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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
[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.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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:
Take your business where they employ humans instead of robots.
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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
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.
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.
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-31 because the
old
link was broken.]
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.
Prostitution should be legalized, too, and regulated to protect the rights and safety of prostitutes.
Trump says he won't actually work on Celebrity Apprentice, just get credit.
A typical piece of trumpery, because the question is not whether he does work, but whether he gets paid.
The US Border Patrol chases border crossers on the Mexican border into harsh terrain, as a tactic to kill lots of them.
The Trump energy plan: going all-out to boost greenhouse gas emissions.
France requires products of Israeli colonies in the West Bank to be labeled explicitly as such.
The US government makes its photo data base available for stores to recognize people.
The announcement says that only criminal's photos are offered for matching. But we know that the US government has photos of millions of other Americans. Does it secretly match the photos companies send against all of them, too, and make a private tracking list?
Trump's choice to head the Labor department wants the minimum wage to be low.
Due to Trump's intimidation, no US book publisher dares to publish a book of spoof Trump photos made using lookalikes.
The newspaper lobby wants to reduce
