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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.
The troll wants to increase military spending by 54 billion dollars a year, at the expense of things that benefit Americans and the US.
It wasn't easy to find the names of the "300 scientists" that signed a letter urging hte troll to increase use of fossil fuels. Perhaps that's because they have no pertinent expertise — they are in other fields.
Legalized marijuana has created a economic boom in Colorado with a consequent rise in population and a housing shortage. This has led to more homeless people. So some right-wingers are trying to blame marijuana use for the increase in numbers of homeless.
As other states legalize marijuana, the boom will spread itself around and Colorado won't draw as many people from other states.
Ethiopian journalist Anania Sorri has been imprisoned without trial.
Here's how the troll treats his real buddies, defined as those who paid at least 200 thousand dollars.
Pruitt announced his intention to sabotage the EPA in big ways quickly.
Vietnamese journalist Dang Xuan Dieu was sent into exile after five years in prison in cruel conditions.
US courts are starting to question whether thugs have the right to make people use fingerprints to unlock devices.
A bigot shot two Indian men in Kansas after demanding to know their visa status.
Right-wing hatred directed at foreigners stirs up acts like this. The killer seems to have been susceptible, but such a susceptibility does not always develop into actual violence. That depends on what ideas are being trump-eted in the social environment.
The troll has started hand-picking which media organizations are allowed into press-manipulation sessions.
This looks like a campaign to repress and destroy journalism.
What the troll and Spicer say is unimportant. The press should ignore these press-manipulation sessions and focus on what the troll actually does, and on the leaks that show his plans.
But that doesn't mean the campaign to repress and destroy journalism is harmless.
Republicans are winning the favor of companies that own broadcasting, with a plan to permit increased concentration of radio and TV stations.
Paul Ryan defines freedom as "the ability to buy what you want".
With that definition, wealthy people have and deserve more freedom than the rest of us. This reductio ad absurdam shows that that is the wrong definition of freedom.
Ryan is not alone in proposing this neoliberal definitoin of freedom. Many people I meet say that your freedom is defined as how many options you have. That definition is basically the same as Ryan's, and it has the same basic flaw.
My definition of freedom is "having control of your own life."
Sea Shepherd pursued an illegal fishing boat for four months; when the fishing crew gave up hope of escaping pursuit, they scuttled the fishing boat in deep water.
They knew that if they brought their illegal catch into port, they would be prosecuted based on the evidence Sea Shepherd would provide.
The catch was illegal because the boat was taking protected fish, fish in danger of being wiped out by fishing.
They may still be prosecuted, based on the evidence of fish that Sea Shepherd sailors collected from the fishing boat as it sank. But even if they are not prosecuted, the loss of their boat and their catch is a substantial punishment.
If Sea Shepherd can do this to many such fishing boats, or if navies help, it could do a lot to discourage illegal fishing.
SCROTUS, visiting their home districts, meet with wealthy donors while shunning the voters.
Mexico says it will not not let the US deport Central Americans to Mexico.
US citizens: stand for network neutrality.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to preserve the Dodd-Frank whistleblower protections,
which apply to people that report crimes of their employers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to support HR 975 to end the federal war on marijuana.
US citizens: call on Congress to preserve the Johnson amendment, which prohibits churches and tax-exempt charities (such as the FSF) from campaigning for or against political candidates.
To weaken this amendment would give rich people a way to donate any amount of money to political campaigns, and get a tax deduction for doing so.
The troll's aide, Stephen Miller, is an avowed racist. He made a "white power" hand gesture in a White House event.
An Anaheim thug attacked a teenage girl for walking on his lawn, and ended up shooting at a group of teenagers. Fortunately he did not hit them, but protesters demand his arrest.
White House Defers to "States' Rights" on Transgender Protections — But Not on Legalizing Marijuana.
Sessions has cancelled the plan to phase out federal use of private prisons, which are harsher than government-run prisons.
The troll was paid to do this job by the private prison companies.
Advances in face recognition threaten to track everyone around on the street, even using low-quality images.
Can we determine what victims can do to make this not work?
Kim Jong-un used a chemical weapon, VX nerve agent, to assassinate his brother.
It seems that two different people put two different chemicals on his face, where they came in contact and generated VX.
Technology designed to herd and control is increasingly frustrating to use. Even in the bathroom.
I find most sensor-operated faucets very difficult to activate. The fact that I can't see where the sensor is actually located limits me to trial and error. I have to hunt for a long time to put my hands where they will be detected by the sensor, and I can never do it reliably.
President Do-Dirty of the Philippines is prosecuting opposition leader, Senator De Lima, using absurd charges.
She called him a "serial killer", an accusation which he has admitted.
The troll has started to provoke a new nuclear arms race.
Obama had already arranged to spend a trillion dollars on new nuclear weapons, though without increasing the total number of missiles (limited by treaty).
There is a systematic pattern of US immigration harassing US citizens that have Muslim names.
The Long History of Deportation Scare Tactics at the U.S.-Mexico Border.
There is pressure to stop the tiny "flood" of Central American asylum seekers from the US to Canada.
I am suspicious of exaggerated citation of tiny "dangers". For instance, one MP says "it is not safe" for the refugees who trek across the border, but they are not in much danger and they think staying in the US is more dangerous. She also says it is "not safe" for the community, but what danger is there? All these refugees wish to do is find Canadian authorities to surrender to, away from the border. They are not going to hurt anyone.
But it would be a good thing for Canada to suspend the agreement with the US to return refugees to the US when they go through border crossings. Then they could seek asylum that way.
Leaked documents show how the Heatland Institute operates to promote denial of global heating, and that this is one of its priority missions.
The organization calls itself the "Heartland" Institute, but "Heatland" describes it more accurately. The organization describes itself as "libertarian", but I won't call it that. Global heating denialism has nothing to do with liberty, and little to do with the views of the people that call themselves "libertarians", since most of them are not denialists.
However, I have decided not to refer to them as "libertarians", since I reject their claim to support liberty more than I do. Their basic philosophy is that the state should not actively help people have better lives.
Since they call all state programs to help people "socialist", I am thinking of calling them "antisocialists".
More of the Raqqa diaries.
The author says that PISSI and the Assad regime practice similar cruelties. That may be true in terms of what they do to those they consider enemies. However, my understanding is that the regime defines people as enemies only for opposing it, not for religion.
The Democratic Party elected the establishment candidate, Tom Perez, as chair.
I fear he will rig the 2020 primaries against Sanders or whoever is the progressive candidate.
Scientists remind us that we could destroy half of all living species by 2100.
SCROTUS are wiping out state retirement laws that facilitate keeping a retirement account moving from one employer to another.
Montana Democrats Accuse Republicans of Voter Suppression Ahead of Special Election.
US border thugs harassed Muhammad Ali Jr for hours as he was returning to the US. Their first questions were, "Where did you get your name from? Are you a Muslim?"
I am puzzled by the idea that he needed to prove that he was the son of the famous boxer. They had seen by his passport that he is a US citizen and has an unconditional right to reenter the US.
How the plutocrats gradually replaced American democracy with their own rule.
The troll sabotaged the US treasury by cancelling a recently adopted rule that stopped fossil fuel companies from cheating when paying for taking fossil fuels out of public lands.
Thugs' unions have great political influence, and use it to protect them from punishment for tyrannizing people.
It should be a crime for a thug to turn off any cameras in a place where the thug has an interaction with the public, or to interfere with filming by bystanders. This should be punished by years in prison.
Starting the fight against budget cuts in important social programs involves fighting against increases in military spending.
A famous Australian author was interrogated for hours by US border thugs, evidently for no reason.
She had visited the US 116 times before, but says she will never do so again.
US border thugs were even nastier to Canadian writer Peter Watts.
South Korea's government is bowing to Japanese pressure, and pressuring local governments to remove statues that commemorate the Korean (and other) women that were forced into prostitution during Japanese occupation.
Wolves in Finland are so numerous that they endanger the dogs that rural people use to hunt moose. Finland is looking for a way to maintain a wolf stable population level that can coexist with the sparse human population of rural areas.
Everyone: call on Elon Musk to quit the troll's business council.
US citizens: tell the FBI to keep accepting FOIA requests by email.
US immigration thugs dragged refugee Sara Beltrán Hernández away from the hospital, tied to a wheelchair, as she was waiting for an operation to remove a brain tumor.
Since then, she has received no medical attention although the thugs pretend she does.
This may be because she is kept in a privatized prison. They tend to skimp on their duties towards prisoners, figuring that they can get away with lying about it.
Everyone: Tell the prosecutors to indict the Los Angeles thug who shot at a 13-year-old boy.
A man who publicly burned a copy of the Qur'an, in Denmark, is being prosecuted for blasphemy.
This prosecution is an injustice. In addition, it will lend support to the Islamists that are pressuring for a global ban on criticism of their religion. That is not merely wrong in principle, it is a big threat to our freedom. Denmark should repeal this law.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to criticize, condemn, insult, or mock any person, group, thing, institution, belief, or practice. Censorship is an attack on human rights, and we must fight against campaigns for censorship.
SCROTUS are expected to kill a Democratic resolution demanding that Sessions hand over documents about the Troll.
Arizona, under Republican rule, wants to define organized protest as "organized crime" by defining it as "rioting" if any participant engages in violence.
It is very important for protest organizers to avoid violence. As long as we have enough democracy for a nonviolent protest to be effective, violence only weakens the effect.
But organizers can't guarantee that there is no violence in the vicinity of a protest. If the protesters are disciplined and refuse to engage in violence, anyone in the vicinity of the protest who commits an act of violence could provide an excuse for this prosecution. Even a thug dressed up as a protester.
US citizens: call on Senator Schumer to kick right-wing Democrat Manchin from his leadership team.
Manchin has repeatedly voted for the troll's saboteur cabinet nominees.
Democrats are not well organized for fighting Republican sabotage.
White House Asked FBI to Deny Reports Linking Russia and Trump Advisers.
I think the same rule requires that the FBI should not have publicly stated that it had found more emails exchanged with Clinton — emails which, a few days later, it admitted contained nothing important.
Israel has stated a formal policy of not giving visas to staff of Human Rights Watch.
That is to support the policy of trampling Arabs' human rights.
US citizens: Call on Sessions to disassociate himself from Operation Rescue.
The troll's men want to deport Herbert Carino to the Philippines, where President Do-Dirty's men are likely to murder him.
Turkish-supported Syrian rebels have captured al-Bab.
Next maybe they will fight PISSI elsewhere — but they would have to fight the Syrian Kurds first.
North Korea used the assassination of Kim Jong-nam as an opportunity to declare its chemical weapons capabilities.
Thugs arrested the last protesters blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline.
All of humanity will suffer the effects of burning the oil that pipeline will enable extraction of.
The troll wants to eliminate deportation hearings and ship people out of the US without time for second thoughts.
Human activity is messing up the ecology of the sea bottom, even deep down.
The defeated tyrannical ruler of Gambia has imposed a billion-dollar debt on the people.
Currently, when tyrannical or corrupt government imposes debts on the country, the people have to pay them even after that government has been kicked out. This is an injustice, and creates a moral hazard: it encourages banks to lend to dictators, knowing they can squeeze the money out of the people afterward.
For the sake of justice, we must enable countries to repudiate the debts of a corrupt or tyrannical regime. That would teach banks to think twice before lending to such a regime, and that would make it harder for such a regime to stay in power.
Poor people can't afford the fresh fruits and vegetables that make for a healthy diet.
Teenagers have blockaded high schools in Paris in protest against the thugs that raped a student and said it was an "accident".
It is wrong for protesters to destroy cars — they belong to people who have nothing to do with that crime.
I am glad that thugs face charges for the rape.
Amnesty International: The divisive rhetoric of the troll, and other right-wing politicians around the world, add up to a current of eliminating human rights world-wide.
Rep. Ryan is hiding from constituents and has deactivated his fax line.
Senator Daines of Nevada cancelled a talk at the state capitol to avoid protesters.
The troll discriminated against blacks in renting housing. He told a doorman to overstate the rent when blacks inquired.
SCROTUS are aiming to eliminate much more than Obama's medical insurance program. They want to replace medicaid with schemes of little help to any but wealthy Americas, and tell the rest, "You're on your own."
The loser displays several typical signs of incipient tyranny.
A journalist interviewed 100 supporters of the troll and reports on what reasons they give for supporting him.
Also what they disapprove of.
If the US starts demanding visitors give passwords to their internet accounts, this could crush the freedom of all international travelers.
The spooks won't tell us why, but they seem to think that what Flynn said to the Russian ambassador, together with what the troll said, suggests a serious wrong.
We can't assume they are telling the truth, because they had reasons to try to screw the troll and his men.
Still, it calls for an investigation.
I've read elsewhere that the NSA's supposed rules for not snooping on Americans are bullshit — because they can get other countries to collect the conversations and give the recordings to the NSA, and then it can do whatever it likes. So don't believe that part.
A US agent displayed irrational discrimination to British children on a school trip, by blocking their teacher from entering the US with them.
The school's principal says the students have learned the right lesson, to condemn bigotry, rather than the trumpish lesson of imitating bigotry.
The Raqqa Diaries were smuggled out of Raqqa to report on PISSI's violence and oppression. The author condemns PISSI for perverting Islam.
The more Muslims learn about what PISSI really means, the more PISSI will be weakened.
Malawi's forests are being cut down — for charcoal.
Unlike Brazil and Indonesia, where business interests are behind deforestation, the pressure in Malawi comes from ordinary people. They are not particularly greedy. The problem is only that they are living unsustainably. (Just as in the United States.)
I hope that the efficient stoves solve this problem. Solar-heated stoves might be even better. But ultimately we need to reduce human population growth before we destroy all forests in a final frenzy.
A right-wing bigot in North Carolina talks openly about exterminating Muslims.
The troll is substantially responsible for this, since he encouraged it.
On April 22, participate in the March for Science.
A BBC journalist is stuck in Thailand for two years as he faces prosecution for reporting on a swindler.
A power shortage in Australia was due mainly to problems in fossil fuel power plants. The planet-roaster Australian government tried to blame it on renewable energy and use that as an excuse to promote fossil fuel use.
The UK government is planning to increase pollution limits so that extending Heathrow airport will fit them.
The FBI has lured another weak-willed, feckless man into participating in a fantasy terrorist plot. He will spend much of his life in prison, and the FBI will present this as an example of "protecting us".
The FBI will claim that it sets these traps to catch capable and dangerous terrorists in the US, if there were any, and it just happens that confused fantasy terrorists keep falling into them. However, anybody mentally competent enough to be a real danger as a terrorist would be competent enough not to be caught.
After two years, Mexico's tax on sugar-sweetened drinks has led to a 15% drop in consumption of them.
It will take years to measure the effect on health.
Meanwhile, the higher tax in Berkeley, California, has decreased sugar-sweetened drink consumption by over 20%.
Women are taking the lead in British union organizing.
In the absence of government by a real Labor party, one that will stand for the non-rich against the rich, unions are what workers need.
Climate scientists in the US fear harassment from lunatic Republican denialists.
Pruitt, the saboteur head of the EPA, worked in close concert with fossil fuel companies to attack the EPA when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. He even repeated what they told him to say.
The troll knew this, of course, but he concealed this illegally from the public long enough to get confirmed by the senate. Here's more information about that.
US cities with many immigrants had bigger declines in crime rates than other cities.
A British teacher, leading a class trip to the US, was blocked from a flight to the US by US officials operating in Reykjavík airport. He can see no possible reason except that he is a Muslim and one of his names is "Mohamed".
Why does Iceland permit US officials to exercise such powers in Reykjavík?
Outside Coastal Bubbles, to Say "America is Already Great" Rings Hollow.
The author does not realize that the blacks that didn't vote in Mahoning County may have been disenfranchized by Republican voter-suppression.
People who hope that manufacturing jobs will return to the US don't realize that robots already mean manufacturing provides few jobs. The cause of their poverty, and of the lack of hope in their cities, is dooH niboR.
Gorsuch's rulings on rights of the disabled show a streak of cruelty.
No One Should Demand the Closure of Galleries — Even for Far-Right Artworks.
When a congresscritter won't meet with constituents, constituents hold a "town hall meeting" with a cardboard mockup of the congresscritter.
The troll wants to distort economic statistics by altering the definition of "exports".
The troll killed funds for electrification of California railroads.
The Israeli soldiers that run the checkpoint for Palestinians going into parts of Hebron harass them arbitrarily to make them move away.
Ethnic cleansing in the Jordan valley: Israel demolishes Palestinians' houses, steals their tractors, and declares their land a military firing zone.
Israel seized even the tents they were given as emergency aid.
The people of Bil'in have protested every week for 12 years against the Israeli wall that was built through their lands.
The only place Israel has the right to build a wall is on the border between Israel and Palestine — the Green Line.
Restricting people's use of their courts is, in effect, rationing justice.
At the same time, if the rich have an advantage in court because they can pay lawyers to make outrageous maneuvers (as the troll does). that's slanting justice.
How We Got Here: The Misuse of American Military Power and The Middle East in Chaos.
In the US: join a rally near you to preserve the US government's support for medical care, now threatened by Republicans.
Now that the US government's excessive surveillance power is in the hands of the troll, Democrats are starting to want to limit it.
If Republicans still want to limit it, maybe it can be done.
Some states are deregulating food produced and sold on a small scale direct from producers to consumers.
Republicans in Iowa proposed a law to impose an explicit political requirement for hiring professors.
Several congresscritters have asked the troll to replace Dubya's broad authorization for war against al Qa'ida, everywhere in the world, with a narrow one directed at PISSI.
One of the commissioners on the Federal Election Commission has resigned as a protest against how the Republicans have stopped it from doing its job.
If the US sends all Central American refugees into Mexico, Mexico will be overwhelmed.
In principle, Mexico does not have to accept them. But it may have no mechanism at the US border to keep them out.
I crossed the border from San Diego to Tijuana by car a few years ago. As far as I could see there was no border control. At some point I was surprised to see that the signs on the street were all in Spanish. "Could we be in Mexico," I asked myself. Indeed, we were. We arrived at our destination in Tijuana without being stopped anywhere.
Later, when I boarded a flight from Tijuana to Mexico City, I had to go through Mexican immigration formalities. That surprised me again, since I was already in Mexico. The agent explained to me that the area near the border has some sort of special status; leaving that area for the rest of Mexico is when immigration control occurs.
If Mexico doesn't check people at the border, it will have no way to stop the US from dumping Salvadoreans, Hondurans and Guatemalans across it.
Thugs are preparing to attack the remaining pipeline protesters at Standing Rock.
They have a silly pretense that it is for the protesters' own safety. If that were their concern, there would be no need for threats or demands; "We are here if you need us" would suffice.
It was right to release Jamal al-Harith from Guantanamo, because he was charged with no crime. The fact that he subsequently joined PISSI can't change that.
17 Britons were prisoners in Guantanamo and released. Here's what happened to them.
One of them joined PISSI. But if he hadn't been imprisoned, maybe he wouldn't have done that.
One of them simply lived peacefully, but the way prison had maimed him provoked his nephew to join al-Qa'ida. We can be pretty sure that, if the US hadn't imprisoned people without charges and tortured them, he would not have become an enemy of the US.
There are surely hundreds more, if not thousands, who were inspired to fight the US by their disgust for Guantanamo.
The US Export-Import Bank financed mines in Africa which run on slave labor and environmental destruction.
It also finances fossil fuel use, so there was a campaign to get rid of it.
Floods in California are driving homeless people out of their tents.
US citizens: oppose union-weakening "right to work" laws at state and federal level.
US citizens: call on Sessions to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the administration's ties to Russia.
The troll plans to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation, so that poor people harmed by illegal acts of people, agencies and companies would be unable to get justice.
One former prisoner in Guantanamo joined PISSI and became a suicide bomber.
The enemies of human rights will use this to argue for imprisoning every suspect forever — an instance of their general strategy of exaggerating small dangers as distractions.
We have no way of counting the number of people that PISSI was able to recruit because of resentment of the Guantanamo prison, but it must have been in the hundreds at least.
English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of indigenous Americans, many of whom were sent to other English colonies far away.
How can scientists effectively fight the troll's anti-science politics.
The Watergate burglary was a small part of Nixon's broad attack on the US political system.
This offers a lesson about what the troll might do.
The UK scandalously trains Ethiopian officials involved in "security" (i.e., repression).
Women in Ireland will strike on March 8 demanding a referendum on changing the constitution to permit abortion.
Everyone: support the International Women's Strike.
With so many items in their program, naturally I don't agree with 100%. I disagree in principle with a right to unlimited reproduction, and with the goal of eliminating all limits on migration between countries.
I agree with the rest of their program, which means around 95% of it, so I support the action.
US citizens: oppose Iraq war architect John Bolton as National Security Adviser.
The UK is adopting a law to allow seizing property of people who violate human rights in other countries.
A Mexican woman has lived in the US since age 2, but is not a citizen. She is terrified to have any contact with thugs, even when her husband attacks her, lest they deport her.
A bizarre Utah law requires giving anesthetic to a fetus before an abortion after 20 weeks, but doctors don't know of any way to do that.
The law's purpose is to create an irrational way for anti-abortion activists to convince people that those fetuses can feel pain. First make smoke, then claim it proves there must be a fire.
The troll wants to give priority for deportation of immigrants that are merely suspected of a crime.
A subtle analysis of how the troll's campaign rallies functioned to build up stubborn support, wilfully blind to his mistakes and crimes.
The article errs in treating the loser's victory as legitimate. He did not win the election—it was stolen by Republican voter-suppression, just as in 2000.
China has ordered installation of GPS trackers in every car in a certain part of Xinjiang.
When we see China do this, we recognize it as a repressive act. The universal tracking of cars by camera in the UK is equally repressive, and so is similar tracking that is spreading (though unevenly) around the US.
Let's demand an end to tracking of cars and people on our streets!
Republicans in 21 states are using the troll's complaints about nonexistent voter fraud as an excuse for more voter-suppression.
Data collected via snooping devices such as the Fitbit could be used to deny you medical insurance or make you pay more.
"We charge less if you let a Fitbit track you" is just a nice way of saying, "We charge more if you don't let a Fitbit track you." If you're bit, you'll have a fit.
We Can't Let Silicon Valley Companies And Their Spin Undermine Workers' Rights.
The question for investigation: who told Flynn to phone the Russian ambassador?
Another question to think about: did someone choose a hothead with no diplomatic experience to do an unofficial diplomatic job?
Salafi Arabia's perverted Islam is spreading in Pakistan. Supporters of PISSI are killing the more traditional Sufis and attacking their festivals.
Starting a successful business is a road to wealth, for perhaps a few percent of people; but those who start out poor can't get on that road.
Sri Lanka has arrested officers in military intelligence and accused them of political assassinations.
The teenager who will have to register as a "violent sex offender" had a sexual meeting with a younger teenager.
Why do people think there is something wrong with a sexual relationship between people of ages 13 and 18? The principal activity of human adolescents is sex.
Buying a used "smart" car, house, TV, refrigerator, etc? Usually the previous owners can still remotely control it.
75 years ago, the US imprisoned all citizens and residents of Japanese descent.
Hardly anyone opposed this. The ACLU tried to fight it in court.
The troll's plan to trample the rights of people because they are Muslim is facing a lot more resistance. We have learned something from history.
Americans are pushing to meet with congresscritters on recess, even the ones that "can't make it".
To be progressive, politics must not adulate our focus on the successful entrepreneurs who present themselves as "smart".
To do so is to serve some of the rich.
New Yorkers must replace Senator Schumer with a real progressive champion.
Global heating is reducing the level of oxygen in the ocean, and some kinds of fish already have trouble getting enough.
There are local "dead zones" with very little oxygen, but this is a different issue. This is a decrease in the amount of oxygen in surface waters where no local phenomenon operates to reduce it.
When some US states legalized same-sex marriage, the suicide rate for high school students dropped 14% in those states.
Cryin'air shows its non-respect for people that need wheelchairs by saying, "Please walk up this stairway, or we will leave you behind."
California's rainy season is the wettest ever recorded, and while in some ways that will help make up for the drought, it was the occasion for the Oroville dam to start to break.
Paradoxically, global heating makes for bigger rains and for deeper droughts — just not at the same time and place.
The precarious service sweatshop platforms are platforms for racial discrimination.
This results from making users give their names, then allowing lots of people (most of them racist, at least unconsciously) to accept or reject each user.
Please don't use the word "sharing" to describe what these platforms do. What they do is a kind of business, and "sharing" means cooperation that isn't a sale.
"Gig economy" is not incorrect, but "precarious service sweatshop" explicitly states their principal wrong.
Supermarkets offer fresh fruit and vegetables all the time by importing them from other countries, even other continents. The extreme weather events that interrupt this are a foretaste of global heating disaster.
Scientists protested in Boston: Stand up for Science.
Here's what's wrong with Bannon.
In specialized high-tech manufacturing, foreign companies often out-compete US rivals by treating their workers better.
Those companies succeed even though they pay higher taxes than in the US, which enables everyone in those countries to live a better life.
This is interesting, but it doesn't make globalization ok overall. Specialized high-tech manufacturing employs only a small fraction of workers. It is the exception and will remain so. Most factory employees are in the race-to-the-bottom economy where globalization provides a force to knock down unions and workers' rights. For them, as for farm workers, globalization is a disaster.
"Trump's Lying Reveals That He Is Empty Inside."
It appears that the only way lying can get you fired as the troll's servitor is if spy agencies catch you and dislike you enough to use the evidence.
Montenegro claims it defeated a Russian-sponsored coup d'etat in October.
Old CRTs need to be recycled, but the materials are not valuable so the recycling companies are paid to take them. Closed Loop was paid to accept millions of them, then didn't recycle them, and went bust.
If the UK exits the European Union, it will cease to have laws to protect human rights.
An Israeli soldier who murdered an incapacitated Palestinian prisoner has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.
I think that is too little for cold-blooded murder.
Rosa Ortega, who has lived in the US since infancy, will be deported to Mexico because she voted in Texas without authorization. The normal penalty is probation.
She didn't try to hide her identity, she just didn't know that she wasn't allowed to vote, and the state didn't tell her.
Adults who have lived in the US since infancy should be entitled to citizenship even if they commit little crimes like this. (That doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished.)
US citizens: call for impeaching the troll now.
US citizens: sign up for meetings this week with your congresscritter and staff.
Extreme heat is bleaching coral again in the Great Barrier Reef.
This despite the fact that El Niño is not happening this year.
The only way to save coral is to cap CO2 in the atmosphere.
Right-wingers are the ultimate sensitive snowflakes,raging against anyone who violates their PC (populist correctness) rules for speech.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to legislate Bannon's removal from the National
Security Council.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on the Ladies Professional Golf Association not to hold its tournament in the troll's golf course.
UK universities are being flooded by antisemitism.
Exit from the EU creates the opportunity for the UK to raise money discouraging speculation and encouraging investment.
Most Republican congresscritters are hiding from their constituents during their week home from Washington.
Ramirez, in immigration prison, says that the immigration thugs altered his statement to make it appear to be a confession of gang involvement.
Should North Korea be on listed as a supporter of terrorism?
The assassination of Kim Jong-nam was a brazen crime, but equating murder with terrorism would undermine the meaning of the word "terrorism". And even if it were terrorism, one instance of it is not "repeated".
Now that coal plants are uneconomical to run, the planet-roaster government of Australia wants to change rules to give them "clean energy" funds.
Meanwhile, deadly heat continues to blanket parts of Australia.
None so blind as he who will not see.
Iraqi Shi'ites post bloodthirsty videos of killing PISSI prisoners.
As the FARC and the Colombian state make peace, assassination of activists is increasing.
The paramilitares are involved in this. They were the worst terrorist group in Colombia, even when the FARC was at war. For instance, they collaborated with the Coca Cola Company bottler to murder union organizers.
US employers increasingly track everything that employees do while at work. Even how often they speak to someone.
I think we need to limit this, by law if we can't find another way.
Apps and devices to monitor medical indicators can make people's health worse. They can lead to false alarms and pointless anxiety.
The saboteurs have changed the Department of Energy web site that used to teach kids about the environment.
The Same Republicans Who Pushed for Invasive Surveillance Are Complaining About It Now.
Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook a platform for world-wide democratic decisionmaking. In other words, to require people to be useds of Facebook if we want a say in political decisions.
That might be ok if that part of Facebook is pulled out and converted into a public utility. I say "might" because there are likely to be other pitfalls that would have to be avoided.
CETA would allow 40,000 US companies to demand changes in European laws, through their Canadian subsidiaries.
Germany has classified a doll with a built-in microphone as an illegal spy device. People who own them are required to disable the microphone.
Does this seem like an overreaction to you? I think action is required so as to teach people how dangerous these listening devices are. I disagree with punishing people who have bought them, but they ought to fix the devices.
The device is nasty in other ways too, It is full of proprietary software, and it communicates with other devices. To use it at all is a mistake. But the microphone allows it to snoop on people that don't use it.
"Ignore his insults and focus on his lies" is a step in the right direction. But you have to go further because his lies are mostly trolling too.
I'd say, ignore his insults, and ignore his lies except when attacking them is funny. Focus on the troll's actions and how they are unjust or damaging.
SCROTUS rushed to confirm saboteur Pruitt as head of the EPA before he obeyed the court order to release emails he exchanged with fossil fuel companies. I guess SCROTUS feared that the email would give them some reason they had to reject him.
Senator Manchin is officially a Democrat, but in deeds he is a Republican.
Obama's head of the Securities and Exchange Commission was working the whole time for the companies she was supposed to regulate. Now she has returned to working for them more directly.
The troll's appointee will probably act even worse because person won't be obligated to pretend to be doing the job right.
A Canadian court held the government legally responsible for the suffering and life impairments caused to indigenous children cause by forcibly taking them from their parents and putting them into assimilationist boarding schools.
It is amazing that this continued as late as 1984.
The US had a similar policy of coercing indigenous children to attend assimilationist boarding schools, and this was only finally eliminated in 1978.
Another technique for forced assimilation was taking indigenous
children away from their families and
giving
them to non-indigenous foster families.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The troll and his appointed White House staff use a private email server.
Remember the exaggerated attacks on Clinton for using a private email server.
Arresting and deporting people for participating in public safety activities makes the whole community less safe.
US thugs go to great lengths to hide their use of stingrays.
Two big coal-burning power plants in the US are expected to shut because they are no longer economical.
The article ignores the most important reason we need to turn off coal-burning power plants: as one step to avoid global disaster.
By the way, global heating disaster could eliminate a lot more jobs than are provided today by fossil fuels. Human society is taking a terrible and stupid risk by continuing the subsidies that keep fossil-fuel-burning power plants running. But that's plutocracy for you.
The troll punished California by refusing federal aid for the evacuation of areas threatened by the damage to the Oroville dam.
This could be retaliation for opposition to the troll's other cruelty. For example, California is moving ahead making the whole state a "sanctuary" for unauthorized immigrants.
The term "sanctuary" is misleading. No city or state can stop immigration thugs from operating — all it can do is deny the cooperation of its own agencies.
Sally Yates warned the troll in January that Flynn was covering up contacts with Russia.
The troll fired Yates but not Flynn. He continued to defend Flynn until the fact that Flynn was lying became public knowledge.
I wonder why the troll cared about public pressure about those lies. Was it that some SCROTUS demanded it?
The biggest danger to the US today is not the troll. It is SCROTUS, who we now see will support the troll's actions and overlook his dishonesty almost without limit.
The troll's executive orders have been mainly for show. (The article overlooks the fact that the executive order about the Dakota Access pipeline did cause construction to restart.)
Alas, his appointees are doing real harm, and so are SCROTUS.
This is why confronting SCROTUS now in their districts is so important.
Their intention is to bamboozle the public so as to serve the plutocrats, but the public can make that more difficult.
The Tories do not like the study which blames medical care cuts for 30,000 more deaths in 2015 than in previous years.
Britons, are you letting minor dangers such as terrorism distract you?
Americans, our medical system is much worse than Britain's NHS, even in its current degraded form. How many Americans die each year from this?
US volunteers try every two years to count all the homeless people, but they overlook a large fraction, maybe more than 1/3.
The US State Department is partly inoperative, since the troll makes all decisions without consulting or even informing anyone there.
The troll pretends to be good at hiring people, but we see now that he can't do that well.
Senate Democrats demand information about the troll's dealings with Russia and call on Sessions to recuse himself from the issue.
'Draconian' Trump Gag on Scientists Could Affect Legislation, Experts Warn.
US citizens: Support the bill to prohibit a US nuclear first strike.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate White House ethics violations.
US citizens: support the Global HER Act which would overturn the global gag rule.
This petition is run by Population Connection, which I am a member of.
Canada switched to a proprietary payroll system a year ago for paying government employees. Many employees have gone unpaid for months. The article was published in November but the situation is basically unchanged.
The loser is an extreme example of a common phenomenon: bosses that think they can demand anything.
That does not conflict with the conclusion that he is on the edge of insanity. There are many sorts of psychological problems which, in their extreme forms, can be called insanity, but have less severe forms that certainly aren't insanity.
"Smart city" often means massive surveillance. I've concluded that anything described as "smart" is very likely to be an injustice. There are exceptions, but be very suspicious of them.
Microsoft is converting LinkedIn into a system for tracking and profiling people as employees. This makes it highly dangerous.
New Jersey Governor Christie vetoed a bill to require thugs and prosecutors to report on the property they "seize" (i.e., steal) from people without charging them with crimes. His reasons are absurd.
I hope the legislature can and will ignore his no-op "compromise" and override the veto. They have the votes for it.
One month of "government" by the loser shows he doesn't know how to do anything well, except troll the media and keep his hard-core supporters fired up.
US warhawks want to send more US troops to Afghanistan "to train Afghan soldiers", and there is no political will in Congress to refuse. No amount of training will enable government soldiers to fight as well as religious fanatics. The only real decision for the US to make about the Afghan government is how long to prop it up.
US immigration thugs can label you as a "gang member" based on vaguely suggestive "evidence".
Empathy is not necessary for thinking about good and bad, and if we assume that it is, we may fail to try to do justice to those who (for other reasons) we cannot empathize with.
The UK has cut prison guards in half, firing the most experienced ones. The remaining ones have no training in how to deal with the prisoners that are being driven mad by prison conditions.
US citizens: Tell the US not to target survivors of domestic abuse for deportation.
The US immigration thugs held a meeting with congresscritters, but members of the House Hispanic Caucus were not allowed.
Paul Ryan's scheme for medical insurance would make it cheaper for healthy people (provided they don't have a problem) and impossibly expensive for everyone else.
Here are other Republican schemes to deny millions of Americans medical care.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports on 10 journalists who are being prosecuted for covering pipeline protests.
This is in addition to protesters. Federal thugs are arresting pipeline protesters away from the protests, and charging them with horrible "crimes".
This is a policy of systematic repression, intended to crush Americans' spirit so they won't resist. I hope it has the opposite effect.
Contrasting Bannon's theocratic agenda with the previous generation of "theocons".
The FBI is now pursuing right-wing fantasy terrorists as well as Islamist fantasy terrorists.
The loser's new nominee for Secretary of Labor did a bad job in the Justice Department (that's assuming it wasn't intentional).
US border thugs jailed a Mexican woman as she was in court asking for an order to protect her from a violent man.
This sort of thing will make unauthorized immigrants frightened of asking for protection.
Another immigrant faces deportation because of a tattoo which border thugs claim is suspicious. They don't think it is necessary to charge him with any crime, let alone to try him for it.
The death in French jail of Adama Traoré in July is still being investigated.
The troll is already planning ways to crush civil society in the US.
It appears Russia and Syria were behind an attack on an MSF hospital in Syria a year ago.
A giant coral reef at the mouth of the Amazon River is unlike all other known reefs because it thrives under light-blocking sediment. Scientists are just beginning to explore it and have found many new species.
It will be killed by ocean acidification if spilled oil from wells to be drilled nearby don't get it first.
Immigrants across the US went on strike, shutting many restaurants and some other businesses.
A Republican congresscritter (Chaffetz) has proposed two good bills, for a change. One would require a court order aimed at a specific person before the state can use a stingray to track cell phones. The other would ban all other use of stingrays.
Israeli leaders no longer have to pretend to want to make peace with Palestine or end the occupation of the West Bank. They can come out and admit their real goal—annexation of the West Bank.
SCROTUS have introduced a bill to weaken the CFPB so that it couldn't protect people much any more.
Teaching a lesson about solidarity, the 5th grade basketball team in a Catholic school voted to forfeit the season's competition rather than obey a rule that would have required kicking out the two girls on the team.
The head of the House Intelligence Committee insists there is nothing to investigate about Flynn's contacts with Russia.
On behalf of Wall Street, SCROTUS propose to eliminate California's new retirement savings plan.
Buyers of new houses in the UK get a sort of warranty, but they are being forced to sign nondisclosure agreements for the complaints they are compensated for.
The staff of UK "jobcenters" treat unemployed people as chiselers to be kept down, not as citizens to be helped. They arbitrarily punish anyone that is not subservient by making them go hungry or even homeless.
It can't be the case that everyone working in every "jobcenter" has spontaneously developed a cruel streak. The ethical tone of the organization comes from its leaders, and we know they have sometimes had quotas for punishments. They have done this, and I would guess they did it intentionally. Every penny less provided to the poor is one more penny for dooH niboR.
Thus they demonstrate, once again, that the Tories are lower than vermin.
SCROTUS refuse to investigate Flynn's links with Russia. They only want to investigate the leaks that told us about those links. In the same way, some Democrats attack the cracking of Democratic Party emails to distract attention from the anti-Sanders dishonesty of the party officials.
The loser's regime has arrested a Mexican who was brought to the US as a child, and who was employed pursuant to permission given him under Obama. That's the troll's cruelty at work—intended to reinforce the support of people who support him for his cruelty.
Everyone: tell Oklahoma legislators: don't let men veto abortion.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the troll's budget cuts.
Right-wing extremist judges such as Gorsuch hide their plans behind a fictional idea of "original intent" which systematically ends up meaning "right-wing".
Systematic repression and torture effectively treats all defense of human rights in China as crime.
Torture includes denying people treatment for diabetes and cancer.
SCROTUS eliminated a rule, made under Obama, that forbids demented old people from buying guns.
I don't know whether demented people will misuse guns very often, but they often mistake their relatives for burglars. Those who are well enough to grab and shoot a gun could shoot their relatives.
If there is no research on whether those people are likely to misuse guns, why is that? Because Republicans have prohibited federal funding for any research about gun violence. Step 1: ensure there is no research. Step 2: cite the lack of research as a reason to eliminate a rule.
In London, blacks and people of mixed black-white ancestry are disproportionately attacked with tasers, showing that the thugs are applying a double standard.
US thugs are disproportionately violent towards nonwhites, too.
In Cambodia, the big threat to the rain forest is cutting the trees for timber.
Instead of Truman's "The Buck Stops Here", the troll's motto is "The Buck Never Gets Here."
Global heating is affecting a worldwide oceanic current system. As a result, the ocean is absorbing more CO2 than was previously forecast.
This slows global heating somewhat but speeds up ocean acidification, which can wipe out coral, molluscs, and many other forms of life in the ocean.
Air pollution may cause millions of premature births.
The extent of Antarctic sea ice has hit a record low.
Before this year, Antarctic sea ice was growing, and this was cited by global heating denialists who erroneously presented it as evidence there was no heating.
SCROTUS and the troll have eliminated the requirement for US extraction companies to disclose their bribery of foreign governments.
The Office of Government Ethics called on the troll to investigate Kellyanne Conway's violation of ethics rules.
Fake news from the White House: an Arkansas case which found no voting by any ineligible voters is cited as proving there are lots of them.
UK citizens (and anyone else): Support Liberty's campaign against the snooper's charter by sending a donation to
Liberty The Royal Bank of Scotland Sort Code: 15-30-00 Account Number: 71186809or by mailing a check to
Liberty House 26-30 Strutton Ground London SW1P 2HR.They also accept donations digitally, but their web site requires nonfree software to do that, and you shouldn't run nonfree software.
US citizens: call on US prisons that implement virtual visits with prisoners not to use this as an excuse to ban real visits.
I am worried about these virtual visits. Does the visitor have to run a nonfree program? I suspect it does.
US citizens: call for continuing research about pollinators despite the troll's hiring freeze.
You will need to use the Salsalabs method to overcome a Javascript problem.
Natalya Sharina is being prosecuted in Russia for letting people read a banned Ukrainian nationalist book.
The staff of the Ukrainian library say that the copy that thugs reported finding there wasn't theirs — they planted it.
To carry out the Paris treaty pledges, the EU must close all coal-burning power plants by 2030.
To do its share of avoiding disaster surely requires more and sooner.
The famous "border wall" is the least of the nasty things in the troll's Jan 25 executive order.
It's easy to bribe the president of the US: just stay at one of his hotels and buy some thousand-dollar bottles of wine.
I once bribed Congressman Barnie Frank with a zero-dollar bill. I had the ambition of someday bribing the president that way, but I realized it was unlikely I'd ever meet the president of the US.
Now I see I could easily give the president a nonzero bribe, but I wouldn't want to.
SCROTUS are responsible for appointing Sessions, just as much as the troll is.
Yazidis from Iraq, accepted as refugees, were included in the troll's partial Muslim ban (although they are not Muslims).
A study found that UK parents give more mental stimulation to the first-born child, on the average, and it is reflected in their IQ.
Many kinds of human relationship jobs now appear vulnerable to replacement by robots.
13 million Syrians have trouble getting the necessities of life. 600,000 are in towns under siege. Most of them are besieged by Assad's army, but some are besieged by PISSI. 4 million more live in areas that are hard to reach, sometimes because of fighting. UN aid can't reach many of these people.
For curing bulimia, 20 weekly sessions of cognitive behaviour therapy was far more effective than 20 weekly sessions of psychoanalysis, or even 100 weekly sessions of psychoanalysis.
Australian gas-burning power companies are choosing to keep power plants off line so as to manipulate the market.
Australia's planet-roaster government is trying to use this to argue for burning more fossil fuels.
The loser is trying to bully the store Nordstrom for dropping his daughter's celebrity clothing line.
America's "paid protesters" were ripped off 181 million dollars of pay in just one day.
The troll wants to convert Medicaid into a block grant, for states to use as they wish. Many states would eliminate care for disabled people.
Furthermore, the block grant would not be increased to cover the need, so it will increasingly fall short, almost forcing each state to keep cutting this care.
The FBI says that new restrictions on FOIA requests will be lifted when its new web site becomes active.
If the FBI follows through on this, the matter won't be a real problem.
The president of Sri Lanka promised not to prosecute rejected refugees returned there.
The loser expresses contempt for people when shaking their hands.
Leaks have made the troll pull back from several nasty policies before officially ordering them. This demonstrates how democracy depends on leaks.
A Democratic representative has invoked a rule by which Congress can inspect officials' tax returns for conflicts of interest.
US intelligence officials say that the troll's campaign aids talked frequently with Russian officials.
The Tories propose to jail journalists that publish government leaks. The UK has been drifting steadily into tyranny, with increasing surveillance, censorship, and repression. It is logical that such a state would take this additional step into out-and-out repression of the press.
And natural that the Tories, when criticized for this proposal, pretend that the law's obvious consequences would not occur, for some magic reason they decline to explain.
Unions and climate defenders now have an opportunity to unite.
A girl sent Zachary photos of herself in underwear, so he will have to register as a "violent sex offender" for all his life.
Merely to possess a copy of anything should not be a crime.
Hamas in Gaza elected a hardline leader that opposes any reconciliation with Israel. In effect, a miror image of Netanyahu.
Michael Flynn has resigned as the troll's national security advisor because of his contacts with Russia.
Of all the troll's advisors, Bannon endangers national security the most, since he is attracted to the idea of starting a war.
A UK rapper was awakened by thugs breaking his door down. Someone saw him entering his house and assumed he was a burglar.
The article doesn't say, but I hazard a guess that he is black.
A similar thing happened to a black Harvard professor who was reported to the thugs for trying to get into his house in Cambridge, Massachusets.
The European Parliament voted to approve CETA, but national governments still have a chance to block it.
The ACLU is suing to destroy DNA samples taken by thugs after illegally harassing some teenagers (apparently because of their skin color).
A proposed federal law would require thugs get court orders before they collect people's geolocation data.
A survey of US community college students found that 13% of them are homeless and 20% don't get enough food.
Some US teenagers have to go hungry so their younger siblings can eat.
Part of the solution to this is providing reliable birth control to everyone at no charge. But once children are born, society must make sure they get everything they need to grow up well and capable.
SCROTUS are attacking the EPA in several ways at once.
It was over 100F in Oklahoma recently — an astounding sign of global heating.
The troll's management approach creates distrust and rivalry.
Israel systematically seizes land and houses belonging to Palestinians that live outside Israel — even when the reason for that is that Israel won't allow them to live inside Israel.
Nonviolent pro-Palestine activists in Spain are being prosecuted for urging a music festival to exclude a musician who campaigns against rights for Palestine.
Whatever you might think about the issue of the occupation of Palestine, it could not justify prosecuting people for taking a stand on the matter.
6 crucial questions about the troll and Flynn.
Ajit Pai as head of the FCC is systematically for big companies and against users of technology.
500 US Christian leaders have called for welcoming refugees, and rejected the troll's partial ban on Muslim visitors.
SCROTUS in a House committee blocked the demand for the troll to show the committee his tax returns.
In other words, they really really want him to get away with anything whatsoever.
Greece's leaders have refused to make more cuts, thus in effect causing a showdown with the euro-banksters that are crushing the country.
It is worrysome that the IMF seems to have gone back to the side of the banksters.
Has anyone tried to estimate the number of peopl in Greece that the euro-banksters have killed? If you see such an estimate, please send it to me.
Pence is putting allies into the US government to push his theocratic agenda.
A proposed law in Mexico would ban import of US corn.
This might help Mexican peasants support themselves.
Mines in Australia are covering up what it will cost to clean up the mines once they are exhausted.
Some Americans are refusing to pay federal taxes as a protest against the loser.
The really bad things that the US does with its money, such as spending more on the military than all its main rivals put together and bombing people around the world, while bailing out the big banks that are our country's worst enemies, did not start this year.
The White House "press corps" is shifting its membership, downgrading mainstream media and inviting trollish extremists.
Imagine calling the New York Times "liberal", and you see how extremist they are.
Apple proposes a fingerprint-scanning touch screen — which would make it difficult to use it at all without having your fingerprints taken.
There are still a few scientists, outside the climate field, that deny global heating. The troll has chosen one hard-core denialist to give him "science advice".
Selling water from exotic sources reflects and encourages a propensity for the rich to engage in frivolous waste.
One more reason why we need to transfer a lot of their money to poor people. Even if it won't lift everyone out of poverty, it will reduce the tendency that pushes society into increasing levels of frivolous waste.
The previous UK law to repress whistleblowers and journalists was covered up so Parliament would not realize what it was passing. The current attempt was also supposed to be covered up, but this time that failed.
Now Britons have a chance to fight to prevent repression.
The EU ban on neonicotinoids allows "emergency" exceptions, and some countries authorize these without real scrutiny.
The troll sets the ethical tone of the administration. By his constant lying and cheating, he inspires everyone to lie and cheat.
If you didn't want to lie and cheat, would you accept a job with
him?
Would he offer you one?
A former confidant of the troll, being investigated by the FBI over contacts with Russian intelligence, asks for an official investigation.
The EU parliament has voted for a tightening of the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme. Emitters gamed it and made it totally ineffective.
The fact that even with the reforms it is still not tight enough to work very well shows that they still have far too much power.
The troll abolished the US policy of supporting in principle a Palestinian state.
Pudzer has been forced to withdraw, after criticism convinced some Republican senators to reject him.
His companies has now been sued for illegal wage-fixing conspiracy between the franchises that are (notionally) "independent" and competing businesses.
That's typical of how businesses today try to have it both ways.
Alas, this victory comes afer most of the saboteurs, including those in the crucial areas of climate and human rights, got through.
Seattle Judge Demands an Explanation after Undocumented 'Dreamer' Arrested.
He has been in the US since he was a child.
Saboteur nominee Pruitt is connected with 15 companies that have been disciplined many times by the EPA.
Republicans say it out loud: a pregnant woman is a "host". In effect, they consider women incubators.
Proposal: tax junk foods and subsidize healthful foods.
ALEC has made common cause with the troll to eliminate regulations that protect us from being poisoned or cheated by businesses.
It is hard to determine which side is responsible for the renwed fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Theresa May is trying to perpetuate the "special relationship" with the US by sucking up to the troll.
There is a name for this kind of relationship: "slavish subservience".
Plutocratic states are attacking the idea of retirement, by reducing pensions to the point where people can't really live on them.
There's no money for pensions because it's all needed for dooH niboR.
For over a billion people working poor, work is hell.
To a large extent this is because a rich few get too much of a share of the total.
The NAACP and other civil rights groups have been bought by major ISPs and now campaign against network neutrality regulations.
US citizens: Support preserving the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the troll to stand by the Paris climate agreement. It's insufficient to avoid disaster but it will reduce the disaster somewhat.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: thank the US football players that refuse to visit the troll.
US citizens: call on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the troll's conflicts of interest and connections to the Russian government.
Voting rights defenders in Georgia have got a court order to block one Republican scheme for voter suppression. Alas, Republicans keep inventing new methods to do this, and for each election several schemes are in effect to rig the election.
Many young vaguely-progressives naively assume that the TPP must have been good because Obama supported it and the troll opposed it. This article explains what is dangerous about the TPP and other business-supremacy treaties. We also need to teach people that Obama was not much of a progressive, and Clinton even less so.
The founders of Mossack Fonseca, the wealth-hiding company, have been arrested for money laundering. Accusations stemming from Brazil's investigation are spreading around Latin America. The current president of Panama and a former president of Peru are involved, as is the current president of Brazil.
India is forcing nearly everyone into a system that tracks people through fingerprints and iris scans, and records all payments. It may also use a universal basic income to force people into total surveillance. Whether the Aadhar system's security can be broken is a side issue of minor importance. The principal danger is what the state will do with the data. The Modi government leans toward repression, and more power to track everyone means more power to repress both minorities and dissidents.
A UK MP says that the abusive attacks directed at women politicians are discouraging women from entering politics.
Freedom of speech means people have a right to say rather nasty things to anyone. They have a right to say things we consider disgusting.
But that doesn't mean we should not show our disgust for them and pressure them to stop.
In an Age of Robots, Schools Are Teaching Our Children to be Redundant.
Kim Jong-un's brother, who had criticized him and fled, died in an airport after saying someone had put a contact poison on his face.
A suspect has been arrested.
Feminism must not be depoliticized into self-pampering. It must fight to end the power that men usually have over women.
French thugs claimed that they anally raped a teenager "by accident".
I guess the resulting riots were an accident too.
Theocratic Republicans in Oklahoma are proposing anti-abortion laws that make no sense except to religious nuts. One would ban abortions based on genetic abnormality in the fetus.
Another would require a woman to get the fetus's father's approval for an abortion. If an abortion should require this, what about the more drastic act of having a baby?
US citizens: call for Keeping wolves in Alaska protected on wildlife refuges.
US citizens: phone your Democratic senators and urge them to stand firm against Gorsuch.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on Congress to support HR 608, which is designed to pressure Salafi Arabia about its war in Yemen since that makes it an ally of al Qa'ida.
The Tories' Digital Repression Bill proposes a ten-year prison term for sharing copies of almost anything, on or off the internet.
43% of American children live in families that are barely able to afford basic needs. This fraction has increased since 2009.
The US racial wealth gap between blacks and whites has built up through generations of discrimination, and personal efforts such as education, working hard, and marriage are insufficient to overcome the effects.
Exposing the Myths of Neoliberal Capitalism — and why the troll is not likely to change it in the way that would help Americans.
Insecure work, often involving forcing workers to be "self-employed", impoverishes the state as well as the individual workers.
Part of the remedy for this is to stop basing the taxation of businesses on how much they pay to employees. The practice gives businesses a perverse incentive to have fewer employees. Regardless of how they achieve that, it is not what we want to incentivize.
Gorsuch wants the Supreme Court to ban abortion and ban assisted suicide. Here is a suggestion for how Democrats could defeat his nomination: by showing that he argued that Merrick Garland should have been confirmed.
I didn't support the campaigns in favor of confirming Garland, partly because I was sure Republican senators would ignore them, and because he's a "centrist" and corporatist, too right-wing for me to support. I agree he is much less bad than Gorsuch.
The income of the bottom 50% of Americans in 1978 was 20%. As of 2015 it was 12%.
South Dakota legislators defended the rights of employers to refuse to make feasible accommodations for pregnant women.
This amounts to defending the profits or convenience of the powerful (bosses) against the needs of the weak (employees, female ones in this case). And telling these women, "just quit your job" means, for many, "just starve," due to other forms of cruelty that these same legislators support.
Spyware was installed into the phones of Mexicans that advocate a tax on soda with sugar.
Canada is looking at authorizing US border thugs to violate the rights of Canadians trying to enter the US.
Canadians, I hope you organize to stop this.
The People's March for Education Justice is planned for several US cities.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the nomination of Pruitt to head the EPA. Pruitt wants to eliminate the EPA, but sabotaging it would be the next best thing.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on journalists to skip the White House correspondents' dinner.
Americans, prepare yourselves now to oppose the power grab that the troll has already said he intends to make as soon as a terrorist or military attack gives him an opportunity.
NAFTA hurt Mexicans more than any wall could. NAFTA and the previous application of neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s ended income growth and poverty reduction in Mexico.
NAFTA has harmed workers in the US, too.
Calling NAFTA a "trade treaty" leads people to erroneously suppose that it is a compromise between conflicting interests of various countries — that each decision in NAFTA would pit the interests of Mexicans against the interests of Americans and the interests of Canadians.
In fact, NAFTA is a business-supremacy treaty, and it pit the interest of plutocrats in Canada, Mexico and the US against the interests of most people in Canada, Mexico and the US. That's why we need to get rid of it.
The prime minister of Australia knew that an electric blackout was due to a failure in a gas plant, but publicly blamed the extent of renewable electric generation.
This shows he is willing to lie to destroy civilization.
US policy towards Iran is based on three assumptions that are mostly false.
Iran is not expansionist, and is mostly rational about its foreign policy — perhaps more so than the US. However, it is a mistake to call Iran a democracy, since the principal political authority is the council of religious rulers and the people have no avenue to replace them except revolution. Iran's democracy is limited to lower levels; reformist presidents have been thwarted.
Iran is somewhat evil, since it represses non-Muslims (Zoroastrians and Bahais terribly, Christians less so) and dissidents. In this dimension it is considerably worse than what the troll tried to do to Muslims. It represses Muslims too, by imposing religious rules that many Iranian Muslims don't want to follow.
However, it is not as bad as Salafi Arabia in religious repression.
The troll says that he "hasn't got one call" to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline.
That's true, because he shut off the phone line to call the White House. He hasn't got one call about anything.
Four US Muslim schools and community organizations have rejected
federal
grants conditioned on turning into informers on the people
they serve.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
They feel it would corrupt them.
Many US universities have "bias response teams" which are effectively the speech police.
I might despise some of the bias that these teams try to stop; in other cases, I might agree with it, because their scope is wide. However, students have a right to state their views regardless of what I think of them.
A drug company will henceforth charge Americans $89000 for an old drug for treating muscular distrophy, available in most countries for under a dollar.
The company says that insurance will pay for most of it. Perhaps so, if you have insurance (tens of millions of Americans still don't). Even so, your deductible and your co-pay might bankrupt you.
This is the consequence of a bad artificial monopoly law that ought to be repealed. In addition, the US should have a National Health Service to drive the price down for everyone.
US citizens: call on Congress
to continue the methane leak limits.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Rep. Chaffetz to do his job and investigate Kellyanne Conway's ethics violation.
The UK's National Health Service, after years of increasingly insufficient funding, is making doctors burn out before they are finished training.
The NHS worked very well, and cost much less than the US medical system, but the Tories didn't like that. Starving the NHS ever more of funds over a period of several years has brought it to the verge of cracking.
In reaction to the troll, the membership of the ACLU has doubled.
I first joined in a similar way. When Bush I called Dukakis a "card carrying member of the ACLU", in effect insinuating that defending the US Constitution was the equivalent of joining the Communist Party, I asked myself, "Why I am I not an ACLU member?" Before that, it had never occurred to me that this was a choice I could make.
If you reside in the US, are you an ACLU member? If not, why not?
Low incomes and rising rents have made the US a maelstrom of evictions. Millions of Americans are evicted each year.
I wish they could get their shit together to riot and stop the evictions.
Republicans in Congress are feeling lots of pressure from their constituents.
They don't really want to serve their constituents, only to use them. For the moment they are holding the line for their plutocratic masters. But they may have trouble doing that in October 2018.
Tens of millions of people face famine in Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia.
Thug unions hope for Sessions' support in eliminating court-ordered settlements that required thugs to change policies to protect people's lives from the thugs.
A bill proposed by SCROTUS would mess up the EPA badly for reasons that are subtle and not obvious. This explains them.
Some fake news is starting to target right-wing authoritarians.
Even if that helps in some narrow sense to fight the troll and his saboteurs, it won't help us make truth great again. But it may give us a chance to do that, by organizing to reject fake news intended to appeal to us.
Ironically, the article encourages people to believe news articles without careful thought by endorsing the foolish concept idea that people "consume" news. You can't be thoughful about judging what you consume, but you can be thoughful about judging what you read or hear.
Ingrained poverty is not simply a matter of people's lacking certain resources. To lead a people out of ingrained poverty involves more than simply giving them certain specific things.
The article has some cheap shot arguments which are mistaken. Eliminating public defacation won't make people prosperous but it can reduce transmission of diseases and it can help the stigmatized caste that collects the waste.
School for today's 5-year-olds won't educate today's 25-year-olds, but will educate the 25-year-olds of 20 years from now, and it could be a lot easier to teach 5-year-olds than 25-year-olds. Even if learning to read won't assure children a future job, it will help them think about their world.
However, the overall point about creating prosperity seems valid.
Birth control and reduced birth rate is a crucial part of creating prosperity. A rapidly growing population has not got a chance for prosperity to get ahead of births.
Fake news is being used for character assassination against German politicians.
Many American right-wing extremists want another civil war. Some dream of bringing back slavery.
Almost every company involved in health care in the US is selling "anonymized" patient data, from which only the patient's name and address is missing. It is easy to correlate that data with other data to reidentify the patient.
My main medical provider invited me to communicate through a service I call "Tracking Your Health". When I saw that its "privacy" policy permitted selling my data provided it is "anonymized", I rejected it.
(I would have rejected it anyway, because communication with the web site requires running nonfree Javascript code. And because the terms say that they can change the terms at any time.)
The cheater wants to give people a tax deduction for supporting his future campaigns. They will only have to launder the money through a church.
Other candidates will be able to do more or less the same thing, but they won't get the support of the billionaires that could really win big.
Daniel Dennett puts fake news in the context of a world in which appreciation of truth and facts is being lost.
Microsoft is inviting that GNU/Linux distributors pay for "protection" from patents. It is the patent protection racket.
The human contribution to global heating: 1.7C per century (so far). The natural contribution: .01C per century.
The human contribution is increasing, since it is causing consequences that increase the rate of heating.
The loser is thinking of eliminating the EPA's enforcement division. That would be almost equivalent to doing away with those annoying antipollution regulations, since polluters could usuall simply ignore them.
Attorney General Sessions will display cruelty and inflict many kinds of suffering on Americans who are disadvantaged, including seeking opportunities to punish people who are not guilty.
About the refugee minors in France that now can't go to the UK.
They believe that staying in France would be horrible, and if thugs are patrolling to stop charities from giving them food and sleeping bags, perhaps they are right. On the other hand, conditions if they got to the UK might be even worse. For those that can be legally accepted in France, staying there is probably a good idea.
Uri Avnery summarizes the history of Israel's war of independence, and how expulsions of Arabs and Jews from their homes fit into it.
Representative Nadler has used a special kind of petition to force the House Judiciary Committee to vote on demanding information from the troll about his conflicts of interest and his dealings with Russia.
The Republicans can vote no and defeat it, but this will put them on record as defending his trashing the Constitution.
US citizens: oppose plans to make Milwaukee county thugs double as US immigration thugs.
US citizens: tell your senators to block Gorsuch.
US citizens: insist that designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a "terrorist organization" would hurt the US. It is a violation of human rights when government arbitrarily labels an organization as guilty of terrorism or of anything else. Each accused party must get a fair trial.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop Bannon's takeover of national security decisions.
US citizens: call on senators to oppose the partial ban on Muslims.
US citizens: oppose fast-tracking the Dakota Access Pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: oppose plans to make the DMCA worse.
US citizens: call for full opposition to Gorsuch.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on US business leaders to quit the troll's "business advisory panel". The only advice he would follow is bad advice.
US citizens: oppose trying to use fighting between Houthis and Salafi Arabia as an excuse for war between the US and Iran. Since Salafi Arabia and the US started, and continue, a war against the Houthis, one can hardly blame the Houthis for firing back on a Salafi Arabian ship or a US ship.
US citizens: The Army Corps of Engineers is supposedly accepting comments about the Dakota Access Pipeline, but its comment page has shut off. So submit your comment via activists.
"We Fear Soldiers More Than Gangsters": El Salvador's "Iron Fist" Policy Turns Deadly. The US could fix most of this problem by ending the War on Drugs.
Proposing that women go on strike against male violence and for reproductive rights. I wish they wouldn't define this as for women only. I would support that campaign if I am welcome.
SCROTUS plan to deactivate climate protection by changing the Clean Air Act to exclude greenhouse gases.
For Americans in general, this policy is like waiting till you have a toothache to visit the dentist. However, the plutocrats that SCROTUS serve expect to buy their way out of the consequences. Will we let them?
The Tories are killing Sure Start, which successfully improved education for UK children in poverty. Everything suggests that the Tories want poor people to be badly educated and thus easy to swindle and confuse.
The troll's scientific censorship is comparable to Stalin's. We will depend on whistleblowers like Snowden to tell us what EPA scientists find out.
Blocking Yiannopoulos from speaking at Berkeley redounded to his advantage. It was foolish as well as wrong.
As the civil war in Afganistan moves closer to cities, the number of civilian casualties in 2016 was the highest since 2001.
The troll wants to allow financial advisors to knowingly give clients advice that goes against their interest. That fits his general alignment: for banksters, against everyone else.
Twitter favorizes raw emotion—not wisdom, logic, honesty, creativity or anything of independent value. The infant knows how to take advantage of that.
California is considering laws to reduce the range of personal data collected by its agencies, as well as refusing to give some of it to the federal government. Both prongs are good, but the first is especially heartening. To make democracy safe, we need to limit collection of personal data by all sorts of entities.
Der Spiegel cartoon: the troll has beheaded the Statue of Liberty. It is useful of Der Spiegel to warn Americans while we may be able to prevent this.
More Republicans face crowds of angry constituents for planning to eliminate Obama's medical insurance system.
Because the FBI uses "national security letters" without judicial supervision, and those who receive them are forbidden to talk about them, the FBI knowingly uses them to demand information such as people's email contents, which are supposedly exempt from them.
US immigration thugs, exceeding their authority in applying the partial ban on Muslims, coerced several people to "voluntarily" sign away their permanent residence visas. Now that the ban has been suspended, those people still cannot come.
Dr. Suha Abushamma was deported in that way. Some of these people are suing.
In Tory Britain, Disabled People Are Seen as Idle (as an excuse to cut their support money).
An Iranian refugee who smuggled himself from Manus Island to Fiji was sent back to Manus peremptorily while his legal case was still going on. He now faces prosecution there for leaving. What a succession of evil treatments he has lived through.
A former Israeli minister had to cancel a visit to Belgium because she would have been prosecuted there for war crimes.
Israeli thugs arrested 14-year-old Amir Othman Darweesh and beat him up in jail.
Israeli thugs murdered Israeli Arab Yaqoub Abu Al-Qiaan. They shot him while he was driving a car; he lost control of it due to his wounds, and it injured and killed some.
Instead of retaliating against those responsible (themselves), the thugs murdered Abu Al-Qiaan by denying him medical aid while he bled to death.
These events occurred during protests as the thugs were about to demolish the whole village where he lived.
Several African countries plan to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. Dubya's opposition weakened the ICC.
The FBI offers Muslims "temporary immigration relief" if they become informants. When the informants are no longer useful, the FBI helps deport them.
US Nazis planned a hate march in Whitefish, Montana, but no Nazis showed up on the appointed day, even though local Jews were offering handouts of matzo-ball soup. The article offers insight about how to defeat Nazi hate through a sort of aikido resistance.
The Arecibo radio telescope faces closure for lack of funds.
About the judge that the troll referred to as "so-called" for deciding against the troll.
China is slowly extending military domination over the Japanese Senkaku islands. For years it has used threats of force to stop Japanese fishing boats from going there.
Since oil seems to be part of the motivation for this dispute, as well as many other disputes in the sea near China, the best solution would be for all the countries involved to agree never to extract any fossil fuel from the sea bottom there. We need to leave 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, plus all other unknown fossil fuels. Why not start with fuels that there is a dispute over?
Due to business-dominated globalization, international clothing front companies use workers of age 14 that are paid under 20 cents an hour.
Making countries compete to permit the lowest wages and the worst abuses is what business-supremacy treaties were designed to do. We must abolish them so that workers in each country can organize.
The Tories are arranging to quietly impose further cuts in vital social support, hoping fools will blame the local councils (which will decide what crucial activities to cut) instead of the Tories (that will decide how much to cut).
An alleged Russian source for Steele's dossier about the troll and Russia died mysteriously in Moscow. This doesn't prove everything in the dossier is true, but does lend it some additional credibility.
Legalization of marijuana in some US states has hurt Mexican drug cartels through a big decrease in smuggling marijuana to the US. Ending the War on Drugs would be far more effective at this than any wall. And it would end the other evils caused by a war that is blitzed out of its mind on drugs.
Ready... Fire... Aim: How an Unhinged Trump Is Threatening US National Security. Of course, atrocities and precipitous injustice are worse than merely self-destructive—they are wrong.
South Dakota voters passed an initiative for campaign financing. The legislators spat in their faces by abolishing it.
Hawaii's republican legislators removed Minority Leader Beth Fukumoto because she supported the Women's March and rejects bullying.
Many federal judges have separately concluded that the partial ban on Muslims is almost sure to be rejected as unconstitutional, and thus issued temporary stays on its execution. Here are the reasons why it is unconstitutional.
The troll has cut off public access to USDA inspectors' reports about how animals are treated at sites ranging from circuses to research labs.
Paul Ryan hopes to attack non-rich Americans financially while we are paying attention to the troll's acts of gratuitous cruelty.
The FCC suspended investigations into ISPs that are violating the net neutrality rules. The troll will have it eliminate those rules.
The US continues rigging elections in Haiti and installing corrupt presidents of its own choice.
The imaginary "Bowling Green terrorist plot" was a plot concocted by the FBI to (in imagination) aid al Qa'ida in Iraq. If the plot had been real, it would have been wrongdoing, but it would have harmed no one in the US.
Terrorism Is Only a Real Threat If It Frightens Us into Destroying Our Liberties.
Uri Avnery: the boycott of products of Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory is wisest, because it can teach Israelis the importance of respecting the boundary between Israel and Palestine. I agree in principle, but I am starting to think that it will take sanctions on Israel to make the Israeli right wing stop establishing more colonies.
In an act of spectacular betrayal, the troll's recent deregulatory executive orders give Wall Street more power to cause an economic crisis. Wall Street wants the deregulation so as to cheat others, and likes economic crises too because they provide more opportunities to cheat others (for instance, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures that Obama forgave them for).
People don't want to hear that some mothers wish they weren't mothers. Those who talk about it face personal insults.
Women who have babies are pressured into adopting the narrow and suffocating social role and attitudes prescribed for mothers. They understand why other people find them dull, because they find it dull themselves.
I hear from people who are happy to have children. I can understand how it might make someone happy, in a world of plenty where raising children is not a crushing burden and where there is no anxiety that something might go wrong. But I can't imagine being happy with it in the world we are in.
More about Flynn's apparent hint to a Russian ambassador that the troll would drop sanctions if elected.
The troll has mostly succeeded in distracting the US press from the scandal of his involvement with Russia.
The troll's habit of speaking without thinking is providing useful help for lawyers challenging some of his policies in court.
As the extent of January Arctic sea ice hits a record low, a macroengineering plan to rebuild Arctic sea ice must now be considered.
This plan would not be treating a symptom. The loss of sea ice is a result of global heating, but also a cause of more global heating.
The 120,000 victims of Erdoğan's witch hunt find themselves blacklisted, unable to get any kind of work, and fearing that their bank accounts might be seized at any time.
Those who are arrested do not get a fair trial. They are told the only way to get out of jail is to name some "co-conspirators", which often means additional innocent targets for the witch-hunt.
UK house builders are holding back the supply of new houses to push up the price.
The diamond mining companies hold back the supply of diamonds to keep the price up, but we can disregard this because nobody really needs a diamond. Everyone needs a home to live in.
One district court ruled in favor of storing government regulations behind paywalls.
The case is not over.
Anti-abortion protests at Planned Parenthood offices were met by numerous supporters, in some cases greatly outnumbering the protesters.
It is very important to speak up visibly and publicly against the right-wing supporters of the troll.
Rosa María Ortega, a Mexican citizen who has lived in the US since infancy and thought she was allowed to vote, was sentenced to 8 years in prison for illegal voting.
I don't think the term "fraud" applies, since she did not lie about anything. She just registered and voted.
The unusual severity of her sentence was caused by talking about the troll's fictitious claims. It will probably cause her to deported to a country she has no memory of living in, and may not be able to survive in.
Increasing the belligerency of PISSI may serve Bannon's apocalyptic desires.
An unexploded 500-pound bomb dropped on Thessaloniki in World War II was just found, and before trying to defuse it, they are evacuating people over a mile away.
A bomb that size can demolish a building, but such a large evacuation seems hypercautious. The evacuation will do substantial economic harm and it too has a chance of causing harm to someone's health.
Excluding Iranian refugees — typically fleeing because they are opposed to the Islamist regime — is self-defeating for the US as well as cruel to them.
The troll may appear stupid to progressives when he talks about a "'so-called' judge", but he is dog-whistling to his supporters. Most of them think he should have the power to override judges.
The troll wants the US to adopt protectionist trade policies but wants Canada to do the opposite. Canadians would rather have a trade war.
In opposing the troll, we must not defend neoliberalism and its "free trade" agenda.
I am against "free trade" because that tends, in practice, to give big business power over the nation. "Free trade" treaties are really business-supremacy treaties.
I am not particularly concerned with tariffs, and not against buying things from other countries. What we must do is make it difficult to move production from one country to another in order to cut wages for workers of all countries.
In the UK, smart children from a background of poverty are years behind smart children from a rich background, in what they learn.
The Cyborg Bill of Rights v1.0.
I think another principle is required, that persons are entitled to control over all software implanted in them. This means that the software must be free, and each person must get a copy of the source code of that software, the power to install modified versions into perself, and the power to stop others from installing modified versions into per.
Time Warner Cable has been sued, accusing executives of knowingly swindling customers for years.
A tyrant or cruel strongman needs lots of underlings to exercise power. Nonviolent resistance operates by convincing many underlings not to carry out the orders.
Reportedly the troll spends his days in the White House isolated, lonely, and communicating with few other people. He gets his news from cable TV, which means he has a very biased picture including a reflection of himself. He could easily be fooled by his own propaganda.
He might decide after a few months of this that it is no fun, and resign.
Perhaps Bannon is taking advantage of the troll's habitual careless approach to give himself more power.
Coretta Scott King's letter opposing confirmation of Sessions as a US judge shows what an enemy of democracy he is.
Sessions tried to prosecute people for helping black voters fill out their absentee ballots, and aimed to get them sentenced to 200 years in prison.
Troll's 60-day delay on new regulations could wipe out the rusty patched bumblebee.
The appeals court's decision to keep the troll's partial ban on Muslims suspended is an example of judicial courage.
Every visit of the troll to Mar-a-Lago is a disaster for businesses in Palm Beach. Some will have to close.
The 2015 Republican smear campaign against Planned Parenthood failed to find any illegality but succeeded in stirring up right-wing extremist violence.
Most of those Britons who voted for leaving the EU aimed to reduce the number of immigrants. An economic projection suggests this will reduce the number little, if at all.
The troll is closer, so far, to Brave New World than to 1984.
However, considering how the troll threatens people, and uses the state to inflict suffering on many, 1984 is certainly part of it.
Flynn discussed US sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador in the month before the inauguration — meaning the denials of Pence and others were false.
Even when SCROTUS rebuke Republicans for ethics rule violations, they continue to protect those Republicans.
Call on the Senate to block the appointment of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel. He leads an organization that funds construction of colonies in Palestinian territory.
The troll threatened to "destroy the career" of a Texas legislator that proposed curtail "civil forfeiture", taking people's property without prosecuting them let alone convicting them. But the troll seems not to have understood what it means.
Ilana Hammerman: Why I, as a Proud Israeli, Want the World to Boycott Us.
US Army veterans have returned to the pipeline protest camp, pledging to defend protesters with their bodies.
US citizens: call on the EPA hold mining companies accountable for clean-up.
The wildfire danger in eastern Australia is now "off the scale". They had to extend the scale up from 100 to 150.
The immediate cause is due to conditions that vary. It probably won't be this bad next year, and even 30 years from now it won't be this bad every year.
However, many of these conditions will become gradually worse, on the average, due to global heating. It is expected to increase the frequency of droughts and the frequency of heavy rains. In 30 years, there will be occasional years that extend the scale to 200 or 300. Expect towns and villages to have no trees or bushes, and be surrounded by 50-meter firebreaks.
From desperation, apartments are now being made in London that have space only for a bed, a toilet and a shower.
The UN assistant secretary general compares Boko Haram to the IRA and says that Nigeria has learned it cannot get rid of Boko Haram.
I never felt any sympathy for the IRA's cause, and I still don't. But the IRA never tried to kidnap girls and turn them into slaves or suicide bombers, and one can at least understand its cause without having to be a fanatic. Does a large minority in a part of Nigeria really support Boko Haram including its violence, or does it support a less violent position from which the extremists go to Boko Haram?
Adults under 35 waste more food, apparently because they want to show off a large platefull on Instagram.
The study that found this was in the UK, but I expect the US is just the same.
How silly it is to show off the food on your plate! Unless it is a work of art. I've eaten a few times in my life in restaurants where that was the case, and I appreciated it — but what I particularly want from food is for it to be delicious when it has disappeared into my mouth.
And if there is food left over, how silly to throw it away!
8 countries have now joined forces to make up the cuts in aid to be caused by the troll's global gag rule against aid to organizations that mention "abortion".
Bravo! I hope American individuals who donate to global women's health provision can also redirect their aid to this fund rather than to funds which don't counter the anti-abortion extremism of the US.
Most Americans hold a sexist attitude towards married couples' names: they condemn women who don't change their last names, but strangely don't condemn men for doing the same thing. When you look into the reasons, you find broader sexism.
Kellyanne Conway directly broke US ethics rules by promoting Ivanka Trump's clothing line.
The troll's standard practice is to violate all ethics standards in the most blatant way, in effect saying "You can't stop me!" Conway must have felt she could and ought to do likewise. It will be interesting to see if Republicans allow her to be punished for this.
The US publishes a list of air attacks in Afghanistan, but it is bogus: thousands of attacks were left out of the list.
Successful protests against the Trump regime should look for a broad base and should demonstrate they are patriotic.
I agree with most of the article's points, but some of them betray the author's right-wing positions. We would be fools to limit ourselves to criticizing only things that Marco Rubio wouldn't do; he like all the Republican presidential candidates is a right-wing extremist and would do great wrong if given the chance.
Defending abortion rights is a crucial issue, and we shouldn't seek more support by dropping that issue.
The troll has told the border patrol to give high priority to deporting unauthorized immigrants who were prosecuted in the past for working without permission.
They are now treated just like people who committed violent crimes.
The US appeals court upheld the restraining order that suspended the troll's partial ban on Muslim visitors.
The infant responded, "See you in court", as if he thought he would sue the judges.
The troll flipped out in a phone call when Putin proposed extending the most recent nuclear arms limitation treaty.
In the US: call on supermarkets to reject GMO apples that disguise when they have spoiled.
You can sign this petition with Javascript disabled using the salsalabs workaround.
The Democratic Party would be making a big mistake if it focuses on helping the white workers whose pay has gone down in the past 3 decades.
I agree with the article's conclusion, but we should not suppose that right-wing democrats abandoned white workers because they were focused on nondiscrimination. It's more the opposite: after Bill Clinton sold out to the rich in the 90s, mainstream Democrats would no longer offer a New Deal, so nondiscrimination was all they had left.
When dooH niboR is making the non-rich poor, if they are not wise enough to see this, they tend to break up into groups that compete with each other. Especially if right-wingers encourage this and nobody discourages it. But if Democrats offer everyone a chance to have comfortable a life, they can work together for that.
The troll has reversed himself in regard to supporting Taiwan's independence.
Too bad. I have long been disappointed with the US's timid bowing to China's demand; it looked like this was one of the few areas where the troll might make something better.
Overall, the troll is moving towards continuing the foreign policy of previous presidents.
The EU is offering a lot of aid to Gambia under its newly elected president.
I hope someone can check the deal for strings that might be bad for the country. Such strings in the fine print are common in foreign aid.
Democrats must stop blaming secondary causes of Clinton's defeat and recognize the fault is that the party has not tried to oppose dooH niboR.
The FBI is investigating pipeline protesters, by visiting activists and hoping to lead the activists into saying something about the movement.
Religious tolerance has deteriorated in India, as Sikhs, Christians and Muslims face persecution and even forced conversion. The theocratic BJP government has contributed to this.
Even in prestigious universities, some students and alumni are treated as criminals because their skin color inspires suspicion.
The troll approved the ground raid in Yemen without proper intelligence (in either sense of the word). Not a great surprise that it was a military failure as well as killing many civilians.
The troll's mouthpiece: we must all call the raid a success because one of the raiders died.
This attempt to manipulate people through their patriotism to supporting unjust wars is nothing new. Dubya called on Americans to support the occupation of Iraq because it was done by the US Army. My response to this was to say that he had hijacked the US Army and it was now the Bush forces. It was used during the Vietnam War, so people posted bumber stickers saying, "Support our troops in Vietnam — bring them home."
But the troll is taking it to an extreme that is almost risible.
US citizens: phone your senators to call on them to respect and
preserve regulations that protect Americans from harm from industry
and not override them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
The UK had a policy of accepting unaccompanied child refugees that come to the EU, but the government quietly cancelled the policy hoping no one would notice.
The troll wants to put more prisoners in Guantanamo.
Anyone captured or arrested and accused of supporting PISSI could be put there.
PISSI fighters captured in Syria or Iraq should be held there as prisoners of war.
If teachers wear body cameras, it will destroy trust between teachers and students.
Recognition from a Christian that the troll is no Christian.
Melania Trump appears to have ignored her commitment to campaigning against cyberbullying, unless perhaps she's boycotting her husband.
Seattle has decided to move its account out of Wells Fargo bank.
Seattle moves billions of dollars through that account each year. If each dollar money remains there a month on the average, the account probably has a balance of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, Seattle can't actually change how it does this banking until late next year. But you can move your money out of the DAPL-funding banks next week. They are
Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, BayernLB, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Crédit Agricole, DNB ASA, ICBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, Mizuho Bank, Natixis, SMBC, Société Générale, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, TD Bank, Wells Fargo.
It is also important on general principles to stop doing business with the big banks that provoked the financial crisis of 2008. I moved money out of Bank of America several years ago for that reason.
It appears that the UK thug group that infiltrated political groups destroyed documents after being told to preserve them.
Hina Shamsi was harassed by US border thugs about working for the ACLU and travelling to other countries, while being a Pakistani citizen.
She being a lawyer responded to them with a lecture about the laws they were ignoring.
A Canadian Muslim was harassed trying to visit the US with her family.
I am trying to think of a good way to respond to thugs' questions which try to put one on the defensive by putting some nasty construction on innocent activities. Perhaps, "Why do you wear glasses and black shoes?"
Intel Gives [Troll] credit for $7bn US Factory it Announced under Obama.
What this says is that Intel is willing to support the troll by repeating his lies.
Apple iCloud Hoards 'Deleted' Browser History.
Dependence on future bots and agents could be debilitating, especially if they contain nonfree software.
Doctors, students and patients condemn Dana-Farber for holding a fund-raising event at the troll's hotel.
Sooner or later an Islamist terrorist attack will kill a few Americans. The troll more or less ignores right-wing terrorist attacks, but an Islamist attack will give him a welcome opportunity for repression and massive snooping.
Americans had better prepare now to defend our freedom from the troll if and when that happens.
Sad to say, the events in Boston a few years ago show that killing even three people can lead to a nationwide media frenzy, and to irrational self-destructive responsess such as shutting down a whole large city.
The refugees dumped on Manus Island have to wait weeks for medical attention for serious problems, and are denied treatment rather than sending them to Australia. Then the state lies to cover it up.
It seems pretty clear that the officials in charge of this have dehumanized the refugees. I'd guess that by now most of the people employed now to deal with them dehumanize them — because the decent ones have left by now. The doctors are to some extent an exception, because they have medical ethics to strengthen them.
Temperatures in Australia are reaching 48C, which creates various dangers to lives and property.
The planet-roaster ruling coalition is not satisfied and hopes to achieve 53C in a few decades.
Send thousands more troops to Afghanistan???
The corrupt Afghan government can't inspire people to fight for it and win the war. The US can prop up the Afghan government for as long as it wants to keep spending lots of money on continuing the war, but the only way the war can end is to let the Taliban win.
It's not clear whether Kellyanne Conway is working for the White House or for Trump Inc. Maybe there is no difference any more.
Everyone: oppose the Rhode Island bill to jail parents that leave a child in a car.
US citizens: call on Congress to prohibit a nuclear first strike without a prior declaration of war.
US citizens: support removing dams on the Snake River so that salmon and orcas can survive.
US citizens: call on congress not to legalize discrimination based on religion as an excuse.
The Salafi Arabian bombardment of Yemen is causing famine.
While the nation writhes in agony, Obama ignores that and gives a tycoon a great PR opportunity.
This disappoints many Americans who have for 8 years invested in Obama more hope than he should rationally inspire.
Israeli fanatics cut down 700 olive and almond trees near Nablus, part of their unremitting efforts to drive Palestinians away from places where they are taking Palestinian land.
Admiral Mullen, formerly head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rebuked the troll for putting Bannon on the National Security Council.
Melania Trump intended to use her presence in the White House to market fashion products.
Influenced perhaps by her husband?
A landfill company sued activists that opposed plans to put coal ash in a landfill. The ACLU defended them and won.
SCROTUS is planning to abolish the federal agency that helps states maintain the security of voting machines.
Maybe Republicans want to rig elections digitally, as well as stopping hundreds of thousands of marginalized Americans from voting.
Atalya Ben-Abba and other Israelis are about to refuse to be drafted and go to prison instead.
Israel is considering a law to refuse entry to anyone that supports a boycott of Israeli products.
Thousands of Jews And Arabs Attend a Protest against the Treatment of the Arab Community.
Israel prosecuted and jailed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy.
In Breaking the Silence, former Israeli soldiers report on the repressive practices they were ordered to carry out.
Republicans claim that the protests against them are full of "paid protesters".
How much money would it have cost to pay a million people to protest? We progressives are not backed by billionaires — we can't afford to do that. Only Republicans can.
It is standard Republican practice to accuse the opposition, falsely, of using the methods that they themselves use.
The Army Corps of Engineers is rushing to complete the Dakota Access pipeline, skipping the steps that are normally required.
This is to make sure that the environmental impacts are never studied and that no court can rule on the legality of the project before it is too late.
Since the pipeline will contribute to mass murder, I think that sabotaging it with violence so that it cannot be used would be justified on the principle of necessity for preventing a greater crime.
Sherry Turkle: campaigning to reestablish direct conversation between people in a world of people who are addicted to portable phones.
She doesn't put this together with the fact that the technology, being proprietary, is designed to be addictive. The users generally don't have control over this or any other aspect of it, so they can't make it less addictive.
Ajit Pal, the troll's head of the FCC, supports charging prisoners $14 an hour for phone calls.
This panders to those who want to grind the heel on prisoners, and will please many supporters of the troll. It will have the byproduct of increasing crime in the future, as prisoners who have limited communication with their families and friends will be less likely to fit back into society after they are released. (Most prisoners are released, you know.) So they will be led back to a life of crime.
But the main effect will be to enrich some companies, whose owners Pai seems to consider his cronies.
The troll approved a ground raid in Yemen, disregarding uncertainty about who was there. It killed lots of civilians.
How to organize resistance to the loser so it can go beyond protests and have long-term effects.
Canadians Form 'Rings of Peace' Around Mosques After Quebec Shooting.
The troll's executive order for the partial ban on Muslims disregarded the executive order about the procedure for checking executive orders, which was designed to avoid gratuitous mistakes.
The troll is aiming for the sort of misery that other presidents tried to avoid.
Travis County in Texas stands firm as a sanctuary, resisting Governor Abbott's threats to cut unrelated funding as a punishment.
Such threats are probably unconstitutional, but Republicans don't care. Any threat will do, to intimidate.
The responses from Travis County are good for retaining support from the people there, but I think it is crucial to publicly attack Abbott in ways that will hurt him state-wide. I would think of showing how he is dishonest, cruel, false to the Constitution, and un-American.
California is passing laws to resist the troll's cruelest plans.
[The troll's] belligerence towards Iran plays into the hands of Tehran's hardliners.
If the UK leaves the EU, Tories will be able to mistreat disabled people to their heart's content.
The corrupt head of the UK branch of ALEC has been appointed to design a trade treaty with the US that would subjugate the UK permanently to the US.
Since the senate rules don't allow a committee to vote with no Democrats present, the Republicans in the Finance Committee decided to ignore the rules.
Is it valid to suspend the rules without a quorum? It sounds like cheating to me — which fits the Republican political philosophy of "by hook or by crook."
US citizens: support State Department dissenters that criticized the partial ban on Muslims.
Iran's theocratic supreme leader thanked the troll for demonstrating that the US leaders cannot be trusted, revealing "the real face of the US."
This will harm Iran; it will strengthen the extremists in domestic politics.
Lawsuit Filed Against Trump Nominee Scott Pruitt for Denying Public Access to Polluter Emails.
Ordinary Americans Carried Out Inhumane Acts for Trump.
Perhaps there were immigration thugs that imprisoned travelers merely because they thought they had orders to do so. But those orders could not require handcuffing people who were not dangerous, denying them food, or denying them a wheelchair. The people who do that went beyond obeying orders. They were eager to mistreat someone, and their orders gave them license to do so.
"How dare Trump use my daughter's death to further his brutal agenda."
The TSA's "behavioral" inspection has no scientific base, it is just an excuse for racial profiling.
The troll is giving Erdoğan support and encouragement.
This is probably partly because Turkey is fighting PISSI, but it will support Erdoğan's repression too. I fear for the Kurds. Their support for secularity and human rights will not win any support from the the troll.
The danger of terrorism in the US is minuscule compared with the danger of other people with guns. Babies with guns kill a lot more Americans than terrorists do.
Microbead Ban Should Include All Products Washed Down the Drain, Say Campaigners.
An orphanage worker condemns the whole idea of orphanages, saying we must enable children to stay with their families.
With some funds it would be possible to enable many of these children to live with families. But it is not going to be easy for a single parent to care for five children, even with money, if the parent has to work as well.
We must give poor people help in having fewer children.
Local participatory activities, even if initially shallow, have the possibility to lead to creation of real communities.
Nigerian hunters try to free captives from Boko Haram, but their funding has been cut and they don't get the help they need from the army.
The FBI will discourage FOIA requests by ceasing to accept them by email.
To get people to accept intrusive biometrics, UK railroads propose to use this to enable people to pay fares faster.
The same could be achieved by making more entry gates, but that would not teach people to accept surveillance.
The UK is considering a law to require social networks to verify users' ages (and thus their identifies) or else impose censorship on them for their "protection".
40% of Americans are in favor of impeaching the troll, and 12% are not sure.
SCROTUS are proposing various bills to hamstring the EPA, or even abolish it.
Bermuda objects to being required to correct some of the openings for tax evasion and cheating and argues that other countries also have policies that facilitate this. What a non-sequitur.
Every country change the laws that help the rich and businesses to hide profits, and each step forward in any country will focus pressure on the countries that fail to do so.
Keeping fake news out of the coming French elections. Suspicions are that Putin will direct efforts to elect the right-wing extremist Le Pen.
The troll upholds and continues Obama's practice of rigging elections in Haiti.
A judge sentenced racist teenage vandals to read 35 books that could help them recognize the humanity of people they blindly hate.
A city in Australia has placed hundreds of microphones in public places to record people's conversations.
There are also microphones in taxis in Canberra, and buses in San Francisco. No matter what supposed justification there is, the danger of listening to people is more important. We must get rid of them.
A Russian dissident was poisoned last week with a substance not yet identified. It was the second such attack.
We failed to convince a third Republican to reject miseducator DeVos as Secretary of Education. She was confirmed on Tuesday.
The latest reshuffle of the UK's welfare system requires people to wait 6 weeks before benefits begin. During this time they often can't afford rent or food.
We are supposed to think of this as a minor detail or side effect of a large change, but I think it is the opposite. They make "reforms" that change many things, but the overall effect is less money for the poor. Since less money for the poor is exactly the Tories' general aim, I think that the "reforms" are meant as excuses for this.
Russia has greatly reduced the penalties for beating a spouse or children so badly that it causes bruises. In effect, the state is now encouraging domestic violence.
Has the troll already advocated such laws? If not, I expect he will.
The mainstream media tend to give the impression that Islamist terrorism is directed mainly at non-Muslims. Actually nearly all the targets are Muslims.
Hungary plans to imprison all asylum seekers.
The idea of calling these prisons "shelters" reminds me of what the British did when they put all the Boer civilians in prisons, which they called "concentration camps".
Palestinians ask other countries to punish Israel with sanctions for the newly adopted law that legitimizes theft of Palestinians' land by fanatical colonists.
Other kinds of thoughts can suppress the fast racist response.
To shield his lies from refutation, the troll wants to destroy the institutions that protect the truth.
Refugees in the US are walking across the Canadian border so they can apply for asylum there.
Global heating effects, including heavy rains, have damaged many historic places and sites of natural beauty in Britain.
The Statue of Liberty and other US historic sites are vulnerable to damage from global heating effects.
We won't have to worry about the Statue of Liberty if the troll succeeds in making liberty obsolete for everyone but him.
Australia's planet-roaster government has recognized that coal is now so uneconomic that the way to get new coal mines started is to subsidize them.
In other words, the coal barons have taken control of the country with their denialist lies, and now like a virus will direct the country's machinery to enriching them while endangering everyone else.
Amnesty International says that Assad's men killed thousands of prisoners by hanging, and thousands more by torture and starvation.
The available information stops in 2015; there is no information on whether the executions continued then.
Every US TV network gave far more coverage to a Canadian murderer who was a Muslim than to a Canadian murderer who was a right-wing extremist and killed Muslims.
Your average bank is far more likely to ruin Americans' lives than your average immigrant. That's why the troll wants "extreme vetting" for immigrants and not for banks.
The troll acts as if he were seeking regime change in the US.
Bernie Sanders: Trump 'Is a Fraud' Sending Nation in 'Authoritarian Direction'.
US citizens: call on the Senate to block Gorsuch.
US citizens: call on Senate Democrats to block the troll's Supreme Court nominee by all means possible.
US citizens: Call the Senate Committee on Homeland Security at 202-224-4751 and say that no individual whose primary responsibility is political in nature (such as Bannon) should be allowed on the NSC or authorized to attend its meetings.
US citizens: phone your senators to defend pollution regulations.
US citizens: call on Congress to invoke War Powers on the intervention in Yemen before any military escalation against Iran.
Massachusetts citizens: call your state legislator and state senator to oppose a bill designed to punish supporters of the campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel's occupation of Palestine.
Here's an explanation of the bill.
Canadian journalists face threats of imprisonment, much as US journalists do.
We must study and maintain nonviolent discipline in our protests against the troll's real and threatened violence.
Gorsuch as an undergraduate joked about founding a "Fascism Forever" club and repeatedly quoted Kissinger to countenance doing the unconstitutional.
Such jokes indicate something about the person who makes them.
If Gorsuch in the years since then had persistently demonstrated the rejection of what those jokes imply, I'd say we should overlook them. But there is no sign of that.
Romanian protesters have made the prime minister back down from pardoning the politicians convicted of corruption.
The troll reportedly wants to permit churches to endorse political candidates and to permit various kinds of religiously-motivated bigotry.
The troll's partial ban on Muslims included automatically denying their applications for citizenship and permanent residency. The ACLU sued stop this.
Now it seems that the troll cancelled this.
Perhaps he found out he was going to lose the case.
Pipeline protester Ken Ward, facing decades in prison for shutting off a pipeline by turning a valve, got a mistrial.
Some jurors must have been convinced by his arguments that he was acting to protect our world.
The troll is a salesman more than a businessman. His approach to
"creating jobs", like his approach to "creating casinos", is to borrow a lot of money.
A court temporarily suspended the troll's partial ban on Muslims, so the troll said this was done by a "'so-called' judge".
I think the troll is trying to build up mob support for defying the
judiciary so he can in effect rule by decree.
Large protests against releasing imprisoned corrupt politicians continue all around Romania.
Umberto Eco analyzes fascism.
Antisemitism is rising in the US: 50 bomb threats since the start of the year.
We can't trace these directly to the troll, but we know he is partly
responsible in general ways, such as his association with Bannon who
has encouraged antisemitic extremism, and his "holocaust remembrance"
announcement which avoided mention of Jews.
Antisemitism was once normal and accepted in the US, just like bigotry
against blacks. However, awareness of the holocaust mostly suppressed
antisemitism starting when I was a child; thus, I have escaped that
bigotry, though my mother told me about encountering it when she was
young. I never expected to see it come back in the US.
It's one more item for the list of the troll's injustices to humanity.
Annual giant forest fires in Indonesia produce pollutinn that kills
many thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand, and release tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases.
Stopping them is difficult because giant companies set the fires.
The Netroots, progressive resistance against Dubya, was bought out and
undermined by Obama and other nonprogressive Democrats.
It failed because it couldn't replace the nonprogressive Democrats.
This time we must do better.
[The cheater] Retains Direct Tie to Businesses, Documents Show.
Impeachment is called for.
The cheater tried to cheat customers of a golf course he bought; a
court ruled he owes them 6 million dollars.
The infant never accepts defeat, so he will appeal the decision. He
figures that if he makes them go through enough steps he will win by
intimidation sooner or later.
Everyone:
call
on the CEO of Uber to leave the troll's Business Council.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to reject the troll's bigoted policies against
Muslims.
In the US:
call on TV
networks to stop broadcasting Kellyanne Conway and the troll's
press manipulation rallies.
Executives of Tepco face prosecution for failing to take action to keep the Fukushima reactors safe in the event of a tsunami.
India has forbidden Compassion International, a Christian charity for children, from bringing 60 million dollars of foreign funds into India.
Most Greeks now believe it was a mistake to have joined the euro. Greece needs to get out of the Euro zone so that it can throw off the power of the Euro-banksters, whose demands for Greece to pay of its debt have pushed Greece into ever-increasing debt.
Sweden will aim to be carbon neutral by 2045. Whether this is fast enough to avoid disaster (if the whole world did it), I am not sure. Perhaps if the emissions are reduced enough in the next 10 years, it would be ok to take 20 more years to reduce them to zero.
What is clear is that Sweden can't avoid disaster by itself no matter how good a job it does.
Drawing lessons about men and masculinity from the success of the troll—a parody of all the worst aspects of traditional masculinity.
As the FARC soldiers lay down arms, crime rackets that they used to operate are being taken over by others, including Colombia's worst terrorists, the paramilitares. Those are right-wing terrorists connected with the army.
Increasing CO2 makes some algae produce poisons and kill coral.
As the troll drives away allies, China is winning more.
Vanuatu has banned import of junk food.
Australia's "climate and energy adviser" was a coal industry lobbyist. One must suppose that his advice will be to burn more coal and destroy civilization.
Trump’s CIA Chief Selects Major Torture Operative to be Agency’s Deputy Director. The troll seems to be seriously gung ho about torture.
I suspect he wants his supporters to get vicariously high on violence, whether it happens or not. This would enable him to use them to approve other violence.
SCROTUS in the House of Representatives voted to allow mentally incompetent people to own guns. Next will be toddlers: don't they deserve to be able to keep guns in their cribs?
A small relaxation of US sanctions on Russia is not corruption.
A peaceful but illegal sit-in protest in 1960 sparked a wave of protests that ended segregation in stores across the American south.
The cheater said he would make drug companies lower their prices. But now it seems he wants to deregulate them instead. Depending on which regulations he gets rid of, that would allow them either to charge even more, or to sell drugs which are totally unsafe.
A bill in Congress would reduce the scope of the DMCA's prohibition on breaking all sorts of digital handcuffs. This would reduce the injustice, but that part of the DMCA is entirely unjust and should be repealed entirely. DRM is an injustice and the government should help us get rid of it. This is pertinent again because this bill has been reintroduced in the
new congress.
Rumors say that the troll wants the US anti-terrorist educational activity to focus exclusively on Islamist violence, thus giving clear sailing to the violent right-wing extremists that the troll encourages.
SCROTUS have backed off the plan to sell large amounts of federal land, due to public opposition.
The UK admits refugees from persecution, then makes them go hungry.
Comparing the troll with the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that predicted some of what digital mass media do to people. I'm more or less immune to the direct effects because I stay away from those technologies.
Bangladesh proposes to force Rohingya refugees to an island that floods every high tide. This would be effectively to kill them. If Bangladesh does not stabilize its population, it will turn into a game of musical land lots with lives eliminated at each turn.
The French right-wing party violently pushed a reporter out of a press conference, for asking an inconvenient question. Then the party officials claimed that thugs had ordered the expulsion, which if true would mean that the thugs were intervening politically and ought to be fired.
Facebook has taken a positive step to avoid boosting fake news. Despite this, many reasons remain to refuse to be used by Facebook. Sad to say, research is advancing on generating fake audio in someone's voice, and fake video using someone's face.
Federal Reserve heads mocked unemployed Americans in a meeting, in effect blaming them for suffering from macroeconomic circumstances. It's convenient for plutocrats to have high unemployment, since that makes workers desperate and easy to abuse and easy to cheat.
We need a government that will be on our side against the banksters (and other rich and powerful individuals and businesses).
Israel is one of the last states to maintain a colonial empire. Others include Indonesia, in West Papua, and Morocco, in Western Sahara.
SCROTUS want to destroy unions all across the US with so-called "right to work" laws.
They want the rich to be united, as in "Citizens" United, while the non-rich are set against each other.
A systematic phishing campaign targets human rights defenders in Egypt. Presumably it is run by the Egyptian military dictatorship or some state friendly to it.
Central American refugees from violence there have been excluded by the troll.
Reddit has banned two right-wing extremist subreddits associated with the groups sponsored by Bannon.
In South Africa, pregnant women using meth are creating many mentally handicapped, aggressive children.
This harms society, but especially harms those children. To save more children from being victims of that incurable lifelong damage, we should give those women long-term birth control so they will not make and harm any more children.
Obama made an agreement to accept many of the refugees that Australia has imprisoned on Nauru and Manus Island. The troll doesn't like refugees and this has created hostility between the two countries.
The Australian government is a planet-roaster government, like the troll. Anything that creates conflict between them has a tendency to make for good.
Under pressure from drought, nomads in Kenya have invaded the most important wildlife conservancy.
In an overpopulated world, it may be possible in theory for people to coexist with wild areas—as long as all goes well. But we can't suppose expect everything will go well all the time. Overpopulating humanity will wipe out natural ecosystems, as the last step of trying to survive—a few years before masses of humans begin dying.
To avoid this future requires we do all we can to encourage use of birth control and reduction of birth rate.
Building a million more separate houses in the UK will increase flooding. The solution is to build more densely—near mass transit lines.
Some companies aim to make all their plastic packaging sustainably disposable. This is a big step towards eliminating plastic waste, but the concomitant requirement is to get all purchasers to dispose of the packaging properly.
Can garment workers in Kenya escape the race-to-the-bottom of globalized production? Changes in some treaties might help.
Since the infant seems to be putting Bannon in charge of national security issues, the fact that he expected war with China should be of some concern.
The Netherlands will count ballots by hand to protect the security of their elections. All countries should adopt this wise policy.
The troll reportedly threatened to invade Mexico, while talking on the phone with the president of Mexico.
I hope the president of Mexico ended the phone call at that point, because to continue it would have been servile.
Theresa May, when minister for surveillance and repression, tried to make the NHS hand over patient data to the state, looking for unauthorized immigrants.
Now the UK has a new plan for denying medical care to unauthorized immigrants: demanding two kinds of ID before people can get treatment.
We must stop letting companies pay fines to protect their executives from prosecution.
The US is heading for a shortage of potable water in 25 years or so. The price of water is rising so fast that many of US households may be unable to afford water in a few years.
Contrasting the troll's lies with most politicians' and diplomat's deception: the troll uses lies to get underlings that will obey with no scruples, while intimidating everyone else into obeying from fear. And it's a strategy aimed at the short term only.
New York Senator Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, is weak in opposing the troll's saboteur cabinet nominees.
Thousands protested at his apartment calling on him to "wake up".
The right to repair should include motorcycles. Of course, what we really need to do is repeal that part of the DMCA.
Homeless refugees in France face continual harassment by thugs, and people that help them (for instance, with food or transportation) face prosecution, sometimes on false or patently illegal charges.
City policies to harass unauthorized immigrants have in some cases been rolled back by courts.
The troll has discarded Obama's ethics rule that somewhat impeded the president's appointed officials from acting corruptly for their own profit.
Some US thug departments are refusing to say whether they used stingrays to snoop on the participants in the Women's Marches.
The Department of Labor has assisted Wells Fargo in getting away with mistreatment of workers, by deleting a web site for whistleblowers there.
Windows 10 forced software changes can sabotage the user terribly if Microsoft chooses an inconvenient time to do them. Since the article is in the mainstream media, it suggests only to buy another computer that serves a master that doesn't do this particular form of nastiness. It completely ignores the possibility of installing a free operating system in the PC—which doesn't even require buying a new computer.
Driverless cars will have trouble participating in social interactions with pedestrians and other drivers.
This article is perceptive—however, not surprisingly someone in the tech industry, it ignores the danger of massive surveillance through cars, which can lead to giant disasters.
Google has made Chrome automatically install the DRM module. This makes it dangerous for security researchers in the US to investigate possible insecurity in Chrome. More information.
To preserve the US Constitution, members of Congress must act like adults and be loyal to the Constitution. Unfortunately, most of them are Republicans and their goal is to win power for their plutocratic masters by hook or by crook.
The leaked intelligence dossier says that Putin promised the troll 19% of a principal Russian oil company if the troll drops sanctions. It looks like this gift is already being carried out.
The troll's actions could indicate either strength and decisiveness, or weakness and confusion.
A US citizen was held for hours in an airport because he was entering with his mother who is Iranian. The citizen, 5 years old, was handcuffed because he was considered a "security threat"—or so the troll's press manipulator said.
Superstitious Burmese endanger various species for the sake of "natural remedies".
PISSI has applauded the troll's entry cutoff for Iraqis and Syrians. The government of Iraq responded with hostility.
The loser could get Iraq, Syria and Turkey to be aligned with Russia. Hmm, perhaps that's one of the missions he was given.
How did the troll choose the seven target countries for the partisan Muslim ban?
The article's title seems to suggest that extending the ban by adding countries to it would make it better, but that not the central point.
The European Union wants to get rid of cash, but some countries and many people are opposed to this.
If you live in the European Union (especially Sweden), you can oppose this by using a button company to make a batch of buttons saying "DON'T BE TRACKED PAY CASH", then selling them to others? Use a translation in your local language if that will be more effective.
A new surveillance app will monitor people's actions and communications to check for depression. The information will be available to "counselors".
I suspect that later versions will be made mandatory for employees of various companies, and that they will inform Human Resources.
People in Manchester, England, took direct action against spikes designed to stop people from sleeping—by putting cushions on them.
One million Britons have signed a petition not to allow the loser to make a state visit there.
A journalist was investigated by the Secret Service after posting jokes on Twitter that referred to hypothetical assassination of the troll. This infringed his freedom of speech, as understood under US law.
Here's How We Know Trump's Cabinet Picks Are Wrong on Human-Caused Global Warming.
Pipeline protesters in Washington State, and journalists that covered the protest, face up to 30 years in prison from the repressive state.
A Burmese Muslim who was one of Aung San Suu Kyi's advisors was assassinated. Political motives are presumed.
Americans should organize to carry out general strikes. Disruption and inconvenience are a necessary price for effective protest.
The author is unaware of the injustice that both Uber and Lyft commit against their passengers. Do delete your Uber account if you have one, but don't replace it with another nonfree surveillance app such as Lyft.
Statisticians fear the troll will manipulate future economic statistics, or simply end the making of measurements that would show harm that is occurring.
A unique coral reef at the mouth of the Amazon is likely to be destroyed soon by oil drilling.
Turkey, Hungary and Romania drive 23% rise in appeals to the European Court of Human Rights.
Bernie Sanders: How Corporate Media Threatens Our Democracy.
Many large tech companies condemn or criticize the troll's partial Muslim ban, but Uber took the opportunity to undercut the taxi drivers' protest strike.
Now many users are boycotting Uber demanding that it stop helping the loser. This would be a good reason to boycott Guber, and it adds to the other reasons, such as mistreatment of its workers.
But even without a boycott, customers should reject Guber (and other such services including Lyft and Bridj) because they are surveillance systems and require running a nonfree app.
The troll's demolition derby is meant to wreck US government agencies.
Then Republicans will point to the wreckage and say, "See, this proves the government can't help anyone." They've been playing that game since Reagan's days.
The troll will exclude the chief military and intelligence officers from National Security Council meetings, and invite Bannon instead.
Banks in the UK are distracting attention from their crimes and misdeeds by threatening to leave the country.
There's only one valid reason for the UK to leave the EU and that is to get rid of the EU laws that give the rich (such as banksters) too much power. But Tories don't want to do that—on the contrary, they will let themselves be "forced" to give the rich more power.
The troll has decided that most permanent residents (green card holders) will be allowed to return to the US, but not necessarily all, and it is not automatic for anyone. Thus, they face being grilled and threatened on return to the US.
They could be compelled to surrender the passwords to their phones, or pressured to become informants.
Many students in US universities are covered by the troll's incomplete Muslim ban, and some were caught outside the US and are unable to return to their studies.
How US Indian reservations can resist right-wing oppression coming from state and federal levels.
A warehouse in the UK is such a dangerous place to work that ambulances take 35 people per year to hospitals from there.
Violent right-wing fanatics attacked a squat in London where homeless people live, throwing bricks and poles through the windows.
Many large tech companies are bringing staff back to the US in a hurry, who originate from countries that the troll might ban next.
Deutsche Bank will
cease funding new coal power plants and some coal
mines.
It is a substantial part of what every bank must do, to protect
humanity and other living species from disaster.
The
leader of Zimbabwean protests against Mugabe has been arrested and
accused
of "subversion".
Immigration thugs continued to jail US permanent residents
of Iraqi origin, trying to return to the US, after the order saying
they were allowed to return.
SCROTUS are
preparing to abolish recent regulations to make extractors
limit methane leaks and limit harm done by mountaintop removal coal
mining.
They are seriously embarking on a course of mass murder and the
possible collapse of civiliation.
It would be interesting to make an order of magnitude estimate of how
many people are likely to be killed by removing one mountaintop and
extracting the coal. Each one kills people both by pollution that
makes them sick, and in long term by global heating.
Trump's
Copying the Bush Censorship Playbook. Scientists Aren't
Standing for It.
Fighting in eastern Ukraine is
getting hotter.
The article says it isn't clear which side is escalating, but the fact
that the fight is going against Ukraine suggests that Russia is doing
so.
"Steve Bannon is
calling the shots in the White House. That's
terrifying."
"America First in pugilism, parochialism and misplaced
protectionism."
What We're Witnessing Is a
Stress Test of the US Constitution.
The troll's executive
order to eliminate two regulations for each new
one
is totally irrational.
Its superficial purpose is to prevent necessary regulations. Its
deeper purpose is to convince people irrationally that regulations
that
protect the public are all bad.
A Dutch hacker and Tor admin
recounts how state agents tried to
recruit
him for underground activities.
How Scientists Can Protect Their Data From the Trump Administration.
Don't Give In To Coup Fantasies;
Power Is More Straightforward.
The Tories have reduced claims for mistreatment of workers by 70%
by imposing a fee on such claims. The result is that lots
of poor women can't defend their rights.
How Do We Stop Trump and Win Gains in Justice and Equality?
Peaceful protesters in Cameroon
face execution.
US citizens:
rebuke the democrats that voted to advance Tillerson's
nomination.
White supremacists and other right-wing
extremists are present in many
US thug departments.
Tying Honduran politicians and plutocrats to the murder of over 120
environmental activists since the military coup that installed an
oppressive government.
Clinton seems to have endorsed the coup.
US citizens:
call on Congress to overturn the troll's partial ban on
visiting Muslims.
US citizens: Phone your senators to
resist and delay the troll's
cabinet nominees.
US citizens: support Senator Warren's bill to require president and
vice president to divest from
conflicts of interest.
Everyone:
call on mayors of sanctuary cities not to yield to the
troll's
pressure.
US citizens:
call on the Army Corps of Engineers not to approve the
Dakota Access Pipeline.
Here's the comment I submitted.
Democratic Senator Whitehouse encountered anger from hundreds of
voters who showed up to criticize him for
approving
some of the loser's saboteur cabinet nominees.
Protester Ken Ward has been
prohibited
from arguing a necessity defense as he goes on trial for shutting
the valve on a pipeline. He could be imprisoned for 30 years.
The troll wants to
risk
another financial crisis by overriding the Dodd-Frank financial
reform bill that was designed to try to prevent one.
The Dodd-Frank law does not go far enough — what we really need
is to bring back the Glass-Steagal act. However, getting rid of
Dodd-Frank would make things much worse.
Washington
State will sue to cancel the troll's partial Muslim ban.
The troll is causing disasters that reflect his temperament and character,
and this is likely to get worse, as he
makes
more enemies and gets more angry. This could end in calamity.
Women are protesting Texas's absurd miscarriage-harassment law by
mailing
their used tampons to the state governor.
In the heart of the loser:
despite
all the advantages that were handed to him, he feels no gratitude,
only anger that he wasn't given even more.
SCROTUS
want
to privatize gigantic areas of US government land.
Alcohol Industry
Subverting
Science to Prevent Greater Regulation, Study Finds.
Between
overfishing
and sewage effluent, fish stocks in the Bay of Bengal are
crashing.
Only massive contraception can save the people of that overpopulating
region.
The FBI has rules about infiltrating political and religious
organizations, rather weak rules though they are, but agents are
allowed
to ignore them essentially at will.
The FBI has
ignored
Obama's orders to stop racial profiling.
The FBI makes
standard
practice of seizing journalists phone records without a court
order.
This is exactly the threat to democracy which is why we must stop
systems from keeping records of who people talk with.
The moral lesson of the holocaust is
being
forgotten.
To defeat the troll, we need to
replace
right-wing establishment Democratic officials that resemble
Clinton.
US Funding Cuts to UN Agencies
Would
Be Costly for Peace And Security.
Protesters in Romania Denounce Plan to Decriminalise Misconduct Offences.
This could enable many convicted corrupt politicians to get out of prison.
Two young children were effectively arrested in their British school
because they had a toy gun. Based on their skin color, they were
treated as terrorists. Now they are terrified in school and out.
This treatment was part of official government "terrorism prevention"
policy, part of the fear-tyranny-industrial complex.
How various people are suffering due to the troll's partial ban on Muslims,
which was implemented in terms of seven specific countries.
Do-dirty has ordered the Philippine thugs to stop their anti-drug
operations (targeted killings).
Will the Philippines return to rule of law?
Only the state can enable everyone to have a good life, but
plutocratist policies and propaganda have convinced many people to give up on the idea of using the state for that purpose.
As the wealthy take more and more of the world's wealth, they are
crushing people slowly to death. Only reestablished democracy can
save us.
Homosexual Iranian refugees who were excluded precipitously from the US
fear Turkey will send them back to Iran to face persecution.
Canada: "Islamophobia has killed innocent Canadians".
Faux News eagerly claimed that the Québec shooting was done by a
Muslim (actually one of the worshippers at the mosque, who fled when
the bigot started shooting), and didn't withdraw the false claim until
Prime Minister Trudeau demanded it.
Why Democrats Should Hold the Line And Filibuster against Neil Gorsuch.
Homeless people have refused to be forced away from the main train
station in Melbourne, where they have camped.
I would like to know more about the "social housing" that the city
wants to move them to, and why they don't want to go.
Israel represses Palestinian nonviolent protesters with false accusations. A prominent example is Issa Amro, who received a UN
award as a human rights defender.
Even worse, it shows contempt for freedom of speech. Supposing that
the protester had indeed called a soldier "stupid", what kind of
state makes that a crime? A tyrannical state.
Also a dishonest state, which systematically denies the facts of the occupation.
The Israeli Law to Legalize Land Theft (only from Palestinians): it
would declare Israel a criminal state and call for sanctions.
The Council of Europe adopted a report rebuking Israel for "systematic
killing" in Gaza, as well as the siege and its consequences.
The report calls for an investigation by the International Criminal
Court, which I hope will take place.
Gaza's infrastructure is on the verge of collapse, and the blame falls mainly on Israel.
A robot is being developed to replace food warehouse workers.
The total number of jobs lost in the US could be in the hundreds of
thousands.
Deutsche Bank has been fined over half a billion dollars for not trying to avoid laundering money from Russia.
Four states have sued to overturn the troll's partial ban on Muslim visitors.
The troll's nominee for the Supreme Court is a right-wing extremist and might swing the decision on those cases.
Israel is going all out to extend its colonies in Palestinian territory.
A repair company for Macintoshes is sending threatening lawyer letters to
customers that published complaints.
If the victims say "so sue me", they would win in court. But many of them
are likely to panic and pay what was demanded.
Note that it is possible to install GNU/Linux in a Mac.
When Sally Yates was appointed as acting head of the Justice
Department, Senator Sessions asked her to commit to defend the
Constitution by rejecting unconstitutional orders from the president.
She did exactly that, and the troll fired her for it.
Tesla is producing electric storage facilities to help meet peak electric demand using renewable sources.
Wise governments would announce plans to buy lots of batteries over
many years, to create an incentive for R&D and production volume that
would drive the cost of production down.
Democratic senators blocked two of the troll's saboteur nominees by
refusing to attend the committee meeting which had to vote on them.
This tactic could be used against all the nominees if the Democrats
are united.
Naturally, Republicans called this shocking and unheard-of, although
they did the same thing a few years ago. That's the standard
Republican dishonesty, to demand that Democrats follow the bipartisan
comity which they themselves have completely rejected.
Extreme right-wing advances in the UK have stimulated hatred against
Jews as well as against Muslims.
A right-wing extremist in Québec murdered six Muslims in a mosque.
He seems to have been inspired by the French right-wing polician Le Pen.
Other right-wing politicians inspire murderers, too.
The troll has shut down the phone number to call the White House and
leave a message for the president. So Sanders has set up
WhiteHouseInc.org, where you can
send
him a message via one of his businesses.
The troll does not seem to understand
what's
required in responding to emergencies.
Republicans since Reagan have claimed that the government can't do a
good job of helping people, to build support for eliminating the
effective
programs that do so. They find it inconvenient when the facts to
undercut that claim. Thus, they have every reason to stop government
programs such as FEMA, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, food
stamps and welfare from working well. And they don't have enough
civic virtue to override their political interest.
Many Iranians that live in the US have been
separated
from their families because they were temporarily out of the
country.
They are being forced to give the passwords to their phones, which
means the US gets to know everything about them.
Philippine President Do-dirty admits to being "embarrassed" that thugs
killed
a South Korean businessman, assuming he was a drug dealer.
Even with its laws for trials, the US still gets mistaken convictions.
With no trial, just a gunshot, mistakes are far more likely.
The troll's precipitous prohibition on entering the US was not well
thought out, partly because the troll didn't consult very many people
about it. Even some Republicans recognize it
will
strengthen jihadis and terrorists.
Some immigration agents are
deporting
people in defiance of the court decision.
US border thugs who surprised visitors and returning students with the
news that their US visas had been canceled also
charged
them with attempting to enter the US illegally.
Are they imitating the troll's vicious dishonesty, or is this merely
the natural tendency of a thug when the opportunity arises?
Peter Watts, Canadian, was also banned from entering the US for a
period of many years after he was
convicted
of a bogus crime against the border thug that beat him up.
Bad
forest management contributed to the monster fire in Chile, which
threatens the city of Constitución.
Greece and the Euro-banksters are heading for the showdown, after a
secret IMF report says that
traveling
the path the banksters impose would make Greece's debt snowball.
Republicans still can't find a way to repeal Obama's medical insurance
system without
making
lots of their constituents very very mad.
If those constituents were aware of how Republicans' other changes
will hurt them, they would make those stop too.
The UN Human Rights Committee ruled that
denial
of abortion rights violated a woman's human rights.
The UK Labour Party
needs
to listen to white working class Britons' concerns rather than
dismiss them out of hand as "racist". Even though some of what they
say is racist.
The same applies to the US Democratic Party. We need to find common
cause with downtrodden people who do racist scapegoating, without
endorsing their racism.
Most of the necessary change consists to ceasing to treat plutocratic
bankster rule as inevitable and start fighting to eliminate it.
North Carolina's Republicans have threatened to eliminate the city
government of Charlotte if it continues to
stand
against bigotry.
The European Union
formally
called on China to investigate its arrest and torture of human
rights lawyers.
The troll has, apparently, brought back the practice of
sending
soldiers on ground raids in Yemen.
In this raid there were substantial casualties on both sides, as well
as many civilians. At least the target was a real al-Qa'ida base.
Killing 14 members of al-Qa'ida and an officer is insignificant as a
blow against that organization. What determines its strength is how
well it can recruit. The troll's ban against visits from Yemen and
other countries is sure to strengthen al-Qa'ida recruiting, generally
and especially in Yemen.
White supremacists and other right-wing extremists are present in many
US thug departments.
Amnesty International accuses the Philippines thugs of paying for
murder, planting evidence, and extorting money from the families of
the people they kill.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Pudzer as Secretary of
Labor.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose DeVos as Secretary
of Education.
Two Republican senators have already said they won't vote for her.
With one more Republican, and if no Democrats defect, DeVos will lose.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Tim Price.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
US citizens:
call on
Democratic senators to oppose the troll's Supreme Court nominees.
US citizens:
sign
this White House petition calling on the troll to release tax
returns and conflict of interest data.
Everyone:
Help
NASA save data from the troll's men.
US citizens:
call on
Democrats to do all possible to resist the troll's budget cuts.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to require the troll to show he is no longer
financially involved in the Dakota Access Pipeline.
A former US official who resigned in disgust under Bush I urges
officials to
"kick
sand in the gears" until they are fired, rather than quitting
immediately.
That is a drastic response, and would be a harmful overreaction under
ordinary circumstances, but these are not ordinary and I think it is
justified against the troll and the saboteur cabinet.
Kurdish forces are accused of
torturing
prisoners accused of supporting PISSI.
The article talks about "children", but it really means "minors".
Given the age range of 11 to 17, it is clear that some (most?) of the
prisoners are teenagers, but some are really children.
I point this out to avoid a frequent kind of error, but it makes no
important difference in this case. Torturing teenagers is just as
wrong as torturing children. Likewise for torturing adults.
The infant's abrupt
dismissal
of the State Department's second-level management will leave the
department on blind autopilot for weeks or months.
The Iraqi army presented a captured
PISSI
poison gas lab facility.
A court cancelled the troll's exclusion order, but
only
for those that were en route with a valid visa when the order was
issued.
This deals with the most acute part of the problem, but everyone with
a valid visa or a green card should be allowed in, unless there is
some specific personal reason which should be examined in a personal
hearing.
Pointlessly
excluding
the Iranian cast and director of an oscar-nominated film is going
to make the troll look bad.
Some in India
still
blame inexplicable mishaps on witches, and kill the witches.
This happens in
parts
of Africa, too.
The troll has done something I think is good:
long-period
bans on many federal officials from lobbying.
This doesn't cover members of Congress, since that requires a law.
Such a law is called for.
A broad and large movement to protect America from the troll
is taking shape, and got a big boost from the initial Muslim ban.
The troll's repression of Muslims
tracks the start of Hitler's
repression of Jews.
It is fair to call the troll's precipitous immigration restrictions a
partial Muslim ban because that's how he intended it. Giuliani says
that the troll asked for advice on he could make such a ban fit
legal requirements.
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals sued scientist Pieter Cohen for a scientific
paper
reporting an illegal and possibly dangerous chemical was present in
various
Hi-Tech "nutritional supplements".
The company lost, but its head hopes that the expense of defending it
will scare off any scientists that think of criticizing in the future.
The loser's partial Muslim ban is playing into PISSI's hands: PISSI
stated its intention to
use terrorism to provoke stupid reactions like
this.
More Than 100 Natural World Heritage Sites
Degraded by Human Activity.
Mnuchin Again Denies Robo-Signing,
Despite Yet More Evidence He Is
Lying.
Salafi Arabia has had to start taxing residents, but did it in the
worst possible way: with a value-added tax (effectively a sales tax)
that falls hardest on the poor and spares the rich.
An
Indonesian Islamist who pushed for the prosecution of Jakarta's
mayor for blasphemy is being prosecuted for defamation.
Making defamation a crime is the same wrong as making blasphemy a
crime. Freedom of speech includes the right to speak ill of any
person and any religion.
Washington DC thugs
dropped charges against some of the journalists
arrested covering a protest. But not all.
The UN warns that the troll's ban on admitting refugees
will put
20,000 refugees in danger.
Steve Bannon NSC Seat Risks Politicizing National Security, Former
Officials
Warn.
The troll politicizes all decisions — he lacks the concept that some
issues are more important in their own right than his political
tactics.
Several US Christian leaders denounced the idea of giving Christian
refugees
priority because of their religion.
Supposedly American multinationals said they would "create lots of
jobs" if given a big tax cut. But now that they think they can
actually get it, they are saying they
will
give the money to their stockholders instead.
Letting businesses abuse workers and the public treasury in your
country can sometimes convince businesses to move jobs there from
other coutries. If only one country do this, it gets an economic
boost (though probably little trickles down to the now increasingly
mistreated workers).
But when countries in general join this competition, it becomes a
policy of
"beggar
thy neighbor" which ultimately benefits businesses at the expense
of all countries.
Bill McKibben: the troll has reduced our slim chances of avoiding
global heating disaster, but they are not zero. We
must
not give up.
In addition, our efforts now might reduce somewhat the scope of the
disaster even if it is too late to avoid it. Maybe half a billion
humans could survive this century instead of a hundred million. Maybe
we could keep technological civilization going.
American plutocrats hope to survive that
disaster
in New Zealand. They think they can condemn the world to disaster
and protect their own families from the consequences.
If they knew today that they could not succeed at this, because the
dying masses would drag them back to share in those consequences, they
might change their plans and prevent the disaster.
Angela Sutton: "I am
the
woman you don't see when you walk down the street sipping your
Starbucks coffee."
Torture seen as a
system
for producing fake news.
The troll's new immigration restrictions will be a
big
boost to jihadis and Muslim terrorists around the world.
One effect of the screwy US medical insurance system is that you
can't
find out what anything will cost.
Temporarily unemployed people in the UK are more likely to be obese,
because they are rejected by many employers. However, long-term
unemployed people are more likely to be very thin, because they
don't
have enough access to food.
Americals of all political camps love the national parks. Maybe
the
troll's attack on them, and threat to eliminate them, will teach some
Americans a lesson about him.
If the UK wants a trade deal with the US, it will have to accept the
possibly dangerous products of
US
farm practices.
Citizens of Massachusetts: support the
ACLU's Freedom Agenda.
Here's the
description of it.
US citizens:
thank two senators for blocking a senate resolution
to condemn the UN for defending Palestinians' rights.
Robots in the near term will
wipe
out many of the better-paid jobs that still exist, leaving only
low-paid service jobs to repay the student loans of many graduates.
Most of the ruling class have no plan to avoid mass descent into poverty.
Now that the US has withdrawn from the TPP, what about other business-supremacy treaties?
Americans are unrealistically optimistic about their chances of getting rich. That makes them sitting ducks for right-wingers that promise them lower taxes, supposing they do someday get rich.
Most Israeli reporters repeat the lies thugs tell about Palestinians they kill.
Israeli extremists have organized a campaign to harass Arabs that drive buses.
The Women's March a week ago was a powerful act of defiance, but in order for it to lead to victory people must form and join organizations.
5000 Israeli Jews and Arabs protested Israel's demolitions of Palestinians' homes.
US left-oriented movements should unite, as the troll and his hate group attack all the areas of resistance together.
Democrats' tepid resistance to the troll's nominees reflects a mistaken strategy that will fail to inspire Americans for the struggle to come.
Mikhail Gorbachev: Appears 'The World Is Preparing for War'.
Here are some suggested rules for evaluating news stories that refer to anonymous sources like an intelligence analyst.
The Kuwaiti ambassador claims he was not pressured to move the event to the troll's hotel, but I am not sure I believe him. He argues that it is ridiculous to think that Kuwait would need to influence the US government by its choice of where to hold a reception—and that's a valid point, except that it's not a matter of influencing the US government, it's a matter of the troll's personal desire for money, which seems to be more important to him that any sense of US interest.
Another element, for me, is that I think the troll would not try very hard to conceal such things, so it is plausible to me that quite a few people could have leaked the information.
Black teenager Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 because Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, said he had grabbed her and insulted her. Much later she admitted that she had lied.
The cheater put a coal lobbyist in charge of prosecution of some environmental crimes.
The troll's executive order blocking entry to everyone from 7 Muslim countries was done in a gratuitously cruel way.
It is basically irrelevant to protection from terrorism, but will be very effective at provoking some, playing into the hands of jihadis.
The ban has stranded Iraqi refugees already granted visas, who are in danger at home because they worked for the US there.
Permanent residents who came from those countries don't dare leave the US as they might not be allowed back in.
Protesters at Kennedy Airport have brought about release into the US of one of the blocked Iraqis.
The UK has rewarded Erdogan's tyranny with a big sale of fighter planes.
Several leaders of Labour, and I think not the Blairite sellout wing, refuse to vote for leaving the UK.
Arkansas has passed a law banning the usual method of abortions in the second trimester.
Abortions in the second trimester are done only based on specific justifications, usually medical.
Sonny Purdue as Secretary of Agriculture would support "farmers" that are big corporations, and endanger the health of humans.
A nun rebukes the hypocrisy of theocratic anti-abortionists.
Public opinion is slowly turning against Big Agriculture's practices of mistreatment of animals.
The ag-gag censorship bills have been unable to stop it.
Ending these practices is important for humans' health in two ways. One is that if meat costs more we will eat less of it and live longer. The other is that keeping the animals alive in such harmful conditions requires lots of antibiotics, and using the antibiotics on them breeds resistant bacteria that already kill people.
US citizens:
call
on Senate democrats to resist the troll's saboteur cabinet.
US citizens:
call
on the troll to cancel the Dakota Access Pipeline and respect the
right to protest.
US citizens:
call
on TV networks not to show the troll's press-manipulation rallies
live.
Here's
more
information.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to oppose
the troll's saboteur cabinet as hard as they can.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to reject H.R. 490, the bill to ban nearly all abortions.
US border thugs have
demanded
that US citizens turn over their social media names, and passwords for
their phones.
This is illegal and unconstitutional, but hey, would thugs care?
I am disappointed that the article uses the terms
"content"
and
"cloud".
California is planning to thwart the troll by
collecting
and storing less data about people.
Finally, politicians are tackling dangerous surveillance in the only
way that is really effective.
70%
of users (from a set of volunteers) could be reidentified in
"anonymized" browsing data by correlating it with their tweets.
Some Israeli officials admitted torturing Palestinian prisoners, and
we have some
details
about the practices they use.
The head Khmer Rouge torturer admitted in court that torture was
ineffective
at getting information from suspects. That was inevitable, since
most of them had no real information to give — just like most of
the prisoners in Guantanamo.
Scientists
are planning a protest in Washington against ignorantism.
The troll said he
supports
Paul Ryan's plan to destroy Social Security and Medicare.
A high school student threw a paper airplane at a teacher's head and
was arrested by the school thug. He
faces
30 days in jail.
It is dangerous to have thugs in a school.
Repealing Obama's medical insurance system would hit people from one
side while
global
heating effects hit them from the other side.
Workers File More Than Thirty
Wage
Theft, Harassment, Intimidation Complaints Against Brands Owned by
[the troll's] Embattled Labor Secretary Nominee.
Kathy Kelly was
convicted
of protesting the murder of Jamar Clark. The man's name was
hardly mentioned in the trial.
The troll inspires other deranged people to attack Muslims in the US.
Ayyadurai, the self-styled "inventor of email", sent a threatening
letter
demanding deletion of posts from Diaspora.
The letter also attempts to bully the recipient and journalists not to
publish the letter — though publishing it would surely be fair use.
The troll's statement in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day
peculiarly
avoided mentioning Jews or antisemitism.
Zuckerberg cancelled the lawsuits that were intended to force hundreds
of
Hawaiians to sell land to him.
A special tax loophole
applies to some appointed federal officials.
I can see the reason for having an exception like this. Since they
are
required by law to sell their assets, that could impose a big tax
liability
on them, which would be somewhat unfair. But perhaps the duration of
the tax deferral should be limited to a year after they leave the
appointed
office.
The cheater, his appointees and other Republicans are
preparing
a massive attack on Americans' voting rights.
The Republicans' attacks on abortion rights are
just
beginning.
They do not seek to reduce the number of abortions; they use abortion
as an excuse to harm and repress women.
Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab is on trial for
writing
that journalists and international NGOs are banned from Bahrain.
He could be imprisoned for 17 years for a true statement.
UK: "Theresa May's visit to Turkey
betrays
our liberal values."
Opposition to coal is
organizing
in South Africa.
The troll is undermining the Justice Department by
meeting
directly with companies that want to merge.
The Obama administration was too weak in stopping mergers. If the
troll strengthens the barriers to mergers, I will applaud that. But I
think he is more likely to do the exact opposite.
The troll's saboteur nominee for Secretary of the Interior
wants
to roast Earth's ecosphere with coal.
Another
pipeline
leak reminds us that all oil pipelines leak sooner or later.
They leak more often than necessary because the companies
skimp
on testing for flaws.
CETA, the Canadian version of TTIP (This Treaty Is Plutocratic), is
not
necessarily dead yet. It may yet undermine democracy in the
European Union.
Britons with a working-class background are
paid
7% less (on the average) than equally qualified workers in the
same job that have a privileged class background.
The troll
threatens
to cut off federal aid to cities that offer sanctuary to
unauthorized immigrants.
This would exceed his constitutional authority, and
cities
plan to resist.
Trading with other countries does not require "free trade" treaties.
Instead of "free trade", every country needs
trade
it can regulate so that business don't gain
supremacy over
democracy.
One thing we should put into international treaties is more
tax-enforcement
cooperation.
Unusual high temperatures are fueling
unusual
large wildfires in Chile.
Whatever may be the immediate cause of the fires, it is clear that
their underlying cause is global heating. That is not a matter of
negligence;
Exxon's
funded
and knowingly dishonest denialism is a form of sabotage.
Citizens of Minnesota:
oppose
the proposed state law to bankrupt protesters.
Everyone else, please tell people you know in Minnesota.
US citizens: phone senators to
oppose
confirmation of Tom Price.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
The troll's plan to resume torturing prisoners in secret prisons is
facing
opposition in Congress.
His official press manipulator claims that the draft executive order
didn't come from the White House, and
suggests
that the loser has nothing to do with it. However, the troll has
spoken in favor of these actions.
Why bother looking for ways to reconcile these claims. The statement
comes from someone of no credibility. The simplest explanation is
that it's another "alternate fact" (i.e., lie).
The scenarios where torture is purportedly necessary are so
strained
and unrealistic that they will probably never occur in real life.
Chelsea Manning was punished for revealing US war crimes. Obama and
his men
never
took action about them.
The troll plans to stop issuing visas to citizens of
seven
Muslim countries where the US has made hostile interventions. But
not Salafi Arabia, which is the root of Islamism world-wide.
I've proposed that requiring immigrants and non-tourist visitors to
publish a video statement in favor of human rights. They could make
the statement, reading a provided standard text in their own language,
to the immigration officials, who would publish it on a web site.
By making this statement they will publicly declare their rejection of
Islamism.
Since the troll persists in claiming that torture "works" to get
information, here's an
explanation
of why torture does not "work".
A specific example of its failure: when US agents tortured Ibn
as-Sheikh al-Libi, he
said
what he knew Dubya wanted to hear. This helped Dubya start a war
of aggression whose harmful consequences continue to ramify in Iraq,
Syria, and elsewhere.
But even if torture did "work" in a narrow sense, it would be a
vicious crime, and the harm it does would spread.
Practicing torture implants an inhumane attitude, which then manifests
itself in a range of inhumanity: general cruelty to all prisoners,
imprisonment without trial, collateral murder, and other atrocities.
These atrocities cause great suffering directly. They also provoke
hatred. How many jihadis have been provoked by Guantanamo and US
torture? Surely thousands.
The cheater said his businesses would make "no new deals", as an
inadequate substitute for selling them off; but
that
was a lie.
Betsy DeVos is
connected
with companies that collect student debts.
The troll has
declared
war on our environment and our health.
The Netherlands is
organizing
an international fund for abortion aid to compensate for the harm
done by the US global gag rule.
A medical charity doesn't need to give referrals about abortion if
there is a separate organization next door that provides abortion
information.
Judging the troll's firehose of lies against
1984.
Let's not forget that each one of the troll's lies is an implicit
threat to punish those who won't publicly support the lie.
Republicans in Minnesota
want
to impose huge liability on protesters convicted of even minor
"crimes."
Since those "crimes" mean basically whatever a thug says, civil
disobedience (and maybe all mass protest) would be crushed.
This reminds me of the
Israeli
repression method of imposing unlimited liability on anyone who
advocates any sort of political boycott against Israeli colonization
of Palestinian territory.
The loser
wants
to launch a massive investigation of the millions of imaginary
"illegal voters" that he claims gave Clinton a majority of votes.
False accusations standard Republican practice —
they
destroyed ACORN this way, and used them against
climate
scientists and
Planned
Parenthood.
I think the loser's plan is to create a lot of smoke so he can claim
it proves there was a fire. It will also be useful for deflecting
attention from
the
real election-rigging that the Republicans did last year.
Advances in production efficiency do not lead to decrease of demand for material resources.
Eventually, scarcity of the resources will raise the price for them, and that may lead to use of less resources. The problem is that if pollution and other harmful side effects are not charged to whoever extracts the resources, they will "cure" the scarcity by extracting more and more.
This is where we need a democratic state to impose taxes high enough to discourage use of the resources.
UK prosecutors are reluctant to prosecute domestic violence. Even after a man blinded Akorede Odutayo in one eye, they didn't charge him.
Several parameters that measure society's well-being.
Rumors say the troll might pull the US out of the UN.
The UN might actually become more capable of useful action without the US dragging it in the wrong direction. But it will have less influence and funds.
When Bannon told the press to "keep its mouth shut", he revealed the intention to abolish journalism, leaving the media with nothing to do but respew the sewage the troll pumps through the White Hose.
UK schools teach gender stereotypes such as "girls can't do physics" and "boys can't become writers". Children learn these stereotypes by age 6.
Right-wing governments around the world will try to match the cheater's tax cuts for the rich.
It is vital to give all children serious sex and relationship education.
The risk of getting sexually involved over the internet is one of the smaller of the problems these classes can prevent. Children and teenagers don't generally meet up with adults over the net unless their families have already caused them some damage. It's good to help those children, but it would be better to help them avoid that damage.
The biggest dangers these classes can help avoid are that of catching pregnancy or disease through consensual sex, and that of getting stuck in a violent relationship.
The troll is promising US unions to create lots of jobs.
He might actually be sincere about this, but it seems unlikely to succeed, especially if AI eliminates a large fraction of today's good jobs.
Meanwhile, state-level Republicans are doing quite a lot to undermine unions. If he is serious about cooperating with unions, he had better get make those Republicans stop that.
Eliminating the business supremacy treaties will be good for workers, simply because making it hard to move production between countries will help workers in each country organize and demand better pay, more rights, and higher minimum wage.
Australia's planet roasters plan to spend 60 billion building advanced coal plants to reduce emissions, but they could achieve the same reduction with renewable energy for half the cost.
It's clear that their highest priority goal is to burn as much coal as possible.
The troll pressured the National Park Service director for photos that would "prove" the falsehood that he attracted more people to the inauguration than Obama did.
This suggests that the troll is worse than a liar—he is going crazy.
Denver kicked out the inhabitants of a large camp of homeless people. Previously, the thugs stole homeless people's blankets.
The UK's NHS plans to limit hip and knee replacements to those patients whose need is greatest—purely to save money.
The Tories simply cannot give the NHS enough funds because catering to rich tax-dodgers is so expensive ;-{.
British children should go outdoors and play the game "Chicken, Catch a Tory", to learn what you do with a Tory when you catch one.
The Tohono O’odham tribe, whose reservation crosses the US-Mexico border, intends to block construction of the troll's wall on its land.
An Australian company decided to ignore natural gas leaks for years, and pay fines, rather than fix them.
It's obvious what to do here:
The question is, why doesn't the government do this obvious thing? Because it's been corrupted by these companies, I suppose.
The Greek Supreme Court refused Erdogan's request to extradite eight Turkish soldiers that sought asylum in Greece.
They were sent to rescue troops that participated in the coup, but they themselves were not part of the coup. For Erdogan, however, association implies guilt.
The Economic Intelligence Unit, which rates democracy of countries in general, has downgraded its rating of the US to "flawed democracy".
This is based on recognition of the flaws that existed before the last election, such as the fact that the people no longer get to decide anything much.
The troll proposes to impose a 20% tariff on imports from Mexico.
If Mexico retaliates with a tariff on US grain, Mexican peasants might be able to prosper in Mexico. A side benefit for the US would be a big drop in immigration of Mexicans.
The US grain that won't be shipped to Mexico is grown by corporations, not by family farms. (The Republicans, under Reagan, destroyed nearly all of those.) So to hell with them.
By the troll's executive order, all asylum seekers crossing the US southern border will be imprisoned.
Conditions in America's privatized immigration prisons are already cruel and dangerous, especially for children.
With many more people put in them, they will be overloaded and even more dangerous.
Executive Orders Are Normal; [the troll's] Are Only Appalling Because of What They Say.
Some of them don't actually say much in substantive terms.
Marc Short: Koch Dark-Money Operative Is Trump's Liaison to Congress.
Journalists in Germany face jail for reporting on leaked information.
SCROTUS now want to eliminate the inheritance tax, boosting the growth of inherited capital.
As Piketty pointed out, this tendency is already devastating democracy. Naturally, the plutocrats' lackeys want to make it worse.
France used torture against the independence movement in Algeria, and paid a great price for it in the long term.
The troll has imposed censorship on scientists at the EPA and some other agencies: they are forbidden to speak to the public about the results of their research without getting political approval.
Scientists met to discuss how to cope with this censorship.
The troll's wife worked illegally while in the US on a tourist visa. If you want to crack down on immigrants that break laws, why not start with her?
She will be just fine back in Slovenia—it's a safe, democratic country with a decent standard of living.
The ACLU asked the Senate to hold another hearing on Sessions before voting about his nomination.
The CIA altered the movie adaptations of Animal Farm and 1984.
It also funded exhibits of abstract expressionist art so as to decrease the popularity of socialist realism.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject Sonny Perdue as head of the USDA.
Everyone:
call on Betagro
to put an end to slavery in its farms.
Naomi Klein: the troll and Republicans are planning to provoke disasters
and
use
them as opportunities for knocking people down.
Charter schools can be cheaper to run than public schools, but
the
way they do so shows why they are not a solution for society.
This chain skims the cream by not dealing with the students that need
special help. That apparently includes the increasing fraction of
students whose families are food-insecure, because these charter
schools have no cafeteria to give them meals with. With no sports,
they appear to lead students to be obese couch potatoes. The absence
of an auditorium rules out many kinds of programs.
Hell, it's easy to cut costs by doing only part of the job.
The cheater
continues
to repeat the lie that millions of illegal voters gave Clinton a
higher popular vote total than he got.
This lie is a sharp knife in the belly of US democracy. It is meant
to provide an excuse for more voter suppression, to be cited by
Republican state officials for whom truth means nothing and democracy
is to be destroyed.
Portable phones with
iris
scanners? Make sure to taoe them over!
14
Democrats voted for pro-torture Pompeo as CIA director.
Contraceptive
programs in Africa are threatened by the reinstated US global gag
rule.
"Inoculating" people about
fact-denial
campaigns can be effective at blunting their effects.
We the people saved the US from the TPP, and we will now have to save
the US from the troll's
unjust
policies.
"What if we gave
universal
income to people in biodiversity hotpots?"
Since we need to keep population growth down, perhaps the universal
income should be limited to those who have no children or use reliable
birth control (which we should provide at no charge).
US journalists should unite to
defend
each other from the troll.
Comparing the loser with the worst Roman emperors.
The American hegemony is often compared with Rome's conquest of the
Mediterranean world. History does not repeat itself, but the gradual
decay of the Roman Republic which led to its becoming a tyranny shows
it can in principle happen here too.
The Keystone Pipeline [would] Create
Just 35 Permanent Jobs.
"We cannot pollute our way to prosperity."
Germany has arrested suspected right-wing terrorist plotters.
Mnuchin told the Senate committee that his bank had not done
fraudulent
robo-signing,
but in fact it did.
The UK is
using the National Health Service to find illegal
immigrants.
The result of this is that illegal immigrants — and others who are
afraid for vague reasons — will forego treatment and die.
The troll plans to
control his Senate-approved cabinet secretaries
by means of unofficial Trumpery Party commisars.
The
IRS has demanded Coinbase surrender records of millions of
peoples' transactions en masse.
Wyoming Republicans
want to ban utilities from using renewable energy.
Israel killed Ahmad Hassan Shubeir by blocking him from leaving Gaza
for treatment for a heart problem.
He was offered permission to travel if only he became an informer.
An Israeli Jew criticized Israel's expulsion of Arabs from the Jordan
valley
and was accused of "antisemitism".
The
latest expulsion technique: seizing Palestinians' tractors.
The cheater
may provoke war with China as a distraction technique.
Everyone:
call on Citibank to stop funding the Dakota Access Pipeline.
US citizens:
tell Spicer to quit lying.
US citizens:
call for restricting use of "stingray" devices that
track all cell phones in a given area.
US media are
starting to call the cheater's lies "lies".
Juvenile prisoners in Wisconsin get
permanently messed up by solitary
confinement.
Even adults have trouble standing up to that.
The troll's infrastructure plan would construct toll roads chosen
based on how much profit the private owners hope to get from tolls.
Senate Democrats have proposed an alternate infrastructure plan
which doesn't give businesses a big handout.
Proposals for a transition to the post-scarcity society in which work
is not needed.
One problem not touched on is that resources humans need — such as
food, and potable water — are likely to be scarce later this century.
SCROTUS are
planning to prohibit Obamacare insurance from covering
abortions.
This could cause many medical plans to eliminate abortion coverage.
Governments pledged over 15 billion dollars for education of Syrian
refugee children,
then paid only 1/3 of that.
Global Public Sector Corruption Fuels Rise of Populist Politicians,
report
says.
George Monbiot's
proposals to make a democratic system that makes
thoughtful decisions.
Scientists of the US National Parks Service have set up an unofficial
Twitter account
to refute the troll's lies.
In England, women who were unable to care for their children are
offered
help for a fresh start, with the requirement that they use
contraception.
Not having more children turns out to enable many of them to learn
to make
a success of their lives.
I think that people who predictably won't be able to take care of
children have a responsibility to society not to make more of them.
Having children who will be condemned to a life of stress and want is
very bad.
The troll is considering
three potential saboteurs to put on the
Supreme Court.
Each of them could be worse than Scalia.
Don't be taken in by the myth of the suppressed cancer cure.
These so-called "cures" are quackery.
What is true is that the big pharma companies spend a lot
more on sleazy marketing (including "gifts" for doctors) than on
research, and that they direct the research more at chronic conditions
of the wealthy part of the world than at curing diseases common
mainly among poor people.
Washington DC thugs encircled a large group of protesters, then
attacked them indiscriminately with teargas, grenades and sticks, then
arrested them all and charged them with the felony of "rioting".
I saw reports that some people were breaking windows that night.
But that can't justify indiscriminately charging everyone who was
in the vicinity. Nor, perhaps, such serious charges even against
those
who broke windows.
The
targets of repression include six journalists.
"For people sick of high deductibles,
Republicans offer
high-deductible
[medical] plans as replacements for [Obama's medical insurance
program]."
Mattel is making a device to
monitor children all the time
and report on what they say and what they do.
The troll's choice for the civil rights office at the Justice
Department
is a saboteur. He has worked in favor Republican gerrymandering
and voter suppression.
This is part of the "grab power by hook or by crook" attitude
of US Republicans.
Data brokers sell
all sorts of information about nearly everyone.
Never post any information about anyone else to an internet site
without first consulting that other person. This includes Facebook
(though in principle you
shouldn't let Facebook use you at all).
However, there's a lot of information they get from companies and
services
that you use in a non-anonymous way. Most of those companies and
services
should be required to allow anonymous use.
The few that we need to use, and that need to know who we are, should
not be allowed to give any piece of personal information to anyone.
Not even "anonymized". And that should include government agencies,
except when there is a subpoena for specific people's data.
The troll is adopting
propaganda
practices of North Korea.
Until we get the troll out of office, every day calls for patriotic
devotion. This political note is just one of my acts of patriotic
devotion for today.
The cheater resigned as director of some golf companies but is
still
the owner of them.
This is not enough to make them cease to be a conflict of interest and
a violation of the constitution. It's a mere sham.
Washington DC thugs
arrested
two TV journalists and charged them with "rioting".
The journalists were covering the riot, not rioting, but thugs don't
care about such distinctions.
The US is safe from the TPP, but
other
governments still relish the possibility of subjugating their
countries to foreign companies.
The Treacherous Plutocratic Poison
would
put dooH niboR in charge of any countries that sign it.
The
Center for Disease Control cancelled a summit on global heating
and public health, which was scheduled for February.
The troll has
frozen EPA grants and contracts.
Although the troll opposes the TPP, that doesn't mean he won't
establish harmful trade treaties. Certain
transparency principles in
the negotiation would help avoid that.
When the cheater visited the CIA, he brought along an audience
supporters, apparently not connected with the CIA, to cheer for him
and
give a false impression of support.
The troll's nominee to head the FCC is a Verizon lawyer.
Everything he does will help ISPs against the public.
Tillerson's record of pushing damaging fossil fuels.
Sad to say, he was confirmed by the Senate to head the State
Department.
A bad surveillance bill in Connecticut has a bad purpose:
repression of customers of prostitutes.
This bill would not help those women who consider practicing
prostitution, and would violate the rights of everyone who uses a
hotel in Connecticut.
The troll intends to
revive the blocked Keystone XL and Dakota Access
pipelines.
The article does not make it clear what effect today's executive
orders actually have.
The troll claims to be an "environmentalist".
Self-contradiction is
all in a day's work.
Now if only he would claim to eliminate abortions by opening 1000 new
abortion clinics.
A new tech product
offers parents the chance to impose total
monitoring and
regimentation on their children.
Some progress towards a cease-fire in Syria.
Putin seems to be serious about pushing for a settlement, and has a
chance to achieve it.
The troll may will prevent the neocons from interfering. That would
be good
for Syria.
Protesters are setting up camps to stop the Sabal pipeline in Florida.
They focus on the danger of polluting the area's rivers and lakes, but
that's the least of the worries. If we burn the gas that will be
shipped through that pipeline, those rivers and lakes won't exist,
because the land will become part of the Atlantic Ocean.
Teaching girls they are inferior
starts very young.
A prisoner in Texas was on the verge of dying of malnutrition,
before someone attacked and killed him.
Israel is
massively accelerating colonization of Palestinian
territory.
I have for years supported boycott of products of these colonies, but
these developments are making me consider taking a stronger position.
In states where judges are elected directly,
billionaires can stack
the courts.
This avenue for corruption has
existed for a long time.
It doesn't take billions to sway a judgeship election.
Facebook buys personal data from various data brokers, and correlates
that with what it figures out directly about its useds.
Facebook advises useds that they can tell the data brokers to stop
collecting data about them, but it doesn't ensure that this really
works. After all, no one will punish Facebook for false claims of
that
sort.
US citizens: call on members of Congress to
sign the Lieu-Conyers
letter, which Obama to stop refueling Salafi Arabian planes involved
in the bombardment of Yemen.
US citizens:
Call
on state legislators to oppose a constitutional convention.
US citizens:
call on Congress
to impeach the loser now.
US workers held a strike on Friday to condemn the cheater, who wants to "bring back jobs" but doesn't want the employees to get good working conditions or fair treatment.
Giving homeless people in Australia a chance to speak, while they face the threat of a crackdown.
One way or another, Republican plans to "reform" Medicare and Social Security will screw Americans that aren't rich.
The troll has officially pulled the US out of the Treacherous Plutocratic Poison.
Well, I can't say that the troll never did anything that was good. But our resistance made it possible.
Transcripts describe the torture of Xie Yang, Chinese human rights lawyer.
Jeffrey Beall used to maintain a blog that identified bogus "scientific journals", but he has erased it all, apparently facing legal threats from those predators.
A court decision in Australia narrowed the definition of "personal information" to the point where privacy laws are nearly ineffective.
True protection of privacy requires limiting the accumulation of data about people, not merely limiting how it is used once accumulated.
Tom Price helped a drug company by pressuring the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to downplay a study that reported problems with the company's product.
Clearly the wrong sort of person to be allowed any say in US health care. In other words, just the sort of swamp creature that the troll would put in charge of it.
Families arriving at the US border without a visa are put immediately in immigration prison, where children get shoddy medical care that can kill them.
Obama didn't help non-rich Americans wield political power, but he made them feel (mistakenly) that they were psychologically "empowered".
Alexey Kovalev gives advice to the press about how to cover the cheater, based on experience covering Putin.
One thing we should not do is ponder in kremlinological fashion every hint about what the cheater is thinking, as in this article.
That's a recipe for getting distracted by every little gesture.
Zuckerberg is suing hundreds of people in Hawaii to force them to sell him their land that's in the middle of his large estate.
At the current rate of deforestation, rainforests will all be gone in a century.
They are also in danger of drying out and burning up.
A state in Australia proposes laws to require nightclubs to track and record everyone who enters.
That is an injustice.
If the system checked only for certain known individuals, and did not record anyone else, it would be acceptable.
The end of China's one-child policy raised the birth rate by 8%.
These results show that the one-child policy was making a significant contribution to reducing population growth. Eliminating it was a mistake.
The low birth rate will cause short term inconvenience, but not a disaster. China's population is still increasing, and that is likely to lead to disaster.
This article proposes ways to convince the troll to support activities to help people cope with the short-term effects of global heating.
There's just one giant flaw in this proposal: working on "resilience" is treating the symptoms only. Since the disease of inducing global heating is likely to be fatal to most species and most humans on Earth, what really matters is arresting the progress of the disease, not treating the symptoms.
In the US, it has become customary to condemn parents for any freak accident that happens to their children.
The troll and his trumpettes call their factual lies "alternate facts".
How many people attended the inauguration is of no substantive political importance, but the loser's mystique is based on the claim that he always wins, so he is compelled to deny the inconvenient facts whenever he loses any sort of contest.
Romanians protested a plan to free many prisoners to reduce prison overcrowding. They fear this would be used to free people convicted of corruption.
The Republican Party is the disloyal party, opposed to democracy as well as to the Democrats.
Haldeman's notes prove that Nixon sabotaged President Johnson's Vietnam peace negotiations so as to get himself elected. This was an act of treason.
John Dean gives more explanation of Haldeman's notes and why we can rely on them.
Reagan likewise sabotaged his country (working with Iran) to get himself elected. A few years later, he ransomed terrorists' hostages with arms for Iran, from which he also got money to spend illegally to launch an underground war against Nicaragua. That too was treason, I believe.
Since 2000, Republicans have instead cheated by rigging the elections. After gaining power by hook or by crook, they use it to swindle their country.
China has
prohibited
all unlicensed VPNs.
US farmers are suing to stop the use of
Monsanto's
latest pesticide, designed for certain GMO crops.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is
suing
to demand that the troll not receive payments from foreign
governments
Various commentators'
legal
analysis.
Some
points to set against the loser's militarism.
There is a correction for item 4: attacks against soldiers of an
occupying army are not terrorism. They are, rather, an armed
uprising. We need to distinguish armed uprising from terrorism, since
both do exist.
Another point worth mentioning is that the US army already is so big
that no other army would mess with it. However, no army can be so big
that it discourages guerrilla uprising, or terrorism.
UK immigration
ignored
information about repression in Eritrea in order to reject teenage
refugees.
Disturbed
Man Gets Past White House Security, Gives Press Conference.
Lawyers' leaders, world wide,
rebuke
China for arresting and torturing human rights lawyers.
3.5
million people participated in the Women's Marches Saturday, and
established contacts they can use in future resistance to the
kleptocratic party.
The troll has reintroduced the Reagan gag rule that
prohibits
US-funded organizations from referring women to abortion
providers.
In the past, this rule
impacted
birth control provision and health care for women and for
children. It is also likely to kill thousands of women by leaving
them with no safe abortion option.
It will surely encourage population growth and thus increase future
poverty.
English Usage is
changing
so fast that it has become a pitfall for most people — at
least on Twitter.
Since I don't use Twitter or SMS, I have never seen most of the terms
discussed in the article. Indeed, I don't even recognize, the words
that the article describes as "passé". They had their 15
minutes of usage and I never noticed. I don't think I missed much.
I've always refused to adopt the latest fashionable slang words, just
as I've refused to adopt the latest fashionable clothing styles. I
didn't adopt them when I was young, and I see no reason to start. Why
be dragged around by fads?
I still use the word "staff", because "team" means something different
to me. The FSF hires staff, and some of the staff belong to various
teams.
The FBI is now
campaigning
in favor of "forfeiture", i.e. punishment without trial.
Although the US is terribly weak on curbing greenhouse emissions,
California is pushing harder.
Carmen Ortiz,
the prosecutor that hounded Aaron Swartz to death, has
retired.
She stretched the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to an extreme
interpretation that attacks the rights of everyone in the US. It's
too bad she is already gone, because it would have been great have a
rally
to tell her "Good riddance!"
US citizens: call on Congress to
kill the F35 fighter.
US citizens:
call on Congress to defend the programs to protect women
from domestic violence.
Israel set a new record in 2016 for demolishing Palestinians' homes in areas it has annexed to Jerusalem.
Aggressive questioning of suspects, even if it doesn't reach the level of torture, often elicits false confessions.
So if you think someone knows where a ticking time bomb is, and you want to find it, the last thing you'd want to try is torture.
The US intentionally bombed a hospital in Mosul, saying that PISSI soldiers were firing from it. But the US did not say whether it followed the requirements of international law by warning civilians to flee the area.
Japan's inequality is growing—millions of children there don't get properly fed.
When I was a child, my relatives told me to eat because children in Japan were hungry. In the 1950s, perhaps that was still true. How sad that it is true once again. Japan has plenty of food; what it lacks is a progressive government that aims to reduce inequality.
Americans that oppose the troll must aim for more than just to stop him from making things worse.
Amazon and Google are competing for the chance to listen to people's homes.
Be wise—choose "none of the above".
Republicans in several states are passing laws to ban abortions after 20 weeks. This would force some women to carry gravely damaged fetuses to term.
The legislators cite junk science as an excuse.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe will be imprisoned for five years for working with the BBC. According to Iran, the BBC is some sort of plot to overthrow the government. Her trial was a sham.
Any Islamist government is the enemy of human rights, so overthrowing it would generally be an advance for humanity.
Interviews with participants in Saturday's Women's Protest, around the world.
The infant lies even about what we can all see: the size of the crowd at the inauguration.
The infant's press secretary repeated the lies. It is an outright declaration of war against the idea of truth.
I reject the use of the term "Groucho Marxist" to describe this. Groucho's comedy wasn't a lie, it was humorous fiction. His good name should not be tarred by association with the troll.
The proper term for overt political contempt for truth is Orwell's term, "blackwhiting".
Israel, profiting from the troll's backing, just announced plans for a large colonization project in Palestinian territory annexed and called part of Jerusalem.
Varoufakis: as nationalist trumpery disputes power with the neoliberal globalizers, only an international progressive movement can represent the people.
State-supported business globalization means that ships operating in British waters can hire Indian sailors for a pittance, and then refuse to pay them the pittance.
This is no unwanted side effect. Knocking down pay for workers is the purpose of business globalization, and governments that support it compete to undercut living standards around the world.
In response to the massacre last June, American gays are organizing to campaign for gun control.
Jewish institutions in the US are receiving lots of bomb threats.
American antisemites got a big boost from the troll's campaign.
Criticism of Israel's policy now leads people to false history such as denial of the holocaust.
It's a non sequitur, but that doesn't stop people from following it.
Israel won't end the occupation/siege of Palestine for simple justice, will it do so to avert future antisemitism?
This is comparable to the US and Guantanamo. Imprisonment without trial, whether in Guantanamo or Israel, is not only a great wrong, it also provokes hostility. In the case of the US, Guantanamo recruits supporters for jihadi terrorist movements around the world.
The White House web site now promotes Melania Trump's branded products.
That's the troll's totally shameless approach to conflict of interest.
In China, basically anyone can get full tracking data about anyone for under 15 dollars.
The loser is attacking science massively.
Right-wing disinformation includes a phony site which pretends to recruit paid phony protesters against the troll.
It is standard practice for the right wing to falsely accuse their opponents of what they themselves do. The troll's "press conference" had paid supporters.
The Tea Party used fake "grass roots" support.
A
supporter of the troll wrote an essay that clearly presents his
thinking, which he says his community mostly shares.
The people know the facts of their experience, but they have been sold
misguided explanations for them. For instance, they blame welfare,
rather than war, for high taxes, and they don't realize that they pay
so much because businesses and rich people don't pay their share.
Everyone: call on NBC
not to hide white nationalism behind the
innocent-sounding term "alt-right".
US citizens:
call on the Office of Government Ethics to release all
documents
about Trump's conflicts of interest.
North Dakota Republicans propose to legalize hitting protesters with cars. Ostensibly it is only for unintentional collisions, but it is easy for the driver to claim falsely that it was unintentional. Also, it would encourage drivers to be intentionally careless, and intentionally risk hitting someone.
To resist the loser's way of thinking, we should not resist his approach to language.
Half a million people protested in Washington DC today.
The Tories' threat against the EU is to make itself a puppet state of the rich and trash the lives of nonrich Britons.
The Tories are lower than vermin—Aneurin Bevan.
The troll used the inauguration as another bullying campaign rally and a way to reward the investors in his presidency. His speech misrepresented the situation, as usual.
The press must not be distracted by his bullshitting and manipulation—it must focus on the issues raised by what he does.
Five Takeaways From Scott Pruitt's Nomination Hearing That Should Worry Scientists.
Melbourne, Australia, is threatening to attack homeless people for sleeping or begging on the streets.
Where are they supposed to go? A grave?
Arguing that Facebook can't deal with the fake news problem without taking political stands.
However, what political stands would Facebook take? It is not an upstanding organization. It is a business that aims to make more and more money.
My conclusion is that we can't tolerate a business as influential as Facebook.
The loser is encouraging nationalisms that are sure to lead to conflicts.
US hegemony kept many of these conflicts down, but it has been getting increasingly ineffective ever since Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
"The American left will be reborn under President Trump."
On the meaning of citizenship and democracy.
Immigrants are not a burden on the national treasury, because they contribute to it. There are, however, two resources that they strain: housing space and farmland.
The footprint on housing and farmland of one immigrant is no different from the burden of one native-born inhabitant. To limit those footprints is a matter of curbing the future population, not immigration as such.
Canadians intending to march in Washington today were blocked from entering the US, as immigration agents stretched the truth to generate an excuse.
French and British people coming with them were permanently barred from the US.
Agents also searched their car and phones for hours—obviously for no reason but to harass them. The agents glory in the power to harass with impunity. They are a disgrace to their country.
Don't forget the unprovoked beating of Canadian writer Peter Watts when he tried to visit the US.
The loser's first act, as president, was to raise taxes on homebuyers.
UK universities are imposing surveillance and strict censorship on student and faculty email systems.
They require users to agree to this as a condition of using those systems. It is very important for people to respond by refusing ever to connect to them, even once.
Two Britons may be imprisoned for swallowing a goldfish.
What next—prison for boiling a lobster?
Washington DC thugs attacked peaceful protesters with tear gas on Thursday evening.
Extreme weather has killed most of Spain's vegetable crop, so there will be a shortage of fresh vegetables in Europe for a few months.
Global heating makes extreme weather more common. At least this shortage won't kill anyone, but now imagine an equal shortage of grain. That will happen frequently in a decade or two.
Thugs lie, lie, and lie. It's all to protect and serve…themselves.
Blue Lies Matter!
Mallinckrodt raised the price of a drug for infant epilepsy from $50 to $34,000.
The loser wanted to militarize the US in spirit with a Soviet-style parade of tanks and missiles in Washington DC.
The UK illegally rushed deportations of 10,000 asylum seekers, some of whom were sent back to be tortured.
Constant monitoring of employees, while on duty and even when off, adds up to STASI capitalism.
In the US:
join
a rally on Tuesday Jan 24 against the troll's swamp creature
cabinet.
A sit-in protest by "swamp creatures" against Government Sachs.
SCROTUS say they want to "replace" Obama's medical insurance plan, but their design goals lead inevitably to failure.
Over Half of World's Wild Primate Species Face Extinction, report reveals.
Protests against the Dakota Access pipeline are continuing, and so is violence by thugs against protesters.
Obama has never seriously tried to end imprisonment without trial, the central injustice of the Guantanamo prison.
He has freed 200 prisoners that were held without trial, but by accepting the idea that some 25 prisoners can't be tried or freed, he has endorsed that unjust practice.
The US has a moral obligation to try or release every single one of them, without exceptions.
The loser confused two EU "presidents".
Iraq has recaptured the eastern side of Mosul from PISSI, aside from a few pockets.
However, in Syria, PISSI forces surrounded the airport in besieged Deir ez-Zor, which will make air supply of the city difficult.
The EFF calls on Congress to limit the power of EULAs.
I take a stronger position: EULAs should be legally void.
2016 was the hottest year since at least 115,000 years ago.
We will have an even hotter year, next time there is an El Niño
event.
US citizens: call on Senator Booker to support legalizing import of pharmaceuticals from Canada.
DeVos wants schools to have guns for the sake of shooting "potential grizzlies" in the school.
When it comes to protection from bears, a fence is safer for the children (and for the bears) than a gun.
Many reasons why Betsy DeVos should not be head of the Department of Education.
The Paris peace conference is not a serious effort to bring about peace between Israel and Palestine.
A serious effort would require convincing the Israeli government to be serious about peace, and that requires some sort of pressure.
Israeli soldiers attacked a nonviolent protest in Bethlehem.
I think it is foolish to make a fuss about a corpse—but even when a protest concerns a foolish issue, that doesn't justify attacking the protesters.
The Israeli army is destroying 2000 olive trees belonging to Palestinians to make a new road to one of the illegal colonies on Palestinian territory.
The US abortion rate has dropped considerably, but Republicans will not be happy about this, because it is due to more use of contraception.
And Obama's medical insurance system helped pay for it.
Republicans don't actually care about babies, they just want to punish women for having sex.
Cities are investigating how to build flood resilience.
Coping with sea level rise is a short-term approach. For the long term, it's an hopeless— excuse for not confronting the problem.
Several techniques that the troll uses to manipulate opponents.
I suggest that the first step in resisting is to ignore his empty spectacle. Don't show footage of him, and let some analyst report once a month on what he said during that time. Pay attention to what he actually does.
Israeli thugs, suppressing protests at the demolition of Arab homes, saw a Palestinian teacher driving a car. They panicked and assumed he was going to attack them, so they shot him dead.
Pudzer's restaurant chains have a particularly high level of sexual harassment, perhaps inspired by his personal attitude towards women.
A community in Puerto Rico collectivized its land to resist gentrification.
General Kelly, nominated by the loser to head the Department of Homeland Security, omitted two more business relationships from his conflict of interest forms.
Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence. She is supposed to be released from prison on May 17.
I hope the troll won't find some excuse to undo this.
I don't agree with those who say Manning has "suffered enough," because I don't think she deserved to be punished at all. Her releases to the public were a service to justice.
Obamas's War on Whistleblowers launched the US in the direction of covering up wrongdoing rather than correcting it.
This will give the troll a head start on repression.
Companies have a chance to bribe each new president by sponsoring inauguration activities. This year is no different.
The Fight Inequality Alliance.
A Republican congresscritter offered to meet with his constituents, but when he discovered they were all very unhappy with his vote to eliminate Obama's medical insurance law, he snuck out the back.
Most Americans have fallen into economic hardship, shown clearly by a wide range of statistics.
Martin Luther King, Jr., puts clearly why the laws of today's Republican-dominated states are unjust. Search for "being denied the right to vote."
As long as the loser knows he owns certain hotels in foreign countries, that will prejudice his foreign policy decisions.
Exxon's frequent business with the State Department constitutes a big conflict of interest for Tillerson.
A Pakistani mother has been convicted of murdering her daughter. The daughter had married the man of her own choice.
This crime was horrible, and convicting someone for this crime is a big step forward for Pakistan. However, no one should be executed.
Beware the perversion known as philanthrocapitalism—the idea that civil society, charity and mutual help should be conceptualized and structured on business lines.
Russia is accused of running a disinformation and confusion campaign to keep Sweden from joining NATO.
The wealthy powers, together with the Gates Foundation, have prohibited informal sale and sharing of seeds. Only registered varieties may be sold now.
Farmers who continue traditional practices face 12 years in prison and a fine that no Tanzanian farmer can afford.
It is a shame that the article uses the term "intellectual property rights", since that spreads confusion.
It also uses the term "patented", but plant variety monopolies do not work like patents. The differences are bigger than the similarities.
Several Pakistani dissidents who criticize the power of the military were kidnaped recently.
One suspects the military did it.
The internet age witnesses the loss of effective democracy, and the internet is helping the process along.
Your Private Medical Data Is for Sale.
Clinics sell it in "anonymized" form, but data brokers combine that with prescription data to figure out who it pertains to.
I think drug stores should be forbidden to release any data about prescriptions they fill to anyone under any circumstances, except to patients about themselves, to state agencies, or under subpoena.
The richest 8 people, together, now own more than the poorest half of humanity.
The article is mistaken in excusing Mr Gates. He got his money through proprietary (unjust) software, and substantial parts of his "philanthropy" are harmful meddling.
The Gates Foundation also acts as a tax-deductible marketing arm for Microsoft. It buys Windows licenses from Microsoft at the official price (though they cost Microsoft zero), then "donates" them to schools where they teach students dependence on Windows.
On building local militance to challenge elite power.
Lavabit is
reopening,
with new systems to protect privacy from Big Brother.
The troll's cabinet of saboteurs represent the
plutocratic
establishment that he said he'd protect people from.
I pity the people who chose to trust a bullshitter.
Amnesty International: European countries are imposing
tyranny
and injustice in the name of "security".
The incorruptible judge in charge of Brazil's corruption investigation
died
in a plane crash, and his replacement will be chosen by President
Corruption.
Laci Taylor's baby died while she went to get a bottle for it. Now
she is charged with "endangering a child" —
taking
her eyes off the baby while going for the bottle.
Why is a changing table a dangerous place to leave a baby for a few
minutes?
Researchers are
planning
how to continue research about gun violence despite opposition
from the NRA and SCROTUS, which prefer ignorance to knowledge.
Some of Trump's campaign team are
being
investigated for deals with Russia.
Thugs in Bristol, England, tased 63-year-old Judah Adunbi
as
he was trying to open the gate into his yard.
The thugs mistook Mr Adunbi for a criminal suspect, perhaps because the two had
the same skin color, and then approached him in an aggressive way.
Ironically, Mr Adunbi was part of a program to improve relations
between the thugs and the black community. No one could succeed at
that task while the thugs' own behavior works in the opposite
direction.
Armies from neighboring countries have entered Gambia to
force
the old president to hand over power to the newly elected one.
The Iraqi Kurds are
permanently
claiming territory that they recaptured from PISSI, and preparing
to defend it if necessary.
Here's a wild idea. The Iraqi Sunni Arabs feel oppressed by the
majority Shi'ites, and this hostility led them to ally with al Qa'ida
and partly to support PISSI. They have learned now that
PISSI
is no protector for them, but if the oppression continues it will
continue to breed terrorism.
I wonder if a union between the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds could work
out better. The Kurds are less numerous than the Shi'ites, so in such
a union the Arabs would not be at such a disadvantage.
There are many reasons why this might not work, but I may as well
mention it.
Australia's Conservative Government
Fiddles
on Climate Policy While the Country Burns.
Farmers around the world see how effects of global heating create
new
difficulties for them. Occasionally there is an opportunity, but
mostly the effects are negative because their farming practices were
honed for the old conditions. In addition, extreme weather almost
never benefits people, and one general effect of global heating is to
increase
the frequency of extreme weather.
Parts of Bangladesh are
disappearing
under the rising sea. 25 million people will lose their land by
2050 due to global heating.
The advance of the sea will not stop in 2050.
Our carbon emissions make one side of the vice squeezing the people of
Bangladesh. Their own reproduction is the other. Bangladesh's
population is still increasing, and most of the children born now will
face a disaster before they are old. Bangladesh needs to cut its
birth rate to almost nothing, and we must help.
Resistance and refusal have played important political roles in the
past. They
may
be necessary against the troll and the saboteurs.
Republicans in many states are
trying
to impose harsh penalties on nonviolent protests, following
Putin's example of
repressing
a Greenpeace protest.
SCROTUS
want
to give large tracts of US government lands to states, which would
probably hand it to rich people.
A Republican operative
fabricated
a false accusation of vote-rigging against Clinton.
Now that Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj has won the right to sue
the British ministers that handed him over to Qadhafi to be tortured,
the government
must
give him the apology that he deserves.
The troll and SCROTUS are
destroying
the legitimacy of the US government.
US citizens: phone the White House on Jan 23 and remind the troll he
said he would protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
Rolls-Royce and other UK companies
lobbied
to weaken new rules against bribing officials in other countries.
Elizabeth Warren: Trump's Nominees Putting Us All at Risk by
Ignoring
Ethics Laws.
Google has
censored
a Chrome add-on that clicks automatically on all ads. The add-on
is an attempt to screw advertising on the web.
Censorship is just as bad when Google does it as when Apple does it.
The troll's appointees for national "security" include people
associated
with face recognition software.
This is dangerous for American's security against tyranny.
The Texas law that forced many abortion clinics to close was very
effective at
making
abortion inaccessible.
Without
Path
from Protest to Power, the Women's March Will End Up like Occupy.
Julian Assange promised to put himself in US hands if Obama commuted
Chelsea Manning's sentence. Obama did so, and Assange
confirms
he is willing to face possible US prosecution.
It makes no sense at all to me.
The last interglacial period, which ended 116,000 years ago, had
global temperatures comparable to today's. Sea level eventually rose
by
6
to 9 meters.
That's enough to inundate many coastal cities. But our global heating
will reach even higher temperatures and melt even more ice.
See New York City, Washington DC, and Boston while they is still here.
I'm not the only one who noticed that the troll committed a felony by
interfering in US diplomacy. Congresscritters have
called
on the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to
investigate this.
Unfortunately, if she wants to do this now, she has little time to
find and appoint one.
Mnuchin
tried
to conceal an investment fund the Cayman Islands.
Note to Britain: "If you thought Brussels was tough, wait until
corporate
America writes the rules."
The article has fallen into the "intellectual property" confusion in a
big way. There is no "pharmaceutical copyright" —
pharmaceuticals are covered by patent law, which is totally different,
and by other specialized laws that restrict generic drugs. If a
statement uses the term "intellectual property", it is wise to be
suspicious of it.
Scotland aims to
eliminate
fossil fuel electricity by 2032.
Due to global heating, the annual rate of flood disasters in Europe
has
more
than doubled since 1980.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, Alexandria is gradually losing to the
rising
Mediterranean.
See global heating at work on
the
Arctic and Greenland ice.
Animals ranging from birds to seals to butterflies are endangered by
global heating. Here are
some
examples, including one that is already extinct as a result.
Climate
[Mayhem] Will Affect All Of Us. So Why the Lack of Urgency?
In the UK under Tory rule, poor people
have
to pay extra to heat their homes.
A sensible country would invest in the energy efficiency of every home
as well as giving the poor what they need.
The details of the plot to murder Archbishop Óscar Romero have
been
found
and published, but those who arranged it (and thus started the
civil war in El Salvador) still enjoy impunity.
China's development of renewable energy is already massive, and it is
ramping
up fast.
China alone can't avoid disaster if the troll and his saboteur cabinet
insist on
rushing
towards it.
Everyone:
call on the British
Commonwealth to take action against slavery in its member states.
The FBI takes
$5
billion per year from people it chooses to suspect of crimes,
without convicting them first. It gives around 1% of that to some
possibly worthwhile local projects — and that's supposed to make
the theft ok.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject Pruitt as saboteur-in-chief of the EPA.
We
need
an independent investigation of the troll's relationship with
Putin — whether the claims are true or not.
Australia has set up a computerized system to take back welfare
payments from citizens who were (supposedly) overpaid. However,
the system is unreliable and
generates
lots of false accusations. The victims, usually broke, are then
cruelly dunned.
The problem is deeper than that. A whistleblower reports that the
staff have been
ordered
not to give victims information about errors that the victims have not
noticed, or correct any.
Clearly someone intentionally squeezes those poor people for money
they do not owe. Maybe the errors are not entirely errors.
A senator wants to
legalize
such leaks.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to defend net neutrality.
Rich people extract far more wealth from poor countries (via tax havens and cheating) than the countries receive in aid.
The troll's "press conference" was a phony rally, with paid staff to cheer, meant to punish and intimidate the press.
Akram Shibly, US citizen, reports being attacked by US border thugs when he refused to give them the password to his mobile phone.
We should not allow public infrastructure repair to be privatized by [the loser].
The Privacy Threat From Always-On Microphones Like The Amazon Echo
The article omits to mention two elephants in the room:
US Workers Making Bisphenol-A Have Enormous Loads of It in Them.
In China, mobs of bullies now attack people that disagree with the official political line.
These mobs are organized with state support, much as Tea Party mobs in the US were supported by funds from wealthy sponsors.
The tacit support of the thugs is a dead giveaway.
Over the long term, China will weaken itself this way—through groupthink.
Several government policies that make it hard for Americans to move to the places that have jobs. One of the worst is zoning law.
Zoning that blocks development of concentrated (efficient) housing benefits those who have already got a house, while screwing those who have not. They make thousands of Americans homeless, and millions live in small rooms far from work. We should get rid of it.
The repeal of Obama's medical coverage system would give a 7-million-dollar tax cut to each of 400 very rich Americans.
It would shaft millions poor Americans, but you can't make a rich person richer without breaking somebody.
10 banks involved with the Dakota Access Pipeline are refusing to meet with pipeline opponents.
If you have any money in these banks, how about moving it out?
A study concludes that threats against sharing have little effect on how much income movies make.
Republicans in Arizona have proposed a law to prohibit public schools from teaching ethnic studies or promote social justice.
I agree that courses aimed at specific social groups have no place in public school, because public school should teach solidarity and respect across groups. Courses about specific social groups are legitimate if they are meant for everyone.
Over 11000 Australians have pledged to join in civil disobedience against the giant proposed coal mine and other businesses that support it.
This is in the face of repression by a state that has pledged itself
to denialism.
GM salmon threatening wild fish populations
Genetically modified salmon interbreed with wild trout to produce offspring that can drive down the wild populations of trout and salmon.
The fact that the offspring are infertile won't stop them from causing great damage.
Comey refused to speak privately to Congress about the investigation of the loser's ties with Russia.
Quite a contrast with speaking publicly about a step in the investigation of insignificant Clinton emails.
So-called master media manipulators are playing to media that beg to be manipulated.
Haiti's debt is increasing and it can't possibly pay.
France should return the money that it took from Haiti in exchange for recognizing the freedom of the slaves there.
A nuclear engineer who reads the secret trouble reports says we are lucky that we haven't had a nuclear power plant disaster since Three Mile Island.
The inspectors are made impotent by law, and plants which were designed to last 40 years are degrading so that they will be distinctly less safe.
Trump and the Dangers of Secret Law
Obama gave many agencies, including the FBI and DEA, access to raw intercepts made by the NSA of foreigners' communications with Americans.
Obama has removed US sanctions against trading with Sudan, claiming improvements in its respect for human rights.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say there were no improvements.
Scott Pruitt, the troll's choice to run the EPA, blocked the approval of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court as a tool to raise money from polluters.
Merrick Garland was a centrist, not the sort of person I particularly want to have on the Supreme Court. But that does nothing to excuse Pruitt.
The European Parliament is considering giving some robots a limited legal status as persons.
If AI continues to advance, this and more will be necessary. I don't think we are there yet.
Tillerson illegally directed millions of dollars to ALEC's lobbying.
Fiat-Chrysler diesel cars have software that misleads emissions tests.
Shame on Democrats such as Cory Booker that voted to support high drug prices in the US.
Prisoners with disabilities are often "protected" with solitary confinement, which damages them even more than it damages other prisoners.
Russia is neither free nor just nor friendly, but neither is it a demon.
Arguing that the collapse of civilization is now inevitable.
The FBI subverted tech support employees of Best Buy to snoop on customers' data.
Performers on "reality" TV shows are being cruelly manipulated.
You have to wonder whether a man who would be the host of such a show can be trusted with public office.
6 more Volkswagen executives have been charged with fraud.
Official unemployment figures give a
misleading
picture of "recovery"; they don't include the people who go
through low-paid precarious part-time temporary jobs.
Erdoğan is changing Turkey's constitution
to
increase his power permanently.
Some manufacturers are
trying
to impose arbitration requirements on purchasers of products.
It should be illegal to impose an arbitration requirement
on either a customer or a worker (whether employee or contractor).
Whatever elements of sovereignty the UK manages to recover by leaving
the EU, it is
likely
to surrender if it agrees to any new business-supremacy treaties.
The troll is the most fragile of snowflakes; he
lashes
out whenever a sunbeam falls on his continent-wide "safe space".
Martin Luther King, Jr: champion of
economic
equality and ending the Vietnam War.
The
distraction-marketing
complex can turn the name of anything important into a mere excuse
for sales.
Atheist Americans of Muslim background
feel
threatened by the troll.
The FBI started questioning surprised American Muslims, based on
no
substantial grounds for suspicion, last year.
Tillerson's last line of resistance against saving Earth's ecosphere
is the claim that global heating will go slower than forecasts say.
However,
new
scientific discoveries point in the opposite direction.
Europe is
moving
to mass surveillance, with some terrorist acts as an excuse.
Competition has finally delivered a
much
cheaper equivalent for the gouging EpiPen.
That it took such a long time for this to happen shows that our system
of competition in making medicines is not working very well. I
speculate that this has to do with the amount of concentration in the
pharma industry.
What to expect if the loser follows Putin's example of
holding
pressure rallies and calling them "press conferences".
What the loser says is of no importance, so the serious press
should ignore these rallies the way it ignores his other rallies.
Bahrain's prison, where dissidents are tortured into false confessions
as an excuse to execute them,
gets
help from the UK in covering this up.
Netanyahu calls the Paris peace talks
"rigged
against Israel", presumably because the countries involved have a
serious intention to work for a two-state peace agreement. He would
say that against any serious efforts. The only kind of peace talks he
has ever been accepted are
pretend
talks, guaranteed to achieve nothing.
Since Israel's colonization of the West Bank is the biggest obstacle
to peace, achieving peace must be based on convincing Israel to undo
the colonization. Given that most Israelis are no longer to trade
land for peace, I think only external pressure can achieve this.
In the US: if you know of a McDonald's that has replaced human
order-takers with computers,
stand
in front for an hour handing out leaflets.
My idea for a leaflet text:
You might have a better idea.
The troll has rejected no only truth but consistency. He
bullies
people weaker than him while claiming to be the victim.
I have a suggestion for the press. Ignore the specific things that
the loser says — they are meaningless
bullshit
anyway — and focus on what he does.
US citizens:
tell
the loser you oppose the Bayer-Monsanto merger.
With Javascript disabled, you will need to use the
Salsalabs fix.
Everyone:
call
on US journalists to refused to be herded or controlled by the
troll.
ePrivacy: [European] Commission's Weak Proposal
Forecasts Harsh
Debates.
FCC Report Clearly Says AT&T & Verizon Are Violating Net Neutrality —
And
Nobody Is Going To Do A Damn Thing About It.
Tillerson had the gall to deny the existence of the fossil fuel
subsidies
that Exxon receives.
Thugs that commit crimes, in many parts of the US, are
protected
by union contracts from proper investigation.
A study found
evidence that using a phone to get information tends to
make people distrust strangers.
The article's title says "your smartphone", presuming in effect that
you
have one, and that you will continue to have one even after learning
more reason not to have one.
The foolish author also says that we
"consume" information.
How silly.
If you're suffering from tech-induced isolation,
the remedy is less
technology, not more.
Fanatic "child protectors" in California have convicted a father of
"child endangerment" for punishing his son by making him to walk a
mile (on a path he walks frequently).
Assad, with Iran's support, is
colonizing parts of Syria
from which Syrian Sunnis have fled.
Uber could destroy public transit, leaving many people no choice
except to be tracked.
We can make this less likely by boycotting Uber now.
Russian yoga teacher Dmitry Ugay has been
charged with "illegal
missionary activity".
Apparently Russia's mad crackdown on human rights had gone insanely
far.
The self-styled "inventor of email" is
suing Techdirt for publishing
the true history of email, which existed many years earlier.
He claims to have made this invention in 1979.
I developed software for email in 1974 or 75: the program Rmail,
a reimplementation of which I am using now to read my mail.
Techdirt could be destroyed by the costs before it can win, and we
would all losts.
Does Betsy DeVos Understand the Impact of Poverty and Trauma on
Children's
Learning?
US citizens:
tell the Senate to oppose Mnuchin.
The
Greek and Turkish parts of Cyprus are basically ready to reunite.
However, Erdoğan spoiled it.
He could be
using Cyprus as a bargaining chip.
US citizens: call on the EPA to
ban Chlorpyrifos.
The Netherlands will veto any trade deal with the UK
which makes it a tax haven.
Why not demand in addition that the UK force its dependencies,
such as Jersey, to stop acting as tax havens?
Contempt
for truth and fact
has undermined many areas of life;
that it has done so in politics is perhaps the crowning achievement.
US citizens:
call on NBC to cut its business relationship with the
troll.
EU citizens:
support
SaveTheLink.
The Justice Department has launched an inquiry into whether FBI director Comey violated official policy with his premature announcement about Clinton.
Too bad they waited till after the election.
The Justice Department made a consent decree with the Baltimore thug department to reduce violence against citizens.
Sad to say, the troll and Sessions might cancel it.
Tillerson wants to give more "intelligence" support to Salafi Arabia's bombardment of Yemen.
However, Salafi Arabia uses such intelligence to attack civilians.
Salafi Arabia's world-wide Islamist propaganda engine is at the root of today's Islamist threat.
The troll's "plan" to deal with conflicts of interest is a failure on all levels.
Buzzfeed published the Trump-Putin dossier knowing and saying that it was unsubstantiated. This has raised a controversy about what the press should do.
Its author has now been identified and is a former UK intelligence officer generally considered credible.
That is no proof that it is true, but I do think that gives it some more credibility. The author does not claim that every point is a certainty, only that they are credible intelligence.
An additional point in favor is that the troll seems to be giving Putin exactly what those documents say Putin wanted.
The troll, in his first press conference after stealing the election, bullied reporters and threatened to have one thrown out of the room.
When the troll bullies people, his aim is to intimidate. "I'm so powerful that I can break every rule and no one can stop me."
Hong Kong's respect for human rights deteriorated in 2016, to the point where the government now refuses to talk with Amnesty International about rights issues.
The corruptor's nominee for head of Homeland Security forgot to mention that he is an executive in a lobbying firm.
Tillerson is talking about a sharp military confrontation with China in the disputed South China Sea.
My proposal to resolve that dispute is to get all the countries involved to agree not to extract any oil from the region. With that in place, I think they will have little trouble agreeing about sovereignty.
The coral in Sekisei lagoon in Okinawa has been devastated by bleaching which killed 3/4 of the coral there.
Australia wants to replace a very dirty coal power plant with a plant to use it to generate liquid hydrogen.
Burning the liquid hydrogen won't emit any CO2, but the process of generating the hydrogen will, so this may not do any good for avoiding global disaster.
Mexico's president vows not to pay for the wall that the loser wants to build on the frontier.
I don't see anything wrong with building a wall there. (I doubt it is a good use of the money it would cost.) However, demanding that Mexico pay for it is something that no proud people could stand.
Employees of Microsoft, whose job is to monitor and delete videos of violence, say they have got PTSD from the experience.
I can believe it, but it may not be easy to avoid. Perhaps if each person does this for just an hour a day it would be easier to bear.
The troll threatens to put big tariffs on US companies that produce their goods in other countries, but his daughter's company is mysteriously exempt.
The UK proposes to start bombing people based on vague information, as the US does.
Giving money directly to poor people in poor countries is an effective part of foreign aid.
Progressives in Congress asked Obama to finish up closing the Guantanamo prison.
Obama should simply release all the prisoners there—including the handful that have been tried and the few that might be tried. Giving them fair trials for their crimes would not be wrong, but it is better to release them just to get the prison closed.
Supposing 10 or 20 of them would join PISSI or al Qa'ida, their contribution would be insignificant compared to the thousands that have already joined those organizations based partly on rage at what the Guantanamo prison represents—or compared to the thousands that continue to join them for the same reason.
Department of Energy finally releases new guidelines to protect scientists from political pressure.
The troll can abolish them, but it will be one more step to discredit him.
Proposed Secretary of State Tillerson says he doesn't know anything about Putin's human rights record and partially denies global heating.
Trump's trainwreck press conference ushers in a clueless presidency.
By putting his children in control of his businesses—children that sometimes join in policy discussions—the big debtor continues to retain effective control over them. Thus, the conflict of interest remains fully active.
The Philippines has rejected building a theme park on an unspoiled island.
Bravo!
Chicago thugs officially found to frequently use unlawful force,
especially
against blacks,
and then cover it up.
WhatsApp has a back door that the company can use to read the
plaintext of
messages.
This should not come as a surprise.
Nonfree software for encryption is never trustworthy.
Billionaire Polluters has been found to have caused the big spill
through
recklessness.
US citizens:
tell the troll: Sell your assets, put them in a blind
trust, and release your tax returns.
US citizens: phone your senators (both of them) at 877-959-6082
and call on them to vote against Sessions for attorney general.
One reason to cite is that he wants to escalate the war on marijuana.
Another is that he threatens to undo the progress on restraining the
violence of local thugs. And he doesn't care about sexual assault.
And another is he concealed a private business interest.
There are more.
Democrats can
turn the Democratic Party progressive again by
participating
at the local level.
Some humans are born intermediate between male and female. In the
20th century,
standard
practice was to do surgery on them as infants to make them
resemble one or the other.
The UK's
immigration
bureaucracy is driven by the goal of excluding as many foreigners
as possible, grasping for any possible excuse to make procedures hard
to satisfy.
I think the words used by the UK about the negotiation sound worse
than the position policy really is. It is valid for the UK to say,
"We will recognize the rights of EU citizens already living in the UK
to stay in the UK if the EU recognizes the same rights for UK citizens
already living in other EU countries." If the EU says the same, they
could sign a preliminary exit agreement to this effect. Whichever
side refuses to sign would bear the moral onus.
It was difficult to be a neutral journalist in Donetsk, where each
side was
inclined
to punish those who reported stories embarrassing to it.
Christians in India face
increasing
persecution by the dominant Hindus.
New York Governor Cuomo
plans
to eliminate tuition fees for non-rich college students in state
universities.
I agree that we must make it feasible for all capable students to go
to college, but a substantial fraction of people are not capable
students, and they still should be able to have a decent life.
Sessions is considering
undermining
court orders aimed at protecting citizens from thugs' violence.
The water supply in Flint is not yet lead-free, but Republican
officials are
rushing
to skip required tests and declare it safe.
US citizens:
phone
your senators in favor of Sanders's budget amendment to prevent
cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
Progressives have abandoned the fight against offshoring, so that
now
the
troll gets to claim credit for whatever good happens.
But there is another angle. The whole idea of plutocratic
globalization is that countries compete to draw business away from
other countries by bowing down ever more to business. The roll
proposes to do that, and businesses expect it. In the short term,
this will draw more business to the US.
In the long term, the concessions that achieve this will reduce the
funds that the government needs to
build infrastructure, help the
poor, provide medical care, and so on. And not just in the US,
but globally, as other countries compete with the US.
An executive of VolksWagen is being
prosecuted
for cheating on emissions tests.
Prosecuting individuals is crucial to convincing companies to stop the
abuses. The fact that the person being prosecuted is an executive
makes it even better.
The troll
intends
to let China have potential good jobs in green energy that the US
could have had.
The article is mistaken in equating China's creation of 13 million
jobs to a loss of 13 million jobs in the US. I expect most of those
jobs will be in China simply because they are setting up local
facilities in China.
But the overall point is valid: investing in green energy is a very
effective way to make jobs, and some of those jobs are up for grabs to
the country that invests to take the lead.
Food not Bombs activists have been
arrested
for giving food to homeless people in Tampa.
An upper limit on salary
can
effectively promote equality. A high tax rate on high incomes, as
under Republican President Eisenhauer, also works.
More about
Corbyn's
proposal, which would apply to government contractors.
Many US businesses
implore
the troll to take action to curb global heating.
Medical marijuana
rescues
some people from a life of hell.
The UK's supposed "economic recovery"
applies
only to homeowners in London and the southeast.
The Afghan State no longer officially represses women heavily,
but they
still
face lots of repression there.
Romania's anti-corruption campaign has a 92% conviction rate
because
the
trials are faulty.
The guards at Rykers Island jail have a
tendency
to grope women coming to visit prisoners. It's illegal, but the
guards don't seem to learn that.
Corbyn
calls
for radical action to limit rapidly growing inequality of incomes.
Global heating denialists
still
refer to the so-called "pause" that never really happened.
Jill Stein reports on how her requested recounts were
stymied
by a series of bureaucratic obstacles, often arbitrary and
inexplicable, as well as high fees.
Using computers to count paper ballots is reliable if they can be
checked with a recount. At present, in the US, that is impossible if
local politicians (usually Republicans) want to stop it. As a result,
rigging an election by fiddling with a ballot-reader is as effective
as rigging it in a direct-voting machine.
US citizens: On Jan 23, phone the White House at 202-456-1111 and call
on the loser to keep his promise to protect Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid.
SCROTUS displays blatant support for corruption in multiple ways.
A change in House rules allows congresscritters to conceal some of their papers from ethics investigations.
Leaked memos say that the troll has been feeding Putin intelligence for 8 years, partly because he is being blackmailed, and that his lawyer helped arrange the cracking of Democratic Party sites.
That lawyer says the memos are phony.
I have insufficient basis to reach a conclusion, but the idea of
blackmailing the troll by threatening to show that he had sex with
prostitutes in a bed Obama had slept in seems implausible to me. I'd
expect the troll to crow about that as if it were some sort of victory
for him.
More analysis of the credibility of this report.
Changes in society, especially in the nature of work, discourage
people from joining organizations which meet physically and can take
political action. That's super-convenient for the rich.
The Luddites destroyed high-efficiency weaving machines because the
factory owners used them to cut wages and starve the poor.
The same thing is happening today. Worker productivity in the US has
soared since 1980, but the rich take all the benefit.
I've read that some McDonalds outlets in NYC have replaced service
personnel with keyboards. If you see one, take your business to a
place that employs humans rather than robots.
The only way to avoid the violent fight against robots is to win by
nonviolent resistance now.
Rex Tillerson is big oil personified. The damage he can do is immense.
The infant wants to put more people in Guantanamo and torture them.
Why? Perhaps the same reason other infants tear the wings off butterflies.
In a setback for freedom of the press, persistent government
harassment has pressured Backpage.com to shut down its adult
advertisement page.
Kamala Harris failed in one prosecution, so she constructed another excuse, and the company couldn't continue to resist.
Under the most pessimistic scenario, we have just one year to take stong action to avert an eventual 1.5C of global heating.
A more optimistic scenario says we have 4 years, which means the
troll can assure the collapse of civilization (some while after his
lifetime) either way.
Poor countries don't adopt measures to reduce smoking, because tobacco
companies pressure and mislead them.
In Racists Anonymous, people work on trying reduce their own personal racism.
It is common for landlords to offer women a lower rent in exchange for
sex. Some of them try to go beyond just offering.
I don't think it is wrong to offer a room in exchange for sex, if it
is offered honestly. The problem is when rents get so high and
unaffordable that many people have no real option to decline such
offers.
The troll has chosen Monica Crowley for a White House PR job just as
her 2012 book has been withdrawn for plagiarism.
What's more, it criticized Obama for things that happened under the
Bush regime.
Facebook plans "stronger ties" with the news venues that it is slowly
strangling. In particular, Facebook may be "more open" with its
useds' data.
The author of the article seems to have reported that with a straight
face,
not realizing that it could mean increased trackinge.
The UK is replacing foreign aid with "investment".
This means that they can't just give food to hungry people; they have
to make it profitable for someone. Businesses will skim money off
this, and those businesses push for the change. Suck-up-to-the-rich
politicians approve it.
Meryl Streep, accepting an award before a large audience,
rebuked
the troll for publicly mocking a disabled reporter.
The troll responded with an irrelevant personal insult, then proceeded
to try to
distort
and deny the visible facts.
But why was the loser attacking that disabled reporter? Because the
loser had misrepresented his reporting about Sep 11, 2001, to try to
justify an major campaign lie. The reported objected to this and
pointed to his real text, so the troll mocked him.
Streep's speech
treated
the troll's offensiveness as a performance and condemned it as one
— which may really rile him.
If people stop using cash, how can
street
performers, musicians, food carts etc. survive?
Of course, digital payments oppress those who use them, because they
track everything. I don't use my credit card except with airline
tickets and fees, and car rental. For the rest, it's cash or nothing,
and if I business doesn't accept cash, I don't buy there.
You can help defend privacy every day simply by firmly telling
businesses "cash or no sale, and no you may not have my name."
Most city Americans have little understanding of the
lives,
attitudes and behaviors of rural Americans (such as supporters of
the troll).
If the loser's net worth is positive, he
can
divest himself of interest in the running of his businesses without
actually selling them in a hurry.
This method won't work, however, if the worth
if
his businesses is negative.
There are two aspects of Republican rule we need to resist:
policies
that are cruel to the poor and weak, and attacks on democracy
itself.
In the latter, conservatives might join in.
Ethics lawyers for Dubya and Obama
called
for delaying confirmation hearings so the ethics reports could be
delivered.
Wisconsin Republicans
threaten
to censor teaching at the University of Wisconsin.
The US lists polar bears as threatened, but the program to protect
them is ineffective, since it
fails
to address the fatal threat.
Hate sites such as Breitbart
depend
on advertising from companies that don't know where their ads will
appear. A movement to show companies how their ads appear on
Breitbart has convinced many companies to exclude their ads from that
site.
The big loser's choice for Director of National Intelligence, Dan
Coats,
loves
imprisonment without trial, hates Snowden, and helped to cover up
torture.
A court case will decide
whether
the big loser can remove Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau.
Netanyahu was recorded
trying
to buy more support from a major Israeli newspaper.
In Missouri, children of any age that fight in school
can
now be jailed for years.
We have to fight the troll and the plutocrats in ways that can
change
politics, not merely enable us to say we tried.
In many parts of the world, menstruating women are
subject
to taboos, and persecuted more or less.
The Israeli diplomat who wanted to "take down" UK MPs that criticized
the occupation/siege of Palestine also set up a
hidden
political group within the Labour Party.
The Democratic Party stopped really supporting unions decades ago, so
union are weakened and their members have often become Republicans.
Part of political organizing today includes
recovering
the strength of unions.
Eliminating anonymity is no guarantee of civility. In practice,
trolls
and haters often choose to state their real names.
SCROTUS
will
find it difficult to "replace" Obama's medical insurance program
with anything different that actually works.
They don't really want to continue to give Americans access to medical
care. They just don't want to be blamed for stopping it. So here
is what I think they will do.
They will come up with something that appears to work, a disguise that
will hold up for a year or two, and lie to claim that is a solution.
When it becomes obvious that it doesn't work, they will duck the issue
by distraction and use standard tobacco/sugar/petroleum obfuscation
techniques to deny the problem.
Arguing that the US is
descending
into an authoritarian regime.
The title says "totalitarianism", but that seems to be an incorrect
choice of words.
US citizens:
oppose
fracking near Chaco Canyon.
Haitian warlord Guy Philippe has been
arrested
for US drug charges.
Philippe fronted the
US-backed
coup that
overthrew
elected President Aristide.
With the REINS act, SCROTUS would
make
all new federal regulations require specific approval from
Congress.
The troll
"accepts"
the claim that Putin interfered in the election on his behalf,
based on non-published evidence.
Based on this, I think I should accept it too. He would not have
taken this stand if he thought he could deny it.
Craig Murray said that he received the first (DNC) leak material
from an intermediary who said it was an
insider
leak.
I have confidence in what he says.
Perhaps Russians were involved in the phishing attack on John Podesta.
Vicious right-wingers are attacking progressive organizations and artists'
centers by getting them
raided
and shut down.
Right-wing organizations, often
secretly
funded by rich people, can afford to rent space that has no flaws.
The US economy is worse for workers now than in 2008,
for
the bottom 50% of earners. They get no more pay, and more of them
are in precarious work.
Meanwhile, in many cities their rents have gone up, and millions had
their houses
taken
fraudulently by banksters.
Facebook snoops on surfers via disqus comments: when a page uses
disqus for comments, the proprietary disqus software
loads
a Facebook software package into the browser of every anonymous
visitor to the page, and makes the page's URL available to
Facebook.
How the plutocratic system
manipulates
Americans to support it even as it squashes them.
I think it is a mistake to equate "capitalism" with the plutocratic
type of capitalism that we have now. There are various kinds of
capitalism, and the one we had in 1970 worked tolerably well in the
US. It coexisted with the public sphere and didn't propagandize that
wealth was the measure of everything.
Public schools are the
largest
remaining sector that hasn't been turned into a business. Thus,
the sect of the invisible hand wants to privatize it.
Americans' support for plutocracy is not complete, as many have come
to see a
conflict
between the plutocratic system and Christianity.
Will 2017 Be the Year We Get Serious about
Sustainable
Food?
One step most Americans can easily take is to eat less beef.
Everyone:
call
for firing the thug that threw Jasmine Darwin on the floor and
gave her a concussion.
Netanyahu
wants
the Israeli soldier convicted of murdering a Palestinian to be
pardoned.
That would mean, in effect, that Israelis could murder Palestinians
with impunity.
US national parks will henceforth be turned into
sales
and promotion schemes for businesses.
Allowing companies to
"sponsor"
parks, or stadiums, or any other civic institution, conveys a
message: "everything here is for sale." The right way to get these
companies' money for civic uses is to tax them properly.
Public response blocked
SCROTUS from
neutralizing the ethics committee. It may be possible to
do
the same to protect Americans' health care.
This applies to Medicare and Medicaid, too.
A scientific report showed that many forms of forensic identification
are scientifically bogus and produce
many
false accusations. The Obama administration rejected the report,
preferring to let miscarriages of justice continue.
Racially biased predictions about the risk of recidivism come from an
inherent
conflict between two ideas of fairness — not from specific
implementations.
Former Texas governor Perry
gave
out billions to corporations.
Bad climate news: a careful comparison finds that the most
authoritative measurements of global heating so far is the set from
NOAA, which
shows
more heating than the other measurements.
Everyone: call on Obama to pardon Snowden
now.
US citizens:
call
on your governor and state legislators to oppose the troll's
registry of Muslims.
Overfishing has knocked down the bluefin tuna population by
97%.
Due to continued human pressure, 95% of bluefin tuna caught are under
3 years old.
A respite could allow fish stocks to recover; in 10 years, we might be
able to fish sustainably and catch more tuna per year than we now
catch unsustainably. But this requires long-term thinking, which is
in short supply when a government bows down to business.
Americans Can Spot Election Meddling Because They've
Been
Doing It for Years.
Rohingya Plight Making Myanmar a
Target
for [PISSI], Malaysia Warns.
A study found that teenagers given a little alcohol by their parents
are
less
likely to drink excessively a year later.
Handicapped people face
big
problems in any place where there is no toilet for them, and it's
not unusual to find them.
Apple used its censorship system to enforce China's censorship by
blocking
distribution of the New York Times app.
More about
Apple's
censorship of apps and other malicious functionalities in Apple
software.
Scrapping EU Rules Won't Save UK Farming.
Supporting
Small Farmers Will.
Scientists have learned how river valleys and floodplains participate
in the ecology of a river, and how
dams
and nearby human activities can damage it.
The UK
needs
more inheritance tax. So does the US.
If the wealthy tend to have more successful children, or even smarter
children, there are so many obvious social causes that there's no
point getting distracted by possible genetic contributions. When they
go to school, they go to a better school, with other good students,
and they make good connections. They have a calm place to study, and
enough food to eat. Even before they start school, they are probably
taught a better approach towards learning and success.
These are things that we can give to children in poor families. All
we need to do is tax the rich to a fair extent (much more than now).
Teenager Slammed to Ground Raises Fresh Concerns About
[thugs]
in Schools.
At the time she was attacked,
that
teenager was trying to break up a fight between others.
Unless your school is very violent, you will be safer if they get the
School Havoc Officer out of it.
One of the principle prosecutors of Leonard Peltier has
called
on Obama to give him clemency.
Record-breaking
extreme weather in Australia caused fires in areas which don't
normally have them.
40%
of the "suspicions" IP addresses that US agencies attribute to
Russian crackers are simply Tor exit nodes.
Either US intelligence agencies are trying to snow us with meaningless
factoids, or they don't have enough intelligence to recognize them as
meaningless.
The jihadi terrorism in Turkey is
fueled
partly by Erdoğan's support for Turkish Islamists, and partly
by foolish purges of officials responsible for security.
When the PKK attacks the forces of the state, that's not terrorism;
that's rebellion. There are some civilian casualties, but the PKK
does not target them. They are what the US calls "collateral damage".
There is no way to fight and completely avoid civilian casualties.
What the Geneva Conventions require, for the US or for the PKK or any
other combatant, is to make sufficient efforts to avoid and minimize
them.
I can't judge whether the PKK makes a sufficient effort, but it is
pretty clear that
the
Turkish state isn't trying to.
It's a shame Erdoğan
terminated
the many years of cease fire with the PKK.
US citizens: call your senators at 1-866-985-2543, and ask them to
support a review of Trump's financial arrangements AND to support
Sen. Warren's bill requiring the president to divest and disclose all
business affairs in order to avoid serious and unconstitutional
conflicts of interest.
The Tories have
almost
completely eliminated UK investment in renewable energy. Their
policy has been to
eliminate
it
step
by step, and they are now
reaching
the end of the process.
The Tories are lower than vermin —
Aneurin
Bevan.
An Israeli soldier has been
convicted
of killing a wounded, disabled Palestinian suspect.
I'm glad the Israeli legal system can at least occasionally give
Palestinians justice, but it only rarely tries.
Right-wing extremists
lionized
that soldier, taking a racist position in favor of killing
Palestinians.
The troll is
begging
for funds to pay his transition team.
This lends support to the conjecture that
his
net assets are far less than zero.
Everyone:
call on
tech companies to refuse to help the loser build a registry of
Muslims.
Pakistani religious fanatics are
out
to murder Shaan Taseer for criticizing the law that punishes
"insulting Islam" with execution.
That law would be a great evil if it were enforced carefully, but it's
even worse because they are sloppy about it. It provides an
all-purpose
excuse to execute people based on unverifiable accusations.
Mnuchin's bank repeatedly
broke
California's foreclosure laws.
SCROTUS
threaten
all aspects of reproductive health care, and don't mind if mothers
and babies die for the principle that the state shouldn't do any good
for individuals that aren't rich.
SCROTUS made
a
plan
to very quickly inactivate the Office of Congressional Ethics, but
was dissuaded by public disgust from various people including the
loser.
It is ironic that the troll helped pressure them to do it, given how
corrupt and corrupting he is in other ways.
Some of the Republicans expressed a preference to do the same plan
but at a later date when it would not be noticed as much.
Drought, probably caused by global heating, is
making
Mexican peasants flee their land; some flee to the US.
Don't blame them, trumpets. They didn't cause the drought; the US
did.
US citizens: Call on the Senate to
reject Pudzer as Secretary of
Labor.
US citizens:
phone your senators to grill Pompeo, nominated to run the
CIA,
about respecting human rights.
This includes surveillance of you and me, and torture.
US citizens:
call on Senate Democrats to fight hard against Betsy
DeVos.
Right-wing budget cuts have
strained the UK's medical system to the
breaking point. Patients can't get urgent treatment, There are not
enough beds available for patients. It takes a long time for an
ambulance to arrive when needed.
Doctors feel that their relatives are not safe in a hospital, and are
thinking of quitting.
An
Israeli embassy official in the UK was caught scheming to "take
down" certain members of the UK parliament that are insufficiently
subservient to Israel.
SCROTUS are
rushing to confirm the troll's proposed cabinet officials
without waiting for the ethics review.
Businesses create or take over NGOs to use as front groups,
even
in the UN.
For instance, CORE, the Congress On Racial Equality, which was a real
and important civil rights group in the 1960s, has been
turned
into a
puppet.
Even groups that are not puppets can be co-opted on a side issue by
businesses that in exchange offer some support for the cause.
This happened to the
NAACP.
The FDA has a
new rule to limit the indiscriminate dosing of farm
animals
with antibiotics. But it is a weak rule, and it's not clear how much
good it will do.
Since our lives are at stake here — resistant bacteria could kill
anyone — we need a strong rule.
A proposed natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to North Carolina
is facing increasing local opposition.
Aside from whatever local problems it will cause, the pipeline would
act as inertia for extraction of natural gas. The owners, having
built the pipeline, will do all in their power to make sure it gets
used for a lot of natural gas. That will speed our fall over the
climate cliff.
A large fraction of US employees are
tracked in their movements 24
hours a day by their employers. Most states have no laws against
this.
Basically, if your employer gives you a portable phone, or software
to run on one, don't trust it!
If you have a union, it can help you fight against being tracked
when there is no valid reason.
If you don't have a union, you need one.
A Palestinian in Jerusalem
used a truck as a weapon to attack Israeli
soldiers.
I am sure Israel and its supporters will call this "terrorism", but
attacking soldiers of an occupying army is properly called
"rebellion", "resistance" or "guerrilla war". If the targets had been
civilians, it would have been terrorism.
The World Wide Web has become dominated by a few web sites, most of
which are run by businesses and designed to addict and mistreat their
visitors. A book puts this into the historical perspective of the
"attention industry".
You can personally escape this if you don't visit those sites. I
don't log in on any of them, and I rarely visit them at all. But we
can't individually escape from the harm they do at the social level.
Thick multi-year ice is
rapidly diminishing in the Arctic, leaving an
ice cap made only of thin one-year ice.
The many schemes for corruption of apparently authoritative truth have
made the teaching of information literacy a challenge.
Evgeny Morozov: the epidemic of fake news is a symptom of the digital
system that makes fake news profitable,
but focusing on it serves as
distraction from recognizing the deeper origin of today's real
political problems.
Global heating is
undermining localized rules to protect fish stocks
because it makes the fish move to different areas. Combined with
widespread overfishing, the result is that the total seafood catch has
decreased drastically in 20 years.
This matter much if ocean acidification wipes out the sea life we
catch.
Clothes workers in Bangladesh that participated in the strike
are
not just blacklisted, they are harassed by thugs as well.
What this means is that the Bangladeshi state represses citizens on
behalf of foreign businesses.
Japan's admirable
tradition of designing systems and structures to be
considerate to their users.
Several state legislatures controlled by Republicans are
determined to
crush unions.
Sessions's reactionary views, harshness for harshness' sake, are
rejected by many Republican politicians.
Benevolent sexism and hostile sexism work together, like the good cop
and bad cop, to keep women under men's power. Many women, when they
see hostile sexism, turn to benevolent sexism for protection.
Large companies now own and rent out lots of houses in the US. They
are much quicker to evict tenants that get in any sort of trouble.
I think it would be wise to charge a higher tax rate to a landlord
that owns lots of rental housing.
The most important step to help victims of domestic violence
is to
provide a place for them to go to safety. Right-wing
governments
are cutting that.
Acción Ecológica is struggling to stop the Ecuadorian state from
shutting it down.
Poles in the UK are
often the target of hate crimes by bigots
that hate immigrants. They are afraid to report the crimes
because it could affect the political pressure to make them leave.
The military-industrial complex could be responsible for persecution
of Rohingyas,
in support of a land-grab that has kicked millions of
people (of various ethnic groups) off their lands.
Fossil fuel workers whose jobs will (we desperately hope) disappear
can oppose decarbonization. Also, planet-roaster politicians cite
them as a reason to keep using fossil fuels. If we can help these
workers get new jobs, that will facilitate decarbonization.
But we don't dare choose to slow decarbonization for this. Avoiding
global heating disaster, which could kill 2/3 of all living humans and
2/3 of all living species, is desperately urgent.
Donald Trump Didn't Save the Ethics Committee. The American people
did.
The troll only chimed in with a weak statement.
Several state legislatures controlled by Republicans are
determined to
make life difficult for transsexuals.
In the long run, transsexuals can push back simply by obeying the
bathroom law and refusing to be embarrassed. "Don't blame me —
right-wing jerks passed a law that says I have to use this toilet.
Will you join me in campaigning to vote them out?"
Many Americans that voted for the troll are nostalgic for 1950s
America, with its good jobs to support a family on, with women and
minorities in their place, with gays invisible, and transsexuals not
yet invented.
A six-hour work day
can make society better for people overall, in
countries that don't let the rich crush the rest.
It is one way to cope with the problem of technological employment
for millions of people.
The troll's threats
seem to have convinced Ford not to increase
production in Mexico.
I see nothing wrong about importing products made by Mexicans in
Mexico, but moving production to Mexico should not serve as an excuse
to cut workers' pay. US companies that move US production to Mexico
should pay the Mexican workers US-style salaries.
The newly published report on
alleged Russian involvement in cracking
Democratic Party servers has no new evidence to show that Russia was
involved.
Some of the report was leaked to the Washington Post by the CIA.
The troll is scandalized.
Wikileaks points out that the CIA is
leaking top secret documents to
the press to manipulate US public opinion,
just as Wikileaks is accused of doing.
Why
Workers Everywhere Should Be Scared by Kentucky's Assault on
Unions.
The Israeli soldier convicted of killing a helpless Palestinian is not
a "rotten apple". He's
a typical sample of the whole rotten barrel.
Historian Stephen Cohen, who has studied Russia for decades,
criticized
in 2015 the confrontational and domineering policy that the US has
taken towards Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Here's the
second
half.
I think we can have some confidence in Cohen's judgment, because he is
not one of the Putin pets you find so many of nowadays. He doesn't
start from the assumption that Putin is good and the US is bad. He
regards the US government and the Russian government both as playing
the same kind of power game, but Putin's aims are more modest and his
strategy more coherent.
One point in the articles requires correction. The referendum in the
Crimea was imposed by "pro-Russian gunmen" who had captured the
parliament building and
ordered
the vote at gunpoint. We now know that they were capable of
mounting a "well co-ordinated military operation" because they were
Russian
soldiers not wearing their usual uniforms.
But this is a small error and I still trust the articles overall.
The UK ambassador to the EU has
resigned.
He reported to the Tories that they wouldn't be able to get a
favorable deal when leaving the EU, and they did not like what they
heard.
Speech-recognition devices that keep recordings of what people say —
even if only some of the time —
threaten constitutional rights.
An ethically designed speech recognition device will not save any
voice recordings (or transcripts) of actual use, except when the user
explicitly commands that it save one. Training the device to
understand particular people's voices better should be something that
users explicitly request.
The troll
owes 1.5 billion dollars to Wall Street companies,
adding up to a giant corruptive force.
SCROTUS have
a
plan to distract and impede press coverage of the vital
confirmation hearings for the troll's saboteur candidates.
14,000 people have implored the UK not to deport Bashir Naderi to
Afghanistan, where he knows no people and none of the local languages.
People who have lived in a country for many years, since childhood,
should always be given citizenship. If the citizens want to reduce
the number of immigrants, there is no need to do it in a cruel way.
Uri Avnery: don't despair about getting the Israeli colonies
out of the way of a viable Palestinian state.
Suggestions every American can put into effect for resisting the
troll.
SCROTUS
protect their disinformation from comparison with: their new rules
package tells the Congressional Budget Office
not to report on
the likely costs of repealing or changing Obama's medical insurance
program.
One estimate is that it would cost the economy almost a trillion
dollars a year, and eliminate 3 million jobs. And that's not to
mention
the suffering of people who can't get medical care.
Earth is on track towards more than 2C of global heating by 2050.
US citizens: oppose the troll's
cabinet of polluters.
Kentucky's new
Republican legislature is passing laws to destroy
unions,
so fast that there won't be time for the victims to react.
It appears the UK will exit the EU
with no agreement at all — a
"train crash".
Britain still has hope. If the train is operated by a lousy
privatized UK train company, such as Southern Rail, it may not run.
Facebook provided personal data to Mastercard.
The data was provided in anonymized form, but Mastercard could
reidentify
the data by correlating it with other data.
Sessions wants more private prisons.
He says privatization "seem to work better", but better for whom?
Perhaps for his future employers, some years from now.
Chinese ivory carvers are coming to grips with China's decision to ban
the ivory trade.
It makes no sense to eliminate elephants so that Africa can
accommodate more humans.
Shutting down the legal ivory trade
will not stop the illegal trade.
The FCC's weak ISP privacy rules are
too much for the trumpets.
They plan to eliminate them.
ISPs should respect customers' privacy by not taking any note
of their traffic, except pursuant to a specific court order.
Thugs in Alabama killed Robert Earl Lawrence for refusing to show
identification.
All he did was refuse.
He brought a stray dog to an animal shelter, but refused to show a
driver's license, so the staff called the thugs. How gratuitous.
They could just as easily said, "We won't take the dog from you
without your identification, so just let it run loose outside the
door." It would have been stupid, but no more stupid than what they
did.
More US states have fallen under the control of Republicans and ALEC.
They generally gerrymander the districts so that they subsequently
always "win" even when they don't get most of the votes.
SCROTUS want
to eliminate or neutralize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
because it does a good job of protecting people
from banks that would cheat them.
SCROTUS have
expanded their power to harass and intimidate Americans
by giving congressional staff the power to interrogate people under
oath.
Congressional investigations have a legitimate function, but
Republicans
are not interested in pursuing real abuses. Their goal is to crush
despised climate defenders and abortion providers, by hook or by
crook.
A US thug that is dismissed for misconduct can easily get another job
as a thug, because there is
no firm system to prevent it.
Many states do absolutely nothing, when thugs are fired for violence
against
the public, to stop them from getting hired somewhere else.
Shawna, in her 19th birthday party, had sex with a younger teenager.
She was sentenced to register as a
sex offender for her whole life.
Zineb El Rhazoui has quit working for Charlie Hebdo, rebuking the
magazine for
no longer daring to draw Mohammed.
Roughly
10,000 people die in London each year from air pollution,
much of it from diesel engines.
The UK government attacks everyone's freedom, supposedly to reduce the
already tiny danger of terrorism. But terrorists would find it
exceedingly hard to kill even 1% as many people as the diesels do.
Britons should demand that the government end to massive surveillance
and focus on the greater danger of cars. But this lesson is not
limited to Britain.
How many thousands do diesels kill every year in France? I don't
know, but it must be thousands. So why have a "state of emergency"
that tramples human rights supposedly to protect against the secondary
danger of terrorists, instead of against car companies?
Now that El Niño has ended,
2017 may not set a new heat record.
Denialists are likely to start spreading the myth that "global heating
stopped in 2016."
China has become dominant in the manufacturing of renewable energy
generation.
China is making a big investment, while its potential competitors are
dominated by planet-roasters and denialists.
US citizens:
call on Senate Democrats to go all-out to block Tom Price
from Health and Human Services.
US citizens:
phone your senators to oppose Resolution 6, which would
condemn the recent UN resolution rebuking Israel for colonizing
Palestinian territory.
If you can't phone (or after you phone), sign
this
petition.
Homeless people are "spat on and ignored."
Outside the US, the TPP is marching on, threatening to subjugate
other countries to the power of foreign business.
Japan Recalls Envoy after South Korea Puts "Comfort Woman" Statue
Outside
Consulate.
This is political posturing on both sides, but South Korea is
posturing
on behalf of a real injustice, while Japan is posturing on behalf of
military nationalism.
Most Israelis support cold-blooded murder of Palestinian suspects.
The World Wildlife Foundation faces accusations of helping to
establish
and patrol a wildlife reserve in Cameroon. The land was inhabited by
hunter-gatherers.
As humans overpopulate Earth and overrun all wild areas, more and more
the survival of some humans will come in conflict with the survival of
specific species, and then the survival of entire ecosystems.
Human population growth will stop, one way or another, in this
century, because too many factors stand to limit it. The question is,
what will be left of the natural world at that point?
I think therefore that preserving species and wild areas has to take
precedence over human claims, when they cannot coexist.
It ought to be possible to do this without violence against
unarmed trespassers, though.
Former congressional staff recommend local organizing methods to fight
the right-wing agenda, learning from the success of the Tea Party.
In order for this to work, we must do another thing that the Tea Party
did:
replace nonprogressive Democrats.
President Do-dirty of the Philippines joins lies to murder; his
campaign to make Davao City by killing all the criminals, which he
claims made it a safe place,
actually left it with a high rate of
crime.
UK thugs surrounded Yassar Yaqub's car as it was exiting a highway,
then shot him dead.
They said that the operation was pre-planned.
His father asks whether it was a pre-planned assassination.
If Yassar Yaqub was a gangster, that was grounds to arrest and
prosecute him, but not to assassinate him.
Of course, the effective way to put an end to drug gangs is to
get the War on Drugs off drugs.
How Washington DC
resists
gentrification to protect low-income residents.
Canada
plans
to work with the loser to resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline.
Los Angeles proposes to follow New York City's absurd law prohibiting
unaccompanied adults from playgrounds, but now there is
resistance.
If the goal is to protect children from sexual abuse, it would be more
effective to keep them away from adults in private places, since that
is where abuse almost always occurs. For instance, there could be a
law to prohibit children from spending time at home with just one
adult. A single parent arriving home with children should call Child
Protective Services and wait for an agent to arrive before entering
the home. When the agent has to depart, the family must leave the
house.
I had better state that the proposal above is meant satirically.
US citizens:
tell
the Democratic National Committee you support Keith Ellison as
leader.
Everyone:
call
on Senator Murphy to stop criticizing the UN resolution in support
of Israeli annexationists.
US citizens:
call
on senators Warren and Murphy to resist bipartisan pressure for
military confrontation with Russia.
Putin is a smarmy tyrant, who has crushed opposition and the free
press in Russia. He engages in military aggression, though in a more
measured way than the US does. I think it is sick to suck up to him
as the troll does, but that doesn't mean we need a military rivalry
with Russia.
More U.S. Workers Have
Highly
Volatile, Unstable Incomes.
That means they are at risk of homelessness, hunger, and
dying
from lack of medicine. Their children are at risk of growing up
under stress that will
impair
them for their whole lives.
Multinational megacorporations can use the forced arbitration of
business-supremacy
treaties to
overturn
even convictions for crimes.
They also
invest
in potential lawsuits to be arbitrated under these treaties.
With the help of business-supremacy treaties, corporations that made a
deal with a corrupt dictator
can
force a democratic successor government to pay whatever the dictator
promised. This encourages dictators to cheat their countries.
We need to change the legal system at all levels so that corrupt deals
can be cancelled and even undone. For instance, a predatory
privatization should be cancelled, and the privatizer should be
compensated with the money it paid minus whatever profit it
has extracted.
Most privatizations of state operations are
predatory.
US citizens:
support the
National Popular Vote Act.
A
proposed US pipeline company merger would reportedly create so
much
market power that the combined company could raise prices for oil and
natural gas.
If it could do that, it might discourage consumption, but not enough:
we need heavy taxes on petroleum products and an end to all subsidies
to raise the price enough to avoid disaster.
The better reason to oppose this merger is that bigger companies have
more lobbying power. We need to make large companies split up, except
for those that are natural monopolies and ought to be regulated
utilities.
The ACLU warns that bill HR 6421, the misnamed "Anti-Semitism
Awareness Act",
would impose unconstitutional censorship on debate
about
Israel and its occupation policies.
The
Free Market Isn't Working — And Labour Now Dares to Say
So.
The troll
provides
growing authoritarianism in the US
an opportunity to potentially supplant democracy.
The
15
Warnings Signs of Impending Tyranny — as seen through the
troll.
People in the US are supposed to be able to buy copies of their credit
reports, but
Equifax
and Transunion have been lying — sending people
doctored reports that are not what businesses get.
It's
a fundamental mistake to make a fuss about the national debt,
disregarding other systems that will make the public pay in the
future, such as toll collection and drug patents.
Pressuring restaurant chains
to stop causing antibiotic resistance.
The Jack in the Box pledge is an example of, "We will stop using
certain antibiotics in certain animals for certain purposes, several
years from now." Which is more show than reality.
We shouldn't need to campaign to pressure restaurants or companies. A
government that gives companies the value they deserve, and human
health the value it deserves, would have made this a firm law many
years ago.
Don't these legislators realize that antibiotic resistance can kill
them or their children?
Tom Price, the troll's choice for a cabinet post,
appears to have
committed insider trading.
The US abolished direct military conscription, but has replaced it
with an
indirect system of economic conscription: young people from
poor backgrounds often see no opportunity to get ahead except
through the army.
The article is mistaken on a couple of important points. First, Nixon
did damp down the movement to end the Vietnam War, by pulling the US
army out of Vietnam, but that was not the permanent effect that the
article presents. The US antiwar movement was quite strong for the
first few years of the occupation of Iraq.
It also omits another, deeper blindness about thanking troops for
"serving their country" — for the most part, that's not what they are
doing. And, in Iraq, many of them figured that out; (then) Bradley
Manning was far from alone. A soldier wrote to me, responding to
what he saw in stallman.org, saying that the troops in his unit
felt that they were in Iraq to support an empire.
I think we should offer troops condolences rather than thanks.
Many of them joined up intending to serve their country, and
they were cheated of the opportunity.
The
Chicago Review of Books will boycott publisher Simon & Schuster
because of its book deal with a hate guru.
Nuclear Experts Warn [the troll]:
Do Not Torpedo Successful Iran Deal.
It not only keeps Iran non-nuclear, it indirectly helps keep other
countries non-nuclear.
A
school thug in North Carolina picked up a student, then threw her on
the floor, momentarily stunning her.
We should refuse to call these thugs by the euphemism, "school
resource officer". These thugs are the suction end of the
school-to-prison pipeline, and their presence in a school creates
a danger of more than physical injury.
Anti-Surveillance Clothing
Aims to Hide Wearers from Facial
Recognition.
The idea is good, but does it do the job effectively? It may be hard
to determine that. However, at least it will serve for public
education
about the danger of surveillance.
NAACP activists held a sit-in in Senator Sessions' office to oppose
making him Attorney General.
US citizens: join rallies on
Sunday
Jan 15 against Republican cuts to medical care and Planned
Parenthood.
US citizens: phone your senators to
oppose
Resolution 6, which would condemn the recent UN resolution
rebuking Israel for colonizing Palestinian territory.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
Australia is full of introduced feral cats, which have
wiped out 20
native species and could wipe out many more.
Another
Tory politician has been connected with hidden offshoring of
profits.
A
last-ditch plan to protect the remaining vaquita porpoises: find
them
and move them to a protected area.
It could wipe them out, or it could save them. But since they are
being
wiped
out anyway, I think it is better to try it than not to.
Amnesty
International is campaigning for Obama to close the Guantanamo
prison now.
The injustice of the Guantanamo prison is not which prison those
prisoners are in, but that they are held in prison without trial.
Releasing all the prisoners that don't face charges, and giving the
rest real trials, would end that injustice. That's what needs to be
done.
Obama can do the first part, and he should. As for preventing the
troll from imprisoning more people without trial, Obama can't do that
now. If he had firmly opposed imprisonment without trial for years,
as he should have, he might have made it difficult for a future
president to restart it.
18-year-old Idress Wazeer
faces deportation from the UK to
Afghanistan, where (he reports) his family was murdered by the
Taliban. He says he would rather die than be sent there, and he means
it: he has tried twice to kill himself in immigration prison.
Both times he was saved by a meddlesome cellmate who is too mentally
rigid to realize that saving Wazeer was only making things worse.
It takes courage to end your life today in a way that might achieve
some good, rather than hang on a while so that it ends later in a
useless way.
Israeli doctors, in the name of medical ethics,
defy the state and
refuse to force-feed Palestinian hunger strikers.
Israeli
Home Demolitions Break Records, Shatter Lives in 2016,
Rail
passengers protested in many UK train stations against high
fares
and unreliable trains.
This is the natural result of privatization.
An infectious disease, buruli ulcer, has become more common among
humans
because humans have wiped out carnivorous wildlife.
Peter Dahlin reports on his 23 days in a brainwashing Chinese prison.
A year later, he has not recovered.
The Tories plan to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights
endangers human rights in the UK and globally.
It appears that the loser must have debts that he can't pay.
Relating the violence of US thugs in the US to the violence of US soldiers
in other countries.
Kerry's last speech acknowledged in detail the oppression of Israel's
occupation of the West Bank.
If Obama had made this point persistently for 8 years, and insisted on it,
we might have a peace deal by now.
In France, everyone is now an organ donor by default.
You can opt out, but I can't see any rational reason to do so unless
for some special reason you are likely to murdered for your organs.
E-cigarettes are much less dangerous than smoking, but if you are not a nicotine user you should not start using it
in any form.
Oakland, California, provides ordinary public services to a homeless
encampment instead of trying to drive them away.
A leak showed that Jean-Claude Juncker, when PM of Luxembourg, worked
actively to protect tax dodging by thwarting EU efforts to reduce it.
The EU is set up to give the executive power to playthings of the
rich, such as Juncker. That means it is corrupt at the root.
Austerity in Greece means sick people die who ought to be cured.
Why Oil Is the Glue That Bonds Trump and Putin.
Express lanes in security are a clever idea to make Americans want to be
biometrically tracked.
It is fairly predictable that once the gentry are eagerly doing this,
it is likely to be pushed on everyone else.
Please use your moral strength to resist biometric tracking
to the best of your ability.
The UK should not follow China with state control of universities.
The rising US stock market constitutes a big bet that the new
president is a conman, and won't really do anything to benefit the
working-class people that voted for him.
All that money wagered will generate pressure for him to be a conman
so that the bettors win the bet.
The cease-fire in most of Syria is holding.
We have 100 months to curb global heating or face probable catastrophic
change in climate.
Three Miami thugs were fired for a racist discussion in which they joked
about shooting blacks for target practice.
That's far beyond unconscious racism; that's real hatred.
Previous presidents opposed Israel's land grab much more forcefully;
Obama has been mostly subservient.
And when, at last minute, he dares to show a sign of opposition,
Netanyahu vilifies him.
Matt Taibi distrusts the accusations of Russian meddling in the US
election. It's not impossible, but there seems to be more propaganda
than evidence.
Large companies that buy consumer debt has made debt collection an
unbearable burden for millions of Americans.
Since the debt-buyers are more aggressive, one solution is to forbid
that activity. Legislators are constantly pestered by companies for
laws that let them make more money … often at society's expense.
Australian volunteers tag and measure the loggerhead sea turtles every year
as they lay eggs on the beach. They rarely find a mature turtle they had
not already tagged, which indicates the species is dying.
Several cities in the San Francisco area have rejected "predictive
policing".
Using a proprietary program such as PredPol to guide policing means,
in effect, outsourcing the data analysis and policy decisions of the
state to the proprietor of the software. That's never justifiable.
One of the singers in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has quit rather
than perform for the loser.
I've decided to call him "the loser" for a while
rather than "the troll".
Is Civilian Control of the [US] Military in Jeopardy?
The new American segregation, like the American segregation of 50 years ago,
is created by a system of institutionalized bigotry.
The most effective way to radicalize Muslims is to display bigotry
toward them.
Faux News wants to eliminate food stamps because allegedly .1% (one
part in a thousand) gets fraudulently put into buying drugs.
When dooH niboR wants an excuse to hurt the poor, the smallest excuse
will suffice.
Oil companies are blocking research into the effect of spills of
diluted bitumen into the sea, by keeping the composition of the
diluent fluid secret.
I don't believe in prohibiting companies from keeping secrets, not in
general. But companies are not persons and they are not entitled to
human rights. Any time their secrecy interferes with some public
need, the state should require publication. The companies that don't
like this are welcome to shut down or go away — good riddance to
them.
Turkish writer Aslı Erdoğan has been released from jail
but still faces political charges.
Tiny irukandji jellyfish, whose sting can kill a human, are spreading
along the Australian coast, far beyond the equatorial areas where they
have lived in the past.
Global heating is cause of this, as well as so many larger dangers.
The Republican plan to destroy medicare works by letting hospitals and
doctors charge whatever they like, and bill the old people for
whatever Medicare doesn't cover.
Although the Rockettes have been told that they have the option of
not performing for the troll, the dancers fear getting fired.
I have a suggestion: they should perform in the park that day, in
street clothing rather than their costumes, as a protest.
If the troll stretches the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force
the way Obama did, he could bomb or invade nearly anywhere.
The troll claims credit for 5000 jobs that are moving to the US
under a business agreement made before the election.
Assange was smeared with distorted quotations claiming that he
supported Trump and supported Putin.
Looking at his actual interview, the main reference to Trump, which ends with
I think Assange exaggerates a little when he says that the tolerated
Russian opposition press constitutes an alternative to Wikileaks.
Those publications may be tolerated for now, but if they published
leaks they might be shut down.
However, his point that Wikileaks can't publish effectively to
Russians because that needs to be done by people with a Russian
background is valid — and a far cry from what the smear article
claimed.
Burger King says it will cut out use of "critical" antibiotics
in raising its chicken.
That is a significant step forward, but it has to be spread to all farming
of all kinds of animals.
Cartoonist Eaten Fish, imprisoned by Australia on Manus Island,
will be sent back to Iran, where he faces imprisonment or execution.
Jeffry Wagner is charged with "child endangerment" because his child
started walking to school on Saturday morning while Jeffry was asleep.
Naveed Baloch, who was temporarily suspected of being responsible for
the terrorist attack in Berlin, reports that the thugs brutalized him
while he was in jail.
The security of "smart meters" is very stupid. Crackers can find out what
devices you own, in many cases take control of them, bankrupt you with a false
electric bill, and even make them explode.
The crackers can learn an awful lot by watching out how much electricity
you use from second to second.
Even worse, the electric utility can learn it, too — and tell big brother.
The obvious "solution" to this problem would be "better security in
the smart meter". That way, only the electric utility and big brother
could snoop on you, invade your other devices, etc.
The real solution is to design smart meters so that they can't do this,
at all, for anyone.
Al Qa'ida is slowly growing by seeking support locally and being less
bloody.
Perhaps it will morph into something we could make peace with.
Any Islamist group advocates oppressive Shari'a law, and thus aims to
violate people's human rights. But it's not usually necessary or
legitimate to respond to every such regime with war. The US has not
started drone attacks in Poland and Hungary, let alone Belarus,
Thailand, and Malaysia, nor even in Bahrain, Egypt, and Salafi Arabia,
for their violations of human rights.
When thugs kill a dog, that's not as grave as killing a person. But
the frequency of killing dogs highlights bad values in training, and they
endanger humans too.
One lesson we could learn from the killing of Philando Castile is
that, in some kinds of traffic stop situations, the thug should stay
in the car and avoid risk to the driver and to the thug.
Tory bigotry has sown bigotry in UK elementary schools.
Activists are attacking the funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Some banks have pulled out, and the company may soon have to renegotiate.
Duterte said that he killed a man by throwing him out of a helicopter.
Such an act is murder, no two ways about it.
I don't think it matters much whether Do-dirty's claim is true or false.
Someone who boasts of murder is despicable whether it is true or not.
Jewish Voice for Peace: Kerry's last-minute push for peace between
Israel and Palestine had the right goals, but it wasn't a serious plan
for overcoming the obstacles.
Electing the troll was effectively a big temper-tantrum, and it presents the
US as infantile. It will have trouble inspiring respect or admiration
anywhere in the world.
The partial vote recounts confirm the previously reported counts, but
show vulnerabilities that need to be fixed.
French President Hollande pardoned a woman who was imprisoned for
killing her violently abusive husband.
Self-defense should apply to spousal violence just like violence by a
stranger.
In Every [US] State, Minimum Wage
Falls Far Short of a Living Wage.
A Texas thug
shot a black man in the back, as he was walking away, and
left him paralyzed for life.
Even supposing that the story about the box cutter was true, the thug
didn't need to shoot him at that time. But you can't believe the
accusations
thugs make against their victims.
How Propaganda Works — repeating a simplistic slogan until the
zombified
followers don't want to try to think.
Israel's response to the UN's condemnation of colonizing the West Bank
is
the usual stupid attempt to put the blame on its critics.
It would be appropriate now for other countries to adopt a first stage
of sanctions, to start pressuring Israel to make peace with Palestine.
Obama should give Palestine US recognition now.
Israel can kick Palestinians around with impunity because they are
stateless. I agree with Juan Cole that the Palestinians must be able
to be citizens of a state that will try defend their human rights,
just as Israelis are.
The troll said he was so rich he could not be bought, but it appears
that his billionaire donors
bought cabinet offices.
Growing Mega-cities Will Displace Vast Tracts of Farmland by 2030,
Study
Says.
Poland shows how a repressive right-wing party can build public
support for repression and tyranny based on subsidies for ordinary
people.
In East Palo Alto,
right near the wealth of Silicon Valley,
1/3 of the children in public school are in families that don't
have a home of their own.
Most of them don't have to live on the street. They live in someone
else's
house, or in a vehicle.
Turkey and Russia have agreed on a limited partial Syrian cease-fire
between Assad's men and non-Jihadi Arab rebels.
PISSI and al-Nusra are excluded. So, at Turkey's insistence, are the
Kurds.
Nonetheless, I think this will be a step forward,
as long as Turkey doesn't turn it into an opportunity to launch
renewed
war against the Kurds.
US progressives are
organizing behind Sanders.
Tony Fullman has been effectively exiled from New Zealand for
talking
with Fijian democracy campaigners. New Zealand brought in Australia
and
the US NSA to spy on him in ways that were illegal for New Zealand to
do.
Sabrina Siddiqui, a Muslim reporter who doesn't dress as one,
encountered violent hatred while covering the troll's campaign.
Prisoners in US prisons are excluded from work safety standards. They
can be maimed on the job due to lack of safety equipment and training,
and the US government covers it up.
Global heating, by changing the seasons, is causing birds to arrive at
their
summer breeding grounds too early. Some find an absence of food.
How the CIA
manipulates the US media.
A fear-spreading city council member in Los Angeles
proposed to make
it a crime for an adult to enter a playground if not accompanied by
children.
Doesn't that fool realize how easy it is for the hypothetical
stranger-molester to arrange to bring a child? One child would pave
per way to meet other children.
Nearly all adults that have sex with children are their relatives or
friends of the family. What could be more natural than to bring that
child in order to meet another?
It would be more logical to prohibit adults that do bring children.
Fortunately the LA Times rebuked this stupid idea.
The US Export-Import Bank
lent over 8 billion dollars to Pemex,
Mexico's
state oil company.
Even if it oil extraction were not dangerous to the world,
that certainly counts as corruption.
American adults under 64 have a 40% higher chance of dying
if they
don't have medical coverage.
This means that
SCROTUS and
the troll, when they plan to cancel Obama's medical care plan, are
planning to kill tens of thousands of people. And if they eliminate
Medicare, they will kill even more.
This article, a couple of years later, suggests that the number
increased
over that time.
Because Fox Asked,
Here Are Examples Of [Americans] Who Were Denied
Health
Care.
To teach your children discretion about what to post on social media,
you have to respect their privacy.
This article recommends a rule: never post anything personal about
family members or friends without explicitly asking permission.
I suggest not posting photos of anyone else, except people who
have sought public attention (me, for instance).
Paying for digital services
through surveillance can do people a lot
of harm.
China's kidnapping of publishers has
crushed the Hong Kong publishing
industry.
Bookstores have been privately censored, or shut down, so that books
that criticize China are now hard to find, if they are published at
all.
Angela Gui, daughter of a kidnaped publisher, has been
warned not to
go to Asia lest she too be attacked by Chinese agents.
Everyone:
urge
Protonmail to make its Javascript code free
such that LibreJS can recognize it.
Gingrich argues that the president's power to pardon is so powerful
that it permits making anyone whatsoever completely above the law.
He didn't urge the troll to do this; it seems he was rather warning
that the troll might do this.
Ever since President Ford pardoned President Nixon, I have believed
that we should amend the constitution to reduce the president's
power to pardon crimes connected with the federal government.
Specifically, the president should not have the power to pardon crimes
that were committed by anyone holding elected or appointed federal
office at the time of the crime, or any crime carried out as part of
working for the federal government or cooperation with the federal
government.
New York State will not allow the Trump Foundation to dissolve
because it is being
investigated for alleged corruption.
Shi'ite Iraqi Ali Amin Abdullah
survived 2 years in Mosul under the
rule of PISSI by pretending to be Sunni.
He did this so effectively that the Iraqi army put him in prison
and his family cannot find him.
There is a rational need to do something to prevent PISSI supporters
from remaining underground in Mosul and setting up cells to try to
take power again. But it has to be done without terrorizing masses of
people because they appear to be Sunnis, or even because they are
Sunnis.
Obama's last blow against the US independent press: establishing an
"anti-propaganda center" for "recognize, understand, expose, and
counter" foreign propaganda.
In principle, that's not a bad thing to do; in practice, almost any
sort of US state propaganda could be described as "countering" some
sort of foreign propaganda. A single foreign article published
anywhere in the world could serve as the excuse for a mammoth US
government propaganda campaign.
Looking back over the history of American journalism, we find, about a
century ago, that articles based on
rumors
and lies were common.
The imperialist war against Spain was started through such pressure.
The slogan for the war was "Remember the Maine", alluding to a US
warship
that exploded mysteriously in Havana. The most recent investigation
concluded it was an internal explosion.
Movements for independence in Cuba and the Philippines were both
crushed by the US, which turned Cuba into a puppet government, and
reduced the Philippines to a colony after years of war and repression.
The rain in Spain
fell mainly on fresh vegetables for sale to the UK,
so UK supermarkets will fly in fresh vegetables from the US.
The heavy rain was probably a result of global heating, and flying the
vegetables will surely cause more global heating. This is one little
example of how civilization can fall.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is going to be
threatened again
by the troll and his extractivist cabinet members.
A
guide
to the planned US protests on Jan 21.
Bangladeshi clothing factories crushed a week-long strike and protest
with
the
help of thugs.
They fired 1500 workers and blacklisted them. This is "free trade"
at
work.
The article calls this a "blow" to the Bangladeshi clothing industry,
but I disagree, because it appears to me that the bad guys won.
(Nonetheless, it was a good try!)
A real blow to the industry will be if the workers win.
How far has sexual repression in the US gone? A
proposed law to
establish a 5-year maximum penalty for sex involving teenagers (in
certain limited cases) is actually a reduction in the
repression.
Cheetah numbers are
dropping fast.
Global heating
threatens
the survival of reindeer. They can dig through dry snow to find
food, but they can't break a surface of ice from rain that froze on
the ground.
Gingrich argues that the president's power to pardon is so powerful
that it
permits
making anyone whatsoever completely above the law.
He didn't urge the troll to do this; it seems he was rather warning
that the troll might do this.
Ever since President Ford pardoned President Nixon, I have believed
that we should amend the constitution to reduce the president's
power to pardon crimes connected with the federal government.
Specifically, the president should not have the power to pardon crimes
that were committed by anyone holding elected or appointed federal
office at the time of the crime, or any crime carried out as part of
working for the federal government or cooperation with the federal
government.
New York State will not allow the Trump Foundation to dissolve
because it is
being
investigated for alleged corruption.
Shi'ite Iraqi Ali Amin Abdullah survived 2 years in Mosul under the
rule of PISSI by
pretending
to be Sunni. He did this so effectively that the Iraqi army put
him in prison and his family cannot find him.
There is a rational need to do something to prevent PISSI supporters
from remaining underground in Mosul and setting up cells to try to
take power again. But it has to be done without terrorizing masses of
people because they appear to be Sunnis, or even because they are
Sunnis.
The rain in Spain fell mainly on fresh vegetables for sale to the UK,
so UK supermarkets
will
fly in fresh vegetables from the US.
The heavy rain was probably a result of global heating, and flying the
vegetables will surely cause more global heating. This is one little
example of how civilization can fall.
Looking back over the history of American journalism, we find, about a
century ago, that
articles
based on rumors and lies were common.
The imperialist war against Spain was started through such pressure.
The slogan for the war was "Remember the Maine", alluding to a US
warship that exploded mysteriously in Havana. The most recent
investigation concluded it was an internal explosion.
Movements for independence in Cuba and the Philippines were both
crushed by the US, which turned Cuba into a puppet government, and
reduced the Philippines to a colony after years of war and repression.
Obama's last blow against the US independent press: establishing an
"anti-propaganda
center" to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter" foreign
propaganda.
In principle, that's not a bad thing to do; in practice, almost any
sort of US state propaganda could be described as "countering" some
sort of foreign propaganda. A single foreign article published
anywhere in the world could serve as the excuse for a mammoth US
government propaganda campaign.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is
going
to be threatened again by the troll and his extractivist cabinet
members.
A
guide
to the planned US protests on Jan 21.
How far has sexual repression in the US gone? A proposed law to
establish a
5-year
maximum penalty for sex involving teenagers (in certain limited
cases) is actually a reduction in the repression.
Bangladeshi clothing factories
crushed
a week-long strike and protest with the help of thugs. They fired
1500 workers and blacklisted them. This is "free trade" at work.
The article calls this a "blow" to the Bangladeshi clothing industry,
but I disagree, because it appears to me that the bad guys won.
(Nonetheless, it was a good try!)
A real blow to the industry will be if the workers win.
Cheetah numbers are
dropping
fast.
Everyone:
urge
Maine legislators to impeach the governor of Maine.
Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin because the crucial
witness spoke a strongly nonstandard dialect of English, typically
found among blacks, and the jurors
interpreted
her testimony wrong by taking it as standard English.
More analysis confirming that Rachel Jeantel spoke in a typical form
of
African-American
Vernacular English, though with a little influence from Haitian
Kreyol, and that she consistently followed the grammatical and lexical
rules of her dialect. The jurors (none of whom knew that dialect)
frequently misunderstood her testimony.
I support the idea that courts should use interpreters whenever
witnesses appear to be speaking in a dialect that many jurors will not
understand.
This also demonstrates how important it is for everyone in the US to
learn to speak a more standard form of English — standard enough
that you won't be systematically misunderstood. Not that you
shouldn't ever speak some other dialect that you grew up with —
but don't let that be the only one you can use fluently.
The US government has
started
asking visitors to give a list of their social media accounts.
Although the answer is not required, many visitors will fear to
decline.
A
link
between Michael Flynn and the KGB.
Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size
distorts
the market.
We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any
market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial
for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be
served by a regulated utility.
The Scandal of
Vast
Inequality in Retirement Pay.
The CEOs pushed their income way up the same way they pushed US
workers' wages down.
Americans'
customary
response to small harmful freak event: demand someone turn the
world upside down to make sure it "never happens again".
This American Fought [PISSI]. Now He's Trying to Get Washington to
Untangle Its
Syria
Policy.
Afghanistan's
military
aid funds support local militias, ostensibly to fight the Taliban,
but they also fight each other and the central government.
Because of overpopulation,
millions
in Manila live in areas that often flood. But hurricanes are
getting stronger and in the future will flood nearly all of Manila.
Meanwhile, crop failures will mean food is scarce.
How to cope with this in the future? Condoms and sterilizations will
help.
Due to global heating, major floods in the UK are
likely
to happen every year.
The ministers not only don't have a plan to deal with it,
they intend to continue the policies that created it.
It would be
useful
in schools to teach adolescents to think critically about porn.
The FBI has collected photos of half the adults in the US, and many
city thug departments feed cameras on the street into this data base
to recognize
everyone walking by.
More
information.
We need laws to restrict putting faces with names into a face
recognition data base.
Schooled in Terror: The Tactical Trainings Where Cops
Militarize
Their Brutality.
Sexist sexual repression in the US starts in school with a
dress
code.
One way girls can push back is by wearing oversize yellow shirts
and making it a new style.
US citizens:
call
on Obama, once again, to pardon Snowden now.
The troll's
proposed
ambassador Israel would be better suited for Israeli ambassador to
the US, but only under a virulent racist extremist government of the
farright.
Egypt Arrests [vacationing] Al-Jazeera Journalist over
"Provoking
Sedition".
Egypt is one of the few countries I have never seen, that I would
specifically like to visit. But I wouldn't go there now; I am afraid
of the repression. I don't suppose the Egyptian regime hates free
software, but it might object to something I say on this site. In
addition, the Egyptian government is so random about its repression
that anyone there could be imprisoned for years
simply
for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I urge tourists to punish Egypt by boycotting it.
A fake news site published a report that Israel threatened a nuclear
attack against Pakistan. The report was false, but
Pakistan's
counter-threat was real.
Focusing on mental illness and failed relationships as causes of
misery
should
not be used to excuse policies that cause poverty.
Poverty has a tendency to cause stress, which can exacerbate mental
illness and provoke relationship problems.
Many mammals can see ultraviolet light. The reason they won't walk
under an electric power line is that those cables
emit
flashes of UV.
Israel threatens to punish the UN by
breaking
off ties with it.
Factory Near Carrier Sends Jobs to Mexico, But
Trump
Just Tweets.
Identity politics is valid opposition to bigotry, but when its
supporters are
not
also the poor and downtrodden, it can turn into "It's ok for
people to be poor as long as it's not due to bigotry."
"You don't build the left by figuring out which victim has been most
victimized; you build it by organizing all the victims."
It seems Betsy DeVos advocates using government money to
subsidize
religious inculcation. Privatizing schools may be a covert scheme
to achieve this.
Campaigns against torture tend to overlook the
everyday
torture of poor people — those who, lacking fame or foreign
supporters, can be tortured with impunity.
Boycott Dr Seuss the greedy, grasping
copyright
bullying.
Thomas Piketty: We Must
Re-Think
Globalization, Or Trumpism Will Prevail.
Thousands of Chinese ships
travel
long distances to fish illegally all around the world. They will
surely wipe out all fisheries that are not protected from them.
Protests (as such) can't take power away from right-wingers.
Only an
electoral
movement can do that.
Madison, Mississippi, passed a law
requiring
every store, business and professional office to run a security
camera. This includes doctors' offices and lawyers' offices.
There's a danger that the city will make this even worse, by requiring
businesses to hand over the recordings without a warrant. Though that
might be overturned as unconstitutional.
Why
Christmas
Time in China Means Jail for Human Rights Activists.
The troll has nominated a man with
no
diplomatic experience to supervise peace negotiations with Israel
and Palestine.
The nominee is well suited to that sinecure, since Netanyahu has
already rejected peace and
has
not held any serious negotiations for many years.
Dishonest publishing lobbyists are
trying
to recruit the troll to make the DMCA even worse.
I was delighted to see that the article recognizes the
absurdity of the
term "intellectual property". I've been explaining this to people
for 12 years now.
The article refers to misrepresentation of the US Constitution
regarding copyright law.
See
https://gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
for how I treat that point.
In 2015, two Turkish members of parliament accused the Turkish state
of shielding
people who provided Sarin gas to Syrian rebels.
This was originally published in the newspaper Today's Zaman, which
was
shut
down arbitrarily by the Turkish government earlier this year.
This accords with claims made by
Seymour
Hersh.
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, describes how Obama
recognized
these facts and cancelled the plan for military intervention in
Syria.
Now Yemen gets its cluster bombs
from
Brazil.
The US Department of Justice is
letting
banks off the hook for giant frauds with inadequate fines.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject Pruitt as head of EPA.
US citizens:
call
on Obama not to start an arms race in space.
The troll said he would stop foreign workers from taking jobs in the US,
but his family's vineyard has
applied
to bring in foreign workers.
Republicans are striving mightily in various states to
block
local laws and even state-level referendums to raise the minimum
wage.
Unauthorized immigrants in the US pay
lots
of taxes, including Social Security tax, although they can't get
Social Security benefits.
George Lakeoff: we who
oppose
the troll should show that he is a loser, corrupt, and a betrayer
of trust. That undermines his message. But we should focus, not on
the troll himself, but on what policies make a nurturing society.
Rick Perry is accused of corruption as governor of Texas, and he
could
easily carry this forward to the US Department of Energy.
US right-wingers make a fuss about religious freedom, but really it's
only when Christians want to
impose
their religion on others.
Republicans in Congress are
frightened
to disagree with the troll on anything. His mob of extremist
supporters, organized through Breitbart, keeps them in check.
This could be the reason why the troll
continues
to hold rallies of the same sort he did during the campaign.
Charter schools in the US are
businesses
subsidized by public funds with very little accountability. They
are now going through a wave of mergers.
The troll, naturally, wants to unleash them to drain even more funds
away from American children's education.
The Nigerian army has
captured
the last Boko Haram camp in the Sambisa forest, which they used to
control.
Alas, this doesn't automatically wipe out Boko Haram. A permanent
camp is useful for operations, but they can surely survive moving
around in the forest.
Kamala Harris is
trying
again to prosecute Backpage and its owners for publishing ads for
escorts, who are probably prostitutes, because some of them may in
fact be minors.
Prostitution should be lawful. Prohibiting the advertising of
prostitution does no good for prostitutes, and tends to force them to
work on the street, which hurts them plenty.
The principal way to prevent women and girls from being forced into
prostitution is to reduce poverty.
Some women are forced into prostitution by violent threats by pimps.
It is hard to prevent that — banning advertising won't do it.
Maybe targeted surveillance could be made to work.
Thailand's new "computer crime act" includes
punishment
for violating vague censorship rules.
Thailand is one of the countries that I won't visit, because of the
repression there. I encourage everyone to boycott Thailand.
The troll's plan to
move
the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would be an explicit
endorsement of Netanyahu's intention for a permanent occupation of
Palestine.
As more children in the UK fall into poverty, the Tories handled it by
eliminating
the special government program meant to reduce the causes of
poverty.
Perhaps the government want to reduce them — since the main
cause of poverty in the UK today is the Tory party.
Another refugee died after
months
of being denied access to Australian medical care. The refugee
was imprisoned by Australia on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
The refugees that die are a small fraction, but they are all subject
to grave mistreatment every day.
Former president Rousseff fights to clear her name of the
charges
used by the right wing to seize power.
A House committee prepared a report to smear Snowden, but
couldn't
demonstrate anything bad about him. Snowden called it
"accidentally exonerating".
It is
full
of falsehoods and distortions.
I speculate that the purpose of this report is to influence the
general climate of public opinion against Snowden, and thus oppose the
campaign asking Obama to pardon him.
Sad to say, that tactic sometimes works. I know someone who is
generally sensible, who has been persuaded by the parade of lies to
call Snowden a traitor.
Obama finally stood up to Netanyahu,
allowing
the UN to rebuke Israel's colonization of the West Bank. This is
a reversal, because Obama has
bent
over backwards to prevent UN criticism of Israel.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has been
accelerating
the colonization, while completely shutting down the possibility
of a peace deal with Palestine.
Netanyahu has displayed
overt
arrogance towards the US, and mostly Obama has swallowed this,
because Congress gives Israel almost bootlicking support.
All this
as
American Jews become increasingly critical of Israeli occupation
policies.
US citizens:
protest
on Jan 9 against the troll's worst saboteur nominees for cabinet
positions.
If necessary, you can hand-edit that URL, substituting your zip code
into it.
Haitian warlord Guy Philippe has been arrested for US drug charges. Philippe fronted the US-backed coup that overthrew elected President Aristide.
With the REINS act,
SCROTUS would
make all new federal regulations
require specific
approval from Congress.
Nothing
is too ugly for a trumpet to say.
The ACLU has got a court order to
stop
schools from arbitrarily demanding drug tests of students.
There is no justification for making people take tests of whether they
have used recreational drugs in the past few days or weeks.
In certain special circumstances it is justified to require someone to
take a test of whether per functioning is currently impaired by a
drug; but that's a different kind of test. And doing schoolwork
is not one of those special circumstances.
Irish homeless people, with support from the community,
occupied
a vacant building to make places they could sleep.
Naturally, the government took the side of the future and past rich
owners rather than people who need a place to sleep. That's a sign of
fundamental callousness: those politicians should spend some months
sleeping on the street to understand what is at stake here.
North Carolina Republicans said they would repeal the "bathroom bill"
if Charlotte repealed its antidiscrimination law which said that
people could use the bathrooms of their own gender identity.
Charlotte did so, upon which the state Republicans
did
not repeal the "bathroom bill".
Republicans are like Trump: cheaters! Never make a deal with
Republicans — if you care whether they keep it.
I suggest that Charlotte pass its bill again, just to show those
cheaters for what they are.
The EU is
considering a plan
to take fingerprints from all visitors. It has no specific
grounds for this violation of privacy, just a vague handwaving that
this is good for "security".
How the group Hope not Hate
teaches
people to have calm discussions to diffuse the anger that promotes
bigotry.
A Breitbart internet mob latched on to a rumor and bullied a Jewish
family with
threats
that made them fear violence.
The Daily Mail attempted a hatchet job against the people behind
snopes.org. Fortunately, without causing much damage. But it raises
the suspicion that the Daily Mail
doesn't
want facts to be checked or myths to be busted.
The troll seems to have
pressured
Egypt to delay a UN resolution to condemn Israel's colonization of
Palestinian territory.
Has the troll violated the Logan act? Could he be prosecuted for this
now? Could that prevent him from taking office?
Apartheid is imposed by the Israeli government on
70%
of towns in Israel: Arabs are entirely excluded.
Right-wing extremists in Israel's government are
setting
their repressive sights on academic freedom. No one, they
believe, should be allowed to question their politics in school.
Unlike the still-risible Professor Witchlist in the US, this will
be state-imposed, enforced censorship.
Israel still claims to be a democracy, but it allows ever less
in the way of human rights.
There were Israelis that predicted after 1967 that occupation of
Palestine would destroy Israel's spirit. I have to say they were
right. The reason the occupation continues is the Israeli colonies
constructed in Palestine by Israelis that want to expel the
Palestinians, slowly.
The current Israeli government has sped up the construction, and the
expulsion. Most Palestinians have
given
up hope of ever having a state of Palestine.
Now that California kicked out Uber's crash-risking driverless cars,
citizens
of Arizona must organize to do likewise.
The Philippine Commission on Human Rights
will
investigate Duterte's confessed killings.
The rate of use of marijuana by teenagers in Colorado is the
same
as it was before the state legalized marijuana sales in stores, to
within the margin of error for surveys.
The
"half-blind
trust" that the troll proposes for his conflicts of interests
would be an absurd parody of a solution.
Workers in the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas
won
a new contract, but the troll is likely to sabotage the NLRB so
that unions can't win any more.
SCROTUS have
another
plan to cut Social Security. In typical right-wing dishonesty,
the plan tries to camouflage the cuts with smaller increases for a
fraction of workers.
Craig Murray says that he received the leaked Democratic Party emails,
from an intermediary who told him that they were
leaked
by an insider.
Ecuador is
acting
to forcibly shut down Acción Ecológica, which
opposes oil drilling in the Amazon.
A future climate lawsuit against Washington state
parallels
the federal future climate lawsuit.
Many of the plaintiffs, now teenagers, could live long enough to see
the years when climate mayhem kills lots of Americans, and be killed
by it.
North Carolina's civil rights campaign, the Moral Mondays, has
succeeded so well that it
elected
a Democrat as governor.
Its success is helped by appealing to universal goals rather than a
specific identity — like the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
A minority that is the target of prejudice and bigotry is entitled to
demand better treatment, but it is hard to get majority support for
changes by setting yourself against the majority. A campaign for
universal values, such as justice for all (so that the minority is no
longer an exception) is more likely to succeed.
The Moral Mondays could win the election for governor because that
runs by simple popular vote. But it can't win back the state
legislature, because that election is
rigged.
Now that thugs have killer robots to use, we have to consider the
danger
that their use will become attractive and frequent.
Does concern about that eventuality seem like borrowing trouble? In
1970 it might have seemed silly to worry that SWAT teams would be used
50,000 times a year, and often against suspects not known to be armed.
Where other large banks have agreed to pay billions in penalties for
cheating millions of American homeowners,
Barclays bank decided to fight the charges.
I wonder if Barclays Bank has made a deal with the troll. Perhaps to
lend one billion dollars with no collateral as part of a scheme
like the one
he did decades ago,
in exchange for being let off the hook.
I don't have enough faith in the honesty of either party to regard
this as impossible.
I expect the penalties are insufficient to deter banks from doing such
things in the future. I don't have any specific knowledge about that,
but it's the usual weak practice of the US.
Arleen Matthews worked for a local government in the UK taking care of
temporary housing. She couldn't pay her own rent, and became
homeless, so she made arrangements with one of those tenants to let
her sleep in a garage.
When her employer found out,
it fired her. What callousness.
CO2 released by melting permafrost could
add .5C extra heating in this
century. The methane released could add even more, for the short
term.
Chopping down (or drying up) a large forest
can alter the climate all around the world.
Everyone:
call on
Democrats in Congress to skip the troll's inauguration.
US citizens:
call
on states to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,
so that presidential elections will be decided by the popular vote.
US citizens:
call on the
Senate to reject Tillerson as Secretary of State.
For
more
explanation.
A video shows a Texas thug
attack
and arrest a woman and her teenage daughter, because she raised
her voice to the thug.
Per standard practice, the thug made false accusations against the two
of them.
The troll said he
wants
a nuclear arms race.
Assuming nuclear weapons continue not to be used, this will be a
bonanza for weapons companies and an excuse to further cut social
programs that people depend on for their lives.
A tribe in the Brazilian Amazon fights violent illegal deforestation
with
their
own traditional arms, as well as modern technology.
Nearly all people who sleep on the street face
frequent
attacks from passers by. The get as bad as kicking them in the
head, and rape.
4000 rebels and civilians were
calmly
evacuated from Aleppo, and Assad's forces took control.
I think this means that the bloodbath and torture fest that some had
feared will not take place.
Obama has
ordered
the elimination of the inactive NSEERS tracking program which was
set up under Dubya to track Muslim visitors to the US.
Tracking 80,000 Muslim visitors must have created plenty of
resentment, but it did exactly zero to reduce terrorism.
Hope not Hate, in the UK, demands an apology from the
right-wing
politician who launched an internet mob attack.
This is "a David v Goliath struggle, where the other side portrays
itself as the underdog, yet in reality is backed by an online army and
millionaires in the wings."
The latest (presumably) Chinese counterfeit food product: fake rice,
made
of plastic.
Facebook lurkers are
likely
to feel happier if they stop being used by Facebook for at least a
week.
If you want to "engage with others" more, how about doing it
outside of Facebook? That would provide the same benefits
and would avoid giving Facebook any more information about you or the
others you engage with.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter (on Jan 4 if possible) to
oppose cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
The giant new Adani coal mine in Australia was funded by the World
Bank through a program that is
supposed
to fund "sustainable development".
Why
Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives.
If the work you do is essential for fighting injustice or preventing
disaster, perhaps it is really desirable for you to work as much as
possible. Otherwise, you shouldn't have to work so hard, and the
reason you do is because an exploitative system wants to extract as
much as it can from you. Rather than working hard for it, better to
organize against it.
Oracle executive George Polisner has resigned in protest against the
CEO's
acceptance of a position in the troll's "transition team".
Joseph Stiglitz describes how the IMF and the US fixed the Russian elections
in the 1990s
in
favor of Yeltsin.
Kuwait's annual diplomatic reception was scheduled for some other hotel,
but the troll's staff
pressured
Kuwait to move it to the troll's hotel.
The best defense against truck-ramming terrorism is with simple
physical
barriers. There is no need to panic.
Especially there is no need to authorize increased surveillance of
people in general. The Berlin truck attacker was a known known
terrorist sympathizer who
had
been investigated and was facing deportation soon.
This specific suspicion could have been used (and, I expect, was used)
to obtain orders for surveillance and searches targeted at him
personally. Increases in surveillance of everyone in Germany would
have provided no more information about him.
It looks like they have
lots
of possible suspects (only a tiny fraction of whom will actually
commit any crime) that they can't keep close tabs on all of them.
Many
places in the US have high levels of lead in the water, enough to
be a real danger to children growing up there.
A proposed EU directive to reduce tax-dodging by businesses has been
undermined
by officials in favor of continuing the tax-dodging.
Trumpery doesn't replace the neoliberal mindset (society is nothing
but business); rather, it takes that mindset to a
further
extreme.
The new FCC commissioners
intend
to eliminate network neutrality rules so that ISPs can mistreat
and manipulate their customers more.
Thousands of retired Americans are having their social security payments
confiscated to pay the
interest
on student loans.
For 2/3 of them, the confiscation pays only interest, so the principal
of the loan does not decrease. They will go on paying this way until
they die, or they elect progressive officials.
It will be hard for the troll's children to avoid
insider
trading charges, if they buy and sell stock and are involved in
policy matters.
The troll's sons
plan
to sell meetings with him for a million dollars, to anonymous
"donors".
India is
investing
heavily in renewable energy and expects to make 57% of its
electricity that way in 10 years.
The European Union is
talking
about taking action against Poland's nondemocratic changes in law.
The year 2016 in
American
child-protection mania.
The Clintons
Turned
the Democratic Party Over to Donors. Can It Recover?
Alas it wasn't just the Clintons. Plenty of Democrats in Congress
still stand for the same center-right positions.
A Nauru refugee has been
denied
medical treatment for a heart attack for a month now.
We urgently need to reduce emissions of soot, so as to stop
blackening
and melting ice.
We wouldn't be grasping at these straws if we had started acting
rationally 15 years ago.
Who disagrees with the studies that show sugar causes obesity?
Researchers
funded
by the sugar industry.
Those sugar-funded scientists will give the sugar industry a way to
claim that there is doubt about the question. Does this seem familiar
to you?
Obama has finally placed a
permanent
ban on oil extraction on most of the Atlantic and Arctic coasts.
The end result of UK austerity is now visible in
the
people sleeping on the streets.
The European Court of Justice ruled that states
may
not collect people's emails indiscriminately.
This could
force
revision of the UK's massive snooping law.
Temporary agencies in the UK profit by
systematically
cheating the employees.
The corrupt Brazilian government is
planning
to legalize massive deforestation.
George Monbiot: Celebrity Isn't Just Harmless Fun — It's the
Smiling
Face of the Corporate Machine.
It is especially disappointing that what young people desire
most is to be famous.
An Israeli politician
wishes
that Arab citizens didn't vote.
In fact, the government
wants
to find an excuse to ban the candidates they elect.
Compare this with the troll, who said he was
glad
many black Americans didn't vote. As usual, he was bullshitting,
since they tried to vote but his party dishonestly
stopped
them from voting.
Torture of Palestinian prisoners is common in Israel. There have been
1000
complaints since 2001, and Israeli officials have dismissed every
one.
Israel has declared half the land area of the West Bank for ethnic
cleansing, and is using a
broad
campaign of repression to drive Palestinians out.
Israel is
confiscating
parts of an old Palestinian cemetery just outside Jerusalem, with
the excuse of making the land into a park.
The troll's proposed ambassador to Israel
viciously
insults Jews that disagree with his politics.
Israel is
threatening
to expel an Australian journalist, but Palestinian journalists get
imprisoned instead.
A business in the UK will have to pay a
million
pounds to some of the workers it enslaved.
Isn't it a crime to imprison people and threaten the with violence
using attack dogs? Why are those abusers being allowed to get off
with a monetary payment?
A UK woman is suing the thugs for having an undercover infiltrator
seduce
her and break up her previous relationship.
The troll is
continuing
to hold campaign rallies, apparently to stir up his supporters
with the latest bullshit.
That he praises them for being violence-maddened suggests to me that
he intends to use them as a kind of private army, for some sort of
harassment that he won't be able to get official thugs to do.
More
officials have been charged about the Flint lead poisoning.
It is good to prosecute the individuals that are responsible, but we
must also get rid of the system that is responsible: the
"emergency
manager" system that Republicans in Michigan created so they could
set aside democratic local government in Detroit and Flint, so as to
screw the residents there.
Workers in the UK should unite against "free trade" that means
moving
jobs to places where workers can be paid a pittance.
And then they should insist that all workers get enough pay, and
enough hours, to
make
work pay.
"Taking back control" does not mean people should get offered
a
few horrible alternatives to choose from. That's like choosing
between a proprietary Microsoft system, a proprietary Apple system,
and a mostly proprietary Google system.
The EU accuses Facebook of
lying
when it applied for permission to buy WhatsApp.
If Facebook is fined $100 million, that won't be enough to deter it
from lying again the same way. Laws should be changed so that mergers
approved as a result of fraud can be undone, with fines far larger.
A poll reports that
most
Americans, even most Republicans, support clean energy and
reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet Republican politicians regularly, almost without exception,
convince those same Republicans to choose denialist candidates.
The European Commission has done next to nothing to enforce emission
standards against the
car
companies that have cheated on tests.
Finland will try giving money
for
two years to some currently unemployed people.
Islamist terrorists and right-wing extremists
want
the same thing: to create social hostility that they can profit
from. Don't help them.
The Professor Witchhunt web site (to call it what it is)
mixes
false rumors with some true facts to create a potential threat to
intellectual freedom in the US.
Several New Orleans thugs were
convicted
or pled guilty to killings, beatings and false accusations made
against innocent people who were trying to flee New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina. Now the city has paid millions to the victims.
It is exemplary that thugs were prosecuted for the more frequent
lesser crimes, and not solely when they had killed someone.
Polish protesters
made
the regime withdraw planned restrictions on journalists in the
parliamemt building.
As the ice melts, the
polar
bears of Hudson's Bay head towards extinction.
US citizens:
call on
Obama and Feinstein to publish the CIA torture report.
Many unions are striking in the UK. Other workers should
follow
their example.
The US Protects Its Wealthy Professionals Financially While
Throwing
Workers to the Wolves.
Salafi Arabia has acknowledged
dropping
UK-made cluster bombs in Yemen. This puts pressure on the UK to
stop selling arms to Salafi Arabia.
The melting of Arctic ice has deranged the jet stream,
causing
strange weather all around the northern hemisphere.
It
endangers
the way of life, and the language, of some indigenous peoples, as well
as the land they live on.
Everyone:
Call
on tech companies to refuse to help the troll register US Muslims.
Instead of identity politics, let's campaign for a government the
provides
justice
and a good life for all.
Also, we can oppose bigotry (whether conscious or unconscious) and
work against it without identifying with a particular identity.
A Jew
condemns
the troll's choice for ambassador to Israel.
The UK Labour Party calls for
regulation
of algorithms used by servers in some cases.
If you can't resist obligatory gift holidays, at least give gifts that
don't
take a lot of resources and don't produce permanent trash.
The Republican
Sabotage
of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Poland Is "on Road to Autocracy",
Says
Constitutional Court President. When his term ends, soon, Poland
may reach the end of that road.
Various Republican-dominated states are trying to propagandize for
their idea that fetuses are human beings with rules requiring
hospitals to
treat
fetuses as dead human bodies.
It is possible to identify at age 3 a fraction of people who will
place a big burden on society, from a few
measurements
of "brain health".
How many such people there are is partly under our control. It is
clear that lead poisoning can put people into that fraction, so the
amount of lead that gets into people will make that fraction bigger or
smaller.
If people get bothered by the fictional all-seeing eye of the
"Elf
on the Shelf", maybe they will start being concerned about
real
systems that do pervasive surveillance.
Tillerson is a director of Bahamas-registered Exxon subsidiary that is
involved
with Russia.
Companies in the Bahamas usually exist to hide income or dodge taxes.
Maybe that is what this one is for. Exxon claims that it doesn't
dodge taxes in one particular way. The denial is phrased in a
legalistic way that makes me suspect it's a word game. Maybe this
subsidiary dodges taxes in some other way.
Identifying the
15
tax havens, measured by the amount of harm they do.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter on Jan 4
to oppose cuts in Medicare. Say that includes
anything that reduces benefits or increases costs,
such as "balance billing".
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
With automation reducing the number of well-paid jobs, most remaining
jobs pay next to nothing and employers prefer
trafficked
workers.
Google says that it's not to blame that its algorithm
makes
a denialist site the number one answer to questions about the
holocaust, but Google tunes that algorithm to serve its own
interests.
Note that what the author reports buying is an ad to appear in the
search results page, not an actual search result.
Xu Hongci was a member of the Chinese Communist Party, campaigning
idealistically for a better world. Eventually he learned the hard way
that
it
had set up a tyrannical regime.
Meanwhile, back in the US, the tyrannical side of the troll is
not
hidden behind goodness.
Giving or receiving gifts on an obligatory gift holiday is an
emotional
minefield.
I recommend you do as I've done, and say, "Please don't give me gifts
for any holiday."
A consortium of German universities will
reject
Elsevier's licensing for journals.
It is good to see a sign of resistance, but it isn't clear whether
they are going to demand a real change, or only a lower price.
Japan's peace movement is
growing
in strength, stimulated by a government oriented towards
militarism.
NPR systematically
substitutes
neuropsychology for political debate.
People's actions are decided by how their brains respond to
circumstances. In areas where people frequently make ineffective
choices, it may be interesting to ask, "What leads people to make that
choice?" But the question that will help us is, "What should we do
instead?"
I think the article is mistaken in equating "progressive" thinking
with a focus on the individual rather than organizing society. What
NPR does is one thing, and what progressives do is another. NPR is
not particularly progressive. I stopped listening to its news
programs in the late 90s when I noticed how often they criticized Bill
Clinton by presenting him as leftist, which I came to recognize is
standard right-wing tactics.
Once, in the 1990s, there was an NPR call-in discussion about how
workers could get raises and improve their work environment. I called
it to suggest they should form unions, but the phone answerers told me
that this was outside the scope of the discussion. People (other than
the rich) were supposed to be divided, not united.
Congresscritters and senators that owned bank stock were
more
likely to vote to give money to banks.
Reportedly
the FBI agrees that Russia was behind leaks that targeted the
Democratic Party.
This is still not proof; but it is clear enough anyway that the troll
is the enemy of American democracy and should not become president.
Ariel Dorfman, Chilean exile,
compares
the possibly Russia-imposed government in the US with the US-imposed
government that made him flee Chile.
Tsipras is defying the banksters,
giving
funds to poor people that the banksters want Greece to starve.
Apparently he sees a crack to exploit.
Those banksters, and the banks they run, are everyone's enemy.
I hope to see them ruined.
In Nebraska, where begging has been declared a crime, beggars are
jailed for
weeks
or months until they are tried.
I have an idea. Homeless people should picket, every day, a store
whose owner advocates repression of the homeless.
Michigan made tens of thousands of
automatic
accusations of unemployment fraud. Investigation of 22,000 of
them found that 93% of the accusations were false. The victims were
hit with fines up to 100,000 dollars.
Of the 20,000 victims, I wonder if some of them were jailed because
they could not pay the fine, or lost their homes, or died because
they could not afford medical care.
Michigan is ruled by crush-the-weak Republicans. I won't say that
they intentionally designed the algorithm to make false accusations,
but it's clear that they went to great lengths to uphold them.
Punishment of the poor, justified or not, serves their politics. It
gives them an excuse to demonize the unemployed and, by extension,
anyone who gets government assistance and isn't rich.
Mass Atrocities Feared in South Sudan as Ethnic Violence Is
Stoked
by Hunger.
President Maduro of Venezuela
cancelled
the invalidation of 100-bolivar bills.
Apparently he is more ready to admit a mistake than
Modi.
Amazon Workers
Sleep
in Tents Near Firm's Scottish Depot to Avoid Travel Costs.
ACLU: The California Transportation Department Is
Cruelly
and Unconstitutionally Destroying Homeless People's Belongings.
The troll's "tech summit" was a
thinly
veiled business negotiation.
Conservatives evince more concern for environmental destruction when
it is presented as a
campaign
to restore the world as it was.
You don't have to be overweight to get type II diabetes. There are
other
causes.
Tis the season to be
sweated,
for those who make Christmas presents.
I recommend rejecting
obligatory
holiday purchases entirely.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to finalize the new fuel economy standards.
US citizens:
Support
the proposed law to require presidents and cabinet officials to
avoid conflicts of interest.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to ban neonics now.
To sign this with Javascript disabled, you need to employ the
salsalabs method.
The troll's success by broadcasting lies creates a problem
for bringing up children:
how
can parents teach them to be honest?
The Montreal Neurological Institute has
decided
to publish all its data, results, and software, and to reject
patenting anything.
This is a great step forward. It is unfortunate that they refer to it
with the vague and usually weak word "open".
Does anyone know what license they will use for publishing software?
Everyone:
call on NBC
to cut its business ties with the troll.
Even in 2011,
the
Republicans had embraced post-truth politics, where what they say
to win has nothing to do with the policies they will actually impose.
Every time Obama foolishly offered them a concession, hoping for a
compromise, the Republicans said, "Now give us another concession."
However, part of the explanation is that Obama acted for a weak,
centrist program, not a progressive one.
Twitter would close the troll's account,
if
it applied its usual rules.
A church in Maryland has been
fined
heavily for giving homeless people a place to sleep.
High inequality in the US is not inevitable. The obstacles are
political.
Wells Fargo bank cheated customers by
charging
them for useless insurance policies they never signed up for.
This means there are now several reasons to move your money out of
Wells Fargo. In addition to the ethical reasons, such as
financing
part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, there is also the protection
of your money. Don't leave your money where Wells Fargo has access to
it. If we move enough money into smaller banks, we can defeat Wells
Fargo.
National Security Advisor-to-be Flynn
violates
conflict of interest law.
Charter schools
undermine
public education, in Africa just as in the US.
Cities and even public service campaigns are outsourcing
transportation to Uber, which is a form of
privatization
of public transit. This excludes poor people, and subjects those
who do use the service to being tracked.
Lyft is no better than Uber in this regard.
The DEA corrupted employees of the TSA, airlines and Amtrak to
finger
people who might carry illegal drugs, or totally lawful cash.
How to get by on social security disability in the US: be
homeless.
Evernote has given itself additional right to
read
users' notes.
Even before this change, Evernote notes were susceptible to being read
under various circumstances. The way to protect your privacy is to
keep your notes in your own computer.
Since North Carolina elected a Democrat as governor, the Republicans
in the state legislature are
passing
laws to reduce the governor's authority.
The Republicans control the legislature due to gerrymandering that
make it nearly impossible to remove them from control.
The troll embodies a lifestyle of the rich and famous. Some voted for
him out of identification with that lifestyle — never mind that
that he
will
get even more of it at their expense.
Calling out intentional, coded racism is not a matter of "political
correctness." Such racism is not innocent, it is a
system
of propaganda.
Mass protests blocked the doors of Poland's parliament after the
ruling party
claimed
to have unconstitutionally passed a budget.
Everyone:
tell some big
banks to stop funding the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Condemning
the IHRA redefinition of "antisemitism".
Another conflict of interest for the troll: he
owes
Wells Fargo Bank a lot of money, and he could let it off the
punishment for its crimes and dishonesty.
Israel seized a
medical van
that Italy gave to Palestinians. This is part of the decade-long
campaign to exile all Palestinians from that area.
Powerful Democratic politicians
still
want to serve Wall Street.
Refuting
six
common conspiracy theories about the Middle East.
With various sides
eager
to lie, and willing to kill journalists, the war in Syria is
endangering our ability to find out the truth about the events of war.
Thai fishing boats operated by slave labor now
operate
for long periods far in the ocean, transferring their catch to
other ships to be ferried to land. This way, the fishing boats escape
from all laws, and slaves can never escape.
Greenpeace reports that this provides an entry path for
tainted seafood, and urges prohibition of the practice
of transferring caught fish to transport ships.
Technology has made fishing ever more efficient, and the result
is overfishing, as well as idleness for many fishing boats.
More efficiency in fishing is the last thing we need.
The UK government has
converted
public schooling into a system for tracking children of illegal
immigrants.
The express purpose of this is to
"create
hostility" in the school system.
They will respond by keeping their children out of school.
The right-wing double standard at work: Flynn, the troll's national
security advisor, was
rebuked
twice for revealing secrets to foreign officers.
The inspector general of the NSA condemned Snowden for releasing
information to the public instead of "going through channels" to
report abuses internally in the NSA.
Reportedly the same inspector general
retaliated
against another NSA staffer who did exactly that, and he faces
punishment for it.
As this example shows, reporting some illegality internally would be
inadequate even if it were safe. We can't rely on internal reports to
make the NSA obey laws, let alone to make it respect our freedom.
In Reed College, radical students
intimidate
teachers based on their "identity". This sort of bigotry becomes
ludicrous when, as in Reed College, the students are factually
mistaken about the people they label. But it's equally wrong when the
labels are accurate. This form of bigotry is a part of the "political
correctness" that some right-wing Americans resent.
There are much bigger patterns of bigotry in our society. Many
studies have shown that
blacks and
women
are systematically judged by a harsher standard than while males. To
measure this bigotry, we have to classify people as bigotry does.
Then we can institute measures to change the bigoted judgments.
That's where the classification should stop. To condemn speakers, to
say their views should not be heard, because of labeling them is an
injustice (which, as it happens, plays into the hands of right-wing
bigots).
Thousands in Venezuela are using bitcoin to
get
away from the inflation of the national currency.
Protests against the troll's rule
need
to focus strategically on undermining his power base.
How fake news
succeeds
in perverting the systems of Facebook and Google.
Some of the promoters of fake news are only in it for the money. They
promoted mainly anti-Clinton fake news once they saw that Clinton's
supporters were not as easy to fool as supporters of the troll.
Russia had
little
to do with the fake news problem.
In Turkey, the politics of contempt for truth led to a tyranny in
which people are
attacked
unless they repeat lies.
California has released many prisoners, but they can't find drug
treatment and
many
have trouble finding a way to live without crime.
This is a general problem in the US. 50 years ago, there were many
jobs you could get after being released from prison, and you could
live on one. Nowadays that is difficult.
Jennings, Missouri, a suburb of St Louis comparable to Ferguson,
jailed 2000 people for not paying fines. In 2014 it issued
more
arrest warrants than it had adult residents.
Basically, it set up a scheme to fund the city by squeezing money out
of the poor and weak.
1/3 of US cities prohibit homeless people (and others) from "camping"
on sidewalks, and use this as an
excuse
to steal their possessions.
When business owners and rich people demand that the city persecute
the homeless, the response they deserve is, "How would you like to be
homeless?"
500 climate scientists joined a
"stand
up for science" rally.
Uber's autonomous cars
frequently
violate traffic laws.
Uber
tries
to put the blame on human safety monitors, who could in principle
intervene to stop this.
That's the general Uber attitude: profits to the company, burdens to
the drivers.
I would guess that the safety monitors would be hard-pressed to react
fast enough to prevent these maneuvers — which would mean that they
are an excuse and a scapegoat, not a real safety system.
Mosques in Cameroon are
starting
education for girls as a campaign to turn the social climate
against Boko Haram.
An autistic teenager in Australia gave radio commands to pilots,
pretending
to be speaking from the control tower.
This kind of hack is very dangerous. I hope he can learn to
understand why he should not do it.
Many civilians were evacuated from Aleppo, but
no
places have been prepared for them to shelter.
Then the cease-fire was broken after rebels
refused
to allow evacuation of civilians from villages they have besieged.
We must condemn
Russian
atrocities just as we condemn
US
atrocities.
But the existence of Russian atrocities doesn't mean western
intervention is the solution.
The evidence does not clearly link the cracking of the DNC to Russia.
It is only suggestive,
not
conclusive.
I wouldn't be shocked if Putin ordered this. He has a penchant
for dirty tricks and for rigging elections (primarily in Russia).
But I also wouldn't be shocked if Putin had nothing to do with it.
Trump offered a major foreign policy post to John Bolton, whose
scheming
made it possible for Dubya to pretend that Saddam Hussein had chemical
weapons.
Facebook
will
use several outside fact-checkers to downgrade fake news.
New Map Reveals
Shattering
Effect of Roads on Nature.
HBO
sent
a DMCA takedown notice to a piece of art that used the phrase
"winter is coming".
The article suggests that at some point in this issue, people confused
copyright law with trademark law. The two have nothing to do with
each other.
HBO has no copyright claim based on that phrase. That phrase might be
a trademark, but the DMCA is only concerned with copyright law and is
not applicable to trademarks at all. Anyway, using a trademarked word
or symbol in a noncommercial way is not trademark infringement.
Unprecedented rapid heating in the Arctic is
showing
in many different measurements.
Michigan refused to count
75,000
votes for president, most of them in Detroit and Flint which means
they are likely to be Democratic votes. The margin of Republican
so-called victory was 10,000.
Do you think the troll really won Michigan? Not likely.
When people are
conscripted
by the DMCA into the War on Sharing.
Reasons not to use
evernote.com.
The troll's choice to head the Interior Department
promotes
coal mining at all costs to society.
American Held Over 900 Days in Egypt
Begs
US for Help Before Trump's Reign.
Many Britons
would
rather die than live in a typical lousy nursing home using up the
money they could otherwise leave to their children.
As the British state finds excuses to punish people by leaving them
destitute, they
end
up in food banks.
Evacuation of wounded people from east Aleppo
has
begun.
San Francisco has passed a law
stopping
landlords from limiting their tenants' choice of ISP.
This is a small positive step, but not applicable in many places in
the US because most places have few high-speed ISPs to choose among.
For the US to get much benefit from ISP competition, it needs to offer
most Americans a choice of many competing ISPs. Failing that, we
should prohibit ISPs from keeping any records of what their customers
connect to.
House Passes Bill
Allowing
Government to Microchip Citizens With "Mental Disabilities."
California Governor Says His State Will Be a
Sanctuary
for Science Under Trump.
George Monbiot: Neither the market nor the state can provide what
people need.
We
need commons as well.
The article starts with a brilliant presentation of the contradictions
of today's plutocratic capitalism.
Ironically, the article
refers to the GNU
system as "Linux" and mentions "open source". Monbiot is probably
not aware that
"open
source" is a corporate-friendly cover-up for views more like his.
Ohio has passed a law
banning
abortion after 20 weeks.
The aim is to create an opportunity for the Supreme Court to reverse
the Roe v Wade decision, in case Trump gets to put a theocratic
fanatic on the court.
US citizens:
call on
Obama to block the Trans-Pecos pipeline (intended to carry fracked
gas).
Many presidential electors (members of the electoral college) are
reportedly considering disregarding their states' official election
results and not voting for the troll.
It would be improper for electors to disregard the voters' choice over
political disagreement. However, on this occasion there are two
reasons why electors might legitimately decide to override the
official election results: because the troll
intends
to violate the emoluments requirement of the Constitution, and is
therefore unfit for office, and because of voter-suppression, which
means that the official election results in some states are false and
Clinton
actually won.
Haiti's Fraudulent Presidential Frontrunner
Seizes
Land for His Own Banana Republic.
The cease-fire arranged by Turkey and Russia may have failed to hold
because
Assad
needed Hezbollah's militia more than Russian bombers.
Reported details of the
phishing
attack that obtained John Podesta's password.
The article ends with claims about Russian cracking groups, but I
can't tell from this article whether those claims are credible.
Craig Murray says that the Democratic Party emails came from a
whistleblower,
not from a cracker, and that he knows the whistleblower.
I trust Craig Murray, but I am not sure which of the conflicting
stories is true.
UK women campaign
against
applying shari'a law in British family courts.
How Roberto Kozak
saved
thousands of people from Pinochet's torturers and murderers.
Duterte said that he used to drive around town
looking
for opportunities to kill suspected criminals.
The main Malaysian opposition candidate has been
imprisoned
and excluded on absurd grounds ("sodomy").
The US Senate unanimously approved a
definition
of "antisemitism" that includes political positions about Israel.
If this law is passed, it will endanger political freedom in US
universities.
An Israeli soldier
shot a
Palestinian for taking photos as the soldiers raided his town.
Two Palestinians imprisoned by Israel without charges have been
on
hunger strike for 80 days. After a court refused to release them,
they have decided to stop drinking water.
Many other Palestinians are
imprisoned
without trial.
President you-know-what
might
be driven to distraction if people don't say his name.
A US hospital chain
tricks people
into committing themselves as mentally incompetent, then holds
them as long as insurance will pay for.
This is one of many reasons to eliminate for-profit hospitals.
Officials accused of corruption in several countries have
found
shelter in the US.
In some cases, there are valid reasons for not deporting them —
for instance, that the justice system in their home country is
suspect.
Trump has announced he
will
paper over his conflicts of interest, rather than actually
eliminate them.
Price Waterhouse Coopers
tried
to suppress knowledge of a security flaw by making legal threats
against the security company that found it.
All proprietary software must be suspected of
concealing flaws, but
software from Price Waterhouse Coopers now has an extra reason for
distrust.
US government scientists are
rushing
to save copies of climate data before Trump can destroy them.
Harper in Canada ordered climate research data
thrown
in the dumpster.
We shouldn't let accusations of Russian interference blind us to the
bigger wrong of
Republican
election-rigging.
Assad's almost-completed conquest of Aleppo, together with the recent
UN resolution, create
opportunities
for intervention (not by fighting) to protect civilians in Syria.
The cease-fire agreed on did not hold, and
civilians
have not been able to leave.
Men
need to be concerned about gender violence.
Solar power backfire: in Australia, houses with solar power systems
buy
more electricity from the grid than houses without solar power.
This defeats the intended social benefit of reducing fossil fuel use.
It seems that the people who have got solar power don't think about
how much electricity they are using. Perhaps they need very visible
meters to show them how much power they are taking from the grid. Or
perhaps there needs to be a higher tax on electricity from the grid.
Why Donald Trump's Potential Conflicts of Interest Are So
Important.
The EU has
increased
fishing quotas in the teeth of existing overfishing, yielding to
short-termers' political pressure.
Across the US, the practice of keeping poor people accused of crimes
in jail unless they can pay to get out is being eliminated, but
some
places hold out.
In theory, you can post bail and get it back. But nearly everyone
pays a bail bonds company to post the bail. The bail bonds company
charges a certain fraction of the bail, and keeps it.
Philippine Senator De Lima
faces
prosecution for criticizing Duterte's murder campaign and his
removal of her from being in charge of it.
The ACLU is
suing
to overturn a Florida abortion-repression law that requires any
person or organization giving anyone advice about abortion to register
with the state, to hand out a state publication (surely full of
anti-abortion lies), and to tell the woman's parents.
The Voice of America and related US government broadcasters have been
placed directly under the president's control, and they are
now
allowed to try to influence US public opinion and beliefs.
Trump could turn them into the Voice of Trumpery, like a US version of
RT.
It appears that civilians in PISSI-held territory in Syria
were killed by a gas attack,
perhaps
sarin.
The US will stop selling some missiles to Salafi Arabia because of its
using them for
war
crimes in Yemen.
This decision does not come because the US has learned new information
about that intervention, in which it has been closely involved all
along. It is a political decision.
At least it's a change in the right direction, so I won't quibble.
Human activity emits
130
times as much CO2 as volcanoes do.
CO2 from fossil fuel combustion
can
be collected through a process that makes limestone, avoiding the
need to quarry limestone.
Most Americans
no
longer earn more than their parents did. The "land of
opportunity" is no more.
What the Department of Energy does, and why
Rick
Perry is a bad choice to run it.
I think there is something sleazy about funding nuclear weapons
through the Department of Energy. It looks like a way to disguise how
much of US government spending is actually on weapons and war.
Global heating generated a
million
climate refugees in Africa in 2015.
The EPA Withdraws Claim that Fracking has no
"Widespread
Systemic Impacts" on Drinking Water.
US citizens: Tell Congress not to create the
neo-McCarthyite
intelligence committee.
Here's
more
information about why not.
To sign the petition with Javascript disabled, you need to use the
"salsalabs method".
Brazil's senate has approved a
20-year
cut in government spending, which 60% of Brazilians oppose.
Brazil is in an economic slump, and cuts in spending are just the
thing to make it worse.
Heroin use is down in the US, but deaths from overdoeses are up. It
seems that the war on drugs is
making
heroin more dangerous.
Heroin is not particularly dangerous if it is manufactured under
proper regulation. It is dangerous because it is sold on the black
market.
The incomplete recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
have shown
substantial
abnormalities.
Individuals, and the city of Seattle, are protesting Wells Fargo Bank
for
financing the Dakota Access Pipeline.
While Bermuda is the world's most damaging tax haven, the top ten
include the
Netherlands,
Ireland, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Jersey.
Tax havens are not the only way business gets out of paying taxes.
Low
tax rates on businesses, combined with plenty of
special
exceptions, are also big parts of the problem.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters without Borders
complained to the US about
interrogation
and search of journalists trying to enter the US.
The UK
blocked
19 delegates to the annual Trust Women conference that aims to end
enslavement of women.
Canada did something similar in August,
blocking speakers coming to
the World Social Forum.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to investigate Trump's ties to Russia.
The CIA has not provided proof of its claims of Russian interference
in the election, and that claim might or might not be true. But we
don't need to wait for certain knowledge before
we investigate.
Mental Illness And Poverty: You
Can't
Tackle One Without The Other. Indeed, each tends to cause the
other.
India requires the national anthem to be played before every showing
of a movie, and
people
who refuse to stand up are arrested.
Orthodox Jews
threaten
secular Israelis with "modesty police".
130,000
gallons of petroleum have poisoned an area in North Dakota, not
far from the Standing Rock pipeline. The test equipment that was
supposed to detect leaks failed to detect this one.
To get 130,000, I have subtracted the amount of oil that was recovered
from the total amount that was spilled.
The UK has
adopted
a formal definition of antisemitism.
I see no problem in the definition itself, which
comes
from the IHRA.
However, some of the suggested interpretations pose problems. For
instance, one says that it is antisemitic to claim that the existence
of Israel is racism. I've met people who argued that the
establishment of Israel was itself an act of racism, and while I don't
agree with them, their reasoning was not based on bigotry.
Another says that it is antisemitic to compare Israel's policies
towards Palestinians to those of the Nazis.
Uri
Avnery has made such comparisons and it is
absurd
to call him antisemitic
In a free country, people can argue about these points, but the state
is not concerned. The injustice in Britain is that the state is
concerned through its censorship policies. What makes this definition
is important is that it sets the criteria for state censorship, the
boundary between opinions that are permissible and opinions that are
criminalized.
Some UK local regions have set targets for
how
many children to remove from their families and send for adoption.
The targets are a response to the annual Tory budget cuts. At this
point, there is no harmless place to cut, except the money that goes
to rich people.
10
years of European attempts to "engage" with Eritrea show that the
very idea is ridiculous.
In principle, abolishing such a cruel regime justifies war, if
Eritreans want that sort of rescue — which we cannot take for
granted — how could it be done?
Ethiopia is no friend of Eritrea. Conceivably it is possible to bring
Eritrean exiles to Ethiopia to train as an army, so that they can kick
out the government that rules Eritrea.
Of course, there are many possible reasons this could be a bad idea.
Everyone:
call
on tech companies to refuse to help Trump set up a registry of
Muslims.
Neonicotinoid pesticides
damage
bumblebees' brains so that they can't learn the way to get pollen
out of some flowers.
Prepare for
50
million refugees from flooding and water shortages by 2020,
according to a report form the Institute for Environment and Human
Security.
Daiwon McPherson
staged
an arrest scene with the local thug department to make a
spectacular proposal of marriage.
To avoid accidents, they carefully informed everyone concerned —
except one, the woman who was the target of the scene. She might have
done something drastic to protect her boyfriend. But that was
unlikely and it didn't happen.
I tend to think that starting off a marriage in such a theatrical way
bodes ill for its durability. It puts the emphasis on getting married
rather than on the relationship itself.
Amnesty International says that Qatar's "labor law reforms" are
too
weak to protect foreign workers from enslavement.
Obama has declared the CIA torture report
secret
for at least 12 years.
This decision protects the report from being destroyed by Senate
Republicans, but I'm not convinced it is safe from being destroyed by
Trump. The only way to preserve it for sure is to publish it, which I
hope will occur one way or another.
Candidate Trump criticized Goldman Sachs, and condemned Clinton for
being close to that company, but he has already
named
three people from that company as officials — now including
its president.
Obama must release
the
intelligence that purports to show Russian interference in the US
election.
"Inclusive economic development is
the
only socially and economically sustainable form of development,"
say Stiglitz and 12 other prestigious economists.
Food studies funded by food companies show a
big
tendency to praise those company's products.
This is corporate corruption of science, comparable to
the
corruption practiced by drug companies.
Some academics even publish articles that have been written for them
by food companies.
Drug
companies have done that, too.
We can develop specific measures to reduce this corruption,
but the root cause is that companies have too much money
and the state has too little. That makes all institutions
of society vulnerable to corruption.
There is a
movement
to reject end-of-year obligatory gifts.
I rejected this when I was a teenager, and am glad that I did. For
me, it was easy, as I was living nowhere near any of my family.
I didn't try to convince others about it.
Elif Shafak writes about how the imprisonment of writers in Turkey
affects
the writers not yet in prison.
Malak al-Shehri, a woman in Salafi Arabia, posted a photo showing
herself with uncovered head. She has been
arrested
for this, demonstrating the misogyny of that Islamist monarchy.
The damaging effects of that country's ultra-harsh version of Islam
can be seen in the people who demand that she be killed.
European Surveillance Companies Were
Eager
to Sell Syria Tools of Oppression.
Conjecture:
Putin intervened to help make Trump president for the sake of an oil
deal that was blocked by US sanctions.
If this is true, the US is in the position of a banana republic, with
a government imposed to serve the local elite and foreign business
interests.
US coal production is
on
the way out, with or without the EPA.
Note, however, that the reason natural gas is so cheap in the US is
fracking, and that's likely to
poison
people's drinking water unless the EPA starts doing its job.
And it may have as much greenhouse effect as coal, when
all
the leaks of gas (methane) are counted.
Rapid Rise in Methane Emissions in 10 Years
Surprises
Scientists.
A suicide bombing was seized on by Erdoğan to arrest over 200
dissidents and opposition politicians,
calling
them "terrorists".
It's clear that those people couldn't all be connected with the
bombing. Most of them, perhaps all, must be falsely accused.
Terrorism means political violence aimed at civilians. This bombing
appears to have been aimed at armed agents of the state, not at
civilians. If so, that makes it rebellion rather than terrorism.
Turkey and the PKK had a cease-fire that lasted for many years, until
it was broken by Erdoğan for
political
reasons. I hope that they mutually reestablish the cease fire,
and that Turkey returns to respecting human rights, for the benefit of
all its citizens of whatever ethnic group and whatever politics or
religion.
After years of effort,
almost
1/4 of the girls in Somaliland escape FGM nowadays.
Somaliland is a mainly peaceful country next to Somalia.
US citizens:
call
on Trump to fire Bannon for promoting bigotry.
More
information about Bannon.
Here's one of the cited examples: an article that
attacks
Anne Applebaum mainly for her political activities.
The article, by Matthew Tyrmand and published under Bannon's
authority, mentions that she is a Jew as a brief aside; that point is
not a focus of the article. However, the aside is harsh in tone, and
entirely irrelevant to the political points. The only possible reason
for including it was as an anti-semitic cheap shot.
A smog protest in Chengdu, China, met with
heavy
repression.
Because protesters wore smog masks, people wearing masks to protect
themselves from smog were also suspect.
Due to global heating, Britons will have to learn to eat
squid
instead of fish.
Crimean Tatars that oppose Russia's annexation of Crimea face
prosecution, exile, psychiatric investigations, even
disappearances.
This is what Putin does to opposition everywhere in Russia.
But the Tatars also face
collective
repression.
The Tatars are a minority in the Crimea, and would not be entitled to
determine the Crimea's fate on their own. The Crimea is full of
people of Russian origin, and it is possible that most of them in 2014
wanted the Crimea to become part of Russia. There's a good case that
they were
entitled
to a real referendum about this question.
But you can't tell anything about the public's views from an election
run under Putin's repression. His elections are
sham.
Kyrgyzstan, the one country in central Asia with some amount of real
democracy, has adopted
constitutional
changes that may reduce democracy.
Bermuda
Is World's Worst Corporate Tax Haven, Says Oxfam.
Global heating effects in the Arctic are affecting reindeer in
Spitzbergen; they
can't
find as much food in the winter.
South Korea's president has been impeached for corruption, and
protesters
now celebrate.
US citizens:
Call on
Trump not to corrupt the FCC.
Willful blindness: Australia plans to invest
4
billion dollars in a second airport in Sydney, to prepare for
increased air travel.
It takes decades for those investments to pay off, but if they keep
increasing carbon emissions, flying won't continue long enough for
that.
Apple buys US government bonds with its profits while still keeping
them
"outside
the US".
Some remote exams demand
total
control over your computer. To agree to that is extremely
dangerous: they could insert malware and copying your files.
The exam service company says it does "proctoring", but I think
"proctoscopy" describes it better.
Letting a company have total control over your computer is simply
nuts. Imagine a computer security school which asks every student to
submit to this, and flunks whoever says yes.
This was reported for a job interview for Amazon. Amazon reportedly
no longer uses that method, but the employee's words suggest that this
disservice is mainly used for course exams. There is no reason to
think schools have stopped doing this.
New York City will
cease
retaining personal data about people who apply for the NYC ID
card, to protect them from repression by Trump.
UK thugs ripped a phone out of a suspect's hands
in order to access the
data in it.
The article fails to say whether the thugs got a specific court order
to authorize the operation, but that is the crucial question. We can
accept such operations if a court has to authorize each one; however,
if thugs can do this on their own authority, that is dangerous.
Global heating has
altered
air and water circulation in the Arctic.
It looks like the Earth's ecosphere is already crossing the edge of
the cliff. Exxon has already brought about the disaster it has been
campaigning to stop us from avoiding.
Trump will now try to prevent US scientists from telling us about it.
The French government
wants
to extend the "state of emergency" yet again.
Couldn't they at least limit these powers to some extent?
Mohamed Tamalt, imprisoned in Algeria for a poem, has
died after months on hunger strike.
Merry Grav-Mass!
Trump has nominated
another
arsonist official: a global heating denialist who would ruin
federally managed land pulling out fossil fuels and burning them.
Uber claims its drivers are independent contractors, but not very
independent, since they are
not
allowed to contract for other ride companies.
By the way, it is clear that Juno has the same basic injustice as
Uber: customers must run nonfree software and identify themselves.
Uber is more nasty and arrogant, but both of them are enemies of our
freedom. We should should reject both of them completely.
Censorship on WeChat for Chinese people is now deceptive: you
can't
tell that your message was blocked.
A poll found that
more
Americans endorse torture than oppose it. Apparently Trump was
right about how to exploit the evil side of Americans.
Thousands of civilians have fled east Aleppo, and report that the
rebels
shoot at civilians that try to leave.
Russia and Syria, encouraged by the example of Guantanamo and CIA
torture, have
overturned
the Geneva conventions. They have established that no atrocity is
beneath them.
I am not convinced that a victorious Assad would make Syria into an
"Iranian-led Shia protectorate". (Assad would surely continue a
friendly relationship with Iran, but that's not the same thing.) But
if it does, I don't see that it would be as bad for the world as
Salafi
Arabia already is.
Nonetheless, I agree with the article overall. The US must stop its
imprisonment without trial.
Obama proposed measures to
punish
US companies that moved jobs out of the US. Republicans defeated
them.
Obama also proposed foolish measures to "reward" companies for not
doing so. Imagine offering each millionaire a government subsidy for
each day he didn't do some antisocial thing.
Why is it that our government tries to influence the poor by
punishing them, and to influence the rich by making them richer?
A small quantity of fentanyl can be an overdose, and due to
prohibition of opioids, it is being
included
in varying concentrations in pills labeled as other opioids.
A
new
treatment for opioid addiction is on the way.
The Pentagon
reports
intentionally bombing a building in an Iraqi hospital, saying that
PISSI fighters were firing from it.
If this is what really took place, it might have been justified.
To find out what really took place, we need another Chelsea Manning.
Everyone:
call
on the International Criminal court to prosecute American war
criminals too.
PISSI has
recaptured
Palmyra, defeating Assad's forces despite Russian air support.
The Exxon oilman, Tillerson, that Trump proposes for Secretary of
State has a
long
history of making deals with Putin's men.
Geert Wilders, a Dutch populist, was convicted of "inciting
discrimination" for
suggesting
it would be desirable to have "fewer Moroccans" in the
Netherlands.
The question of how many immigrants a country should have is a valid
political question, and it should not be a crime to say "fewer".
However, some points in
Wilders'
party platform are outright tyranny. "Preventive" imprisonment is
Guantanamo — an injustice. So is exiling citizens for crimes.
Banning the Qur'an is outrageous censorship. Kicking out asylum
seekers is cruelty.
Cutting foreign aid is cruel. Cutting public broadcasting won't save
much money and seems foolish. Not supporting research is certainly
foolish.
Some aspects of the program might be good. Increased direct democracy
could be good if implemented the Swiss way, where plebiscites can be
held to validate or to reject laws passed by the legislature.
The promise to reduce taxes and increase benefits is questionable.
That can be done for a while by deficit spending, which is the right
way to give the economy an emergency boost, but is harmful to continue
for the long haul. Does the Netherlands need an emergency economic
boost just now?
How will rents be lowered? Building more housing would do the job
well, but they might try some other less healthy method.
Cutting taxes for owning a car is a way of subsidizing fossil fuels.
Do they want the sea to overflow their dikes?
An estimated 1/4 of US prisoners were imprisoned in the
absence
of any public interest in keeping them in prison.
Nuns that feed the homeless in San Francisco got money to buy a
permanent base, but the other residents
don't
want any kindness in their building.
Everyone:
call
on two large California retirement funds to divest from the Dakota
Access Pipeline.
They should be required by law not to invest in any fossil fuels
or fossil fuel infrastructure.
Students suggest names to add to the
Professor
Watchlist.
US citizens:
stand
in support of the First Amendment.
Repressive
Hungary warns us of what Trump and the Trumpets might try to do.
Why we must keep the resistance to trumpery
nonviolent.
The coverup of the CIA-cocaine scandal of the 1980s shows we
can't
trust the major newspapers to separate truth from falsehood.
However, the situation today, where hate groups and political
manipulators fabricate a dozen fake stories a day and supporters take
them as truth, is
even
worse.
I think it is an important insight that this is not a matter of
ceasing to care about the truth, but active rejection of unpleasant
truths.
As for those that invent and post fake news, they don't believe it.
They are lying and they don't care, because they
want
to win by hook or by crook.
Did you know that, when Trump is inaugurated, he will give everyone
that voted for him the ability to fly by holding their arms out to the
side? It will be easy for them to try this: just step out the nearest
window.
Trump voters are
factually
mistaken about what happened under Obama.
This shows how effective the right-wing noise machine is at
misinforming people.
Global heating positive feedback: it will
speed
up the action of soil bacteria that metabolize carbon and release
greenhouse gas.
The effect is huge — like "adding another United States" to the
world's climate cycle.
I don't think global heating is likely to cause the extinction of
humans. That would be almost as hard as making cockroaches extinct.
But it could destroy technological society and kill most of the humans
alive at the time. If you're young today, you could live to see this
happen.
Trump seems to be planning a witch hunt
against
government employees that did any work related to global heating.
Everyone:
call
on Obama to commute Chelsea Manning's sentence.
Batteries
won
a substantial fraction of the auction to provide nighttime and
peak power in the UK.
Some existing coal plants also won, but no new large gas plants.
The article refers to some who inexplicably think it would be better
to burn gas rather than charge batteries from windfarms. I can't
imagine a rational argument for that.
Bigotry/hate groups have
figured
out how to SEO Google's page rank algorithm, so that sites saying
"Jews are evil", and falsehoods such as denial of the holocaust, come
up at the top of search questions.
It isn't clear how to defend against this. If Google chooses the
results of specific searches, it will become legally responsible
for its choices, which currently it is not.
Maybe opponents of bigotry need to play the SEO game against the hate
groups.
The Middle East
still
used leaded gas until 10-20 years ago. The effects might include
today's level of terrorist violence there.
If so, the level of terrorism there might decrease in 5-10 years.
Spikes
and railings are increasingly used in the UK to deny the homeless
any place they can sleep. When they do find a place, people are hired
to spray them with hoses.
Loud music prevents sleeping in public space. Park benches are
designed with bars so people can't sleep on them or under them. This
suggests that one way to help the homeless would be to saw off those
bars, or deactivate the speakers.
Government programs in the US are
gradually
reducing homelessness. Trump's spending cuts could put an end to
that.
The occupants of just one non-state-authorized Israeli colony
in the West Bank
face
demolition of their houses, much as thousands of Palestinians
have.
The inhabitants of Amona have a lot of warning, and won't have to pay
for the demolition. They won't find it impossible to get a building
permit anywhere else. And they, unlike most of those Palestinians,
did something to deserve this — stealing Palestinians' land.
Perhaps the US should convert its aid to Israel into purchase of the
housing in these Israeli colonies, which it could then turn over to
Palestinians.
The Indian state of Goa is
trying
to require all merchants, even in the market, to accept digital
payments.
Present-day digital payments for purchases disrespect the purchaser's
freedom because they are not anonymous. When governments pressure
people to identify themselves when they buy, we should not rely on
their pressure to be defeated by natural resistance. We should push
back, and hard.
That's why I don't use my bank card to buy anything but airline
tickets.
Senator Reid
accuses
FBI chief Comey of suppressing evidence that Russia was
responsible for cracking the Democratic National Committee.
We
don't
actually know whether Russia was responsible, though I would
not be shocked if it were. Whether or not Putin was responsible for
this, he has done nastier things already.
More importantly, we should not let the proof that the DNC corruptly
favored Clinton over Sanders be eclipsed by the question of who
obtained and released that information. If the DNC had not
rigged
the primary election for Clinton then Trump would not have come
close enough to winning for Republican officials to
steal
the rest of the way.
A fracked gas pipeline is being built across Florida, and the public
is
only
beginning to notice it.
US farmers are losing money (on the average) each year because
big
food corporations are taking all the profit in the system.
The long-term effect is that
farmers lose their land, and
it can be taken over by a big corporation.
Charges against Backpage.com and its owners, because prostitutes
advertise there in coded ways, have been
dropped.
Long live the First Amendment.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
The Dakota Access pipeline means disaster. You must consider
the threats it poses to to drinking water supplies (a likely future
disaster, as pipelines generally leak sooner or later), sacred sites
and indigenous rights, and contribution to global heating and
exacerbation of its now inevitable disaster. If the full range of
threats are included in your environmental study, I’m confident you
will determine that the Dakota Access pipeline must not be
built.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
while (policy continues)
fines *= 2;
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
Take your business
where they employ humans
instead of robots.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
there are opportunities for change in the
United States: change for the worse and change for the better.
is a cool evaluation of an unknown factor, not support.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the old link was broken.]
