd.
Summarizing the NSA's series of lies.
Refuting lies about Washington's GMO-labeling initiative.
US citizens: call on the Department of Education
to dump
Sallie Mae for predatory behavior that violated its contract.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Obama
to negotiate with the new
president of Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: sign
this petition in support of Justin Carter, facing 8 years in
prison for a joke threat that he said was a joke.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It's not wise to make joke threats on the Internet. Carter should get a warning from the judge: "Remember, when you're on the Internet, lots of strangers are see or hear everything you say. You can't joke around as if you were among friends." I am sure he would learn that lesson.
I expect that the judge knows this, but takes pleasure in applying perverse "zero tolerance".
In favor of taxing churches — all of them.
With the US morally compromised, now Malaysia's government plans to extend its snooping powers.
An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues: Mathematicians, why are you not speaking out?
Brazil will pass a law that requires all royalties from oil drilling to go to health care. This has good and bad sides.
A teenager in the Maldive Islands will not be flogged for having been raped.
This is a step forward, but they must do more: people who have sex voluntarily should not be punished either.
Can you guess which religion dominates the Maldive Islands?
'Outing Corporate Evil,' One City at a Time.
Making all thugs wear cameras makes them considerably less thuggish.
People working for the state are not entitled to the same rights of privacy that everyone else deserves, and if there's anyone for whom surveillance is necessary, it's the thugs. So I am mostly in favor of this. However, this could lead to intrusive surveillance too.
Global heating seen as humanity's greatest-ever risk management failure.
Seabirds are threatened by global heating.
The world's general slow rise in sea level paused during 2010 and 2011 because the water was piled on parts of Australia instead.
Kucinich says, give Snowden a ticker-tape parade and abolish the NSA.
I broadly sympathize, but given how badly the banksters have mauled our country, I am not sure a ticker-tape parade is appropriate treatment for a hero.
Cynicism is Corporate America's Greatest Weapon: Disarm It.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for revealing US crimes. When will we prosecute the ones who committed those crimes?
Some nuclear experts warn that the situation in Fukushima could be much worse than the "authorities" admit.
US citizens: demand that the next chairman of the Federal Reserve
answer
some crucial questions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Plutocratic politicians in ALEC aim to inflame the public against people who are oppressed a little less than they.
Of course, the ones you ought to hate are the plutocrats that fund and direct ALEC.
The ACLU on the steady militarization of thugs in the US.
The US director of "national security" has started a blog with the aim of "more transparency".
This reflects his persistent campaign to make our activities and conversations more transparent to them.
Ladar Levison can't talk about his court battle for our privacy rights, but he's drawing a lot of attention to the issue.
Obama proposes totally inadequate measures to encourage universities to compete on tuition.
Children in Pakistan are getting sick with polio: perhaps this will convince the religious crazies to allow vaccination.
Former dictator Mubarak was released from prison but will be held under house arrest.
The UK should renationalize its railroads.
Correction: Clegg, head of the Lib Dems, has not endorsed the interrogation of David Miranda and seizure of his computer data.
Miranda's lawyers have won a symbolic victory with the court order for the state not to touch Miranda's memories "unless it is for the purpose of ensuring the protection [of] national security or for investigating whether Miranda is himself involved in the commission, instigation or preparation of an act of terrorism".
At present, it is only symbolic. Whatever they wish to do, they will do it anyway and say it is "protection of national security". Besides, they have surely given copies to the NSA, which will not be affected by this court order. In other words, they will continue playing the court, and the people, for fools.
A US court ruled that federal employees in "national security sensitive" positions can be fired or punished arbitrarily.
The next step will be for the government to drive them to suicide, to make sure they can't flee and start revealing dirty government secrets.
Over 50 large wildfires are burning in the western US.
The cheap solution to air pollution: stop measuring it.
Force-feeding prisoners who are prepared to fast to death solves nothing.
If they doubt whether prisoners really meant to order "don't feed me", why not just ask them now?
British thugs have killed thousands of prisoners since 1969, the last time a thug was punished for doing that.
Worse, relatives of the victims who campaigned for justice were subject to secret surveillance by thugs defending their buddies. But they still say, "if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear."
NSA gathered thousands of Americans' e-mails before court ordered it to revise its tactics.
On the implications of Assad's apparent poison gas attack.
The fact that jihadis are fighting Assad makes it hard to see a way to help the rebels without potentially bringing to power those who are worse.
Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment.
He got a far longer sentence than others convicted of espionage; perhaps because Manning gave information, not secretly to an enemy, but publicly to the people that the US government betrays every day.
Former Egyptian dictator Mubarak will be
released
from prison.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Will he be put back in power?
Another defeat for freedom: New Zealand voted to legalize more spying on everyone.
The NSA collects 75% of US Internet traffic.
Correction — it is 75% of
communications
traffic, which does not include distribution of TV shows, etc.
Also, the word "collects" is not quite accurate; rather, this measurs
the fraction of the communications that the NSA searches through.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Comcast threatened to sue Torrentfreak for copyright infringement over publication of a subpoena, a court document in the public domain.
Six Questions Journalists Should Ask Barack Obama When He Visits (Enter Your Country Name Here).
Miranda's
Rights: How Europe Can Learn from Latin America's Independence.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Using the Boston bombings as a pretext, the National Football League now prohibits fans from bringing in suitcases, fanny packs, even a thermos.
If I couldn't bring my computer in, that rules me out.
I'd never want to go to a football game, so this does not affect me, not directly. But the dangerous current will threaten everyone.
Government Works Fine, Just Not For You (i.e., non-plutocrats).
The UK prime minister directly ordered the interrogation of David Miranda.
Even more horrible, the head of the Liberal Democrats supported the pretext for destroying the Guardian's disk drives.
Russia blocked a Greenpeace icebreaker from entering the Arctic sea, on the peculiar grounds that it isn't strong enough to deal with the little remaining ice.
The American Dream Rewards Few, Enslaves Millions.
Only through collective action against the plutocracy can most Americans make their lives better.
More detail about the increasing frequency of severe heat waves, the damage they to do people and to agriculture, and how ceasing or continuing to emit greenhouse gases will affect the outcome.
Syrian rebels claim the regime's troops fired poison gas missiles that killed over 200 people.
A tank of contaminated water at Fukushima has leaked, and the area around it is now dangerously radioactive.
Amnesty International condemned the Egyptian army and thugs'
"blatant
disregard for human life", and calls for
cutting
off arms supplies to the government of Egypt.
[References updated on 2018-03-10 because the old links were broken.]
A study found that heavy use of Facebook tends to make people sad, independent of how the users felt at the start of the study.
The study eliminated the hypothesis that people used Facebook more because they were sadder to begin with.
This is not yet proof, but given so many other reasons to avoid Facebook, why not take this precaution?
Israel has designated almost 1/5 of the West Bank as "military firing zones" as an excuse to kick Palestinians off their land.
Israel forced a Palestinian to pay to demolish his own home in Jerusalem.
The UK undercover thugs that infiltrated dissident movements seem to be part of an organized plan including all European governments, the US, and other countries. The governments involved refuse to investigate.
In the US, we have been unable to get it to become a scandal. Perhaps because the mainstream media have stayed away from it.
When oil companies promote biofuel, it's the kind of biofuel made by diverting land, water and chemical fertilizer that could have grown food. So it is a kind of greenwashing.
Conjecture: Alexei Navalny has been groomed by Putin to divide opposition and lead it nowhere.
The UK treats single parents as unemployed people, and makes them jump through many arbitrary hoops to get welfare payments. If they fail to get all the hoops — perhaps because they are taking care of their kids — then the state cuts off their money and says it's their fault.
This is the face of plutocracy. The people who set up this scheme deserve no mercy, and those who carry it out deserve none either unless they quit.
US citizens: tell the UK we condemn the detention of David Miranda.
Columbia, South Carolina, will give homeless people a choice between real jail and a "shelter" that is much like a jail.
A court ruled that changing your machine's IP address to get access to a public web site is a crime under the CFAA.
This absurd result adds to the need to reform the CFAA.
Under the shadow of the recession, US companies have massively converted well-paid full-time jobs into part-time subsistence jobs.
A court ruled that thugs can force-feed prisoners on hunger strike who signed papers saying to let them die.
Many of these prisoners have been put in solitary for a long time after they were falsely declared gang members based on coincidences.
The Guantanamo prison guards did not allow a prisoner to get a copy of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
Perhaps the guards are afraid the prisoners will see some similarity to their own lives.
UK thug whistleblower Peter Francis says the thugs are threatening to prosecute him for revealing the dirty work he did for them. He refuses to speak to the official inquiry because he suspects they will use his testimony to punish him.
The Guardian destroyed its London copies of Snowden's revelations to avoid the damage that would have been done by handing them to the regime, or being legally banned from talking about them at all.
"As in Russia, the terror threat has become the excuse to curtail our rights".
Oswaldo Paya's relatives have sued Cuban officials for killing him.
Today is Earth Overshoot Day, when humanity has consumed more natural resources since January 1 than our biosphere can replace in the whole year.
The low wages allowed in the
US hurt and
cost everyone (except the plutocrats).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Moment
the US Ended Iran's Brief Experiment in Democracy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Libya is on the verge of disintegration.
The UK government said it interrogated David Miranda because he was carrying "stolen documents" — which could only refer to the information Snowden gave to Glenn Greenwald.
This claim is both absurd and outrageous. The absurdity is that Greenwald already has copies of all that material, so if Miranda was carrying more copies, it was irrelevant. The only significant thing Miranda might have had would be their journalistic work, which was not stolen from anyone.
The outrage is that the state has now declared its intention to wage unrestricted war against journalists. This is the UK's Putin moment, it shifts from trying to cover up its tyrannical deeds to proudly announcing them.
The UK needs a deep public inquiry into the thugs' infiltration of anti-fascist groups and aid to construction blacklists.
This is also one of the reasons why massive surveillance is dangerous.
100,000 manicurists in the UK are Vietnamese, and most of them have been trafficked.
The crucial questions are, how did they get there, and what keeps them there? If they are there involuntarily, what stops them from escaping?
Don't pathologize heroism, warns a soldier who confesses his cowardice, in failing to blow the whistle on the gratuitous violence his unit carried out against Iraqis.
Groklaw has shut down because it can no longer protect its sources due to massive surveillance.
Here's Pamela Jones' statement.
Former Pakistani
dictator Musharraf
faces charges of murdering Benazir Bhutto, on the grounds that he
took away her bodyguards when she was receiving death threats.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: tell the US and UK to stop attacking and intimidating journalists.
The US cooperates with the Egyptian military in return
for convenience
in attacking other countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Note how the New York Times headline, "Ties With Egypt Army Constrain Washington," presumes that the US could not possibly forfeit Egypt's military cooperation — a considerable exaggeration compared with the facts stated.
The UK government forced the Guardian's London office to delete all of Snowden's material, on threat of seizing it.
Fortunately there were copies elsewhere, but this illustrates the fact that the UK and US governments will go to any lengths of lies and abuse to crush journalism that investigates their nastiest secrets.
It won't remain limited to those issues, because the plutocratic state is in cahoots with corporations that endanger our lives, health, and liberty. We have seen the UK thugs help businesses blacklist workers, while in the US, investigating factory farms is now a crime in many states.
These examples demonstrate that the US or UK will use its repressive power against any journalism that business finds annoying — not that different from China.
David Miranda describes his nine-hour interrogation.
Using the "anti-terror" law to interrogate dissidents entering the UK is standard practice.
Egyptian
thugs killed 36 prisoners. The thugs said they were shot (with
teargas) while trying to escape.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
If you are a journalist, or anyone else that must fear a repressive state, email is inherently unsafe, because you can't hide who you are talking with (i.e., metadata).
The article refers to trade secrets as "intellectual property", which is a gratuitous confusion because it conflates them with unrelated issues such as copyrights and patents. Every time the term "intellectual property" is used, it causes confusion — please join me in avoiding that term.
In the US: implore the Tribune
Company not
to sell its newspapers to the Koch brothers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Save America's Pollinators Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
By 2050, floods in coastal cities will cause a trillion dollars of damage per year.
In the US, Miami, New York and New Orleans are at high risk.
The UK helps people block wind farms even miles away from their homes, but won't let people block fracking even 10 feet away. Why this inconsistency? George Monbiot says he thinks that extraction is more macho.
He could be partly right, but I suspect that the extractors offer more money to corrupt the politicians.
Fracking debate: what does the battle for lead-free air teach us?
Thousands protested against fracking in England.
Everyone: call on Kerry to prove he is serious about peace negotiations by demanding that Israel cease expanding its colonies in Palestinian territory.
US citizens: call on Obama to block the USDA from letting poultry companies inspect themselves, and increase the contamination that's permitted.
Letting these companies "police themselves" is worse than letting teenage street gang members do so, because the companies have worse morals and are less trustworthy.
US propaganda presents officials as "idealists" who wish they could
make a better world —
with no resemblance to the truth about
them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Karzai fired a cabinet minister for meeting
with Taliban
negotiators.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Islamist rebels in the Sinai stopped buses of Egyptian thugs and killed them.
The violent Islamists may be the worse of the two, in regard to disrespect for human rights, but we should not take this as excusing the massacres of nonviolent Islamists last week.
"The innocent have nothing to fear?" They do if they embarrass America and happen to visit British soil.
The Brazilian government and MPs are rebuking the UK thugs for arresting David Miranda and taking his computer memories.
I've read that his computer memories included information obtained from Laura Poitras that he was bringing to Glenn Greenwald. This makes me worry: will the NSA be able to decrypt it? If they did not send it through the Internet, they must have been concerned about this possibility.
I hope Big Brother did not get anything important.
The "Common Core" education standards, imposed on the US by the Gates Foundation, threaten to turn out to be the next stage in using standardized tests to declare children and public schools "failures".
The military grip on US policing.
Obama's speech about surveillance shows he wants to lull the public into forgetting about the problem, not correct it.
He also wants us to believe that his willingness to even pretend to discuss the issue is not due to Snowden.
On two occasions recently, Texas thugs performed body cavity searches for no obvious reason on women stopped for speeding or littering (though the women deny those accusations).
Ways to respond to the claim that "copying is stealing".
The US government is making lots of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it is unable to do anything useful with the money.
Two wildfires in Idaho have burned
almost 400 square miles.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK confiscated journalist David Miranda's computers and memories as he passed through Heathrow Airport, using powers supposedly meant for dealing with terrorists.
When the government says "terrorists", it means dissidents and journalists, or anyone that stands in the way of its abuse of power. If occasionally a would-be terrorist gets caught up in the net, they consider that a bonus.
David Miranda is Glenn Greenwald's mate, and this appears to be an attempt to intimidate Greenwald. But Greenwald is not intimidated.
If the UK regime still fears public disapproval, Greenwald will make it regret this.
Over 2000 marched against fracking in the UK.
UK thugs investigated anti-fascist campaigners so as to blacklist them so they could not work.
The Muslim Brotherhood held protest marches, which were not attacked.
Jihadis in Syria attacked the Syrian Kurds, so 20,000 refugees have fled to the Kurdish part of Iraq.
A heat wave and drought are destroying the crops in Austria and Hungary.
We get droughts like this every year (though not always in the same place). And this is just the beginning.
Australian aboriginals have a very high rate of problem drinking, but is jailing them if they don't go for rehabilitation a good solution?
If rehabilitation were a reliable treatment, perhaps no one would refuse it. But as far as I know, for alcoholics to stay sober requires a deep commitment. The threat of jail can make someone go to an activity, but can't give someone that kind of commitment. So I don't see how this can achieve its goal.
There is surely a relationship between the high consumption of alcohol and the way aboriginals were kicked off their land and continue to be downtrodden. Changing that may be the only way to correct this (though it will take decades).
Retired people in Portugal are protesting daily against the plan to cut their pensions to the bone.
Martin Manley set up a web site to represent him after his suicide, but Yahoo arbitrarily took it down.
His sister say Yahoo should put it back because Manley did not advocate suicide for others. But what if he had? That is no reason for censorship.
US citizens: call on Herakles Farms not to cut down 300 square miles of rainforest in Cameroon, which is habitat for chimpanzees and other threatened species.
US citizens: sign
this
petition against appointing Larry Summers as head of the Federal
Reserve.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This is a different petition; if you signed the other, please sign this too.
Technology to record all conversations could turn life into something unrecognizable.
Russia plans to ban Tor, demonstrating how essential Tor is for resisting tyranny.
If the state has grounds to suspect that a person is committing crimes, it has many other ways to investigate, including planting microphones where that person lives and works. These take some effort, however, which is as it should be.
The NSA's 2776 "accidental" violations of its own rules in a 12-month period covered just the NSA headquarters. And the NSA concealed this report from the Senate Intelligence Committee until the committee saw the leak and asked for it.
A Time Magazine writer said he wants to see the US assassinate Julian Assange.
Some Japanese schools
won't
let students read a famous manga book because it shows some of the
atrocities that Japanese troops committed during the occupation of
other countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
One kind of atrocity they committed was waterboarding. The US executed some Japanese soldiers for this. However, the US has done nothing to punish the Americans responsible for committing the same brutal act.
It's clear that the Japanese officials who imposed this censorship care more about whether Japan looks good than whether Japan is good. You can see the same behavior pattern in officials in other countries.
The capacity to commit atrocities exists in every nation. Thus, all governments must do their best to prevent atrocities by holding perpetrators responsible.
Uri Avnery: Israel deserves the Guinness record for chutzpah, for condemning Palestinian "provocations" that are dwarfed by Israel's own provocations.
Companies running salmon farms on the US west coast are trying to take water that needs to be released to rivers so that wild salmon can survive.
Government Accountability Project:
Statement
on Edward Snowden & NSA Domestic Surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Obama claimed that Snowden should have taken advantage of the protections in the Whistleblower Protection Act. But they didn't apply to him, since he employed by a contractor, not by the US government.
Even if that law had applied to him, other examples show he would have been a fool to try to depend on it.
The US runs international "aid" for Haiti so that it goes to create
resorts, mines and sweatshops
owned
by foreigners — while doing little for the Haitians who have
been homeless for three years.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Why the massive surveillance that Snowden showed to us is a threat to you … no matter who you are or what you do.
A UK law professor suggests that prison is the wrong punishment for thieves.
Under the standards of international law, al Qa'ida is too puny to qualify as an enemy to be at war with. It is unable to carry out military operations.
Thus, the US should stop treating this as a war.
Obama misused the word "decimated", which means to kill 1/10 of the soldiers in a military unit. (It was a Roman punishment for mutiny.) Al Qa'ida has been far more than decimated.
Any Other 'Statesman' Who Negotiated Peace Like John Kerry Would Be Treated as a Thief.
The UK had a housing bubble, fueled, like the US housing bubble, by enticing people into predatory mortgages, for which the capital was obtained by mortgage-backed securities. This article explains the whole process clearly.
In the US, the bubble popped and mortgage-backed securities lead to the systematic foreclosure fraud.
In the UK, according to this article, the bubble didn't stay popped; rather, the government patched it up and is blowing more mortgage funds into it.
Without the bubble's high prices, there would have been no need for so much money to pour into mortgages. Thus, I think mortgage-backed securities should be banned entirely.
However, the low rate of housing construction in the UK is also responsible.
Hong Kong's government is asking high-ranking thugs who are due to retire soon to stay on the job an extra 90 days, because of a planned Occupy protest.
This suggests to me that Hong Kong plans to repress the protest camp, as the US, UK, and other countries have done.
Uganda: Rigged Elections And Mysterious Killings: It's the Mugabe Script with a Different Cast.
In Egypt, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the supporters of the military are accusing the US of supporting the other side.
"Smart" electricity meters are not only surveillance devices, but sabotage devices too.
It is most likely that crackers from China could turn off your electric supply at will. It is certain that agents from your own unjust and lawless state could do so.
Why Isn't Beirut Bombing Called "Terrorist"?
The Police Keep Firing; The Bodies Pile Up. In Cairo, Bloodbaths Are Now a Daily Occurrence.
Egypt: we may despise the Muslim Brotherhood, but a coup is a coup.
Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi,
is suing
Dubya for war crimes.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US nuclear power plants
are sitting
ducks for terrorist attacks. Essentially nothing has been done to
protect them since 2001.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government's plutocratic policies are pushing even working people to use food banks.
Egyptian soldiers attacked a mosque occupied by pro-Morsi protesters. Armed men fired from the minaret. The protesters say that the doors to the minaret were controlled by the thugs, which would suggest that this was a false flag operation meant to create an excuse to attack the protesters. But even if they were real Morsi-supporters shooting at the soldiers, after being victims of a massacre while unarmed, they can't be blamed for fighting back.
Most Egyptians seem to be glad that the Muslim Brotherhood is out of power. I too would be glad of that if I were Egyptian. But banning the Muslim Brotherhood means excluding a large part of society from democracy. This is a recipe for inspiring an armed Islamic terrorist movement to replace the nonviolent movement that has just been defeated.
Fighting that will require long-term repression. How can there be room for democracy alongside that? I think the military are planning not to allow democracy.
Bahrainis have launched a renewed push for freedom despite laws more repressive than ever. Will the US support the repression because a fleet is based there?
A cute video can put a species in danger.
Psychotherapy can teach people to refrain from cruelty on the Internet.
E-book publishers plan to use watermarks to identify who purchased a copy.
This is a further reason not to buy any e-book in a way that identifies you.
Ever since New York State was ordered to stop keeping prisoners in solitary confinement if they had serious mental illness, there has been a mysterious trend to diagnose prisoners with mild mental illness instead. At least one seriously ill prisoner was driven to suicide by solitary confinement.
I have no easy answer for what to do with people like Amir Hall. However, any solution probably involves spending more money. If we end the war on drugs, and free lots of prisoners that shouldn't have been imprisoned in the first place, we could afford to care properly for those that we do need to imprison.
A merger between two large airlines in the US is being blocked because an executive admitted the goal was to raise fares.
We are fortunate that these executives confessed the truth of their merger scheme, but in the future there will be other executives and they will learn from this mistake. We must not depend on such confessions in order to thwart them.
Oligopoly (just a few major sellers) starts to cause some of the same harms as monopoly (one single seller). Therefore, any merger that would create a company having over 8% of some market should be blocked automatically; and if it would have more than 4% of some market, it should face stiff disincentives.
Africa's richest woman is the daughter of the dictator of Angola — and not by coincidence.
A Saudi prince has defected and describes how the regime persecutes anyone that calls for human rights.
America's cheering millions of high school graduates toward college every year, feeding them into the debt grinder under the banner of increased opportunity, when full disclosure would require admitting that there isn't a hell of a lot waiting for them on the other side, where the middle class has nearly vanished and full employment is going the way of the dodo.
Ladar Levison says he may face prosecution for shutting down Lavabit.
Will Bezos, as owner of the Washington Post, stand up to US pressure to conceal government wrongdoing? Not if Amazon is any guide.
US citizens:
thank
EPA official Richard Pelletier, who refused to lift Billionaire
Polluter's suspension from bidding for US government contracts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
BP has not been punished enough to teach it or other oil companies a lesson.
One reason the US doesn't cut off arms aid to Egypt is that
the aid
really goes to US arms companies.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Médecins Sans Frontiéres has withdrawn from Somalia because gangs and militias, some of them allied with the government, are killing aid workers and kidnaping them for ransom.
Israel plans to pay hundreds of students to post pro-Israel statements on Twitter and Facebook.
The Great Divestiture (privatization state services to human beings) has been coupled with the Great Risk Shift (employers dumping various responsibilities onto individuals).
What we need is not "economic recovery" but reversal of those two changes. We must nationalize; we must reregulate. And, as the article says, we must aid and encourage unions.
In May, Obama promised to give us transparency about drone attacks. He has done none of that.
Who
Dies in Yemen Drone Strikes?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
5 Myths Used to Justify Death By Drone and America's Assassination Policy.
Bloomberg wants to install electronic locks on New York City public housing. This means that the doors will record who enters and when, and deliver this info to the state.
Oh, he also proposed fingerprinting the residents.
Senators Sanders and Boxer propose a law that would really do something to curb global heating.
New York City Comptroller Liu proposes legalization and regulated sale of marijuana.
His report estimates the city could save $31 million a year by legalizing sale of marijuana, and bring in $400 million a year by taxing it to keep the price the same.
That's without counting all the other benefits, in the form of decreased repression and lives not ruined.
Young Dalit women are taking the lead to campaign against the rapes and murders carried out by upper-cast people to keep them down.
The perpetrators' first line of defense are the thugs, who refuse to take reports of these crimes, and even conspire with the perpetrators, who have the support of their caste-mates.
This calls to mind the racist arbitrary searches of people on the street in New York City. I think the fact that they are arbitrary already makes them wrong, but the racist application of arbitrariness is part of a broader pattern.
In several cases listed, Dalit victims committed suicide. Suicide sometimes works as a protest, but if you do it in private, it only gives the oppressor a further victory. If you are ready to die because you can't bear the oppression, you may as well go down fighting.
Chomsky: The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy, But You'll Never Hear About It in Our 'Free Press'.
The Lancet says that the UK government treats NHS hospitals like failing banks, seeking to close them, and never mind health care.
The thousands of "errors" per year that the NSA has confessed to are "the tip of the iceberg", according to Senators Wyden and Udall.
At 60 more Egyptians were killed today as Morsi supporters protested.
Random violence plays into the hands of the military, which will use it as an excuse to condemn Morsi supporters. Therefore, I suspect that the unidentified gunmen who shot at passersby on the bridge in Cairo were from the military.
It seems there were armed men among the protesters, but they did not start the firing. Thugs seemed to be out to kill protesters for the sake of killing.
The Zimbabwe
opposition dropped
its court challenge to the election, saying this is because the
government refused to reveal crucial information about the vote.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It is not clear what information this was.
US cities are sending SWAT teams for noise complaints and other matters where violence is not particularly likely.
That tends to cause violence.
4000 US women were forced to have babies in 2008 because they could not scrape together the money for an abortion until it was too late.
The figure will have risen since then because so many more Americans have become poor.
Women who cannot afford an abortion can't afford to raise children either.
Beyond Keystone XL: three other controversial pipelines.
First they came for the terrorists and the foreigners, and no one did anything. Then they came for the drug dealers. Then the tax cheats. Then the journalists. And that's just what we know about. How much worse does it have to get before we say enough is enough?
Tech company executives: fight government surveillance, or users will find out you didn't.
They are not limited to fighting in court. They can lobby, too.
Apple has got a patent on a phone or camera back door that would let Big Brother's men disable functions such as photography.
Actually implementing the idea would be a vicious attack on human rights, and would leave people vulnerable to the persistent abuse and lies of the state's forces.
Patenting the idea has no direct effect on users. It means that others would have to get permission from Apple if they wanted to implement this. But it shows Apple is at least thinking about trying to do this to us.
The Strange Case of Barrett Brown Just Got Stranger.
Explaining all the charges against Barrett Brown.
EFF Supports Human Rights Case Against Cisco for Selling Surveillance Technologies to China.
I think it is wrong to sell them to the US government, too.
The FISA court says it really has no ability to control the NSA. So the rare occasions when it says "no", that may not have much effect.
Obama said that there were three pillars of oversight of NSA mass surveillance, but all three turn out to be empty.
News organizations are using copyright to hush up their embarrassments.
Now that I have read (for the first time) the joke pilot names, I reject the accusation that this joke was "racist". Making jokes about names and words in any language is normal humor. It was the wrong time to joke about an accident where people had just died, but that's not racism.
Coal mines in Australia are making people sick. In one area, 40% of the children have asthma.
Bradley Manning's Statement: A Forced "Confession" Concludes A Drumhead Tribunal.
The defense witnesses tried to show that his heroic leaks were an error that he made because he was unable to think clearly.
Four questions the next chairman of the Federal Reserve should have to answer.
Everyone: call on Kazakhstan to move political prisoner Aron Atabek out of solitary confinement.
Two Londoners face "terrorism" charges for posting a video.
The video they made involves gloating over the killing of a British soldier in London. They had nothing to do with carrying it out; they only expressed an opinion. I don't like the opinion, and maybe you don't either; but freedom of speech includes the freedom to express opinions we don't like.
By 2040, deadly heat waves such as almost never seen today will be fairly common.
The extinction of large animals, 12,000 years ago in South America,
started a
process starving
the forest of nutrients that is still getting worse.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Bankization of America: the imaginary economy of banks drives the real economy down.
The NSA's official rules on surveillance mean little, since
it breaks
those rules thousands of times every year.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the State Department to dismiss ERM from evaluating the environmental impact of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
ERM concealed a conflict of interest: a business tie to Transcanada.
US citizens: call on the senate
to take
action against global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Here's a list of companies and pressure groups that sponsored the latest ALEC meeting.
ExxonMobil, Wells Fargo and UPS would be easy to boycott. People in the computer field could put pressure on SAP.
A year after South African thugs massacred 34 striking miners, apparently as part of a plan, the government continues to stonewall.
I am in favor of nationalizing the mines; compensation is unnecessary, given how much the owners have profited and how much they ought to owe to their past and present workers. However, merely changing the identity of the owner won't by itself result in decent treatment for miners, or the poor in general.
Ecuador has abandoned a plan to keep oil in the ground in exchange for foreign compensation.
Correa asked for half what ten years of oil drilling would have brought in, but received only a tiny fraction.
No Tanks: Let's Not Kid About It, the Government Is Afraid of Its Own Citizens.
Corruption from Siemens is partly to blame for high bus fares
in Sao
Paulo
that led to protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Supporters of Morsi are now attacking government buildings in Egypt.
It is understandable they would do so after so many of them were killed.
Many Christian churches have been burnt, and one Christian was shot dead.
There is no excuse for this. However, it is invalid for the government to cite this violence as an excuse for the attacks which sparked it.
In the US, drinking over four cups of coffee correlates with a much higher death rate.
I'm not convinced this study shows that coffee is the cause of the higher death rate. Maybe people drink more coffee because of some condition that also makes them more likely to die young.
Obama's weak response to Egypt's bloody crackdown is tantamount to support.
One of the Greenpeace protesters who climbed a London skyscraper faces the threat of a long jail term for "aggravated trespass".
The UK crime of "aggravated trespass" was invented as an excuse to punish protesters that didn't injure anyone or destroy property. In other words, it is an explicit and intentional attack against democracy.
An Afghan woman MP has been kidnaped by the Taliban.
Dozens of high ranking thugs in South Africa have been convicted of serious crimes (up to murder) and are not even fired.
Everyone: call for moving the 2014 Winter Olympics out of Russia.
Whites in California defend meritocracy except when they have to compete with people of Asian origin, who seem to have lots of merit.
Wikipedia refuses to participate in China's censorship.
A tentacle of Myhrvold's patent troll company, Intellectual Ventures, has hit a small setback, but it isn't a defeat.
Nova Scotia has passed a draconian law defining any communication that seems likely to hurt someone's self-esteem as "cyberbullying", with harsh punishments.
The practice of criminalizing statements that hurt someone's feelings is a plague that affects most of the world.
A bill has been introduced in Congress to stop schools from punishing students for wielding pastries in the shape of a gun, or drawing a gun on paper, etc.
I support it, but it does not go far enough. We need to reverse the factors that pressure schools to adopt lunatic "zero tolerance" policies.
Brazil has sued Samsung for operating a sweatshop.
More NSA language-twisting: they can search your email but it isn't "collected".
China will stop the official practice
of transplanting
organs from victims of execution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Egyptian suppression forces killed over 500 protesters.
Secular Egyptians mostly seem to support the military; I received mail from one that accused the Muslim Brotherhood of "terrorism". There has been some minor terrorism, specifically attacks against Christian churches (but not people, from what I've read), but as far as I know the Muslim Brotherhood does not advocate this. It might well have violated the human rights of women and non-Muslims, and maybe Muslims too (by forbidding them to stop being Muslims), but that is not the same thing as terrorism.
Egyptian thugs killed over 270 pro-Morsi protesters, and eventually drove the doctors out of the protest camp field hospital by shooting tear gas at it. I wonder if the wounded protesters will turn up dead.
This means Egypt has turned to naked military rule. Will it be as repressive and persistent as it was under Mubarak? One can hope not, but the return of Mubarak's "emergency" law suggests the worst.
Mild criticism with zero firmness is how the US typically treats a repressive regime that it supports. I think it means that the US really supports the Egyptian military's repression and only pretends to disapprove.
Sustainable biofuel, not made using resources needed for making food, is now being developed, so the oil companies are trying to destroy the mandates for using ethanol in fuel.
The mandates should be changed so that they require ethanol made in sustainable ways.
The United Arab Emirates is trying to close the German server of a news site that criticizes oppression in the UAE.
In Ecuador, Indigenous Leaders Sentenced to 12 Years in Jail for "Terrorism".
US citizens: call on CBS to stop biasing the surveillance debate in favor of surveillance.
'Defense' contractor CACI International has sued the victims that its employees tortured.
Censorship Backfire: Surge of Interest in Zinn's 'People's History'
Longlines Killing Pacific Seabirds at Record Rate.
Endangered species protection has been proposed for a Florida butterfly, but if we don't stop pumping out CO2, it will be drowned with the rest of South Florida.
Brazil demands clarifications on NSA surveillance.
US schools have come to
resemble
prisons, physically and in the police state mentality applied to
their inmates.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Two Venezuelan newspapers were fined for publishing photos of violent crime scenes.
I hope people who find this censorship ridiculous will also question the censorship plans of other countries such as the UK.
Indian TV stations have been shut down for broadcasting coverage of a local autonomy movement.
The repression of the nonviolent Islamists in Egypt is likely to boost support for violent Islamists, who can now argue that peaceful methods won't be allowed to win.
It appears that Egyptian thugs intentionally targeted reporters.
Pakistan has disappeared 450 people, and their relatives are trying to find out what happened to them.
Everyone: sign
this petition
calling for no prosecution of the Anonymous leaker whose leaks led to
the prosecution of the Steubenville rapists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Brazilian thugs banned showing a documentary in a poor neighborhood because it might make them hate the thugs.
There is good reason it might, since the documentary shows how children in that very neighborhood got killed in some sort of run-in with the thugs.
Thugs must not be allowed to censor!
US citizens: call on your elected representatives to support constitutional amendments to reverse the Corporations United decision. It's important to do this again even if you've done it before.
Governments that prosecute global heating civil disobedience are coming to court with dirty hands because they failed to protect the atmospheric commons.
The CIA said it had no file on Noam Chomsky, but it had one in 1970.
Israel has released 26 Palestinian prisoners, mostly people who killed civilians.
Can anyone tell me how these prisoners were chosen? Why not release the people who have been imprisoned without charges rather than prisoners convicted of something?
Does the
US Pay Families When Drones Kill Innocent Yemenis?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone senators to oppose appointing New York Thug Commissioner Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Suppression.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Escalating military responses to rhino and elephant poaching are failing, just as they failed to stop drug trafficking, but efforts to convince people to stop buying them might work.
The big differences between poaching and drug trafficking are (1) legalization of hunting rhinos and elephants would not solve the problem, and (2) rhino and elephant horn have no physiological effect on their users.
Another NSA snowjob: it "touches" only 1.6% of all Internet traffic, but communication is only 2.9% of all Internet traffic, so maybe the NSA looks at "only" 55% of all Internet communication.
Or maybe the number means nothing because we don't know their meaning of "touches".
Eastern European Autocrats Pose New Test for Democracy.
A Hungarian friend tells me that Orbán has chipped away at democracy and civil society to the extent that it is nearly impossible to challenge his power, but has avoided the sort of harsh measures that would make lots of Hungarians wish to try. So it is a nondemocratic regime, but not actively oppressive.
War crimes tribunals have set a high bar for proving that high officials are responsible for war crimes carried out when they were not present.
There will be times that underlings commit war crimes that their superiors did not approve, or would not have approved. It would be unjust to hold the superiors responsible for that. However, they can be held responsible for not taking action against the perpetrators.
The Bahrain tyranny threatens violence against those who commemorate the anniversary of 2011 protests.
This tyranny receives the firm support of the US government and its tyrannical regional allies.
A UK agency ruled against
placing
license plate recognition cameras on all roads leading to the town of
Royston.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
However, there is no sign of any plan to limit the network that tracks car travel around the UK.
The Tea Party is being split between grassroots that support home solar power and the business-funded part that obeys the Koch brothers.
A former aide to Senator Wyden rebukes Obama for thwarting an open debate about massive surveillance in Congress for so long.
Finally, the US government opposes a merger between giant companies.
All such mergers should be blocked as standard practice.
Obama set up a web site and promised to respond to petitions, but
he ignores
some of the sharpest ones.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
"Bee-friendly" plants for sale in major US chain stores contain neonicotinoid pesticides.
The Koch-funded Franklin Center generates right-wing "journalism" so newspapers don't need to employ reporters any more.
More details of the Hungarian government's policies that undermine democracy.
Several state governments subsidize ALEC.
Guatemala may face trade sanctions if it does not end the murders of union organizers.
Some of these murders are connected to Coca Cola Company, which is part of the motive for the world-wide boycott of that company.
Why it would be impossible, pointless and misguided to charge Nidal Hasan with "terrorism".
Corporate greed, refusing to allow food workers paid days off,
spreads
illness to their customers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
But hey, the plutocrats have their own cooks.
When Argentine prosecutors charged Iranian officials for the bombing of a Jewish institution, the only link connecting them to it came from the armed opposition (and sometime terrorist) group Mujahedin-E Khalq.
This is not a reliable enough basis to accuse anyone.
See previous notes for how the MEK got itself removed from the US list of "terrorist" groups.
Egyptian suppression forces attacked the Morsi supporters' protest camps, killing dozens of them.
300 protesters had been killed in previous attacks.
A British cameraman was shot dead as he covered the attack.
Assuming he was shot by the suppression forces, that shows they were shooting at people who were offering them no violence.
The coup has a lot of popular support, but that doesn't justify repressing the people who oppose it.
Algorithms trained from data can encode prejudice in a form that is hard to spot.
The hypothetical "grand solar minimum", even if it happens, would probably cool the Earth far less than we have already heated it up.
EU citizens: sign the
initiative for an unconditional basic income.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Australia plans a nuclear waste dump in aboriginal territory without the consent of the aboriginal people that live there.
US citizens: call for increasing social security benefits and remove the cap on social security tax for the rich.
US citizens: call on elected officials not to let the NSA open its new Utah data center.
The NSA already stores too much data about all of us; if storage limitations force it to be selective, that will crimp its excesses. Obviously, this is not a full or elegant solution, but it is a step forward.
Part of Australia plans to let mines pollute as much as they like at any given time, as long as the yearly average stays under a certain level.
A Bangladeshi human rights leader has been arrested for "fabricating information" about atrocities by government suppression forces.
It's normal thug behavior to lie and cover up their brutality. Thus, if a government is minded to arrest the people who reported it, it can easily find witnesses to testilie that they must have "fabricated" the reports.
Obama's announced
review of surveillance, in response to Snowden's revelations,
validates Snowden as a whistleblower.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Those who betrayed the US are its leaders who have ignored their oath to defend the Constitution.
US citizens: phone the Department of the Interior to object to the plan to allow mining of millions of tons of publicly-owned coal.
Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden talk about how their cooperation started and how it proceeded.
Israel's cabinet spat on peace negotiations by voting to expand its colonies in Palestinian territory.
Islamists in Banghazi have killed three journalists in the last four days.
The Moral
Imperative of Activism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The WiFi-tracking trash cans have been deinstalled from a part of London.
However, the phone company continues tracking phones and recording their movements.
LA thugs arrested a photographer for "interfering" with them by photographing them from 90 feet away (30 meters).
This is typical thug behavior, documented dozens of times in earlier political notes.
The British Library's filtering software blocked access to the text of Hamlet, calling it "violent content".
It is insulting to refer to Shakespeare's plays, or any works of authorship, as "content". Please join me in rejecting that term.
Calling Hamlet "violent", however, is accurate, and the example shows why blocking access to violent works (or any works) is wrong.
The Obama regime and congressional leaders kept most members of Congress in the dark about massive surveillance when they had to vote on it.
Holder plans to stop charging "low-level drug offenders" with crimes that require a prison sentence.
It is a small step towards what must be done: ending the War on Drugs.
The groundwater near the Fukushima plants has so much strontium-90 that drinking it for a year would surely give a person cancer. When it gets into the ocean, it accumulates in algae and in fish, so the marine life in that region will be contaminated for a long time.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between the quantities of strontium-90 leaking from the Fukushima plants today and the amount released by above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 50s and early 60s.
John Grisham, whose books are banned in Guantanamo, writes about an innocent prisoner who may finally be freed — and sent to a country where he knows nobody.
The Australian government is taking many aboriginal children away from their parents because of problems that are caused by poverty. Meanwhile, it cuts the assistance that would help aboriginal families cope.
At one point during 2012, 13,299 aboriginal children had been removed from their families.
These statistics say that about 2/3 are placed with relatives or indigenous people, but it is still a large rate of taking children away.
Turkish journalists were sentenced to long prison terms for supposed participation in a conspiracy for a military coup.
It is not implausible, a priori, that Turkish generals were planning a coup. Turkey has seen such coups before. To claim journalists were involved in the conspiracy makes it implausible.
Zimbabwe women report interference with their voting, and threats.
There is no scientific reason for killing whales — the same information can be obtained through methods that don't hurt them.
The
Surveillance State, You, and the Time Traveling Detectives.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Murdoch is ordering journalists working for News Corp's Australian to bias their writing against the Labor government.
Universities snoop more and more on students, making a data base of data such as what web searches they do, their driving habits, whether they miss meetings, as well as how they use the library.
I think libraries should ensure that people's borrowing habits are not recorded in any permanent data base.
US Drones
on Yemen: 'al Qaeda's Public Relations Officer'.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Why the World Bank Shies Away From Energy Efficiency.
The US does not recognize that use of toxic Agent Orange was a war
crime, and offers
no
compensation to millions of Vietnamese who were affected.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The President of Purdue University, when previously Governor of Indiana, tried to ban Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the US" from schools in that state.
A new method for attacking dissident US journalists: send them a "leak" which is really "child" pornography, and get them imprisoned when they look.
To criminalize possession of any kind of digital material is an injustice, and endangers all other human rights.
German justice minister proposes ban for US firms that don't abide privacy laws.
Meanwhile, the German spy agency (BND) is passing metadata on to the NSA.
Teachers in the UK's deregulated "academy" schools report pressure from their managers to inflate grades.
This is a natural consequence of "grading" schools by the average grades of students.
Thanks to fracking, the town of Barnhart, Texas, ran out of water.
Fracking adds to many other forms of overuse, which are running headlong into reduced rainfall caused by global heating.
During 2012, CIA repeatedly followed one drone attack with a second drone attack, targeting rescuers looking for wounded from the first attack. This tactic is a war crime.
It was used by Iraqi resistance fighters; maybe the US learned it from them.
Recommending computing practices that partially resist surveillance is not enough to count as a solution to the surveillance problem. We need to make privacy safe for ordinary users.
US Could Exploit Trade Deal to Expand Spying.
The "trade" deal in question, which is more about giving business more power than about trade in the usual sense, is TAFTA: Turn All Freedom To Ashes.
Angola's principal investigative reporter, Rafael Marques de Morais, faces criminal charges for reporting on blood diamonds.
The government of Ethiopia is systematically kicking certain ethnic groups off their land, forcing them to settle in villages were they have no life, no farms and no future, in order to sell their land to foreign plantations.
When they object, they are tortured. Ethiopia's government has a close relationship with the US, and invaded Somalia for the US a few years ago.
I don't think the victims of this violence have any obligation to refrain from responding with violence.
Meanwhile, Nigeria plans to evict tens of thousands of people from urban areas, destroying their homes, for "redevelopment".
One of the causes of land conflicts like these is world population growth. Offering gratis contraception and abortion to all women will help to avoid some future conflicts.
Political prisoners in Iran remain a political influence.
"Ninja journalists" cover what Brazil's concentrated mainstream media ignore.
Torrent trackers should stop tracking their users.
The same applies to network services in general, I think.
Why did the Obama regime ask its Wikileaks mole to investigate Guardian reporter James Ball?
He asks this question because it seems to illustrate a policy that threatens journalists in general.
Despite a big increase in drone attacks in Yemen, the local al-Qa'ida organization seems to be getting stronger.
This is not surprising, because a guerrilla organization's strength is typically limited by its ability to recruit.
Undercover
thugs infiltrated
a tar sands resistance camp and sabotaged a civil disobedience
action.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The mainstream media present ex-officials such as Michael Hayden as trustworthy authorities, burying the fact that they misled us before and have commercial interests in distorting issues now.
A judge ruled that the New York Thug Department is practicing racial discrimination when it searches people on the street based on no evidence.
I think the question of discrimination is a side issue. Whether they search you because they don't like your skin color, or because they don't like your face, it is equally wrong.
On Friday, the President Treated Us Like Five-Year-Olds.
Liepman's claim, that the government is only listening to terrorists, is now known to be false. And it's not only drug dealers, either. Recall that "terrorist", for the US government, includes dissidents and whistleblowers.
In the US: call on textbook publishers to publish real science and resist the Texas Taliban.
Banksters paid a pittance to settle the US lawsuit over the homes that they foreclosed fraudulently. Now homeowners are suing, and we can see that they stole trillions of dollars.
Masha Gessen, her girlfriend and their children will flee Russia because the state will take away children from gay couples.
US citizens: oppose Rep. Issa's plan
to attack
the US Postal Service.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
What was it that Lavabit was ordered to do, such that it shut down instead?
World energy investment is projected to focus mainly on unconventional oil and gas, that makes more CO2 per energy delivered than ordinary oil.
A Republican admits that the rash of unsatisfiable "safety
regulations" being placed on abortion providers
is meant to
make them impossible.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: sign this petition to close the Guantanamo prison instead of US embassies.
Instead of fracking, make biogas from wastes.
US citizens: Call for a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides.
The patriarchy says, 'no' means 'yes', and they can ruin people's lives.
Others endorsed the opposite falsehood, claiming that 'yes' means 'no', and this too can ruin people's lives.
What part of 'yes', or 'no', don't they understand?
An ISP's "piracy" filter blocks access to the political site torrentfreak.com as well.
Please don't refer to sharing as "piracy" — that is enemy propaganda. Please call it "sharing". The only case where it's proper to use the word "pirate" in this context is in the name "Pirate Party".
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service to choose advisors about protection of wolves based on their expertise, and not reject them because they objected to previous distortion of their views.
Christian theocrats are accusing Planned Parenthood of medicaid fraud. Planned Parenthood says it isn't true, but defending the cases is so expensive that it has to settle instead.
Trash cans in London track all WiFi-enabled devices as they pass by.
They do not track my laptop, as its WiFi device is normally turned off.
Bahrain has, in effect, exiled Maryam Al-Khawaja, by putting her on a "no fly" list.
Her father has been sentenced to life in prison there for protesting.
Saudi Arabia Continues to Fight Human Rights Organizations.
Jordan is imposing crushing censorship on the press.
This is part of a regional attack on dissidents.
Everyone: call on Miami to hold the killers of Israel Hernandez accountable.
Dr Sanjay Gupta, a prominent opponent of marijuana, calls for legalization of medical marijuana, because the US banned it without scientific evidence.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Frack Pack bills to regulate fracking to protect air and water. Also send a message through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: thank Edward Snowden.
Watch out for the tendency to define sadness as a medical condition.
Israel made a drone attack in Egypt, with private permission from Egypt's military.
It is not inherently wrong for Israel to help Egypt against rebels, if that's what they are and Egypt is fighting them militarily. Nonetheless, for Egypt to get this help from Israel seems like asking for trouble, and we can't take Israel's word about who was targeted or who was actually hit.
A large
movement in Greece reconnects people to electricity whose electric
accounts have been shut off.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In ordinary circumstances I would not support this. However, a government of occupation such as the one that rules Greece, a government that is putting undesirables in concentration camps is not entitled to criticize any form of resistance, as long as it doesn't attack ordinary people.
The head of the NSA told us to
"get the
facts" instead of criticizing massive surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Since it is only through Snowden that we get any facts about this, Obama should pardon him and thank him.
The tiny railroad company that caused the Lac Megantic disaster is bankrupt; its insurance will not cover the damages.
This company is a piece of a business empire structured as many corporations with small assets. The apparent purpose of this structure is to save the empire as a whole from paying the damages for accidents such as this. It limits the liability to one small piece, which can go bankrupt in order to spare the empire as a whole. That this leaves the victims screwed is of no importance to the callous rich.
It resembles the strategy used by Peabody Energy which spun off a subsidiary containing its retired workers' pension obligations, so it would go bankrupt and screw those former workers.
This practice is lawful due to politicians and parties that have sold out to business. If they represented the people instead of the plutocrats, they would have adopted laws that hold the entire empire liable.
Why not accuse Dubya of "aiding al Qa'ida"?
The damaged Fukushima reactors are leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, and probably have contaminated the aquifer under the site.
The contaminated aquifer could contaminate plant life there for centuries.
A Tibetan musician was imprisoned merely for calling on Tibetans to be united and learn and speak Tibetan.
Pirate Party Reports IT Minister to the Police for Copyright Infringement.
A Jobs Plan Only Big Business Could Love.
Amerindians in Canada pressured a store to stop selling hair ornaments which "make a mockery of their culture."
It looks like this is not real mockery, just a resemblance that they feel they are entitled to own.
No one has a right to own a style of ornamentation, and these people should get used to that. There is no point fighting to continue the sale accessories that offend someone — they are not important enough. But on principle that would be right.
Senator Feinstein, militantly pro-surveillance, wants to narrow further a press-shield bill that is already ridiculously weak.
Quantifying how wildfires in the West have increased, and how they are projected to increase in coming decades.
This projection is not a certainty. What really happens could be less, or more.
Vietnam: Reporter Who Investigates Corruption Arrested for "Corruption".
US cities including New York are starting municipal composting programs.
The TSA is the Obama regime's scheme to impose random searches on Americans everywhere they go.
Minimum-wage employers are now the biggest employers in the US, and courageous workers are starting to go on strike.
The US need jobs more than it needs "efficiency". If companies use threats of automation as a lever to keep wages down, I suggest banning the automation that they would use. Why not ban automatic check-out machines in all stores?
Although Pope Francis shows concern for the poor, he still supports cruel Catholic dogma.
How I Exposed an Undercover Cop.
Journalists and activists are murdered with impunity in the Philippines.
China and India plan over 400 hydroelectric dams for the Himalayan region, and these are likely to cause big environmental problems.
Wyden: Obama's NSA Proposals Are Nice, But They Don't Go Far Enough.
150 human rights
organizations call
on Obama to stop prosecuting Snowden.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Some of these organizations' activities are explained in Cory Doctorow's article.
The US has sued Bank of America for tricking clients into buying bad investments.
Why no prosecution?
How did Shell get the Irish thugs to attack protesters? A company reportedly delivered around 50,000 dollars worth of whiskey to the thugs, as one among many other favors.
James Risen is ready to go to jail to protect his sources, but if the US is to reclaim democracy, it must ensure no reporter must do so.
Thousands Demand GMO Corporations 'Quit India'.
US forfeiture presented as an instance of systematic entrepreneurial corruption, as found in Russia and Iraq.
Jimmy Carter praised Snowden and said the US does not have a functioning democracy. US media ignored Carter's the speech, which goes against the official party line.
US citizens:
call
for ratification of the Agreement on the Conservation of
Albatrosses and Petrels.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to require government contractors to pay a living wage.
Obama's plans for "reforming" the government housing loan entities, "Freddie Mac" and "Fannie Mae", could lead to a repeat the mortgage bubble.
I think we should ban mortgage-backed securities and require each mortgage to remain in the hands of one sole bank — so that bank can give the homeowner an adjustment when it's called for.
Defense Attorneys Plan to Fight NSA Evidence in Drug Cases.
The NSA collects Americans' communications in a very loose way
by saying that
someone
else is the "target".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The second in charge of the CIA listed the "security threats" that the US faces, and none of them is much of a threat. So why not have a smaller military?
The principal real threats to the well-being of Americans are plutocracy and global heating. A large army can't tax the megacorps' offshored profits or hold back the rising sea. But it can feed our money to the military-industrial complex, and start wars.
Glenn Greenwald comments on the shutdown of Lavabit.
I think the Obama regime will rue the day it did this. I cheer the courage of Lavabit's owner, who has dealt tyranny a great blow.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, support Rush Holt's repeal of the PAT RIOT Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on the FDA to prohibit labeling GMOs as "natural".
US citizens: call on Obama to oppose Israel's plan to destroy Bedouin villages and to call on Israel to respect nonviolent protest.
US citizens:
call
on the judge to reject letting Halliburton off with a tiny fine
for its deadly practices.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
Call
on Congress to investigate the DEA's dishonest use of NSA
materials.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Obama not to allow fracking on public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The effects of global heating are already making US electric plants shut down because they can't get enough water. And it will get worse.
Student Loan Law Raises College Costs, Sanders Says.
Lavabit's
Brave Stand (and Snowden's statement about it).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
There is a big fuss because Oprah Winfrey asked to see a $42,000 handbag in a store in Zurich and was told, "That is too expensive for you." Was this prejudice because of her skin color, or because of her body size?
Whichever it was, the store employee was nasty — but before we get too indignant about the unfairness of receiving an insult when considering buying a bag that costs more than a working-class American makes in a year, let's consider a more important ethical question: should rich people, regardless of skin color or body size, pay more money in taxes? Should some of their gains be spent on education, health care, and renewable energy — rather than $42,000 handbags?
The fisherman of Fukushima still cannot fish, because radioactive material in water leaking into the sea pushes the local fish above the standard limit.
The email service Lavabit has shut down rather than spy on its users.
Since the management of Lavabit would like to tell us what happened, and the US government wants to keep us in the dark, justice requires us to presume the worst about the US government.
Miami thugs killed a prized graffiti artist because he ran away when they tried to arrest him for painting graffiti.
The family won't get any truth from the thugs. They will tell the story that serves their purpose.
Tasers kill quite a few people.
Every time you use one, you should realize, "This might kill."
ALEC and the Heatland Institute continue their funded campaign to falsify climate science and keep us on track to disaster.
ALEC continues to oppose gun control despite saying it would cease.
Richard Dawkins tweeted to criticize Islam because there are not very many Muslim Nobelists.
I don't think his point is cogent. Most have neither the talent nor the interest in doing the sort of work that might win a Nobel prize. If Islam diminishes one's chances of winning a Nobel prize, which has not been proven, that would at worst be marginally unfortunate, not wrong.
What is really wrong about Islam is its disrespect for human rights. For instance, its ban on conversion away from Islam. In general, Muslim countries prohibit this and punish those who try — in some places, with execution.
Fresh leaks say that major UK telecom companies have actively developed spy software for GCHQ.
A legal campaign has been launched against UK telecom that cooperate with GCHQ surveillance.
A lawsuit was launched against Dubya's illegal warrantless wiretapping, but Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act which made it legal.
Now there are plans to try to reverse that.
Prosecutor Heymann compared Aaron Swartz to a rapist, condemning him for dragging MIT through the ordeal of appearing in court by not making a plea bargain.
DC activists have identified an undercover thug infiltrator who arranged for other thugs to sabotage nonviolent protests.
These protests were aimed at pressuring retailers to support safer working conditions in Bangladesh. In other words, aimed at retailers that put people's lives at risk. Why would the thugs help them? Thugs have a general practice of helping the rich (including these companies) against the non-rich.
Cory Doctorow refutes the damaging myth that defenders of computing freedom are naive and foolish cyber-utopians.
One reason the US experiences so many leaks is that it is too quick to stamp things "secret".
On the distinction between real secrets and public secrets.
Manning
and Snowden revealed the latter kind.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Broad U.S. Terror Alert Is "Crazy Pants".
A judge was bribed by a privatized juvenile prison to sentence lots of kids there. He has been sentenced to a long prison term.
That is justice, in the small; but the privatized prison system will lead to such crimes over and over until we put an end to it.
Atherton, California, seems to be doing racial profiling when it stops drivers: 95% of the drivers stopped by its thugs have Hispanic names. And there are other irregularities too.
In the US: call on NBC to stop rejecting anti-Keystone XL ads.
15 Things Everyone [in the US] Would Know If There Were a Liberal Media.
Mothers face widespread workplace discrimination even when they do good work.
A Russian TV journalist who defiantly broadcast sober criticism of
Putin
is threatened
with charges of "hooliganism".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I Do Not Want My Daughter to Be "Nice".
The UK border thugs sometimes copy all the data from people's phones and computers, just like the US border thugs, but in the UK they also threaten to imprison people for not handing over their passwords.
Many elevator Door Close buttons are dummies. (I have sometimes suspected that it was a dummy in a particular elevator.)
So are thermostats in many offices. But that would not convince me I don't feel hot — I know that from empirical evidence, and I have a thermometer to test my personal sensations against.
A giant sinkhole 24 acres in area has swallowed part of Bayou Corne, and the toxic fumes make the rest of the town uninhabitable.
US citizens: call
for abortion coverage for peace corps workers in cases of rape or
medical necessity.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This is not enough, of course. Every woman should be able to get an early-term abortion at no cost.
British Columbia has a carbon tax, and gives the money to people with low incomes.
Thus, the poor are not shafted by the tax, but they do feel pressure to conserve, just as everyone else does.
This is the sensible way to use the market to push society away from burning fossil fuels.
Our carbon emissions are gradually locking in substantial future rises in sea level that will eventually inundate large parts of many coastal cities.
This gives a new meaning to the concept of an "underwater mortgage".
Businesses may one day demand to monitor employees' medical readings all the time. ("Big data" means "massive surveillance".)
Of course, this monitoring will be "optional", except for people who would mind being unemployed.
We should prohibit the practice before it gets started, because limiting mass surveillance is more important than any other pertinent goals.
Obama postponed (probably cancelled) a summit meeting with Putin because negotiations on many issues have stalled.
Obama took advantage of this to smear Snowden again.
John Kiriakou: Obama's Abuse of the Espionage Act is Modern-Day McCarthyism.
Legal action against zero-hours contracts that leave workers in a totally precarious situation.
Forfeiture at work: Rochelle Bing has struggled for 4 years to prevent thugs from seizing her house on the grounds that her son sold drugs there.
The supposed reason for this is to terrorize the head of every family exercise an impossible level of strict control over the rest. Perhaps a middle-class housewife can watch everything that people do in her house, though teenagers will tend to resist that. However, no working person could possibly do this.
That is purely theoretical. The real reason is that the thug department wants money, and will take it on any available pretext from anyone who is vulnerable.
Seizing property is a punishment, and calling it something else is merely a legal lie. Under the US constitution, a punishment should only follow due process of law: conviction of a crime.
As for the thugs and the money they thirst for, if we legalize regulated sale of drugs, we could get along with a lot fewer thugs. Not only the victimless drug crimes, but the robberies fueled by drug habits, would disappear.
The article tangentially touches on another grave danger: it is a bad thing for anyone to have 18 grandchildren. We need to prevent that from happening in the future, but seizing houses from grandparents is not going to help.
ALEC is about to privately present its agenda for the coming year: many possible attacks on democracy.
Egypt's military maybe-ruler is associating himself with the memory of Nasser, a military dictator.
Governments are using Interpol to find and harass dissidents in exile.
Journalists in Russia who criticize mistreatment of people in connection with the coming Olympic games face repression.
