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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.
Relating US intervention in Syria to oil.
Anti-trade-treaty protests in Bogota were crushed by soldiers sent by Colombian President Non-santos*.
He cited the usual pretexts.
UK thugs had no time to listen to Nazim Din explain that they had arrested the wrong one of his sons, so one pushed him and knocked him down. (This was easy as he was on crutches.) Mr Din died of a heart attack.
Are Chemical Weapons Reason Enough to Go to War?
Iran, Not Syria, Is the West's Real Target.
The US tacitly helped Saddam Hussein use
chemical
weapons against Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
New Zealand has adopted a law that intends to prevent issuance of new patents covering computer programs "as such".
I have not seen the exact text of this law. I hope that it is airtight. The European Patent Office is operating under a treaty which excludes "computer programs as such" from patentability, but has issued thousands of computational technique patents despite the words of the treaty on the grounds that they cover techniques, not programs as such.
Meanwhile, they failed to protect programs from lawsuits under the existing patents, as I've recommended, so it will take around 20 years for this to eliminate the problem.
Data brokers are collecting and correlating a lot more data about people than you may realize.
If this sort of snooping is "essential" for the success of some business, we must make that business fail! Meanwhile, it is possible to keep most of our lives out of their data bases, and I do so.
In a setback for journalism, UK thugs were given court approval to seize and search people's memories for "communication of material to an enemy". This is meant to refer to leaked information about dirty deeds that the government is keeping secret from its principal enemy, the people. Naturally, knowledge of these dirty deeds might help other enemies too, so this is a pretext for the state to attack all the enemies at once.
This is in addition to material that "could be useful to terrorists", which covers almost anything when applied to someone assumed to be inclined towards terrorism.
The UK laws invoked are blatant disrespect for human rights, as are many of the "anti-terror" laws there and in other countries. Terrorism exists, but it is a minor danger compared with the deadly practices these laws are used to cover up.
Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of rigging the Zimbabwe election in several ways including manipulating the voters' rolls.
Argentina's government has made a secret fracking deal with Chevron.
Businesses are pushing states to ban adherence to the LEED environmental construction standards, and substitute lax greenwash standards.
US citizens: support Senator Merkley's plan for students to pay for college based on their earnings.
US citizens: call on Secretary of State Kerry to launch an honest environmental review of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
West Papuans face charges of treason for saying they advocate independence from Indonesia.
Indonesia took over West Papua by force.
Evidence does not support claims that pornography promotes violence or sexism.
Since censorship is always dangerous, censorship of pornography cannot be excused.
The rape of middle-class women in India spurs indignation, but when poor low-caste women are raped, they face contempt and intimidation.
CEOs claim they deserve their enormous pay because they do such a great job. Of those that got the most money in the past 20 years, 40% got fired for failure, led their companies into trouble for fraud, or helped cause the financial crisis.
A lawsuit
demands
the publication of the formal legal opinions used by the US
government as the basis for its actions and to shield officials from
prosecution. They are, effectively, secret law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In the
US: sign
this petition demanding fast food companies give workers a raise
and this
one demanding they not retaliate against workers who strike.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
China is accelerating the arrests of people who criticize the state.
The UK parliament voted not to attack Syria. Thus, Obama won't have UK support.
The "discreet and limited" attack on Syria that Obama is considering would not have much effect on Assad's military capability.
There are other ways to deter further use of chemical weapons, either by Assad or by other countries.
It Takes More Courage To Say There Is Nothing Outsiders Can Do.
Stand
With Colombian Protests Against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
(FTA)
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It's not clear what the Obama regime's policy on state-legalized marijuana will really mean in practice.
The US turns readily to war and to military "aid"
because it
supports the military-industrial complex.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to kill the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline now.
The Japanese government has sued anti-nuclear sit-in protesters, demanding the equivalent of $100,000 from each leader.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff listed several options for US intervention in Syria — all with big downsides.
The UK's published intelligence report adds nothing to previous speculation about chemical weapons in Syria.
US intelligence officials say
the US
does not know where chemical weapons are stored now in Syria, or
who controls them, and that it does not have firm evidence that Assad
ordered their use.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I wonder if Obama will prosecute the officials for this leak.
Fast food workers held a strike and protest across the US.
Poverty's consequences, such as preoccupation with short-term difficulties, effectively cut people's intelligence.
Egypt has arrested al-Jazeera reporters, accusing them of threatening national security and supporting Morsi.
I do not support of Morsi, but no one should be arrested or banned from reporting based on who they support.
The US says it won't prosecute marijuana dealers that sell "small amounts" to adults, in states which have legalized it.
Secret US government programs amount to at least 75 billion dollars a year.
Fukushima showed us the intolerable costs of nuclear power. The citizens of Vermont show us the benefits of shutting it down.
America's next president had better believe in restoring liberty.
Israeli soldiers danced with Palestinians at a wedding in Hebron. The Israeli government says it will punish them for this act of fraternization with people who are supposed to be "the enemy".
One Year After Drone Strike on Anti-Terrorist Yemeni Preacher, Still No Apology From Obama.
Teacher Uprisings in Mexico a Lesson in Defending Public Education.
US citizens: Tell Obama not to bomb Syria.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter not to support attacking Syria. "The choice is not between doing nothing and bombing the Syrian people."
US citizens: call on the US to restore the "stream buffer" limitations on mountaintop removal coal mining.
A painting showing Putin and Medvedyev in female clothing has been
seized in Russia and
called
illegal with no explanation.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I understand the logic. In Russia, Putin is the ultimate standard of good. To show Putin doing something is to say it is good. To show Putin in homosexual guise is therefore propaganda for homosexuality. ;-}
A church group that feeds homeless people in Raleigh, North Carolina, was told they'd be arrested if they did not stop. It is illegal to feed the homeless there.
The Republicans who voted for this law probably claim to be Christians, but they'd put Jesus in prison too. When they talk about "family values" they mean "Walton and Koch family values".
Envisioning what Martin Luther King Jr. might say today in the age of plutocracy.
The public deserves answers to the questions about what would happen after a US attack on Syria — and why possible paths for peace are not being pursued instead.
AT&T can use King's "I have a dream" speech to sell phones, but you can't post it.
Whistleblower Russell Tice says that the NSA's data is regularly used to blackmail officials including members of Congress.
NSA sysadmins can access any data about anyone. Snowden used this to inform us all, but a criminal-minded sysadmin could use this to get data to blackmail someone.
Aside from blackmail, here are some bad things that could happen to you thanks to massive surveillance.
California will expand access to early abortions.
A wide range of sea animals face disaster from CO2 in the water.
They evolved to live in water, not seltzer.
India bans shark finning.
Walmart is trying to pretend that it supports manufacturing in the US.
Any company that has 25% of the grocery sales in the US ought to be split up just for that.
A company monitors students' public postings on behalf of schools.
Since they are public, the company has a right to do this. It would become wrong if the school starts punishing students for things they say (such as criticism of the school, dissident views, etc).
Given your metadata, people can find out about addictions, sex, and accusations.
Free Speech for People reviews the various bills to amend the Constitution to reverse the Corporations United* decision.
Israel uses many
schemes in parallel to take Palestinian land.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
And now that "peace negotiations" have been announced, Netanyahu has sped up construction in Palestine.
Israeli "settlers" in Palestinian territory attacked a Palestinian shepherd with an iron rod.
They killed and injured sheep, too.
The Israeli administration bends over backwards to help "settlers" harass Palestinians and drive them off their land.
B'tselem documents the systematic Israeli torture of Palestinian minors.
Israeli Arabs are trying to return to lands from which they were ordered to leave, a few weeks after Israel was established.
Israel demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib for the 54th time. Jailed residents, offered release on the condition that they not return there, said they'd rather stay in prison.
The Leveraged Buyout of America.
Wisconsin has arranged to give half a million dollars to a right-wing lobbying organization.
After all the budget cuts and union-busting, the state has a little cash on hand.
Vandana Shiva: Seed freedom is the answer to hunger and malnutrition.
Former UK military high commanders warn against attacking Syria.
Using a military attack to "send a message" is a rather inarticulate form of communication, as the US found out when it tried "graduated response" in the Vietnam War.
A woman in Kenya wants to marry two willing men, but the state is sexist and won't allow polygamy to go in that direction.
In Russia,
satirizing
Putin is now forbidden.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The heroism of Manning and Snowden will mean
nothing if
the debate about how to judge them distracts us from the central
issue: our government is trashing the constitution with massive
surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Egypt's military rulers seem to be framing arrested protesters in order to "prove" that the Muslim Brotherhood is terrorist.
An imprisoned Iranian blogger on hunger strike is getting ill.
The New York Thug Department arbitrarily labels some mosques as "terrorist" and investigates anyone who goes into them.
Now that the CIA has admitted responsibility for the coup in Iran that toppled it democratic government in 1953, the Iranian Parliament has voted to sue the US.
There is plenty of justification for this suit, in the abstract; but Iran's current theocratic tyranny is part of the damage, and a suit is not going to fix that. Meanwhile, is there any court where such a suit could be heard and a judgment enforced?
Why military intervention in Syria would be wrong.
It is hard to demonstrate what happened well enough for the purposes of justice.
A measured attack against Syria would change nothing.
On the other hand, an attack powerful enough to make Assad really notice would have unpredictable effects.
If the goal is to deter other dictators from using chemical weapons, it would be more effective to wait for a chance to punish Assad cleanly.
Hans Blix believes the military sponsors of both sides could make them agree to peace.
In the US: support an action on Sep 5 against Walmart's low wages.
A New York City thug faces criminal charges for trying to frame a press photographer.
It's about time — but it will take more than one thug on trial to make thugs stop testilying.
Barry Eisler suggests the arrest of David Miranda indicates that surveillance state is trying to make journalism harder, slower and less secure.
He may well be right; this does not contradict my theory, that it is trying to declare journalism criminal.
US citizens: call on Obama not to attack Syria without consulting Congress.
The US
is planning to
fight in Syria on the side of al Qa'ida.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Obama's intended attack might
be meant to
keep Iran isolated (i.e., scupper the opportunity for a peace
deal).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The evidence that Assad's men used chemical weapons came from an Israeli signal interception unit.
Israel has been trying to get the US to fight Syria for a year or two. Thus, I have to wonder whether this "intelligence" was fabricated for the purpose.
The Federal Crop Insurance Program paid for 17 billion dollars in crop losses in 2012, far more than normal, due to extreme weather that will keep getting worse.
What the Assault on Whistleblowers Has to Do With War on Syria.
US citizens: support Senator Merkley's plan for paying for college.
The South African equivalent of the NSA is explicitly meant for spying on South Africans, so it doesn't need to stretch the rules repeatedly — it monitors everything.
Three bogus investigations of the NSA are designed to reassure us that no major change is needed.
Colleges say Obama's plan to link student aid to college tuition could motivate colleges to reject students that need aid.
Overall, the Oregon solution looks better. It could be used to put pressure to cut costs.
The newspaper FrontPageAfrica has been closed, and its publisher jailed, for reporting on corruption in Liberia.
Australia's right-wing party says it will cater to fishermen by eliminating recently established marine reserves.
There is no one less concerned with the long term health of fisheries than the fishermen. They have a culture of short-term thinking, which is why they object to marine reserves; that reserves increase fish stocks outside, and lead to higher catches a few years later, is too long-term for them to appreciate.
Anti-gun-control forces are concentrating their money to defeat Colorado legislators who voted for gun control.
Japan is demonstrating that stimulating the economy still works.
We knew that in the US, too; but the plutocrats arranged for lots of economists to say that we need to cut the deficit.
US citizens: phone the White House at 202-456-1111 to oppose military involvement in Syria.
Also, sign this petition.
Many poor people are logistically compelled to eat expensively; to eat cheap and healthy food, that theoretically would save them money, is out of practical range for them.
A Tunisian group has been banned, accused of responsibility for
assassinating
two politicians.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The group might be guilty for all I know, but that should be proved in court, not decided by an official.
Greece should refuse to be "rescued" again, since the previous "rescues" have only made things worse.
Jail Becomes Home for Husband Stuck With Lifetime Alimony.
A professor told me he had been ordered to pay alimony and child support exceeding his salary. The sad thing is, he had a way to get that money. An evil way: proprietary software. It would have been more ethical to go to jail.
The former mayor of Salt Lake City plans to sue the NSA for spying on all communications there prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics there.
Entrepreneur Chris Kitze says that in 1997 the NSA had already stuck computers into his company to tap all emails.
Julian Assange: Google has become intimately involved with the US government.
The NSA systematically spies on the EU, the UN, and the IAEA. It has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, or even dissidents.
In the US,
"support
the troops" is the slogan of unthinking patriotism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
UN inspectors in Syria are only supposed to determine whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them.
However, the latter is the crucial question.
Zurich will provide a safe facility for prostitutes to work in.
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers rebuked the UK for its threats to the Guardian.
The damage of privatization in Britain, illustrated by taking a seaside holiday.
General monitoring of people causes various kinds of psychological harm.
Reportedly Cuba ceded to US pressure to
bar
Snowden from travelling.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This despite the fact that the US protects terrorists that made attacks in Cuba and imprisoned the Cuban 5 for infiltrating anti-Cuban terrorist groups and warning when they were going to attack.
200,000 Colombians protested the US-Colombia free trade treaty, as part of a national strike.
Of course, the government said the strikers are controlled by the FARC and called them "terrorists". The FARC are terrorists, but not the biggest and worst terrorists in Colombia. That honor goes to the state-sponsored paramilitaries.
California is considering putting RFIDs for tracking into drivers' licenses.
Greg Palast: How Larry Summers and Geithner bullied 165 countries into eliminating their equivalents of Glass-Steagall through the WTO.
And Obama is closely connected to their gang.
Google Play deleted a man's whole collection of downloaded books because it saw he was in Singapore.
Android normally comes with Google Play, which is nonfree, so it's no surprise that it is malware too. Replicant, the free version of Android, does not contain Google Play.
The college loan racket screws all young Americans unless they are rich. If you go to college, you'll spend your life in debt; otherwise you can't get a job except at McDonalds.
Even if you're really smart and get a good job after college, you're not safe; you will be ruined permanently if you get fired or disabled.
Oregon's plan might be a solution: paying students' tuition in exchange for a share of their income.
However, people with poverty level incomes, or living on disability or other assistance, should not have to pay anything. They can barely get by anyway.
The Boy Scouts of America are
bullying
the Hacker Scouts, an organization which is very different in spirit
and purpose.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The BSA bans Atheists as members, which makes it discreditable in substance too.
1983: the power of the NSA was already dangerous.
Religious fanatics in Russia, encouraged by the dictatorship, attacked a small parade of Pastafarians.
Ecuador is considering a law to ban publication of secret documents, even if they have been published elsewhere.
The Obama regime makes itself a laughingstock for pretending that Wikileaks and Snowden material are still secrets; this law would do the same.
A Hindu man was taken for Muslim after he (not knowing why) set off the explosive detector in an airport, and his answers were misunderstood. But even after the TSA cleared him to fly, Jet Blue still refused to let him board.
Apparently someone on the flight crew exercised the despotic power kick anyone off, for no reason.
He thinks his home was subsequently searched and a photograph stolen.
American teens do care about being tracked through portable phones. Over half of teenage girls have turned off location tracking — by their parents.
However, there is no way to stop Big Brother from tracking them, except to take the batteries out.
Beyond Intimidation of Journalists
Internet companies that put their users in PRISM did so knowingly and got paid for the work.
Archeologists are
using
drones to detect looting of ancient ruins in Peru.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A treaty like this can't do anything good, except for the plutocrats.
Having Obama speak at the anniversary of MLK's March on Washington is a sacrilege.
The UK imprisoned Syrian dissident Roudi Chikhi for using false papers to flee Syria to ask for asylum, and stole all his money too.
Progress in solar-powered vehicles demonstrates that we ought to be putting hundreds of millions into research, rather than leaving the matter to a few enthusiasts.
Growing up in poverty tends to stunt children's development permanently.
I'm sure it is true in the US too, though I don't have a study to point to. This is why we need a strong welfare system that lifts children out of poverty, not one that does only the bare minimum such as Clinton gave the US.
Of course, we also need to make it easy for poor people to avoid having children they can't afford to raise, by providing reliable contraception and abortion gratis to all women.
Assad has agreed to cooperate with UN inspectors who are investigating use of chemical weapons.
If it is too late to detect the gas on the site, maybe autopsies can confirm that gas was used. The crucial question is who used it, and maybe some evidence about that can be found.
Assad and his supporters claim it was a false-flag operation by the rebels. I can't put it past them, but I think it is more likely that Assad's forces attacked with gas.
Obama hates our freedoms — he wants the Supreme Court to rule that thugs can search people's phones without a warrant.
The EPA buried its own evidence that fracking was dangerous, and Americans are increasingly organizing to block it — and now it turns out that the amount of gas that can be retrieved is much less than was thought.
In other words, we have to launch a massive program for renewable energy.
A 2011 FISA court decision, published in fragmentary form, rebuked the NSA for unconstitutionally stretching its surveillance powers.
Manning has asked Obama for a pardon, and in the process, has taken back the ill-conceived apology.
Amnesty International says Obama should commute Manning's sentence and investigate the abuses he exposed.
I think Amnesty's stand is too weak. It should ask for a pardon, not a commutation.
Some NSA agents snoop on people they are attracted to.
Thugs have done this for ages ("running a plate for a date"), so it does not surprise me at all that NSA agents do it too. The crucial point is that there is nothing in the system to stop them from snooping on anyone they wish.
This validates Snowden's point that he could snoop on anyone. He wasn't "authorized" to do so, but he could do it.
The NSA staff call it "loveint", and the NSA punishes it, but only when it finds out. If a few cases have been discovered, there were probably many more that the NSA doesn't know about.
US citizens: call on Congress not to
allow "fast
track" for the TPP.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In the US: tell the US and UK to stop equating journalism with terrorism.
In the US: tell Forever 21 you insist it treat workers decently.
"Big
Data" often means "Big Intrusion".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US is selling 1300 cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia.
When cluster bombs are used, they kill children long after the war is over.
Global heating is good for some things, such as the mosquito that spreads Dengue fever.
In countries where Walmart operates:
tell
Walmart to respect their workers and pay a decent wage.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: Call on Western Union to stop blocking funds transfers to China Labor Watch investigators that expose sweatshop practices in China.
Obama viewed against the background of the March on Washington 50 years ago.
Xu Zhiyong has been imprisoned for suggesting that Chinese have dinner parties to discuss political issues.
The US is running into stiff opposition in the Trance Pacific Partnership negotiations.
Apparently the other countries' negotiators are not entirely in a trance yet.
The
lesson of Fukushima: nuclear reactors can explode. And there are
dozens of reactors in the US which use the same design.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government's demand to destroy the Guardian's files was a direct attack against the foundation of democracy: freedom of the press to report how the state treats the people.
A 165-sq-mile
forest fire in California is threatening to contaminate a
reservoir for San Francisco as well as to destroy power lines that
bring electricity there.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Saudi censorship is suppressing knowledge about MERS, which has killed half the people known to have contracted it. As a result, 3 million pilgrims to Mecca could get exposed to it and take it home with them.
Egypt after the revolution: curfew nights and blood-stained days.
The Koch brothers have reportedly given up on trying to buy the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers.
This avoided an immediate defeat but may not be a lasting victory.
Did the US or UK make a damaging leak pretending it came from Snowden?
A journalist in Kazakhstan was hit on the head with a crowbar.
In the US they just get threatened with imprisonment.
Apple is designing a new product to do surveillance on people's movements even more than mobile phones.
The idea of a "trust" to protect the use of the data is ridiculous. It won't be able to withhold anything from the NSA or GCHQ. It would be hard pressed to withhold anything from subpoenas for private lawsuits. Digital toll collection records are often subpoena'd.
Summarizing the NSA's series of lies.
Refuting lies about Washington's GMO-labeling initiative.
US citizens: call on the Department of Education
to dump
Sallie Mae for predatory behavior that violated its contract.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Obama
to negotiate with the new
president of Iran.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: sign
this petition in support of Justin Carter, facing 8 years in
prison for a joke threat that he said was a joke.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It's not wise to make joke threats on the Internet. Carter should get a warning from the judge: "Remember, when you're on the Internet, lots of strangers are see or hear everything you say. You can't joke around as if you were among friends." I am sure he would learn that lesson.
I expect that the judge knows this, but takes pleasure in applying perverse "zero tolerance".
In favor of taxing churches — all of them.
With the US morally compromised, now Malaysia's government plans to extend its snooping powers.
An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues: Mathematicians, why are you not speaking out?
Brazil will pass a law that requires all royalties from oil drilling to go to health care. This has good and bad sides.
A teenager in the Maldive Islands will not be flogged for having been raped.
This is a step forward, but they must do more: people who have sex voluntarily should not be punished either.
Can you guess which religion dominates the Maldive Islands?
'Outing Corporate Evil,' One City at a Time.
Making all thugs wear cameras makes them considerably less thuggish.
People working for the state are not entitled to the same rights of privacy that everyone else deserves, and if there's anyone for whom surveillance is necessary, it's the thugs. So I am mostly in favor of this. However, this could lead to intrusive surveillance too.
Global heating seen as humanity's greatest-ever risk management failure.
Seabirds are threatened by global heating.
The world's general slow rise in sea level paused during 2010 and 2011 because the water was piled on parts of Australia instead.
Kucinich says, give Snowden a ticker-tape parade and abolish the NSA.
I broadly sympathize, but given how badly the banksters have mauled our country, I am not sure a ticker-tape parade is appropriate treatment for a hero.
Cynicism is Corporate America's Greatest Weapon: Disarm It.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for revealing US crimes. When will we prosecute the ones who committed those crimes?
Some nuclear experts warn that the situation in Fukushima could be much worse than the "authorities" admit.
US citizens: demand that the next chairman of the Federal Reserve
answer
some crucial questions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Plutocratic politicians in ALEC aim to inflame the public against people who are oppressed a little less than they.
Of course, the ones you ought to hate are the plutocrats that fund and direct ALEC.
The ACLU on the steady militarization of thugs in the US.
The US director of "national security" has started a blog with the aim of "more transparency".
This reflects his persistent campaign to make our activities and conversations more transparent to them.
Ladar Levison can't talk about his court battle for our privacy rights, but he's drawing a lot of attention to the issue.
Obama proposes totally inadequate measures to encourage universities to compete on tuition.
Children in Pakistan are getting sick with polio: perhaps this will convince the religious crazies to allow vaccination.
Former dictator Mubarak was released from prison but will be held under house arrest.
The UK should renationalize its railroads.
Correction: Clegg, head of the Lib Dems, has not endorsed the interrogation of David Miranda and seizure of his computer data.
Miranda's lawyers have won a symbolic victory with the court order for the state not to touch Miranda's memories "unless it is for the purpose of ensuring the protection [of] national security or for investigating whether Miranda is himself involved in the commission, instigation or preparation of an act of terrorism".
At present, it is only symbolic. Whatever they wish to do, they will do it anyway and say it is "protection of national security". Besides, they have surely given copies to the NSA, which will not be affected by this court order. In other words, they will continue playing the court, and the people, for fools.
A US court ruled that federal employees in "national security sensitive" positions can be fired or punished arbitrarily.
The next step will be for the government to drive them to suicide, to make sure they can't flee and start revealing dirty government secrets.
Over 50 large wildfires are burning in the western US.
The cheap solution to air pollution: stop measuring it.
Force-feeding prisoners who are prepared to fast to death solves nothing.
If they doubt whether prisoners really meant to order "don't feed me", why not just ask them now?
British thugs have killed thousands of prisoners since 1969, the last time a thug was punished for doing that.
Worse, relatives of the victims who campaigned for justice were subject to secret surveillance by thugs defending their buddies. But they still say, "if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear."
NSA gathered thousands of Americans' e-mails before court ordered it to revise its tactics.
On the implications of Assad's apparent poison gas attack.
The fact that jihadis are fighting Assad makes it hard to see a way to help the rebels without potentially bringing to power those who are worse.
Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment.
He got a far longer sentence than others convicted of espionage; perhaps because Manning gave information, not secretly to an enemy, but publicly to the people that the US government betrays every day.
Former Egyptian dictator Mubarak will be
released
from prison.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Will he be put back in power?
Another defeat for freedom: New Zealand voted to legalize more spying on everyone.
The NSA collects 75% of US Internet traffic.
Correction — it is 75% of
communications
traffic, which does not include distribution of TV shows, etc.
Also, the word "collects" is not quite accurate; rather, this measurs
the fraction of the communications that the NSA searches through.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Comcast threatened to sue Torrentfreak for copyright infringement over publication of a subpoena, a court document in the public domain.
Six Questions Journalists Should Ask Barack Obama When He Visits (Enter Your Country Name Here).
Miranda's
Rights: How Europe Can Learn from Latin America's Independence.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Using the Boston bombings as a pretext, the National Football League now prohibits fans from bringing in suitcases, fanny packs, even a thermos.
If I couldn't bring my computer in, that rules me out.
I'd never want to go to a football game, so this does not affect me, not directly. But the dangerous current will threaten everyone.
Government Works Fine, Just Not For You (i.e., non-plutocrats).
The UK prime minister directly ordered the interrogation of David Miranda.
Even more horrible, the head of the Liberal Democrats supported the pretext for destroying the Guardian's disk drives.
Russia blocked a Greenpeace icebreaker from entering the Arctic sea, on the peculiar grounds that it isn't strong enough to deal with the little remaining ice.
The American Dream Rewards Few, Enslaves Millions.
Only through collective action against the plutocracy can most Americans make their lives better.
More detail about the increasing frequency of severe heat waves, the damage they to do people and to agriculture, and how ceasing or continuing to emit greenhouse gases will affect the outcome.
Syrian rebels claim the regime's troops fired poison gas missiles that killed over 200 people.
A tank of contaminated water at Fukushima has leaked, and the area around it is now dangerously radioactive.
Amnesty International condemned the Egyptian army and thugs'
"blatant
disregard for human life", and calls for
cutting
off arms supplies to the government of Egypt.
[References updated on 2018-03-10 because the old links were broken.]
A study found that heavy use of Facebook tends to make people sad, independent of how the users felt at the start of the study.
The study eliminated the hypothesis that people used Facebook more because they were sadder to begin with.
This is not yet proof, but given so many other reasons to avoid Facebook, why not take this precaution?
Israel has designated almost 1/5 of the West Bank as "military firing zones" as an excuse to kick Palestinians off their land.
Israel forced a Palestinian to pay to demolish his own home in Jerusalem.
The UK undercover thugs that infiltrated dissident movements seem to be part of an organized plan including all European governments, the US, and other countries. The governments involved refuse to investigate.
In the US, we have been unable to get it to become a scandal. Perhaps because the mainstream media have stayed away from it.
When oil companies promote biofuel, it's the kind of biofuel made by diverting land, water and chemical fertilizer that could have grown food. So it is a kind of greenwashing.
Conjecture: Alexei Navalny has been groomed by Putin to divide opposition and lead it nowhere.
The UK treats single parents as unemployed people, and makes them jump through many arbitrary hoops to get welfare payments. If they fail to get all the hoops — perhaps because they are taking care of their kids — then the state cuts off their money and says it's their fault.
This is the face of plutocracy. The people who set up this scheme deserve no mercy, and those who carry it out deserve none either unless they quit.
US citizens: tell the UK we condemn the detention of David Miranda.
Columbia, South Carolina, will give homeless people a choice between real jail and a "shelter" that is much like a jail.
A court ruled that changing your machine's IP address to get access to a public web site is a crime under the CFAA.
This absurd result adds to the need to reform the CFAA.
Under the shadow of the recession, US companies have massively converted well-paid full-time jobs into part-time subsistence jobs.
A court ruled that thugs can force-feed prisoners on hunger strike who signed papers saying to let them die.
Many of these prisoners have been put in solitary for a long time after they were falsely declared gang members based on coincidences.
The Guantanamo prison guards did not allow a prisoner to get a copy of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
Perhaps the guards are afraid the prisoners will see some similarity to their own lives.
UK thug whistleblower Peter Francis says the thugs are threatening to prosecute him for revealing the dirty work he did for them. He refuses to speak to the official inquiry because he suspects they will use his testimony to punish him.
The Guardian destroyed its London copies of Snowden's revelations to avoid the damage that would have been done by handing them to the regime, or being legally banned from talking about them at all.
"As in Russia, the terror threat has become the excuse to curtail our rights".
Oswaldo Paya's relatives have sued Cuban officials for killing him.
Today is Earth Overshoot Day, when humanity has consumed more natural resources since January 1 than our biosphere can replace in the whole year.
The low wages allowed in the
US hurt and
cost everyone (except the plutocrats).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Moment
the US Ended Iran's Brief Experiment in Democracy.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Libya is on the verge of disintegration.
The UK government said it interrogated David Miranda because he was carrying "stolen documents" — which could only refer to the information Snowden gave to Glenn Greenwald.
This claim is both absurd and outrageous. The absurdity is that Greenwald already has copies of all that material, so if Miranda was carrying more copies, it was irrelevant. The only significant thing Miranda might have had would be their journalistic work, which was not stolen from anyone.
The outrage is that the state has now declared its intention to wage unrestricted war against journalists. This is the UK's Putin moment, it shifts from trying to cover up its tyrannical deeds to proudly announcing them.
The UK needs a deep public inquiry into the thugs' infiltration of anti-fascist groups and aid to construction blacklists.
This is also one of the reasons why massive surveillance is dangerous.
100,000 manicurists in the UK are Vietnamese, and most of them have been trafficked.
The crucial questions are, how did they get there, and what keeps them there? If they are there involuntarily, what stops them from escaping?
Don't pathologize heroism, warns a soldier who confesses his cowardice, in failing to blow the whistle on the gratuitous violence his unit carried out against Iraqis.
Groklaw has shut down because it can no longer protect its sources due to massive surveillance.
Here's Pamela Jones' statement.
Former Pakistani
dictator Musharraf
faces charges of murdering Benazir Bhutto, on the grounds that he
took away her bodyguards when she was receiving death threats.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: tell the US and UK to stop attacking and intimidating journalists.
The US cooperates with the Egyptian military in return
for convenience
in attacking other countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Note how the New York Times headline, "Ties With Egypt Army Constrain Washington," presumes that the US could not possibly forfeit Egypt's military cooperation — a considerable exaggeration compared with the facts stated.
The UK government forced the Guardian's London office to delete all of Snowden's material, on threat of seizing it.
Fortunately there were copies elsewhere, but this illustrates the fact that the UK and US governments will go to any lengths of lies and abuse to crush journalism that investigates their nastiest secrets.
It won't remain limited to those issues, because the plutocratic state is in cahoots with corporations that endanger our lives, health, and liberty. We have seen the UK thugs help businesses blacklist workers, while in the US, investigating factory farms is now a crime in many states.
These examples demonstrate that the US or UK will use its repressive power against any journalism that business finds annoying — not that different from China.
David Miranda describes his nine-hour interrogation.
Using the "anti-terror" law to interrogate dissidents entering the UK is standard practice.
Egyptian
thugs killed 36 prisoners. The thugs said they were shot (with
teargas) while trying to escape.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
If you are a journalist, or anyone else that must fear a repressive state, email is inherently unsafe, because you can't hide who you are talking with (i.e., metadata).
The article refers to trade secrets as "intellectual property", which is a gratuitous confusion because it conflates them with unrelated issues such as copyrights and patents. Every time the term "intellectual property" is used, it causes confusion — please join me in avoiding that term.
In the US: implore the Tribune
Company not
to sell its newspapers to the Koch brothers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Save America's Pollinators Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
By 2050, floods in coastal cities will cause a trillion dollars of damage per year.
In the US, Miami, New York and New Orleans are at high risk.
The UK helps people block wind farms even miles away from their homes, but won't let people block fracking even 10 feet away. Why this inconsistency? George Monbiot says he thinks that extraction is more macho.
He could be partly right, but I suspect that the extractors offer more money to corrupt the politicians.
Fracking debate: what does the battle for lead-free air teach us?
Thousands protested against fracking in England.
Everyone: call on Kerry to prove he is serious about peace negotiations by demanding that Israel cease expanding its colonies in Palestinian territory.
US citizens: call on Obama to block the USDA from letting poultry companies inspect themselves, and increase the contamination that's permitted.
Letting these companies "police themselves" is worse than letting teenage street gang members do so, because the companies have worse morals and are less trustworthy.
US propaganda presents officials as "idealists" who wish they could
make a better world —
with no resemblance to the truth about
them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Karzai fired a cabinet minister for meeting
with Taliban
negotiators.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Islamist rebels in the Sinai stopped buses of Egyptian thugs and killed them.
The violent Islamists may be the worse of the two, in regard to disrespect for human rights, but we should not take this as excusing the massacres of nonviolent Islamists last week.
"The innocent have nothing to fear?" They do if they embarrass America and happen to visit British soil.
The Brazilian government and MPs are rebuking the UK thugs for arresting David Miranda and taking his computer memories.
I've read that his computer memories included information obtained from Laura Poitras that he was bringing to Glenn Greenwald. This makes me worry: will the NSA be able to decrypt it? If they did not send it through the Internet, they must have been concerned about this possibility.
I hope Big Brother did not get anything important.
The "Common Core" education standards, imposed on the US by the Gates Foundation, threaten to turn out to be the next stage in using standardized tests to declare children and public schools "failures".
The military grip on US policing.
Obama's speech about surveillance shows he wants to lull the public into forgetting about the problem, not correct it.
He also wants us to believe that his willingness to even pretend to discuss the issue is not due to Snowden.
On two occasions recently, Texas thugs performed body cavity searches for no obvious reason on women stopped for speeding or littering (though the women deny those accusations).
Ways to respond to the claim that "copying is stealing".
The US government is making lots of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it is unable to do anything useful with the money.
Two wildfires in Idaho have burned
almost 400 square miles.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK confiscated journalist David Miranda's computers and memories as he passed through Heathrow Airport, using powers supposedly meant for dealing with terrorists.
When the government says "terrorists", it means dissidents and journalists, or anyone that stands in the way of its abuse of power. If occasionally a would-be terrorist gets caught up in the net, they consider that a bonus.
David Miranda is Glenn Greenwald's mate, and this appears to be an attempt to intimidate Greenwald. But Greenwald is not intimidated.
If the UK regime still fears public disapproval, Greenwald will make it regret this.
Over 2000 marched against fracking in the UK.
UK thugs investigated anti-fascist campaigners so as to blacklist them so they could not work.
The Muslim Brotherhood held protest marches, which were not attacked.
Jihadis in Syria attacked the Syrian Kurds, so 20,000 refugees have fled to the Kurdish part of Iraq.
A heat wave and drought are destroying the crops in Austria and Hungary.
We get droughts like this every year (though not always in the same place). And this is just the beginning.
Australian aboriginals have a very high rate of problem drinking, but is jailing them if they don't go for rehabilitation a good solution?
If rehabilitation were a reliable treatment, perhaps no one would refuse it. But as far as I know, for alcoholics to stay sober requires a deep commitment. The threat of jail can make someone go to an activity, but can't give someone that kind of commitment. So I don't see how this can achieve its goal.
There is surely a relationship between the high consumption of alcohol and the way aboriginals were kicked off their land and continue to be downtrodden. Changing that may be the only way to correct this (though it will take decades).
Retired people in Portugal are protesting daily against the plan to cut their pensions to the bone.
Martin Manley set up a web site to represent him after his suicide, but Yahoo arbitrarily took it down.
His sister say Yahoo should put it back because Manley did not advocate suicide for others. But what if he had? That is no reason for censorship.
US citizens: call on Herakles Farms not to cut down 300 square miles of rainforest in Cameroon, which is habitat for chimpanzees and other threatened species.
US citizens: sign
this
petition against appointing Larry Summers as head of the Federal
Reserve.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This is a different petition; if you signed the other, please sign this too.
Technology to record all conversations could turn life into something unrecognizable.
Russia plans to ban Tor, demonstrating how essential Tor is for resisting tyranny.
If the state has grounds to suspect that a person is committing crimes, it has many other ways to investigate, including planting microphones where that person lives and works. These take some effort, however, which is as it should be.
The NSA's 2776 "accidental" violations of its own rules in a 12-month period covered just the NSA headquarters. And the NSA concealed this report from the Senate Intelligence Committee until the committee saw the leak and asked for it.
A Time Magazine writer said he wants to see the US assassinate Julian Assange.
Some Japanese schools
won't
let students read a famous manga book because it shows some of the
atrocities that Japanese troops committed during the occupation of
other countries.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
One kind of atrocity they committed was waterboarding. The US executed some Japanese soldiers for this. However, the US has done nothing to punish the Americans responsible for committing the same brutal act.
It's clear that the Japanese officials who imposed this censorship care more about whether Japan looks good than whether Japan is good. You can see the same behavior pattern in officials in other countries.
The capacity to commit atrocities exists in every nation. Thus, all governments must do their best to prevent atrocities by holding perpetrators responsible.
Uri Avnery: Israel deserves the Guinness record for chutzpah, for condemning Palestinian "provocations" that are dwarfed by Israel's own provocations.
Companies running salmon farms on the US west coast are trying to take water that needs to be released to rivers so that wild salmon can survive.
Government Accountability Project:
Statement
on Edward Snowden & NSA Domestic Surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-08 because the old link was broken.]
Obama claimed that Snowden should have taken advantage of the protections in the Whistleblower Protection Act. But they didn't apply to him, since he employed by a contractor, not by the US government.
Even if that law had applied to him, other examples show he would have been a fool to try to depend on it.
The US runs international "aid" for Haiti so that it goes to create
resorts, mines and sweatshops
owned
by foreigners — while doing little for the Haitians who have
been homeless for three years.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Why the massive surveillance that Snowden showed to us is a threat to you … no matter who you are or what you do.
A UK law professor suggests that prison is the wrong punishment for thieves.
Under the standards of international law, al Qa'ida is too puny to qualify as an enemy to be at war with. It is unable to carry out military operations.
Thus, the US should stop treating this as a war.
Obama misused the word "decimated", which means to kill 1/10 of the soldiers in a military unit. (It was a Roman punishment for mutiny.) Al Qa'ida has been far more than decimated.
Any Other 'Statesman' Who Negotiated Peace Like John Kerry Would Be Treated as a Thief.
The UK had a housing bubble, fueled, like the US housing bubble, by enticing people into predatory mortgages, for which the capital was obtained by mortgage-backed securities. This article explains the whole process clearly.
In the US, the bubble popped and mortgage-backed securities lead to the systematic foreclosure fraud.
In the UK, according to this article, the bubble didn't stay popped; rather, the government patched it up and is blowing more mortgage funds into it.
Without the bubble's high prices, there would have been no need for so much money to pour into mortgages. Thus, I think mortgage-backed securities should be banned entirely.
However, the low rate of housing construction in the UK is also responsible.
Hong Kong's government is asking high-ranking thugs who are due to retire soon to stay on the job an extra 90 days, because of a planned Occupy protest.
This suggests to me that Hong Kong plans to repress the protest camp, as the US, UK, and other countries have done.
Uganda: Rigged Elections And Mysterious Killings: It's the Mugabe Script with a Different Cast.
In Egypt, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the supporters of the military are accusing the US of supporting the other side.
"Smart" electricity meters are not only surveillance devices, but sabotage devices too.
It is most likely that crackers from China could turn off your electric supply at will. It is certain that agents from your own unjust and lawless state could do so.
Why Isn't Beirut Bombing Called "Terrorist"?
The Police Keep Firing; The Bodies Pile Up. In Cairo, Bloodbaths Are Now a Daily Occurrence.
Egypt: we may despise the Muslim Brotherhood, but a coup is a coup.
Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi,
is suing
Dubya for war crimes.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US nuclear power plants
are sitting
ducks for terrorist attacks. Essentially nothing has been done to
protect them since 2001.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government's plutocratic policies are pushing even working people to use food banks.
Egyptian soldiers attacked a mosque occupied by pro-Morsi protesters. Armed men fired from the minaret. The protesters say that the doors to the minaret were controlled by the thugs, which would suggest that this was a false flag operation meant to create an excuse to attack the protesters. But even if they were real Morsi-supporters shooting at the soldiers, after being victims of a massacre while unarmed, they can't be blamed for fighting back.
Most Egyptians seem to be glad that the Muslim Brotherhood is out of power. I too would be glad of that if I were Egyptian. But banning the Muslim Brotherhood means excluding a large part of society from democracy. This is a recipe for inspiring an armed Islamic terrorist movement to replace the nonviolent movement that has just been defeated.
Fighting that will require long-term repression. How can there be room for democracy alongside that? I think the military are planning not to allow democracy.
Bahrainis have launched a renewed push for freedom despite laws more repressive than ever. Will the US support the repression because a fleet is based there?
A cute video can put a species in danger.
Psychotherapy can teach people to refrain from cruelty on the Internet.
E-book publishers plan to use watermarks to identify who purchased a copy.
This is a further reason not to buy any e-book in a way that identifies you.
Ever since New York State was ordered to stop keeping prisoners in solitary confinement if they had serious mental illness, there has been a mysterious trend to diagnose prisoners with mild mental illness instead. At least one seriously ill prisoner was driven to suicide by solitary confinement.
I have no easy answer for what to do with people like Amir Hall. However, any solution probably involves spending more money. If we end the war on drugs, and free lots of prisoners that shouldn't have been imprisoned in the first place, we could afford to care properly for those that we do need to imprison.
A merger between two large airlines in the US is being blocked because an executive admitted the goal was to raise fares.
We are fortunate that these executives confessed the truth of their merger scheme, but in the future there will be other executives and they will learn from this mistake. We must not depend on such confessions in order to thwart them.
Oligopoly (just a few major sellers) starts to cause some of the same harms as monopoly (one single seller). Therefore, any merger that would create a company having over 8% of some market should be blocked automatically; and if it would have more than 4% of some market, it should face stiff disincentives.
Africa's richest woman is the daughter of the dictator of Angola — and not by coincidence.
A Saudi prince has defected and describes how the regime persecutes anyone that calls for human rights.
America's cheering millions of high school graduates toward college every year, feeding them into the debt grinder under the banner of increased opportunity, when full disclosure would require admitting that there isn't a hell of a lot waiting for them on the other side, where the middle class has nearly vanished and full employment is going the way of the dodo.
Ladar Levison says he may face prosecution for shutting down Lavabit.
Will Bezos, as owner of the Washington Post, stand up to US pressure to conceal government wrongdoing? Not if Amazon is any guide.
US citizens:
thank
EPA official Richard Pelletier, who refused to lift Billionaire
Polluter's suspension from bidding for US government contracts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
BP has not been punished enough to teach it or other oil companies a lesson.
One reason the US doesn't cut off arms aid to Egypt is that
the aid
really goes to US arms companies.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Médecins Sans Frontiéres has withdrawn from Somalia because gangs and militias, some of them allied with the government, are killing aid workers and kidnaping them for ransom.
Israel plans to pay hundreds of students to post pro-Israel statements on Twitter and Facebook.
The Great Divestiture (privatization state services to human beings) has been coupled with the Great Risk Shift (employers dumping various responsibilities onto individuals).
What we need is not "economic recovery" but reversal of those two changes. We must nationalize; we must reregulate. And, as the article says, we must aid and encourage unions.
In May, Obama promised to give us transparency about drone attacks. He has done none of that.
Who
Dies in Yemen Drone Strikes?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
5 Myths Used to Justify Death By Drone and America's Assassination Policy.
Bloomberg wants to install electronic locks on New York City public housing. This means that the doors will record who enters and when, and deliver this info to the state.
Oh, he also proposed fingerprinting the residents.
Senators Sanders and Boxer propose a law that would really do something to curb global heating.
New York City Comptroller Liu proposes legalization and regulated sale of marijuana.
His report estimates the city could save $31 million a year by legalizing sale of marijuana, and bring in $400 million a year by taxing it to keep the price the same.
That's without counting all the other benefits, in the form of decreased repression and lives not ruined.
Young Dalit women are taking the lead to campaign against the rapes and murders carried out by upper-cast people to keep them down.
The perpetrators' first line of defense are the thugs, who refuse to take reports of these crimes, and even conspire with the perpetrators, who have the support of their caste-mates.
This calls to mind the racist arbitrary searches of people on the street in New York City. I think the fact that they are arbitrary already makes them wrong, but the racist application of arbitrariness is part of a broader pattern.
In several cases listed, Dalit victims committed suicide. Suicide sometimes works as a protest, but if you do it in private, it only gives the oppressor a further victory. If you are ready to die because you can't bear the oppression, you may as well go down fighting.
Chomsky: The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy, But You'll Never Hear About It in Our 'Free Press'.
The Lancet says that the UK government treats NHS hospitals like failing banks, seeking to close them, and never mind health care.
The thousands of "errors" per year that the NSA has confessed to are "the tip of the iceberg", according to Senators Wyden and Udall.
At 60 more Egyptians were killed today as Morsi supporters protested.
Random violence plays into the hands of the military, which will use it as an excuse to condemn Morsi supporters. Therefore, I suspect that the unidentified gunmen who shot at passersby on the bridge in Cairo were from the military.
It seems there were armed men among the protesters, but they did not start the firing. Thugs seemed to be out to kill protesters for the sake of killing.
The Zimbabwe
opposition dropped
its court challenge to the election, saying this is because the
government refused to reveal crucial information about the vote.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It is not clear what information this was.
US cities are sending SWAT teams for noise complaints and other matters where violence is not particularly likely.
That tends to cause violence.
4000 US women were forced to have babies in 2008 because they could not scrape together the money for an abortion until it was too late.
The figure will have risen since then because so many more Americans have become poor.
Women who cannot afford an abortion can't afford to raise children either.
Beyond Keystone XL: three other controversial pipelines.
First they came for the terrorists and the foreigners, and no one did anything. Then they came for the drug dealers. Then the tax cheats. Then the journalists. And that's just what we know about. How much worse does it have to get before we say enough is enough?
Tech company executives: fight government surveillance, or users will find out you didn't.
They are not limited to fighting in court. They can lobby, too.
Apple has got a patent on a phone or camera back door that would let Big Brother's men disable functions such as photography.
Actually implementing the idea would be a vicious attack on human rights, and would leave people vulnerable to the persistent abuse and lies of the state's forces.
Patenting the idea has no direct effect on users. It means that others would have to get permission from Apple if they wanted to implement this. But it shows Apple is at least thinking about trying to do this to us.
The Strange Case of Barrett Brown Just Got Stranger.
Explaining all the charges against Barrett Brown.
EFF Supports Human Rights Case Against Cisco for Selling Surveillance Technologies to China.
I think it is wrong to sell them to the US government, too.
The FISA court says it really has no ability to control the NSA. So the rare occasions when it says "no", that may not have much effect.
Obama said that there were three pillars of oversight of NSA mass surveillance, but all three turn out to be empty.
News organizations are using copyright to hush up their embarrassments.
Now that I have read (for the first time) the joke pilot names, I reject the accusation that this joke was "racist". Making jokes about names and words in any language is normal humor. It was the wrong time to joke about an accident where people had just died, but that's not racism.
Coal mines in Australia are making people sick. In one area, 40% of the children have asthma.
Bradley Manning's Statement: A Forced "Confession" Concludes A Drumhead Tribunal.
The defense witnesses tried to show that his heroic leaks were an error that he made because he was unable to think clearly.
Four questions the next chairman of the Federal Reserve should have to answer.
Everyone: call on Kazakhstan to move political prisoner Aron Atabek out of solitary confinement.
Two Londoners face "terrorism" charges for posting a video.
The video they made involves gloating over the killing of a British soldier in London. They had nothing to do with carrying it out; they only expressed an opinion. I don't like the opinion, and maybe you don't either; but freedom of speech includes the freedom to express opinions we don't like.
By 2040, deadly heat waves such as almost never seen today will be fairly common.
The extinction of large animals, 12,000 years ago in South America,
started a
process starving
the forest of nutrients that is still getting worse.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Bankization of America: the imaginary economy of banks drives the real economy down.
The NSA's official rules on surveillance mean little, since
it breaks
those rules thousands of times every year.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the State Department to dismiss ERM from evaluating the environmental impact of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
ERM concealed a conflict of interest: a business tie to Transcanada.
US citizens: call on the senate
to take
action against global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Here's a list of companies and pressure groups that sponsored the latest ALEC meeting.
ExxonMobil, Wells Fargo and UPS would be easy to boycott. People in the computer field could put pressure on SAP.
A year after South African thugs massacred 34 striking miners, apparently as part of a plan, the government continues to stonewall.
I am in favor of nationalizing the mines; compensation is unnecessary, given how much the owners have profited and how much they ought to owe to their past and present workers. However, merely changing the identity of the owner won't by itself result in decent treatment for miners, or the poor in general.
Ecuador has abandoned a plan to keep oil in the ground in exchange for foreign compensation.
Correa asked for half what ten years of oil drilling would have brought in, but received only a tiny fraction.
No Tanks: Let's Not Kid About It, the Government Is Afraid of Its Own Citizens.
Corruption from Siemens is partly to blame for high bus fares
in Sao
Paulo
that led to protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Supporters of Morsi are now attacking government buildings in Egypt.
It is understandable they would do so after so many of them were killed.
Many Christian churches have been burnt, and one Christian was shot dead.
There is no excuse for this. However, it is invalid for the government to cite this violence as an excuse for the attacks which sparked it.
In the US, drinking over four cups of coffee correlates with a much higher death rate.
I'm not convinced this study shows that coffee is the cause of the higher death rate. Maybe people drink more coffee because of some condition that also makes them more likely to die young.
Obama's weak response to Egypt's bloody crackdown is tantamount to support.
One of the Greenpeace protesters who climbed a London skyscraper faces the threat of a long jail term for "aggravated trespass".
The UK crime of "aggravated trespass" was invented as an excuse to punish protesters that didn't injure anyone or destroy property. In other words, it is an explicit and intentional attack against democracy.
An Afghan woman MP has been kidnaped by the Taliban.
Dozens of high ranking thugs in South Africa have been convicted of serious crimes (up to murder) and are not even fired.
Everyone: call for moving the 2014 Winter Olympics out of Russia.
Whites in California defend meritocracy except when they have to compete with people of Asian origin, who seem to have lots of merit.
Wikipedia refuses to participate in China's censorship.
A tentacle of Myhrvold's patent troll company, Intellectual Ventures, has hit a small setback, but it isn't a defeat.
Nova Scotia has passed a draconian law defining any communication that seems likely to hurt someone's self-esteem as "cyberbullying", with harsh punishments.
The practice of criminalizing statements that hurt someone's feelings is a plague that affects most of the world.
A bill has been introduced in Congress to stop schools from punishing students for wielding pastries in the shape of a gun, or drawing a gun on paper, etc.
I support it, but it does not go far enough. We need to reverse the factors that pressure schools to adopt lunatic "zero tolerance" policies.
Brazil has sued Samsung for operating a sweatshop.
More NSA language-twisting: they can search your email but it isn't "collected".
China will stop the official practice
of transplanting
organs from victims of execution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Egyptian suppression forces killed over 500 protesters.
Secular Egyptians mostly seem to support the military; I received mail from one that accused the Muslim Brotherhood of "terrorism". There has been some minor terrorism, specifically attacks against Christian churches (but not people, from what I've read), but as far as I know the Muslim Brotherhood does not advocate this. It might well have violated the human rights of women and non-Muslims, and maybe Muslims too (by forbidding them to stop being Muslims), but that is not the same thing as terrorism.
Egyptian thugs killed over 270 pro-Morsi protesters, and eventually drove the doctors out of the protest camp field hospital by shooting tear gas at it. I wonder if the wounded protesters will turn up dead.
This means Egypt has turned to naked military rule. Will it be as repressive and persistent as it was under Mubarak? One can hope not, but the return of Mubarak's "emergency" law suggests the worst.
Mild criticism with zero firmness is how the US typically treats a repressive regime that it supports. I think it means that the US really supports the Egyptian military's repression and only pretends to disapprove.
Sustainable biofuel, not made using resources needed for making food, is now being developed, so the oil companies are trying to destroy the mandates for using ethanol in fuel.
The mandates should be changed so that they require ethanol made in sustainable ways.
The United Arab Emirates is trying to close the German server of a news site that criticizes oppression in the UAE.
In Ecuador, Indigenous Leaders Sentenced to 12 Years in Jail for "Terrorism".
US citizens: call on CBS to stop biasing the surveillance debate in favor of surveillance.
'Defense' contractor CACI International has sued the victims that its employees tortured.
Censorship Backfire: Surge of Interest in Zinn's 'People's History'
Longlines Killing Pacific Seabirds at Record Rate.
Endangered species protection has been proposed for a Florida butterfly, but if we don't stop pumping out CO2, it will be drowned with the rest of South Florida.
Brazil demands clarifications on NSA surveillance.
US schools have come to
resemble
prisons, physically and in the police state mentality applied to
their inmates.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Two Venezuelan newspapers were fined for publishing photos of violent crime scenes.
I hope people who find this censorship ridiculous will also question the censorship plans of other countries such as the UK.
Indian TV stations have been shut down for broadcasting coverage of a local autonomy movement.
The repression of the nonviolent Islamists in Egypt is likely to boost support for violent Islamists, who can now argue that peaceful methods won't be allowed to win.
It appears that Egyptian thugs intentionally targeted reporters.
Pakistan has disappeared 450 people, and their relatives are trying to find out what happened to them.
Everyone: sign
this petition
calling for no prosecution of the Anonymous leaker whose leaks led to
the prosecution of the Steubenville rapists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Brazilian thugs banned showing a documentary in a poor neighborhood because it might make them hate the thugs.
There is good reason it might, since the documentary shows how children in that very neighborhood got killed in some sort of run-in with the thugs.
Thugs must not be allowed to censor!
US citizens: call on your elected representatives to support constitutional amendments to reverse the Corporations United decision. It's important to do this again even if you've done it before.
Governments that prosecute global heating civil disobedience are coming to court with dirty hands because they failed to protect the atmospheric commons.
The CIA said it had no file on Noam Chomsky, but it had one in 1970.
Israel has released 26 Palestinian prisoners, mostly people who killed civilians.
Can anyone tell me how these prisoners were chosen? Why not release the people who have been imprisoned without charges rather than prisoners convicted of something?
Does the
US Pay Families When Drones Kill Innocent Yemenis?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone senators to oppose appointing New York Thug Commissioner Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Suppression.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Escalating military responses to rhino and elephant poaching are failing, just as they failed to stop drug trafficking, but efforts to convince people to stop buying them might work.
The big differences between poaching and drug trafficking are (1) legalization of hunting rhinos and elephants would not solve the problem, and (2) rhino and elephant horn have no physiological effect on their users.
Another NSA snowjob: it "touches" only 1.6% of all Internet traffic, but communication is only 2.9% of all Internet traffic, so maybe the NSA looks at "only" 55% of all Internet communication.
Or maybe the number means nothing because we don't know their meaning of "touches".
Eastern European Autocrats Pose New Test for Democracy.
A Hungarian friend tells me that Orbán has chipped away at democracy and civil society to the extent that it is nearly impossible to challenge his power, but has avoided the sort of harsh measures that would make lots of Hungarians wish to try. So it is a nondemocratic regime, but not actively oppressive.
War crimes tribunals have set a high bar for proving that high officials are responsible for war crimes carried out when they were not present.
There will be times that underlings commit war crimes that their superiors did not approve, or would not have approved. It would be unjust to hold the superiors responsible for that. However, they can be held responsible for not taking action against the perpetrators.
The Bahrain tyranny threatens violence against those who commemorate the anniversary of 2011 protests.
This tyranny receives the firm support of the US government and its tyrannical regional allies.
A UK agency ruled against
placing
license plate recognition cameras on all roads leading to the town of
Royston.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
However, there is no sign of any plan to limit the network that tracks car travel around the UK.
The Tea Party is being split between grassroots that support home solar power and the business-funded part that obeys the Koch brothers.
A former aide to Senator Wyden rebukes Obama for thwarting an open debate about massive surveillance in Congress for so long.
Finally, the US government opposes a merger between giant companies.
All such mergers should be blocked as standard practice.
Obama set up a web site and promised to respond to petitions, but
he ignores
some of the sharpest ones.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
"Bee-friendly" plants for sale in major US chain stores contain neonicotinoid pesticides.
The Koch-funded Franklin Center generates right-wing "journalism" so newspapers don't need to employ reporters any more.
More details of the Hungarian government's policies that undermine democracy.
Several state governments subsidize ALEC.
Guatemala may face trade sanctions if it does not end the murders of union organizers.
Some of these murders are connected to Coca Cola Company, which is part of the motive for the world-wide boycott of that company.
Why it would be impossible, pointless and misguided to charge Nidal Hasan with "terrorism".
Corporate greed, refusing to allow food workers paid days off,
spreads
illness to their customers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
But hey, the plutocrats have their own cooks.
When Argentine prosecutors charged Iranian officials for the bombing of a Jewish institution, the only link connecting them to it came from the armed opposition (and sometime terrorist) group Mujahedin-E Khalq.
This is not a reliable enough basis to accuse anyone.
See previous notes for how the MEK got itself removed from the US list of "terrorist" groups.
Egyptian suppression forces attacked the Morsi supporters' protest camps, killing dozens of them.
300 protesters had been killed in previous attacks.
A British cameraman was shot dead as he covered the attack.
Assuming he was shot by the suppression forces, that shows they were shooting at people who were offering them no violence.
The coup has a lot of popular support, but that doesn't justify repressing the people who oppose it.
Algorithms trained from data can encode prejudice in a form that is hard to spot.
The hypothetical "grand solar minimum", even if it happens, would probably cool the Earth far less than we have already heated it up.
EU citizens: sign the
initiative for an unconditional basic income.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Australia plans a nuclear waste dump in aboriginal territory without the consent of the aboriginal people that live there.
US citizens: call for increasing social security benefits and remove the cap on social security tax for the rich.
US citizens: call on elected officials not to let the NSA open its new Utah data center.
The NSA already stores too much data about all of us; if storage limitations force it to be selective, that will crimp its excesses. Obviously, this is not a full or elegant solution, but it is a step forward.
Part of Australia plans to let mines pollute as much as they like at any given time, as long as the yearly average stays under a certain level.
A Bangladeshi human rights leader has been arrested for "fabricating information" about atrocities by government suppression forces.
It's normal thug behavior to lie and cover up their brutality. Thus, if a government is minded to arrest the people who reported it, it can easily find witnesses to testilie that they must have "fabricated" the reports.
Obama's announced
review of surveillance, in response to Snowden's revelations,
validates Snowden as a whistleblower.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Those who betrayed the US are its leaders who have ignored their oath to defend the Constitution.
US citizens: phone the Department of the Interior to object to the plan to allow mining of millions of tons of publicly-owned coal.
Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden talk about how their cooperation started and how it proceeded.
Israel's cabinet spat on peace negotiations by voting to expand its colonies in Palestinian territory.
Islamists in Banghazi have killed three journalists in the last four days.
The Moral
Imperative of Activism.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The WiFi-tracking trash cans have been deinstalled from a part of London.
However, the phone company continues tracking phones and recording their movements.
LA thugs arrested a photographer for "interfering" with them by photographing them from 90 feet away (30 meters).
This is typical thug behavior, documented dozens of times in earlier political notes.
The British Library's filtering software blocked access to the text of Hamlet, calling it "violent content".
It is insulting to refer to Shakespeare's plays, or any works of authorship, as "content". Please join me in rejecting that term.
Calling Hamlet "violent", however, is accurate, and the example shows why blocking access to violent works (or any works) is wrong.
The Obama regime and congressional leaders kept most members of Congress in the dark about massive surveillance when they had to vote on it.
Holder plans to stop charging "low-level drug offenders" with crimes that require a prison sentence.
It is a small step towards what must be done: ending the War on Drugs.
The groundwater near the Fukushima plants has so much strontium-90 that drinking it for a year would surely give a person cancer. When it gets into the ocean, it accumulates in algae and in fish, so the marine life in that region will be contaminated for a long time.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between the quantities of strontium-90 leaking from the Fukushima plants today and the amount released by above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 50s and early 60s.
John Grisham, whose books are banned in Guantanamo, writes about an innocent prisoner who may finally be freed — and sent to a country where he knows nobody.
The Australian government is taking many aboriginal children away from their parents because of problems that are caused by poverty. Meanwhile, it cuts the assistance that would help aboriginal families cope.
At one point during 2012, 13,299 aboriginal children had been removed from their families.
These statistics say that about 2/3 are placed with relatives or indigenous people, but it is still a large rate of taking children away.
Turkish journalists were sentenced to long prison terms for supposed participation in a conspiracy for a military coup.
It is not implausible, a priori, that Turkish generals were planning a coup. Turkey has seen such coups before. To claim journalists were involved in the conspiracy makes it implausible.
Zimbabwe women report interference with their voting, and threats.
There is no scientific reason for killing whales — the same information can be obtained through methods that don't hurt them.
The
Surveillance State, You, and the Time Traveling Detectives.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Murdoch is ordering journalists working for News Corp's Australian to bias their writing against the Labor government.
Universities snoop more and more on students, making a data base of data such as what web searches they do, their driving habits, whether they miss meetings, as well as how they use the library.
I think libraries should ensure that people's borrowing habits are not recorded in any permanent data base.
US Drones
on Yemen: 'al Qaeda's Public Relations Officer'.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Why the World Bank Shies Away From Energy Efficiency.
The US does not recognize that use of toxic Agent Orange was a war
crime, and offers
no
compensation to millions of Vietnamese who were affected.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The President of Purdue University, when previously Governor of Indiana, tried to ban Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the US" from schools in that state.
A new method for attacking dissident US journalists: send them a "leak" which is really "child" pornography, and get them imprisoned when they look.
To criminalize possession of any kind of digital material is an injustice, and endangers all other human rights.
German justice minister proposes ban for US firms that don't abide privacy laws.
Meanwhile, the German spy agency (BND) is passing metadata on to the NSA.
Teachers in the UK's deregulated "academy" schools report pressure from their managers to inflate grades.
This is a natural consequence of "grading" schools by the average grades of students.
Thanks to fracking, the town of Barnhart, Texas, ran out of water.
Fracking adds to many other forms of overuse, which are running headlong into reduced rainfall caused by global heating.
During 2012, CIA repeatedly followed one drone attack with a second drone attack, targeting rescuers looking for wounded from the first attack. This tactic is a war crime.
It was used by Iraqi resistance fighters; maybe the US learned it from them.
Recommending computing practices that partially resist surveillance is not enough to count as a solution to the surveillance problem. We need to make privacy safe for ordinary users.
US Could Exploit Trade Deal to Expand Spying.
The "trade" deal in question, which is more about giving business more power than about trade in the usual sense, is TAFTA: Turn All Freedom To Ashes.
Angola's principal investigative reporter, Rafael Marques de Morais, faces criminal charges for reporting on blood diamonds.
The government of Ethiopia is systematically kicking certain ethnic groups off their land, forcing them to settle in villages were they have no life, no farms and no future, in order to sell their land to foreign plantations.
When they object, they are tortured. Ethiopia's government has a close relationship with the US, and invaded Somalia for the US a few years ago.
I don't think the victims of this violence have any obligation to refrain from responding with violence.
Meanwhile, Nigeria plans to evict tens of thousands of people from urban areas, destroying their homes, for "redevelopment".
One of the causes of land conflicts like these is world population growth. Offering gratis contraception and abortion to all women will help to avoid some future conflicts.
Political prisoners in Iran remain a political influence.
"Ninja journalists" cover what Brazil's concentrated mainstream media ignore.
Torrent trackers should stop tracking their users.
The same applies to network services in general, I think.
Why did the Obama regime ask its Wikileaks mole to investigate Guardian reporter James Ball?
He asks this question because it seems to illustrate a policy that threatens journalists in general.
Despite a big increase in drone attacks in Yemen, the local al-Qa'ida organization seems to be getting stronger.
This is not surprising, because a guerrilla organization's strength is typically limited by its ability to recruit.
Undercover
thugs infiltrated
a tar sands resistance camp and sabotaged a civil disobedience
action.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The mainstream media present ex-officials such as Michael Hayden as trustworthy authorities, burying the fact that they misled us before and have commercial interests in distorting issues now.
A judge ruled that the New York Thug Department is practicing racial discrimination when it searches people on the street based on no evidence.
I think the question of discrimination is a side issue. Whether they search you because they don't like your skin color, or because they don't like your face, it is equally wrong.
On Friday, the President Treated Us Like Five-Year-Olds.
Liepman's claim, that the government is only listening to terrorists, is now known to be false. And it's not only drug dealers, either. Recall that "terrorist", for the US government, includes dissidents and whistleblowers.
In the US: call on textbook publishers to publish real science and resist the Texas Taliban.
Banksters paid a pittance to settle the US lawsuit over the homes that they foreclosed fraudulently. Now homeowners are suing, and we can see that they stole trillions of dollars.
Masha Gessen, her girlfriend and their children will flee Russia because the state will take away children from gay couples.
US citizens: oppose Rep. Issa's plan
to attack
the US Postal Service.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
What was it that Lavabit was ordered to do, such that it shut down instead?
World energy investment is projected to focus mainly on unconventional oil and gas, that makes more CO2 per energy delivered than ordinary oil.
A Republican admits that the rash of unsatisfiable "safety
regulations" being placed on abortion providers
is meant to
make them impossible.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: sign this petition to close the Guantanamo prison instead of US embassies.
Instead of fracking, make biogas from wastes.
US citizens: Call for a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides.
The patriarchy says, 'no' means 'yes', and they can ruin people's lives.
Others endorsed the opposite falsehood, claiming that 'yes' means 'no', and this too can ruin people's lives.
What part of 'yes', or 'no', don't they understand?
An ISP's "piracy" filter blocks access to the political site torrentfreak.com as well.
Please don't refer to sharing as "piracy" — that is enemy propaganda. Please call it "sharing". The only case where it's proper to use the word "pirate" in this context is in the name "Pirate Party".
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service to choose advisors about protection of wolves based on their expertise, and not reject them because they objected to previous distortion of their views.
Christian theocrats are accusing Planned Parenthood of medicaid fraud. Planned Parenthood says it isn't true, but defending the cases is so expensive that it has to settle instead.
Trash cans in London track all WiFi-enabled devices as they pass by.
They do not track my laptop, as its WiFi device is normally turned off.
Bahrain has, in effect, exiled Maryam Al-Khawaja, by putting her on a "no fly" list.
Her father has been sentenced to life in prison there for protesting.
Saudi Arabia Continues to Fight Human Rights Organizations.
Jordan is imposing crushing censorship on the press.
This is part of a regional attack on dissidents.
Everyone: call on Miami to hold the killers of Israel Hernandez accountable.
Dr Sanjay Gupta, a prominent opponent of marijuana, calls for legalization of medical marijuana, because the US banned it without scientific evidence.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Frack Pack bills to regulate fracking to protect air and water. Also send a message through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: thank Edward Snowden.
Watch out for the tendency to define sadness as a medical condition.
Israel made a drone attack in Egypt, with private permission from Egypt's military.
It is not inherently wrong for Israel to help Egypt against rebels, if that's what they are and Egypt is fighting them militarily. Nonetheless, for Egypt to get this help from Israel seems like asking for trouble, and we can't take Israel's word about who was targeted or who was actually hit.
A large
movement in Greece reconnects people to electricity whose electric
accounts have been shut off.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In ordinary circumstances I would not support this. However, a government of occupation such as the one that rules Greece, a government that is putting undesirables in concentration camps is not entitled to criticize any form of resistance, as long as it doesn't attack ordinary people.
The head of the NSA told us to
"get the
facts" instead of criticizing massive surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Since it is only through Snowden that we get any facts about this, Obama should pardon him and thank him.
The tiny railroad company that caused the Lac Megantic disaster is bankrupt; its insurance will not cover the damages.
This company is a piece of a business empire structured as many corporations with small assets. The apparent purpose of this structure is to save the empire as a whole from paying the damages for accidents such as this. It limits the liability to one small piece, which can go bankrupt in order to spare the empire as a whole. That this leaves the victims screwed is of no importance to the callous rich.
It resembles the strategy used by Peabody Energy which spun off a subsidiary containing its retired workers' pension obligations, so it would go bankrupt and screw those former workers.
This practice is lawful due to politicians and parties that have sold out to business. If they represented the people instead of the plutocrats, they would have adopted laws that hold the entire empire liable.
Why not accuse Dubya of "aiding al Qa'ida"?
The damaged Fukushima reactors are leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, and probably have contaminated the aquifer under the site.
The contaminated aquifer could contaminate plant life there for centuries.
A Tibetan musician was imprisoned merely for calling on Tibetans to be united and learn and speak Tibetan.
Pirate Party Reports IT Minister to the Police for Copyright Infringement.
A Jobs Plan Only Big Business Could Love.
Amerindians in Canada pressured a store to stop selling hair ornaments which "make a mockery of their culture."
It looks like this is not real mockery, just a resemblance that they feel they are entitled to own.
No one has a right to own a style of ornamentation, and these people should get used to that. There is no point fighting to continue the sale accessories that offend someone — they are not important enough. But on principle that would be right.
Senator Feinstein, militantly pro-surveillance, wants to narrow further a press-shield bill that is already ridiculously weak.
Quantifying how wildfires in the West have increased, and how they are projected to increase in coming decades.
This projection is not a certainty. What really happens could be less, or more.
Vietnam: Reporter Who Investigates Corruption Arrested for "Corruption".
US cities including New York are starting municipal composting programs.
The TSA is the Obama regime's scheme to impose random searches on Americans everywhere they go.
Minimum-wage employers are now the biggest employers in the US, and courageous workers are starting to go on strike.
The US need jobs more than it needs "efficiency". If companies use threats of automation as a lever to keep wages down, I suggest banning the automation that they would use. Why not ban automatic check-out machines in all stores?
Although Pope Francis shows concern for the poor, he still supports cruel Catholic dogma.
How I Exposed an Undercover Cop.
Journalists and activists are murdered with impunity in the Philippines.
China and India plan over 400 hydroelectric dams for the Himalayan region, and these are likely to cause big environmental problems.
Wyden: Obama's NSA Proposals Are Nice, But They Don't Go Far Enough.
150 human rights
organizations call
on Obama to stop prosecuting Snowden.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Some of these organizations' activities are explained in Cory Doctorow's article.
The US has sued Bank of America for tricking clients into buying bad investments.
Why no prosecution?
How did Shell get the Irish thugs to attack protesters? A company reportedly delivered around 50,000 dollars worth of whiskey to the thugs, as one among many other favors.
James Risen is ready to go to jail to protect his sources, but if the US is to reclaim democracy, it must ensure no reporter must do so.
Thousands Demand GMO Corporations 'Quit India'.
US forfeiture presented as an instance of systematic entrepreneurial corruption, as found in Russia and Iraq.
Jimmy Carter praised Snowden and said the US does not have a functioning democracy. US media ignored Carter's the speech, which goes against the official party line.
US citizens:
call
for ratification of the Agreement on the Conservation of
Albatrosses and Petrels.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to require government contractors to pay a living wage.
Obama's plans for "reforming" the government housing loan entities, "Freddie Mac" and "Fannie Mae", could lead to a repeat the mortgage bubble.
I think we should ban mortgage-backed securities and require each mortgage to remain in the hands of one sole bank — so that bank can give the homeowner an adjustment when it's called for.
Defense Attorneys Plan to Fight NSA Evidence in Drug Cases.
The NSA collects Americans' communications in a very loose way
by saying that
someone
else is the "target".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The second in charge of the CIA listed the "security threats" that the US faces, and none of them is much of a threat. So why not have a smaller military?
The principal real threats to the well-being of Americans are plutocracy and global heating. A large army can't tax the megacorps' offshored profits or hold back the rising sea. But it can feed our money to the military-industrial complex, and start wars.
Glenn Greenwald comments on the shutdown of Lavabit.
I think the Obama regime will rue the day it did this. I cheer the courage of Lavabit's owner, who has dealt tyranny a great blow.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, support Rush Holt's repeal of the PAT RIOT Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on the FDA to prohibit labeling GMOs as "natural".
US citizens: call on Obama to oppose Israel's plan to destroy Bedouin villages and to call on Israel to respect nonviolent protest.
US citizens:
call
on the judge to reject letting Halliburton off with a tiny fine
for its deadly practices.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
Call
on Congress to investigate the DEA's dishonest use of NSA
materials.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
on Obama not to allow fracking on public lands.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The effects of global heating are already making US electric plants shut down because they can't get enough water. And it will get worse.
Student Loan Law Raises College Costs, Sanders Says.
Lavabit's
Brave Stand (and Snowden's statement about it).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
There is a big fuss because Oprah Winfrey asked to see a $42,000 handbag in a store in Zurich and was told, "That is too expensive for you." Was this prejudice because of her skin color, or because of her body size?
Whichever it was, the store employee was nasty — but before we get too indignant about the unfairness of receiving an insult when considering buying a bag that costs more than a working-class American makes in a year, let's consider a more important ethical question: should rich people, regardless of skin color or body size, pay more money in taxes? Should some of their gains be spent on education, health care, and renewable energy — rather than $42,000 handbags?
The fisherman of Fukushima still cannot fish, because radioactive material in water leaking into the sea pushes the local fish above the standard limit.
The email service Lavabit has shut down rather than spy on its users.
Since the management of Lavabit would like to tell us what happened, and the US government wants to keep us in the dark, justice requires us to presume the worst about the US government.
Miami thugs killed a prized graffiti artist because he ran away when they tried to arrest him for painting graffiti.
The family won't get any truth from the thugs. They will tell the story that serves their purpose.
Tasers kill quite a few people.
Every time you use one, you should realize, "This might kill."
ALEC and the Heatland Institute continue their funded campaign to falsify climate science and keep us on track to disaster.
ALEC continues to oppose gun control despite saying it would cease.
Richard Dawkins tweeted to criticize Islam because there are not very many Muslim Nobelists.
I don't think his point is cogent. Most have neither the talent nor the interest in doing the sort of work that might win a Nobel prize. If Islam diminishes one's chances of winning a Nobel prize, which has not been proven, that would at worst be marginally unfortunate, not wrong.
What is really wrong about Islam is its disrespect for human rights. For instance, its ban on conversion away from Islam. In general, Muslim countries prohibit this and punish those who try — in some places, with execution.
Fresh leaks say that major UK telecom companies have actively developed spy software for GCHQ.
A legal campaign has been launched against UK telecom that cooperate with GCHQ surveillance.
A lawsuit was launched against Dubya's illegal warrantless wiretapping, but Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act which made it legal.
Now there are plans to try to reverse that.
Prosecutor Heymann compared Aaron Swartz to a rapist, condemning him for dragging MIT through the ordeal of appearing in court by not making a plea bargain.
DC activists have identified an undercover thug infiltrator who arranged for other thugs to sabotage nonviolent protests.
These protests were aimed at pressuring retailers to support safer working conditions in Bangladesh. In other words, aimed at retailers that put people's lives at risk. Why would the thugs help them? Thugs have a general practice of helping the rich (including these companies) against the non-rich.
Cory Doctorow refutes the damaging myth that defenders of computing freedom are naive and foolish cyber-utopians.
One reason the US experiences so many leaks is that it is too quick to stamp things "secret".
On the distinction between real secrets and public secrets.
Manning
and Snowden revealed the latter kind.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Broad U.S. Terror Alert Is "Crazy Pants".
A judge was bribed by a privatized juvenile prison to sentence lots of kids there. He has been sentenced to a long prison term.
That is justice, in the small; but the privatized prison system will lead to such crimes over and over until we put an end to it.
Atherton, California, seems to be doing racial profiling when it stops drivers: 95% of the drivers stopped by its thugs have Hispanic names. And there are other irregularities too.
In the US: call on NBC to stop rejecting anti-Keystone XL ads.
15 Things Everyone [in the US] Would Know If There Were a Liberal Media.
Mothers face widespread workplace discrimination even when they do good work.
A Russian TV journalist who defiantly broadcast sober criticism of
Putin
is threatened
with charges of "hooliganism".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I Do Not Want My Daughter to Be "Nice".
The UK border thugs sometimes copy all the data from people's phones and computers, just like the US border thugs, but in the UK they also threaten to imprison people for not handing over their passwords.
Many elevator Door Close buttons are dummies. (I have sometimes suspected that it was a dummy in a particular elevator.)
So are thermostats in many offices. But that would not convince me I don't feel hot — I know that from empirical evidence, and I have a thermometer to test my personal sensations against.
A giant sinkhole 24 acres in area has swallowed part of Bayou Corne, and the toxic fumes make the rest of the town uninhabitable.
US citizens: call
for abortion coverage for peace corps workers in cases of rape or
medical necessity.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This is not enough, of course. Every woman should be able to get an early-term abortion at no cost.
British Columbia has a carbon tax, and gives the money to people with low incomes.
Thus, the poor are not shafted by the tax, but they do feel pressure to conserve, just as everyone else does.
This is the sensible way to use the market to push society away from burning fossil fuels.
Our carbon emissions are gradually locking in substantial future rises in sea level that will eventually inundate large parts of many coastal cities.
This gives a new meaning to the concept of an "underwater mortgage".
Businesses may one day demand to monitor employees' medical readings all the time. ("Big data" means "massive surveillance".)
Of course, this monitoring will be "optional", except for people who would mind being unemployed.
We should prohibit the practice before it gets started, because limiting mass surveillance is more important than any other pertinent goals.
Obama postponed (probably cancelled) a summit meeting with Putin because negotiations on many issues have stalled.
Obama took advantage of this to smear Snowden again.
John Kiriakou: Obama's Abuse of the Espionage Act is Modern-Day McCarthyism.
Legal action against zero-hours contracts that leave workers in a totally precarious situation.
Forfeiture at work: Rochelle Bing has struggled for 4 years to prevent thugs from seizing her house on the grounds that her son sold drugs there.
The supposed reason for this is to terrorize the head of every family exercise an impossible level of strict control over the rest. Perhaps a middle-class housewife can watch everything that people do in her house, though teenagers will tend to resist that. However, no working person could possibly do this.
That is purely theoretical. The real reason is that the thug department wants money, and will take it on any available pretext from anyone who is vulnerable.
Seizing property is a punishment, and calling it something else is merely a legal lie. Under the US constitution, a punishment should only follow due process of law: conviction of a crime.
As for the thugs and the money they thirst for, if we legalize regulated sale of drugs, we could get along with a lot fewer thugs. Not only the victimless drug crimes, but the robberies fueled by drug habits, would disappear.
The article tangentially touches on another grave danger: it is a bad thing for anyone to have 18 grandchildren. We need to prevent that from happening in the future, but seizing houses from grandparents is not going to help.
ALEC is about to privately present its agenda for the coming year: many possible attacks on democracy.
Egypt's military maybe-ruler is associating himself with the memory of Nasser, a military dictator.
Governments are using Interpol to find and harass dissidents in exile.
Journalists in Russia who criticize mistreatment of people in connection with the coming Olympic games face repression.
Uganda has passed a law requiring all protests to get permission from the thugs.
It is not quite as nasty than Bahrain, but it's on the way.
Everyone: support freedom of movement for Palestinian journalists.
Richmond, California, is seizing houses from banks using eminent domain so that the occupants can keep living in them.
Tony Bennett's scheme of "grading" public schools systematically hands out good grades to schools with prosperous students, and bad grades to schools with students from poor families.
Then the "failing" schools (those whose students are poor) get privatized.
I suppose the privatizers don't care which schools they privatize, but the wealthier families could resist harder, so this scheme lets them do it to the families that can't resist.
US citizens:
urge
the EPA to set stricter standards for toxic pollution from
automobiles.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call for raising the minimum wage to $10.50 an hour.
Five
Absurdities about High-Stakes Standardized Tests.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
What the US government must do to restore our trust.
Bezos Buys the Post, Pulled Plug on WikiLeaks in 2010.
New Hampshire thugs described protest groups as "terrorists" to apply for funds to buy an armored vehicle, with which to attack protests.
This is happening across the country, and the federal program that offers money to thugs to buy these armored cars (and other heavy weapons) is primarily to blame. Once the thugs in a town set up a SWAT team, they want to use it, so they set up criteria for when to use it. That results in fatalities because sometimes grandpa gets a heart attack when the house is attacked by a SWAT team.
Any city with less than five incidents per year for which a SWAT team is really needed should borrow one from a bigger city on those rare occasions.
Botnet operators takes advantage of the witch-hunt against "child pornography" to frighten users about getting their PCs disinfected.
This is yet another reason why the ban on possessing "child pornography" must be eliminated, to add to all the other reasons.
I put that expression in quotation marks because, in the US, it includes selfies made by teenagers for sexting.
Bahrain has banned all protests. The repression of the government of Bahrain is supported by the US and US allies sent forces to impose the crackdown.
The cyber-attack against Tor users may be due to some other agency rather than the NSA.
The corporate/state surveillance partnership explains why the state can get so much information about nearly everyone.
It is a shame that the article starts with defeatist statements: "We all carry mobile phones", "We notify Facebook". Not everyone does these things: some of us refuse, as resistance to surveillance. It is not impossible.
The measures proposed in the article are not enough. If data is collected, it will be misused. We must force companies to redesign systems so that they don't keep much data about anyone, except when a court order requires them to keep data about someone in particular.
Another aspect of the corporate/state surveillance
partnership permits
corporate misuse of the data that is collected for the state.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The More Nefarious US Foreign Policy, The More It Relies on Media Complicity.
The coup-installed "business-friendly" government in Honduras seems to encourage the murder of indigenous leaders who oppose dams in their land.
Egypt's government threatens to attack the Morsi supporters by Sunday.
The one firefighter who was not killed along with the rest of his group, because he was doing a job elsewhere at the time, reports feeling guilt that he was not with them, and is looking for some sort of "reason" why he survived.
This is a common pattern of irrationality among those who have the good fortune to escape a calamity. There was probably no "reason", only chance; and he has nothing to feel guilty about. If he had been there with them, he'd be dead too. One survivor is better than none.
The UK provides great subsidies for fossil fuel use but much less for renewable energy.
The US has the same harmful policy. I suppose that in both cases it is because the fossil fuel companies have purchased more political power than the renewable energy companies. In other words, it's a reflection of the fact that we have democracy in form, but plutocracy in substance.
A campaign calls for a boycott of the 2014 Olympics because of its repression of gays.
I think repression of political opposition ought to be cited also.
Congressman Lewis, who has long experience in civil disobedience, praised Snowden for it and compared today's surveillance with the surveillance of civil rights leaders such as Lewis himself.
While Russia protects an American hero from extradition, the US protects violent criminals from extradition.
This does not excuse Putin's repression of dissent, of course, but that's a separate issue.
Bruce Schneier, if head of the NSA, would ask if each surveillance program does enough good to the country to justify it.
That might be a good criterion if exercised by someone conscientious, but it would be too easily stretched, so adopting it would not fix the problem.
Meanwhile, I think it is not sufficient to stop the bulk collection of databases, and the bulk searching of massive databases (as in XKeyscore). We need to prevent these massive dossiers from existing about Americans except when probable cause has been shown to investigate someone.
NSA spying has torpedoed the US Internet freedom agenda.
I, like the author, support that agenda, but Snowden's revelations show we need to apply it to the US as well.
The Bank of England says it will keep interest rates low until 750,000 more jobs are created.
That would be good, if low interests rates created jobs. There was a time when that was to be expected, but I don't think that's the case any more.
Thus, all the plutocrats need to do, to continue to borrow cheaply, is to avoid creating jobs in the UK.
A fair number of teenagers use ask.fm to invite people to insult them. A few of them eventually kill themselves.
It seems to me that the site provided them with a way to nerve themselves to suicide, or (only slightly different) stimulated a latent fatal flaw. In other words, the site wasn't the cause of the problem; the problem came first.
To ban the site would be futile, and unfair to millions of others. Small tweaks in the site might reduce the frequency of making people feel miserable, but I doubt it, simply because that possibility always exists when people interact and want to be popular.
If we understood the reason why teenagers feel inclined to do this, maybe we could see a way to turn them away from death. My uneducated guess is that it will be something about their family life.
10 Ways to Reduce the Threat of Terrorist Attacks on Americans.
US political
parties offer
TV networks "partnerships" of a sort that is essentially
corrupting.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Peru's government has apparently discharged ministers that supported indigenous people's opposition to oil mining on their land.
Dishonest campaigns oppose wind and solar electricity plants in Australia.
"Forfeiture", the practice of confiscating people's property without first convicting them of a crime, has reached the point where some US thug departments threaten bogus charges against people passing through simply in order to take their cash.
Isn't it sad how Ms Boatright still thinks of the thugs as "heroes" despite experiencing their ingrained corruption first hand?
US insurance companies are mostly not facing what the effects of global heating will do to their businesses.
This is an important issue, because if they wake up to it, they will pressure governments to do something.
For Palestinian boys, throwing or shooting stones at Israeli cars and even tanks is socially obligatory as a symbol of resistance.
Throwing stones harms the Palestinian cause, because it makes the Palestinians look bad. However, we have to compare it with Israeli teargas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets. All these weapons occasionally kill someone, but not often.
Palestinians protested in Jerusalem against the plan to evict Bedouin from their towns, and the army attacked them.
The Israeli intelligence agency is interrogating political activists to intimidate them.
Why Arabs rejected Zionism, and how that affects the issue of peace today.
In the US
plutocrats' war against the rest of the US population, Detroit Is
the Front Line.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The banksters whose LIBOR lies pushed Detroit into bankruptcy will now get priority over pensioners for the city's money.
The argument offered for this policy is, essentially, a statement that banks hold our country hostage. We need to destroy the bankster regime, regardless of the short-term damage — because letting them continue to bleed us will be worse in the long run.
Removing the safe harbor provisions for commenting on the Internet would be a disaster even bigger than SOPA.
In the US: call on WGBH to remove David Koch from its advisory board.
The NSA is feeding its surveillance data to the War on Drugs and over criminal investigations that have nothing to do with "terrorism".
This makes trials unfair.
Just a few days ago the government was trying to describe this practice in a way that understates the extent of it.
Surveillance blimps now stationed over Washington DC can be used to monitor armed attack — and to monitor cars and maybe even people.
There's lots of wind power capacity in the prairie. We just need to upgrade the electrical grid to transport the electricity to its users from the prairie.
Electric storage facilities are needed too.
Welcome to
Post-Constitution
America.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Refuting
three false arguments for lowering the tax rate on US
corporations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
However, maintaining the tax rate is not enough. We need to block the tricks that they use to shift the profits out of taxation.
The official who organized the use of Guantanamo prison now says it was
fundamentally
wrong.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Transgender people in Greece are being systematically imprisoned without criminal charges, along with homeless people, prostitutes, immigrants and people infected with HIV.
Who will be next?
Uri Avnery addresses what will need to be done to remove various groups of Israeli colonists from expropriated West Bank land.
On the same day as the "1984 day" protests, the US closed several embassies and consulates in response to a high volume of "chatter". In other words, nothing specific.
No terrorist act has been reported, but they can always say they prevented one.
The US government has been caught using "terror alerts" for political purposes before.
The murder of an Afghan woman because she was accused of having an affair demonstrates the cruel misogyny that typically accompanies Islam.
The official, Sharaf, said that she should instead have been put on trial. That reflects the fact that Islamic law is guilty of cruel misogyny.
Christianity used to carry similar misogyny, and for US theocratic Christians it still does so to some extent.
Uganda is passing a law that would allow thugs to ban any demonstration.
An American journalist who filmed Ugandan thugs attacked an unplanned opposition rally was deported, after being accused of committing journalism without a work permit.
The US also has the unjust policy of prohibiting foreign journalists unless they get special visas. Shame on the US!
Hot, dry weather in Alaska is killing salmon and trout.
In 40 years, normal conditions in Alaska will be hot by today's standards.
The US government sabotaged Tor by means of malicious Javascript code.
Fingers point at the NSA.
Here's an explanation of the attack method. It seems that they attacked certain Tor nodes, and every user who (by chance) was routed to those nodes was attacked.
I've been told that the malicious Javascript was not introduced into Tor routing nodes, but rather into some .onion web sites hosted by the same company.
Amnesty International calls on Cuba to free political prisoners who have been convicted of "dangerousness".
I agree, but Cuba is not the only country to imprison people because the state thinks they might commit a crime in the future. The UK does the same thing.
Where Do "Good" Software Practices Fit Into News Applications?
In Sri Lanka, the army attacked journalists who were covering environmental protests.
US citizens:
tell
Congress to pass the Save America's Pollinators Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
President Rouhani says he wants direct talks with the US and would like to make a deal.
A government-supported campaign to improve access to contraception has reduced Bangladesh's birth rate to roughly the replacement level.
The US should fund such campaigns in all countries with rapidly growing populations, including the US itself.
The prejudice against prostitutes becomes visible when they are murdered, and again when the murder is not investigated much.
I am convinced that much of the pressure to crush prostitution, whether it be punishing prostitutes, closing brothels, or punishing customers, reflects the stigma against prostitutes. The claims that this is mean to "protect" them are hypocrisy.
In 2010, Thai soldiers shot unarmed protesters who had taken refuge in a temple.
The NSA director is trying to distract Americans with speculation about what some supporters of Snowden might do if the US caught him.
He hopes we will worry about this rather than about the NSA's cyber attacks against all of us.
When Obama cited Amazon as the source of jobs in the US, he is saying that he wants Americans to have lousy precarious part-time jobs with no benefits.
Here's why you should not buy from Amazon.
Poor people in Greece face hunger as food bank organizations close for a holiday in August and their volunteers are near burnout.
Global heating is pushing marine species towards the poles at around 4 miles a year.
It will get a lot faster in a few decades.
Since the poles are warming fastest, species that are now too hot at polar latitudes, such as polar bear and harp seals and penguins soon won't have any place to go.
Mining figures show that fracking in the US has not resulted in any decrease in CO2 emission.
President Obama's Disastrous Counterterrorism Legacy.
Everyone: call on US colleges to treat rape as a serious offense.
US citizens: phone your congresscritters
to support
the EPA'a authority to act to curb global heating. Also sign this
petition.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Spanish government's response to public condemnation is to harass Gibraltar. I hope the people of Spain are wise enough to see through this and refuse to be distracted from the corruption of the right-wing ruling party.
The sequester cuts will result in a significant reduction in US military forces.
The US military is so much bigger than all its rivals that even after these cuts it would remain the most powerful in the world.
These cuts are very desirable. We should restore funds in areas that do real good for Americans.
In the US, call on Safeway, Starbucks and Target to stop funding the opposition to GMO labeling initiatives.
Everyone: call on Google to let Google Fiber customers run personal servers.
In the US: call on US stores to stop selling neonicotinoid pesticides.
US citizens: call on Obama not to allow oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
US citizens: call on the Secretary of the Interior to give priority
to strict
safety regulations for undersea oil drilling.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government has ordered local planning authorities not to consider using renewable energy instead of fracking.
The claim that there is something good about fracking is based on a dishonest comparison with coal. But even if an honest comparison found that fracked gas was a little better, it is irrelevant to compare them, because fracking has not reduced the amount of coal that is being extracted and burnt.
Thus, this policy is based on pure dishonesty, and I suspect someone has been influenced by gas company money.
The decline in Arctic sea ice, even in the winter, is killing baby harp seals.
As neonicotinoid pesticides enter the soil and rivers, we have no idea what species they are killing off.
The danger of a giant methane release from the Arctic should not be dismissed.
The London thug department has apologized for killing Ian Tomlinson.
A vat-grown hamburger is a first step towards producing meat without animals.
Tunisia is plagued by attacks by Islamist fanatics, which secularists
accuse the government
of failing to fight against.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
8 fields in which privatization in the US has done harm.
The Charitable-Industrial Complex: rich "philanthropists'" giving to charities means they stay silent as the "philanthropists'" businesses continue making things worse.
The East Japan Railway started selling weakly anonymized data from passengers' travel, which was tracked using transit passes that have the passenger's name.
If data is collected, it will be misused. The East Japan Railway, and all other transit systems, should keep no records of who travels where. They should make transit passes anonymous.
Nobel laureate Tawakul Karman was banned from Egypt because
she had
stated support for Morsi.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A report found a slew of bad practices responsible for the killing of
Jimmy Mubenga when he was being deported
from the UK.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Privatization — the use of company employees to do things to prisoners — is surely the root cause.
Two thugs that stripped and chained a pregnant prisoner, keeping her shackled for half a day and causing her baby to be born prematurely, have been given a bad note, but not fired.
Members of Congress Denied Access to
Basic Information About
NSA.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
UK citizens: sign this petition against government Internet censorship.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to end the tax deductability of excessive pay to CEOs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
JP Morgan Chase manipulated electricity prices in the same way as Enron did,but the penalty was a slap on the wrist.
The conviction of Bradley Manning under the Espionage Act suggests a
greater threat to Julian Assange
from the
Obama regime.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Human Rights Watch: the US should apply human rights law to end "perpetual war".
In other words, replace the "war on terrorism" with a "criminal investigation of terrorism".
The Obama regime plans to selectively declassify some documents about surveillance, to make it look better.
This will be a half truth that, as the saying goes, is worse than a lie.
Certain fungicides may be contributing to the death of honeybees.
Paul Lamb, who wants someone to be allowed to help him die, lost his appeal in the UK.
He is condemned to decades of boredom unless something fortuitously kills him.
Evgeny Morozov explains how Snowden's revelations upended the establishment political certitudes about the Internet.
He notes the danger in the "smart" products that will spy on you.
He is mistaken on one point. Gmail could not encrypt email in such a way that it could never read the email. If the encryption is done by Gmail, Gmail has already had a chance to see the non-encrypted message, and could send it to the NSA first.
Right-wing legislators have many ways of attacking abortion rights and women's health care, through pesky little regulations that cause considerable obstruction without being an absolute ban.
Congress is considering
various
proposals to limit surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Any of these would be an improvement, but none of them goes far enough to prevent the US from carrying out a total fishing expedition against anyone it can present suspicions about.
The UK government has quietly undermined plans for marine reserves, leaving wildlife in danger.
The FBI is forcing ISPs to install "port reader" software for total real-time surveillance.
Turkey's Lack of Democracy Is Storing up Problems.
The effects of massive consumption of sugar are showing up in a generation of obese children. And fruit juices have more sugar than sodas.
1700 Russian web sites protested against the Russian SOPA-like law.
Transcanada plans a pipeline to the Atlantic via Quebec to parallel the Keystone XL.
UK water and sewage companies are the biggest polluters of beaches. The fines are too low to do any good.
The Water Companies And the Foul Stench of Exploitation.
Uruguay's plan is to legalize sale of marijuana, but regulate it tightly.
Tsvangirai says the Zimbabwe election was rigged.
Since Mugabe rejected the usual international observers, there is every reason to believe this accusation.
It is easy to spy a considerable amount on most people's mobile phones. Anyone could do it.
Contrary to the article, there are ways to guard against this. For instance, don't enable WiFi in your computer except on rare occasions.
Even when whistleblowers are not convicted, the attack on them undermines press freedom in the US.
House Republicans passed a bill to eliminate most federal safety regulations; meanwhile, the Senate will hold a hearing into the harm caused by the obstruction of necessary regulations.
The House bill is mere propaganda for the right-wing bullshit that regulations are bad.
While the US government demands the extradition of Snowden, who has done the American people a heroic service, it refuses to extradite people accused of terrorism, murder, and fraud leading to economic collapse in other countries.
US mainstream media typically refer to unpopular pro-plutocrat views as the "center".
NBC misrepresents the collateral murder video.
Antibiotic resistance is spreading to another class of bacteria which could make common surgical operations likely to be fatal.
Two violent thieves dressed in thug uniforms turned out to be
real
thugs.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US system for food aid is designed to aid US agribusiness more than the recipients of the aid.
EFF: MIT was not neutral in the Aaron Swartz case. It aided the prosecution.
Even more fundamentally, MIT never told the government that Swartz's use of MIT's network was not unauthorized.
That would have made the case disappear.
Google is attacking network neutrality by saying that ordinary subscribers of Google Fiber will be banned from running Freedom Box.
UK border thugs are accused of systematically accosting nonwhite persons at a London train station and ordering each to "show your papers".
The threats to citizens who asked what was going on is typical thug behavior.
A fracking company settled with a family sickened by contaminated water, imposing a lifetime gag on everyone in the family including the children.
The company now says that
the gag
order did not cover the children.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The CFAA has been used to punish Bradley Manning twice for the same act.
Past Republican administrators of the EPA demand action to curb global heating.
Their time in office was before the fossil fuel companies cracked the whip and required Republicans to deny the facts.
Steve Blank says
that Intel
and AMD processors are vulnerable to malicious microcode updates,
which could be sent by the NSA, by Intel, by Microsoft, or maybe by
someone else.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
When microcode can be changed, it counts as software installed in the computer. Then it needs to be free software.
The ACLU
points out that Edward Snowden qualifies as a whistleblower under
the definition in the Whistleblower Protection Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
That law does not protect people that work for the NSA, but this should still settle the question of whether Snowden is a whistleblower.
To understand the Bradley Manning case, look at why the Espionage Act was passed in the first place.
Although Michele Catalano was fingered due to local surveillance, the
US
government admits
it looks for such searches.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Migrant Workers and America's Harvest of Shame.
Senator Warren: It's Obscene That The Govt. Profits Off Student Loans.
When a government gives big handouts to the rich, then talks about "paying down the national debt" by squeezing students, it adds up to a government that's on the side of the plutocrats.
Paying off the national debt is a mistaken goal at present, because the way to end a recession is with deficit spending.
"What Does Idealism Get You Today? Abuse, Derision, Or Sometimes Prison."
But not in the free software movement. Here we campaign for real change, and we implement it too. It's only one area of life, true; but a good example in one area can get things started in others too.
The Afghan government has no idea what to do with child suicide bombers who failed to detonate their bombs.
US citizens:
call
on your state legislators to cut ties with ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
San Francisco will create a city-owned bank to reduce the risk and cost of using privately owned banks.
US citizens: call on Congress to limit NSA surveillance.
Just limiting the NSA's access is not enough, but it's a good first step.
The NSA has paid 150 million dollars to the UK surveillance agency GCHQ to ensure it remains a surveillance proxy.
Iranian conservatives say it is a waste of time talking with the US. Republicans are trying to prove them right.
I would expect that the Israeli hawks' lobby is behind this. They want the US and Iran to make war, not a nuclear agreement.
The environmental movement must teach people to question what aim all our work is directed at.
In other words, if we stop the plutocrats from taking most of what humanity makes, we could all live comfortably.
Tsvangirai says the election in Zimbabwe was rigged. Independent monitors seem to agree.
What else would one expect from Mugabe?
Oil drilling in Virunga national park could wipe out mountain gorillas directly, as it helps wipe out most other species on Earth.
Since we need to leave 80% of all fossil fuels in the ground, why not include these as part of the 80%.
If massive surveillance is used for profiling, most of suspects will be innocent. Here's a good example.
It is risky to let thugs search your house. Maybe you will luck out, as happened this time. But you should always consult a lawyer before you let them in, or answer questions for them.
The First Amendment's protection must be extended directly to whistleblowers, now that it has become impossible for journalists to protect their sources as was customary.
Deadliest
Month in 5 Years: Bloodshed Soars in War-Ravaged Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In other words, the disaster that Bush's occupation visited on Iraq is not over. Since Bush used lies to start the war, the war itself was his crime, and he is personally responsible for every Iraqi who is killed. He ought to serve hundreds of thousands of consecutive life sentences.
The US security state has told so many lies, and half-truths, that
we cannot
trust any statement unless we can verify it. And with so much
secrecy, we can't verify anything. We can only judge who is
trustworthy and then trust him.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Here's a lexicon detailing the Orwellian US government practice of twisting everyday English words and making statements that mean one thing to us, while they claim it means the opposite to them.
This practice is deceptive. So I refuse to use these words with their Orwellian NSA meanings. I will insist on using them with their normal meanings and applying those normal meanings to the NSA's actions.
Obama and his men have lied and betrayed us many times, in many areas; but Snowden's statements, even when they seemed incredible, have turned out to be true. I don't trust Obama. I trust Snowden.
Snowden has been granted asylum in Russia.
I expect he is unhappy being stuck there, and would rather go to a country such as Venezuela which permits real political opposition, and has a real opposition press.
The foreclosure of 4 million homes in the US has devastated neighborhoods and entire towns. The banks do not bother to maintain the foreclosed homes, so they are looted and become valueless.
What's the point of foreclosing a house and letting it be destroyed? The only point I can imagine is sheer malice, a desire to make others suffer. The banks which have done this deserve to be destroyed themselves.
As for the people who carry out these evictions, it is a wonder that nobody takes personal revenge on them.
Anthony Weiner's wife and sexting partners aren't saints, sluts or victims.
UK telecom companies admit giving GCHQ access to tap their fiber optic cables.
The taps copy the full data, which the NSA can search via XKeyScore.
XKeyScore holds everyone's complete Internet data for the past few days. Messages or data considered "interesting" can be copied elsewhere for permanent storage.
This supports Snowden's claim that he could read anyone's email and demonstrates that, once again, our officials lied to us when they said he was lying.
Green Shadow Cabinet: The conviction of Bradley Manning for espionage
directly threatens
freedom of the press in the US, because the prosecution's argument
was that publishing (true) information is a crime because it makes the
US look bad.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It is standard for tyrannical regimes to claim that exposing their flaws is disloyalty, as "grounds" to punish those who do it. Some of Dubya's followers argued that people who criticized Dubya's wars were supporting al Qa'ida. Obama has converted this notion into law.
When the US government calls on people to help it cover up crimes so as not to give opponents a way to make it look bad, we must respond, "You should have considered possible condemnation before you committed such acts." Then, as the Green Shadow Cabinet says, we must get the US to drop this practice.
But that's not enough. The US has an obligation to try the perpetrators of war crimes, starting with Dubya.
Green Shadow Cabinet: US funding for the Egyptian
military endangers
the prospects for democracy in Egypt.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Complexities of tying hot weather to violence.
In poor countries, misuse and abuse of pesticides lead to illness and even death.
Stock markets value fossil fuel companies as if all their reserves were going to be used some day.
This has been referred to as the "carbon bubble".
The bubble is sure to pop, but will it pop only after global heating disaster, or will we make it pop sooner? The sooner the better, because these companies use their wealth to paralyze governments and to cause negotiations about preventing disaster to fail.
US companies talk about the cost of adapting to global heating's effects, but say nothing about trying to prevent it.
Adaptation is a real possibility only in the early stages.
When thugs visited of couple suspecting them of terrorism, they said they were cued by general massive surveillance. It turns out they were lying — they were cued by local surveillance at the workplace.
I don't think this makes it much better, however, I think that it is scary people can be considered suspects just for looking for information about a topic.
The Chilean miners who survived being trapped in a mine have been blacklisted from working in mines any more. They are "too famous" — if they saw illegal dangerous practices, and reported them, the mine owners could not hush it up.
The article is mainly about the fact that the owners of the mine where they were trapped won't face charges. I don't know enough about the events, or Chilean law, to have an opinion about whether they were at fault.
Libya's government is unable to stop violence, and Tunisia could be following a few steps behind.
Focus on US
Government's Unlawful Behavior, Not Snowden.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
ALEC-sponsored bills aim to destroy state support for renewable energy.
117 ALEC-sponsored bills in US states attack workers' rights.
GMO companies have set up a web site to answer "virtually any question posed by consumers" — except whether the package of food you hold in your hand contains GMOs.
A study finds that hot weather increases violence.
Global heating is likely give people lots of substantial things to fight about. Now we see it is likely to make them start fighting, too.
Global heating is causing various causes of illness and death to spread.
Campaigners accuse the British GCHQ of selling its spying services to the US.
Berlusconi's conviction for tax fraud has been definitively upheld, and he will have to serve a sentence.
A right-wing Japanese politician proposed a stealthy change to the constitution, and proposed the Nazis' stealthy change to the German constitution as an example.
Proposing a stealthy change to the constitution is enough reason to end a politician's career, even if had not cited Nazis as a positive example of doing so. However, there is reason to think that that politician's may have other views in common with Nazis, as he visits the shrine in which war criminals, the Japanese equivalents of Dubya, are worshiped.
US citizens: stand up for the right to sell free range chicken eggs in the US.
US citizens:
call
on the SEC
to enforce the law requiring companies
to publish how much their CEOs are paid.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Thatcher considered trade unions "the enemy".
It is typical of plutocratic states to consider working people as the enemy.
Obama scuttled Congressional testimony for critics of mass surveillance, with a last-minute request for House Democrats to meet with him at the scheduled time.
The Bradley Manning trial: Slow Death For Democracy.
Ten important
revelations the world received from Bradley Manning.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Surveillance and the Corrosion of Internet Freedom.
A summary of MIT's report about the case of Aaron Swartz.
MIT says it was neutral in regard to whether Swartz should be prosecuted.
The Swartz family say that MIT favored the prosecution in subtle ways, but even if it had been neutral, that is wrong when someone faces an absurd prosecution for actions that help the public.
MIT should atone for this by committing to defend anyone who is prosecuted for "crimes" that involve sharing scientific information with the public.
US citizens: sign this petition for proper oversight of the NSA and to require individual warrants.
One further nasty side effect of the War on Drugs: it is as easy as pie to frame anyone by mailing drugs to him and giving the thugs an anonymous tip when the mail will arrive.
Argentina is planning to change laws to give Monsanto increased power over farmers there.
This has inspired protests.
Oakland's planned surveillance system has generated substantial local opposition.
Don't listen to defeatist propaganda saying "It's too late, privacy is dead" on the one hand, and "This is just an upgrade" on the other. We can defeat surveillance, if we recognize it as tyranny and demand "Whatever change is necessary".
Russia will move away from using foreign-made electronic components in sensitive activities, fearing they may have spy features or back doors.
This is a wise policy; several years ago I read that the Pentagon was concerned about possible malicious features in Chinese chips.
Raif Badawi, the founder of the Free Saudi Liberals website, has been convicted of "insulting Islam".
The evil regime also threatened to kill Badawi if he stopped being a Muslim. Human rights include, for any person, the right not to be a Muslim. Or not to be a Christian. Or not to be a Buddhist. Or not to be an Atheist.
If you feel in the mood to insult Islam, you don't need to say anything yourself. Just spread the word about these events, and behold! Islam insults itself.
The NTSB proposes to require cars to have wireless communication systems.
There are two dangers here. First, we already know that many car systems have bad security, and many wireless systems have bad security. Anything like WiFi in a car could enable someone to cause a crash.
Even if the car does not turn out to have this problem, it could prove to be an excuse to deny car owners control over any of the software in their cars — even the software in the entertainment systems.
Second, if a car can be identified from its transmissions, this will become another surveillance system for tracking everyone.
We must insist that the design be such as to avoid both of these sorts of problems.
Australia plans to dump nuclear waste on Aboriginal land after bribing one of the many concerned groups to "give permission".
Close attention to what Senators Wyden and Udall say to Clapper
enables us
to learn some
of the NSA's dirty secrets.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Florida has refused to investigate how an FBI agent killed Ibragim Todashev. It would be embarrassing if an investigation found it was murder.
A competition for making a commercial scale biofuel factory that would operate from plant waste reiterates that we should not be making biofuels from plants that use water, fertilizer or land that could grow other crops.
In the US: join a protest on August 4 against massive surveillance.
US citizens:
tell
Sallie Mae to stop supporting ALEC.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Uruguay's congress has voted to legalize marijuana.
The people who say that cocaine users started with marijuana could equally well say they started with beer, or mate, or water. Nearly all of them surely used those three first.
The "third party doctrine", that people have no privacy rights over data held by someone else, systematically undermines privacy rights in the US. An appeals court ruled no search warrant is needed to collect people's cell phone location data from the phone company.
It is not enough to limit government access to massive surveillance data. We must prevent the accumulation of those dossiers in the first place. Therefore, what we really need is to forbid phone companies from keeping that data for more than a few days.
The water in the Colorado river is insufficient to keep Phoenix going, and global heating is reducing the flow.
Fracking in North Dakota wastes and burns 30% of the gas extracted — equivalent to running a million more cars.
Manning's trial was unjust because the Espionage Act facilitates the War on Whistleblowers.
Mugabe's opponents charge nonviolent election-rigging is going on.
The US is declassifying some info about surveillance as a form of propaganda, stuffing it with false claims.
But officials had to retract a piece of bullshit — that collecting complete phone call records was their "most important tool".
They are trying to pretend that it is ok to collect bulk information about everyone because only computers, not humans, pay attention to most of it.
On the contrary, simply to accumulate these dossiers is unacceptable no matter where they are kept. The state should only be allowed to start building a dossier about someone given a court order.
Egypt's military-dominated government says it will break up the pro-Morsi protest camps.
That probably means an even bigger massacre.
I dislike the Muslim Brotherhood's politics as much as anyone in the world does, but they do not deserve to be attacked on the street.
A school privatizer in Indiana and Florida wrote standards to ensure a campaign donor would get a high mark.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are rising. Most are killed by Taliban land mines.
Australia is experiencing record high temperatures in winter just as it did last summer.
While a warm winter may not be immediately unpleasant, it is very dangerous. For instance, it allows pests to spread which were previously limited by cold. This is why forests around the American west are now dying.
Rwanda provides medical care to 90% of the population.
When will the US do as well?
McDonalds would be doing fine if it paid its store employees twice as much.
Scientists reject the excuses used for ending protection of wolves in the US.
Major US gay rights groups have ignored Bradley Manning, probably in order to appeal to corporate America.
Illegal immigration of Mexicans to the US has effectively ceased:
as many are
leaving as are entering.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This is due to economic policies that spread poverty in the US, making it more like Mexico.
Nonetheless, defending the US from a nonexistent menace can provide money to companies (which pay legislators to favor these measures) and provide an excuse to attack our human rights.
A Swedish man who was drugged into confessing to multiple murders has been declared innocent.
Israeli
thugs attacked and arrested peaceful protesters against the plan
to demolish Bedouin villages.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Russia plans to track cell phones in the Moscow subway.
The US agreed to inform defendants when FISA spying was used in making the case against them.
This puts an end to a catch-22 that made it impossible ever to challenge the legality of that spying in court.
New Study: 82 of Top 100 Companies Used Tax Havens in 2012.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support an amendment to reverse the Corporations United decision (*)
* To call it what it really is.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Did US Help New Zealand Spy on War Crimes Reporter?
Why Bradley Manning deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Receiving this prize will give Manning a chance to face the real consequences of his actions, which (aside from Obama's retaliation) are very good consequences indeed.
Senator Wyden talks about his campaign against the constantly expanding surveillance state.
Israeli settlers keep attacking the house of "Youth Against Settlements" in Hebron, most recently by shooting at it.
US citizens: Thank Senator Reid
for connecting
wildfires with global heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay criticized Israel's expulsion of Bedouin from their homes.
Uri Avnery says that the negotiations that Kerry has started can only succeed if the US ensures both sides get what they need most.
A lawyer for Volunteers for Human Rights talks about defending human rights in Israel, and says that peace talks are a distraction that enables Israel to get away with anything.
Starting peace talks also releases the boycott pressure that was starting to make Israel uncomfortable.
All in all, having talks that go nowhere is quite useful for Israel.
The Israeli annexation wall will separate the Cremisan Monastery in Bethlehem from most of its land.
Netanyahu expressed his contempt for peace talks by authorizing a new colony in East Jerusalem.
"Moral Monday" protests in North Carolina have focused public attention on the right-wing policies most people disapprove of.
The governor's popularity has dropped 20%.
Iran Nominee Seen As Olive Branch to United States.
As Zimbabwe votes, Mugabe's violent intimidation is limited to rural areas where the world doesn't notice so much.
Bradley Manning was convicted on most of the charges.
He was found innocent of "aiding the enemy", but convicted on other charges that threaten journalism in general.
Meanwhile, those guilty of real war crimes including torture and kidnaping receive Obama's protection.
Shame on you, Obama!
Persistent protests in Bulgaria brought down one government and may bring down another.
Asylum seekers in the UK are on a hunger strike to death.
Characters on MMORPGs that appear female are subject to
repeated
nastiness which isn't done to characters that appear male. One woman
demonstrated this by trying both ways of presenting her character.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I can't understand what motivates men to be so nasty to women, and I think we should condemn threats of violence. At the same time, I think everyone needs to learn not to bow to verbal hostility from strangers.
This is why I admire Tuesday Cain, the Texas girl who rebuked the right-wing misogynists that called her a "slut" because of her political sign.
By the way, the word "slut" is twisted in the first place. It presumes that there is something immoral about a female's being disposed to have sex. Why should that be immoral for a female, any more than it is immoral for a male? Or any more than it is immoral to be monogamous, or celibate? The word packages two kinds of prejudice, anti-female and anti-sex. No wonder theocratic Christians use it.
If we dispute whether person X is a slut, we endorse the prejudices in the word. We should condemn the word instead. I have never used the word "slut".
Transferring control of forests in Australia to the states has led to reckless endangerment of species.
"Zero-hours contracts" make the lowest paid employees even more precarious.
I agree that this should be illegal.
New EPA chief Gina McCarthy calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and points out that this will create jobs in the US.
It has already created lots of jobs in some other countries.
Obama proposes to cut taxes for corporations, as a "bargain" with Republicans whose goal is to spread poverty.
Half of Americans consider themselves middle class, but the fact is 80% will need government assistance before retirement age.
Paying for this assistance calls for more taxes on the rich. That's also what's needed to enable lots of Americans to become middle class once again.
Eliminating business tax deductions is a good idea, but it won't go far enough, and there should be no cuts in the tax rate. Meanwhile, what really needs to be changed are the loopholes that permit offshoring of profits.
Dredging in Gladstone Harbour, Australia, released toxic metals which are making crabs in the area sick.
A journalist interviews a Taliban fighter.
Tough Copyright Laws Chill Innovation, Tech Companies Warn Lawmakers.
They refer to the value of innovation because that's a value that Congress claims to care about. I think freedom to share is more important than innovation.
The twisted values of Congress are reflected also in the use of the term "intellectual property" in the name of this committee.
Being robbed by thugs, then framed for having drugs, is standard practice in the US. Here's one example.
Enough!
Accounting and Remembering the Long War in Colombia.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In the UK, many privatized government services and government-created monopolies have fallen to a company that has been charged with cheating the government.
You'd expect the government to ban this company from new contracts, and terminate old ones, if it wanted the public treasury not to be cheated. But the contracts are written so the company gets a bonus no matter how badly it ruins the service. Hmm, perhaps the whole point was for the public treasury to be cheated.
Why recreational drugs must be regulated instead of banned.
All 8 Republicans in the Senate Environment Committee are global heating denialists.
Meanwhile, the Marshall Islands face inundation from its effects.
Let's challenge those fools, who are certainly rich, to buy land in the Marshall Islands with all their money.
How media bosses in Turkey undermine democracy.
Much the same thing happens in the US mainstream media, except that instead of catering directly to the US government, they cater to the business interests that are above the US government.
The UK will protect employers from accusations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination by charging a high fee for each complaint.
The opposition in Cambodia says that the ruling party
rigged
the election by leaving over a million people off the voting list.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
It's like what Dubya did in Florida in 2000, only bigger.
Movie Subtitle Fansite Raided By Copyright Industry And Police.
Comparing the cases of Edward Snowden and Robert Lady demonstrates what it means for the US to have tremendous global power and use it with arrogance.
A Dutch documentary crew
was arrested
in Russia for interviewing gays to make a film.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Obama wants "free trade" with Vietnam, which achieves low export prices with child labor and slave labor and prohibits trade unions.
Some plutocratic Republican governors face persistent protests.
Yavuz Baydar: My sacking is an attack not just on journalism, but on Turkish democracy.
Egypt's government has formally reactivated repressive units of thugs.
Today's Apple Pegatron sweatshops are even nastier than the Foxconn sweatshops it used before.
Just because you're not pregnant, should that make it ok to require you to work 11 hours a day, 6 days a week? Apple is culpable if its products are made by people working a longer workweek than is allowed in the US.
Hawaii offer homeless people a gratis ticket to the US mainland. The danger is that thugs may bully people into leaving.
If this were applied only to people with an invitation to live with someone in another state, or whose last domicile was in another state, it might do more good than harm.
NSA: permission to spy in Germany.
One step forward, two steps back for media freedom (in the US).
Abdulelah Haider Shaye is no longer in prison, but will be blocked
from committing further embarrassing acts of investigative journalism
in Yemen
by two years
of house arrest.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
'Do the Right Thing': World Rallies Behind Bradley Manning.
Russia's persecution of gays is reaching extreme levels of cruelty.
Is Stolichnaya vodka Russian?
It seems to me that the company is not Russian, and if it claims on the bottle to be Russian, that is false advertising. The company cannot complain about being targeted as Russian if it has brought that on itself by a false claim. And maybe it should be prosecuted for that claim. However, this is not going to achieve the aim of punishing Putin.
Boycotting brands that are actually made in Russia could start.
In regard to the Olympics, if male athletes publicly kiss each other and female athletes publicly kiss each other, that would embarrass Putin. They don't need to actually be gay.
The UK government talks about "protecting children" through censorship to cover up for cuts in real help for vulnerable children.
If you don't like prostitution, it seems to me you ought to help people avoid being prostitutes who wish to avoid it, rather than stigmatizing or attacking prostitutes. Stigmatizing prostitutes causes them suffering and danger.
Australia must stop investing in carbon.
Thugs in schools combined with "zero tolerance" policies lead systematically to arresting, injuring and killing students.
Proposed UK Internet censorship would be dangerous, ineffective, and inconsistent.
And it might distract people from other sorts of censorship — such as increasing blockage of sites used for sharing copies of works.
Thomas Friedman aims to make massive US poverty look acceptable: holding out hope of very unlikely kinds of success and pretending we could all do it.
Being an entrepreneur involves taking a risk: most of those who try this fail. Around 1990 I read that 90% of new businesses in the US failed within 5 years; I doubt it has changed much. Most Americans can't afford to take a risk like this.
Oil spills in Alberta show how toxic tar sands oil is.
Green objection to technologies are not anti-science; rather, they are against extrapolating too far from limited scientific knowledge.
The immigration bill would expand the prison population.
Mexico is spying on the communications of activists and journalists.
Thousands in Germany Protest NSA Surveillance.
Ex-CIA agent Sabrina De Sousa, who was convicted by Italy of involvement in the kidnaping of abu Omar, says that Condoleezza Rice and Dubya personally approved the kidnaping but the US and Italy are scapegoating the underlings.
Everyone:
call
on US fast food chains
not to retaliate against workers
that strike.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell Obama to stop prosecuting whistleblowers.
US citizens:
call
on the Bureau of Land Management
not to allow fracking
in the Grand Valley area of Colorado near Grand Junction.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on your senators to support serious negotiation with Iran.
EU citizens: call for a ban on patenting plant varieties.
The European Patent Office is issuing patents on new varieties of food plants.
The German parliament has banned these patents.
Zero tolerance on a school trip: an unemployed mother was thrown into debt to collect her daughter, who was kicked out for having chocolate.
When someone in a position of power demands people agree to strict conditions, I don't think that buys any moral authority. For Holli to bring chocolate on her trip for her friends was about as wrong as violating a publisher's selfish EULA — that is, not wrong at all.
Crucial evidence against Bradley Manning is being kept secret, including an alleged chat conversation with someone from WikiLeaks which the government cites to insult WikiLeaks.
A 10-year-old girl in Yemen had
a narrow
escape from a forced marriage.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
When mothers take cocaine, that seems to
have no
long-term effect on their children. However, growing up in
poverty does horrible things to children.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Tuesday Cain defends abortion rights and sticks it to the Christian theocratic bigots.
A bill in Congress
would require
recycling of e-waste in the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Concern about snooping is leading many organizations outside the US to reject US-based Internet hosting and services, as they should.
When you consider using some Internet service, even for a single interaction, it is important to scrutinize carefully the privacy implications of using it. In other words, the right attitude is exactly the opposite of the attitude suggested by the word "cloud".
The US government tries to make Internet companies hand over users' passwords for cracking purposes.
An undercover thug agent was caught on camera planting cocaine to frame the owner of a smoking paraphernalia shop.
The things sold by the store are legal because they can be used to smoke addictive, deadly tobacco, but they can also be used to smoke a less dangerous illegal drug.
Obama says the US is at war with a list of enemies, and the list is secret.
Billionaire Polluters claims to be the victim of the Big Spill.
Bahrain Parliament Upholds Banning Protests in Capital.
The government started the violence and has committed most of it, but in typical dishonest fashion it puts the blame on the victims.
UK farmers say that global heating effects are the biggest threat to agriculture in the UK.
The heat wave this summer was a disaster for the wheat crop.
This is a big threat in the US, and around the world, but we don't hear much about it in the mainstream media.
Thousands Turn Out Against New Spy Powers in New Zealand.
4/5 of Americans are forecast
to live in
or near poverty or unemployment.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US leads the opposition to a treaty
to defend
peasants' rights.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
GMO corn could be causing allergic reactions in some people.
What the FBI Needs to Tell Americans About Its Use of Drones.
The US border patrol wants to install not-usually-lethal weapons on drones.
Note that the US border patrol can operate at a considerable distance from the border, and the border includes all coastlines, so this area includes a large fraction of the US population.
Leaked Philip Morris documents show that the public position of tobacco companies, that the UK should wait and study the effect of imposing plain packaging, was a false front for a planned lobbying campaign.
The first black government minister in Italy is
the target
of racist abuse.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Racism is despicable, and people of good will in Italy should condemn it and use this as an opportunity to examine racism in Italy.
However, prosecuting people for throwing bananas (regardless of who is the target or why) would be an offense against democracy. Bananas are not dangerous weapons. People should not be prosecuted for that way of expressing disapproval, not even when their reasons are despicable.
The "aiding the enemy" charge endangers journalism in the US.
UK censorship will include, by default, many categories of sites including "web forums" and "web-blocking circumvention tools".
The FBI says it won't scan people's irises secretly.
Do you trust any assure from the FBI? I don't. We already know that they play word games with their assurances.
US citizens: tell Congress to pass Sen. Warren's 21st Century Glass Steagall Act.
New cartoon: Trance Pacific Partnership.
US citizens:
sign this petition
calling on Congress to replace
the recently invalidated parts of the Voting Rights Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
sign this petition
to remove all US troops from Afghanistan.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support extending Oregon's plan for paying for college to the whole US.
Everyone: oppose the Australian plan to destroy the Great Barrier Reef by shipping giant amounts of coal across it.
When I signed, I mentioned that burning so much coal will cause ocean acidification that is likely to kill nearly all the world's coral.
US citizens:
call on Congress
to repeal the dangerous parts of the
PAT RIOT Act and FISA Amendments Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: sign this petition calling on Kerry to halt the environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline and first investigate a lie by a company engaged to work on it.
US citizens: sign this petition against appointing Summers as head of the Federal Reserve.
Cancelling the sequester could add 1.6 million jobs in the US.
Biochar provides a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. However, to prevent further heating, it would need to be used on a tremendous scale.
Human rights organizations call on Egypt's military to respect human rights and the laws that protect them.
The Obama regime may send Shaker Aamer to Saudi Arabia to be tortured, so that he will be unable to testify about how the US tortured him.
Justice Roberts' selections have made the FISA court even more of a push-over than it was designed to be.
US Government Promises Not to Torture or Execute Edward Snowden.
The thugs and courts in Australia are trained to let rich boys get away with crimes, while they fatally attack Aboriginals who have done nothing.
The defenders of NSA spying in Congress are the
loyal machines
of both parties.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
After 3,000 studies, there is no evidence that acupuncture provides any significant benefit other than that of a placebo.
The Obama regime argues, in court, that its officials should be
autonomous and should
not have to
worry about laws or courts.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The coup against Morsi seems to have been organized since November, and Sisi's call for mass rallies could be interpreted as calling for massive violence against Morsi's supporters.
An example in Nepal shows the sort of effort that it takes to increase the number of tigers that survive.
In 40 years, will anyone have money to protect tigers, elephants, rhinos, penguins, and thousands of other endangered species? Not if we continue causing global heating disaster.
A complex "ethical" charade disguises sweatshops in India.
Egypt: "The Injuries Were Very Precise as The Snipers Were Shooting To Kill".
The Arab Spring Is Being Stifled by the Force of Arms.
The consumerist economy is a recent thing, and it is unsustainable and already starting to collapse. Which poses the question of how to move forward.
The congresscritters who voted to continue collecting all US phone call data are getting paid more by the companies that profit from doing it.
In rural Yemen, villagers think of supporting al Qa'ida so they will get paved roads and electricity. (They fear drone attacks in any case.)
US citizens: comment to the SEC in support
of requiring
publicly traded corporations to disclose their political spending.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Urban Surveillance State Prototype in Oakland Exemplifies "Security" Mission Creep.
Kafka's
America: Secret
Courts, Secret Laws, and Total Surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Big Brother is pushing companies to hand over SSL master keys.
Overreaction of the week: a college in the US is pressuring students to use iris scans to get entry to college buildings, supposedly for their safety.
If you have any contact with students there, please ask them to "opt out". We must oppose all new "security" measures unless there is a specific strong local justification. School shootings in the US are a very small cause of death, so small that they don't justify contorting peoples lives in any matter at all.
I have opted out of the RFID-equipped ID cards that are the main method of getting into the MIT building where my office is.
The big secrets Manning and Snowden revealed
were secret
only from us, not from the enemies the US admits to.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In some parts of India, nearly all those accused of crimes (including murder) against Dalits go free because the witnesses are intimidated into not testifying.
US law protects Internet speech from state laws. State attorneys general are asking to abolish that protection.
Wikipedia could be destroyed if their plan is adopted.
US citizens: oppose making Larry Summers head of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Since the EU decided that cooperation with Israel may not include helping Israel to colonize Palestine, Israel has retaliated by blocking EU projects to help Palestinians.
In effect, Israel is using Palestinians as hostages. Not for the first time.
The Egyptian military is investigating Morsi for working with Hamas as the revolution started.
US blacks still face a big disadvantage in
getting
jobs and entering the middle class.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The plutocratic parties have a plan for eliminating this disparity: shrink the middle class so nobody has much chance of entering it.
The Senate is
planning
trade war against any country that shelters Snowden.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
How the US supported Colombia's government as its right-wing gangs were carrying out massacre after massacre.
Obama's Tribute to Whistleblowers Disappears Two Days after First
Snowden Revelations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Packaging public giveaways to sports teams in complex deals disguises the fact that they are public giveaways to sports teams.
Halliburton has pled guilty to destruction of
evidence
about the big spill. The fine is so tiny, for a company like
Halliburton, that it will hardly be noticed.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Turkish editor Yavuz Baydar says that publishers and the regime are colluding to censor criticism of the state.
In the US, the regime works for the megacorporations and the megacorporations own the mainstream media, so it comes out the same.
Israeli expansionists are buying houses in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, while putting Arabs under pressure to sell.
If all they did was offer to buy, and did not couple that with harassment, I would not criticize it.
Dr. Joseph Bonneau won an award from the NSA, then condemned the NSA while accepting it.
Most Americans want to end the War in Afghanistan and believe it does not improve the security of the US.
When I supported attacking the Taliban, it was to end the oppression of the Afghanistanis. They appreciated that, in the first years when Afghanistan mostly experienced peace. I did not think the Taliban would resurge and turn life in Afghanistan into permanent war.
Is requiring corporations to disclose their political spending "partisan"?
This is not partisan in terms of Democrat and Republican; lots of people in both parties support it. However, if we imagine a struggle between Bow to Business party and the Restore Democracy party, on this scale it is partisan, and the government should be partisan too.
Businesses want TAFTA to exclude "politics" from deciding policies that affect business. For "politics", read "democracy".
#Summerheat Activists Arrested Protesting State Dept Contractor Who Lied About TransCanada Ties.
As Detroit Drowns, GOP says: 'Bailouts For Banks, Not People'.
The two assassinated Tunisian leaders were shot with the same gun.
Egyptian thugs killed at least 38 Morsi supporters who wanted to continue a sit-in protest.
Tsvangirai accuses Mugabe of election fraud and dishonesty. Strangely, the head of the African monitoring team went so far as to claim there were no such complaints.
The new president of Iran seems to have brought small but visible relaxations of some tyrannical practices.
Car ignition locks depend on security through obscurity, and car companies have gagged scientists who discovered the secret algorithm and were going to publish a paper about it.
The manufacturers should have published the algorithm themselves and let the public hammer on it for a few years, before trusting it so far.
Manning And Snowden Light Path for the US to Return to Its Better Self.
A summary of the environmental disasters we will cause by 2050 if we don't change course now.
A senior UK scientist who led a flawed study that appeared to exonerate neonicotinoid has gone to work for a company that produces one of them.
Officials that take actions to help business are often rewarded with a job later on.
A global heating denialist became editor at Reuters and cut the coverage of climate issues by 50%, says a reporter who quit in response.
This makes me wonder: why did Reuters hire him? I have a hunch this was not an accident.
It appears UK thugs spied on Janet Alder and her lawyer, while she campaigned for justice for her brother, who had died while held by the thugs.
Comparison with the thugs' handling of some other cases suggests they may have sought a way to smear Ms Adler so as to distract attention from their own dirty deeds.
Punishing Putin's anti-gay repression with a boycott of Russian vodka.
Alas, the campaign has apparently missed the mark by targeting a brand of vodka that is not Russian any more.
The movie Cars was profitable … as a commercial for toys.
Do you want to watch a movie that is effectively a commercial for toys? Do you want your children to see it? If you are worried they will watch porn, you've been distracted from the truly harmful media.
Drug prohibition kills — not only through the gangs that it fuels, but also by making fairly safe drugs fatal.
US citizens: sign this petition to expand Social Security.
The Turkish government is
systematically
persecuting journalists who covered the protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
If Unions Are Not Speaking Out Against Prism, It Is Because They Have Short Memories.
America's Real Subversives: FBI Spying Then, NSA Surveillance Now.
France has eliminated the unjust law making it a crime to "offend the president". This leaves in place the unjust law making it a crime to defame the president (and other officials).
Another Tunisian secular political leader has been assassinated.
Everyone: tell Google not to fund global heating denialists such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
US citizens:
tell
Putin you support freedom for Pussy Riot.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US restaurant chains are organizing to fight against laws requiring paid sick days for restaurant workers.
After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the North Carolina Senate is pushing a broad and drastic attack on voting rights.
The head of the Egyptian army asked the public to rally against "terrorists", which apparently is meant to refer to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Morsi continues to be imprisoned without charges.
Relatives of Guantanamo prisoners ask the US Senate for justice.
Koch Industries is an oil speculator.
NSA Opponents Call Out White House for Hypocrisy of "Informed" Debate on Spying.
Thug Commissioner Kelly claims his practice of searching people with no grounds is justified by the big drop in the murder rate that happened before he started it.
More about loss of Arctic sea ice and the giant methane escape.
The European Investment Bank has
decided
to stop financing ordinary coal plants.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Some rich Americans propose to help the poor by eliminating the minimum wage and soup kitchens.
"Dump them in the ocean and see if they drown," is their philosophy.
The UK will see even greater torrential rains in the future, due to global heating.
And that's not counting the flooding of the coasts.
US-style economic inequality is bad even for business.
Alas, it may not be bad for the banks. Today's banks seek to make a killing through fraud, not a reliable income from providing a service to society.
US fracking reduced US coal consumption. This made coal cheap, so electric companies in the UK imported and burned more coal.
This shows the error in supposing that fracking means that gas replaces coal. Not as long as a market determines the price of coal and we fail to drive the price up artificially.
In the Democratic primary on Aug 10 for senator from New Jersey, Rush Holt (who calls for repealing the PAT RIOT Act) is running against an Obama-like suck-up to Wall Street.
Here's what his opponent is like.
Refugees often have to do without contraceptives, so they have babies in the worst possible circumstances for someone to be born into.
Anti-"terrorism" laws intimidate and hamper humanitarian aid.
A study sponsored by the Colombian government says that the right-wing terrorist paramilitaries killed more than the left-wing guerrillas that are officially labeled as "terrorist".
An anonymous blog breathes political opposition into Zimbabwe.
This is an example of the importance of anonymous publication on the Internet.
The amendment to limit NSA collection of phone records was defeated, but very narrowly.
This shows that we have hope of winning if we keep pushing.
The UK National Health Service is running short of doctors.
The government is trying surreptitiously to destroy the NHS, by cutting its funds so it does a bad job.
Refugees from Syria are overwhelming the surrounding region.
1/4 of the population are now refugees.
The loss of Arctic sea ice
could trigger
a giant release of methane, which would cause tremendous global
heating.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The damage could amount to 60 trillion dollars.
How does that compare with the cost of writing off 4/5 of the world's fossil fuel reserves, so as to prevent this disaster?
Citizens of Massachusetts: call for more state support of mass transit.
ALEC brought state legislators on a tour of tar sand mines, paid for by oil companies and Alberta, and they subsequently introduced pro-oil bills.
Such handsome "thank you" notes suggest these legislators have more to be grateful for than just a trip to Alberta.
What is the context for Israel's arrest of a 5-year-old boy?
"Stand your ground" laws have led to many shootings.
US citizens: call on the Senate to increase Social Security.
In the US: march on Washington for peace and justice.
An Israeli soldier shot a representative of the human rights group B'tselem who was filming the weekly protest at Nabi Saleh.
The video shows that she was shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet at close range, in violation of orders and safety standards, for no good reason. Not so unusual, actually, because the army doesn't punish the soldiers that do this.
Three retail chains in the Netherlands have decided not to sell products made by Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory.
Both Israel and Palestine assume that Kerry's peace talks will go nowhere.
The Israeli army and the right-wing "settlers" play
"good
cop / bad cop" to Palestinians.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
"Settlers" have repeatedly attacked the Jaber family and destroyed their trees, irrigation systems and homes, hoping to drive them out and steal their land.
A right-wing mob attacked a Bedouin village in Israel.
If a company uses bitcoin, that is no guarantee it isn't a scam.
Hagel: "Troops At a Breaking Point";
Vets: "Then
Bring Us Home".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US is trying to stifle resistance to genetically engineered foods in Ghana.
Activists in Hawai'i are pushing for a local law to require farms to disclose when they use certain especially toxic pesticides, which are suspected of poisoning the drinking water.
Mali is being rushed into elections, which are not being held very well. Many eligible voters have been dropped from the list, apparently due to carelessness.
A former guard says that asylum seekers imprisoned by Australia in Manus Island are often raped and often try to commit suicide.
Salvation Army staff who have been there support the claims.
USDA Fast-Tracks "Rubber-Stamp" Approval of "Dangerous" GE Seeds.
Greg Palast explains the dishonest scheme that triggered the financial crisis, and the small part in it played by the only participant that is being prosecuted.
I see no need to use the smear term "frog" to refer to someone who is French. And what's wrong with garlic, anyway?
Massachusetts citizens: call for limits on keeping data from automatic license plate readers.
US citizens: sign this petition to raise the US minimum wage to $10.10 per hour.
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye has been freed in response to public pressure. He had been accused of aiding the rebels thanks to his reporting on a US drone attack that killed civilians, and was kept in prison due to pressure from Obama.
His release has conditions, though: he has to stay in the capital, and thus cannot investigate any more drone attacks.
Standard technique for protecting privacy on-line can be interpreted as felonies under the CFAA.
Stores are trying new methods of tracking and identifying physical customers.
A thug who leaked photos of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been tentatively punished.
It is interesting to compare this case with that of Edward Snowden. Both released confidential government data, but beyond that the circumstances were very different. Whereas Snowden's leaks told us about massive and grave government abuses, Murphy's only attempted to make Tsarnaev look bad — for shallow reasons.
Tsarnaev is accused of murdering several strangers, and I see no doubt about his guilt. This is the basis of my opinion of him. Only a fool judges someone morally based on how handsome or how weak he looks. How foolish it would be to think better of Tsarnaev due to a photo in Rolling Stone. How foolish it would be to think worse of him due to photos leaked by Murphy.
The NSA says it can't search its own emails.
That's ridiculous — it can search yours and mine.
Suing to overturn Utah's "ag-gag law".
Congress and the Justice Dept's Dangerous Attempts to Define "Journalist" Threaten to Exclude Bloggers.
Congress is considering two "patent reform" bills.
They are small steps for the better. They might reduce the total amount of harm done by patents in computing, and some other fields, but don't try to really solve the problem.
Al Qa'ida attacked three Iraqi large prisons simultaneously, and
freed
hundreds of prisoners, including some of its followers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Al Qa'ida operates in Iraq thanks to the US conquest and occupation of Iraq.
Iraq is experiencing the return of the sectarian killing, which also started as a result of the US conquest and occupation of Iraq.
How Californians enacted a tax increase for the rich. The state's "Democratic" governor wanted to tax mainly the workers.
The US congress reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and other cocaine, but Obama's men don't want the prisoners already convicted under the old higher sentences to have their sentences reduced.
Increased goat-herding in Asia is driving many wild species into a little marginal land.
That area can't support so much human population.
Important butterfly species in Europe have declined by half, threatening pollination.
Does the NSA
Tap That? What We Still Don t Know About the Agency s Internet
Surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Detroit and Goldman Sachs: Makers and Takers.
When Australia forcibly renders asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea, it delivers gay asylum seekers to persecution.
An astroturf campaign pretends that wind turbines cause health problems.
I wonder if this is funded by coal mining companies.
In the
US, big banks
get bailouts — big cities don't.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
And auto companies get bailouts at the expense of their workers and the cities where they live.
The auto companies outflanked the unions through "globalization" (outsourcing). Democracy should not allow outsourcing to low-wage countries as an excuse to knock wages down.
Wild koalas are being wiped out by cutting down the trees they live on.
Preserving the wild relatives of crops such as wheat and potato could be worth $200 billion over the foreseeable future.
The next installment of Obama's mega-gift to the banksters: making Lawrence Summers chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Examining officials and companies that promote massive surveillance and profit from it too.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff warned senators that intervention in Syria is likely to lead to unintended and unpredictable consequences.
California's planned "digital license plates" could lead to even more surveillance of car travel.
The World Bank invests in mining companies, then pressures countries to rewrite their mining laws to favor those companies.
US citizens: email your congresscritter in favor of reducing the PAT RIOT act surveillance power.
Pass the word: Support the Amash amendment, not the deceptive Nugent amendment.
Also phone — that has more effect.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Russia's new copyright enforcement law allows blocking web sites without even a trial, like SOPA/PIPA.
Please do not make the mistake of referring to sharing as "piracy". That's the enemy's propaganda.
Obama's escalating war on journalism directed at the
security state.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Who was intercepting all pager messages in the US in 2001?
Assad seems to be planning to expel Sunnis from a strip of Syria from Damascus to the coast.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to
support
a constitutional amendment saying that human rights are for people,
not for corporations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Global heating is colliding with business-imposed agricultural policies to create a crisis for US agriculture.
Texas School District Drops RFID Chips, Will Track Kids With Surveillance Cameras Instead.
Visualizing phone location tracking data as music.
Director Jahmil Qubeka's film, which was due to open the Durban film festival, has been banned as "child pornography".
Don't be surprised — this is what censorship does.
Here's the form people will have to fill out to turn off censorship on their UK Internet connections.
Why humanity has failed to take the necessary action to stop global heating.
A Norwegian woman in Dubai told the thugs she had been raped, and was
sentenced to prison for non-marital sex.
Now she
has been "pardoned".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This is one of the perverse cruelties of Islamic law: a woman who accuses rape, unless the rapist confesses, will in general be punished in this way.
Morsi's family say they will sue over his imprisonment without trial.
Leaked Pakistani Report Confirms High Civilian Death Toll in CIA Drone Strikes.
The US Government
Is Metamorphosing
Into the Borg.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK Conservatives' "strategist" advised companies how to exploit the "failings" of the NHS.
Perhaps he advises the Conservatives on how to change the NHS to make more "failings" that he can then advise other clients on how to exploit.
Syrian cartoonist Akram Reslan has been given
the Award
for Courage in Editorial Cartooning. He cannot personally accept
it because he is in prison.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to cosponsor a move to
reduce
the price of medicines for a subset of Medicaid patients.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A riot started in France when thugs checked the identity of a woman with her face covered.
I have to admire such firm defense of a custom against the state. At the same time, it is a shame that the custom being defended is a form of women that women are pressured into.
I have to wonder whether her husband really attacked the thugs. It could be true, but thugs often fabricate such accusations.
It is not only Muslim women who should have the right to cover their faces. Everyone must have this, especially in a protest, in case they wish to avoid the danger of retaliation — from the state, from their employers, or from the state and their employers in collusion.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to support the bill to ban some uses of neonicotinoid pesticides.
Obama's treasury
secretary supports
continued austerity in Europe. He told the Greek government to
keep on making
the people
sacrifice.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Amina Sboui could be imprisoned for 9 years for her nonviolent protest.
Human Rights Watch condemns Indonesia's law that restricts mass organizations.
Indian border thugs killed protesters in Kashmir.
Chinese thugs threatened to kill reporters, but (for the moment) just beat them with sticks.
A study forecasts that starting around 2055 there will be a period every year when there is no ice in the Arctic.
Global heating could deprive Volta Basin of water.
This would be a disaster for several African countries.
FBI experts often made claims about hair matching, convicting people of murder, which could not be sustained by the real science.
Barrett Brown Prosecution Threatens Right to Link, Could Criminalize Routine Journalism Practices.
China closed a think tank connected with criticism of the government, based on lies as usual, and has arrested the lawyers that try to defend arrested activists.
A Kuwaiti activist has been sentenced to prison for offending the potentate and offending Islam, with tweets.
To punish either of those things is an outright injustice.
A large fraction of mercury in the ocean, which makes fish dangerous to eat in quantity, is due to human industrial activity, and it will persist in the ocean for centuries or millennia.
The main activities adding to this pollution are gold mining and coal burning.
With greater heat, plants lose ability to remove ozone from the air.
The Puerto Rico thug department will be reformed in an attempt to end their systematic thuggishness.
Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Widespread in Hudson River, Study Finds.
The US government is now allowed to produce "news reports" (i.e., propaganda) and show them in the US. Henceforth the security state won't have to depend on the mainstream media to make propaganda for it.
Even if someone gives away a lot of his privacy, that doesn't excuse taking away the rest of it.
A lot of the "voluntary" giving away of privacy results from "services" that are designed to herd people into doing so. Even young people would maintain their privacy more if they were not systematically pressured to surrender it.
Pharma companies are using astroturf "patient groups" to campaign against a requirement to publish all the studies that test the effects of drugs.
This requirement would make it harder for pharma companies to misrepresent the effectiveness or safety of drugs.
In Finland, a citizen's initiative proposes Snowden's Law, which would
punish excessive surveillance on citizens as a crime,
while protecting
whistleblowers.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A German author calls on Germany to offer Snowden asylum
because in
the past it drove so many to seek asylum.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Poland is trying to investigate the secret CIA torture prison
that a previous government allowed to operate.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Ethiopia: Anti-Terror Law Terrorising
Journalists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Evidence that the US government records and saves the content of lots of phone calls, in the absence of specific cause — not just the call records.
Thugs on a power trip arrested Antonio Morrison for barking at their dog.
Extinct golden toads will protest in British banks.
Kerry's Israel-Palestine peace talks seem not to be really happening.
US banksters, with Obama's quiet help, are trying to use the EU to get rid of the weak and inadequate bank regulations of the Dodd-Frank bill.
Everyone: call
on California to end long-term solitary confinement in its
prisons.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.
The US cannot campaign for Internet freedom abroad while trashing it at home.
A thousand people have died in the US since 2007 due to not getting the usual vaccines.
The Department of "Justice", in drawing up conditions for protecting journalism, is defining a class of privileged "official" journalists who will get protection, in order to deny it to most journalists.
Of course, the protected journalists will be those from the mainstream media, who will usually support the state (with occasional exceptions).
Staff at the Committee for Public Safety * have been ordered not to view certain Washington Post articles on computers not classified "secret", because then for bureaucratic reasons they will have to go through a sort of secrecy exorcism.
The US government pretends that Snowden's leaks are still secret, and is carrying this to the level of lunacy.
A person that persistently denies reality is dangerous. A powerful state that persistently denies reality is extremely dangerous. These delusions could become a "reason" to kill people.
* Officially, the "Department of Homeland Security".
The US takes two contradictory positions about disclosing when it uses information in court that was derived from massive surveillance. Each position is used to block judicial consideration of the constitutionality of massive surveillance.
New York thugs display their arrogance by playing the storm troopers' theme from Star Wars out of their cars.
As press photographer Mandi Wright filmed thugs arresting someone on
the street, a thug in civilian clothes
attacked
her, stole her video camera, and threatened her with prosecution.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The judge in Bradley Manning's trial nearly always decides questions in favor of the prosecution.
This does not surprise me. It looks like an instance of a fundamental flaw in military trials, known as "command influence". The judge is a military officer who reports ultimately to Obama, Obama wants Manning convicted, and the judge knows this. The judge wants to be promoted, and the people who will decide on her promotion also work for Obama and want Manning convicted. What would an ambitious judge do?
MIT requested and got the chance to keep MIT secrets out of the documents that the Secret Service is required to turn over to reporter Kevin Poulsen. This leads Edward Felten to suspect that MIT is looking for a chance to spin the discussion of some MIT actions that might appear nasty.
Obama is trying to confront the WTO's ruling against "dolphin-safe" tuna labels by making the criterion stricter, rather than by weakening it.
This is a good response to the specific problem, but it is a general problem and the general solution is to do away with the "free trade" treaties.
The pending publication of lists of people who get state pensions in California spotlights the point where personal privacy and government transparency conflict.
I value freedom more than transparency; I think the list of people who get pensions should not be published.
If that statement surprises you, you may be misinformed about my views. For instance, I never advocated "open source"; that's the slogan of people who disagree with me. I advocate "free software", free as in freedom.
See also Evgeny Morozov's article on the difference between the two.
How Goldman Sachs makes big profits by intentionally delaying the delivery of aluminum to US factories.
In India, pogroms against "uppity" Dalits have never stopped.
The UK wants to extend its witchhunt against "child pornography" to blocking searches in search engines.
Don't they do that in China already?
There are other materials on the web that are deemed "illegal". If search engines accept this form of censorship, the next step will be to make them block searches for Snowden's revelations.
I find gruesomely violent pornography disgusting, as disgusting as gruesomely violent nonpornography. However, censorship is far more disgusting. The UK is rife with censorship, and that's the injustice it ought to address.
The UK privatized payment of support for refugees, and some people have been evicted because the company didn't do the job.
Everyone: put
heat on McDonald's for telling workers to keep working in the
kitchen during a heat wave with the air conditioner broken.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery thanks Europe for making government cooperation and contracts exclude Israeli institutions and businesses that have any connection to Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.
I did not realize before that this included European government purchases. That will put substantial pressure on Israeli business.
Avnery's article was evidently written before the announcement that Israel and Palestine have agreed to hold talks about having peace talks. Based on his past writings, I expect he will show that these talks about talks don't really change anything.
US
citizens: sign
this petition to the Senate to support a rule change so that
filibusters require senators to actually speak on the senate floor.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Tea plantations in Assam pay starvation wages, and claim they "can't afford" to pay more.
Of course they can afford it. They simply have to raise the price. That's fine — we can pay a little more for our tea.
The poverty of the workers pushes them to fall prey to selling their children to be domestic slaves. This is a separate problem, and could be tackled by informing people around India about the dishonesty of these recruiters/purchasers.
A papal visit to Brazil will be
the occasion
for protests, both against the public subsidy for the visit, and
against some positions of the Catholic Church.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A protest by UK Uncut transformed HSBC banks into food banks.
Updates to Suggestions for National Constitutions.
Journalist Barrett Brown could be sentenced to 105 years in prison for journalistic activity, including posting a link to a site with scandalous information that had been obtained by a cracker from HBGary.
Protest in the US is getting the same treatment as abortion clinics in Texas: a series of laws, enforced with bizarre strictness, leave it permitted in theory but not in practice.
Our response to this must be to say that such laws are just bricks in the wall, and breaking them is not wrong.
The same applies to laws that forbid government officials from telling us how the state really treats us.
The proposed TAFTA treaty is purely a means to let a range of businesses bypass democracy to get rid of the regulations they don't like.
Lt. Adam Cohen faces prosecution instigated by the officer he accused of raping him.
It seems crazy to prosecute anyone for homosexuality after the law was changed so that it is no longer illegal
The crucial role of concealed weapons in the Trayvon Martin killing.
Big US phone and telecom companies have formed a "privacy coalition" to lobby for something.
Everyone: call
for humane
release for Herman Wallace, who has been in solitary confinement
for 40 years and now has terminal cancer.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The 3 Most Absurdly Outdated Internet Laws (in the US, that is).
The "talks" Kerry has arranged to start are actually talks about starting talks.
It looks like they will not go so far as to start actual peace talks.
Kerry has convinced Israel and Palestine to restart negotiations. However, an unusually honest remark from an Israeli official suggests that Israel wants to be able to say, "See, we are negotiating," while making sure no agreement is reached.
Obama rebuked Putin for trying to lock up people that disclose the state's dirty secrets, even as the US made sure a fleeing international criminal would not be extradited.
I agree with Obama's rebuke: prosecuting whistleblowers is wrong when the Putin regime does it — just as wrong as when the Obama regime does it. However, as an American, I believe Americans have a particular responsibility to defend freedom and justice in our own country.
Can we assume that "terrorism" means violence? Can we assume that a "weapon of mass destruction" can kill thousands of people? Not when the US government is talking.
When the US government says "terrorists", think "dissidents", and you can judge its proposals properly.
McDonalds published a suggested budget employees which says they need
a second job, and continues by saying they
can't afford food, medical
care, or heat in the winter.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Turkish protest movement continues activities
every day.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The NSA is considering leaving people's phone call records "in" the phone companies — and searching it there, Prism-style, still without individual warrants.
This would not respect the 4th Amendment, or our freedom, but it would given them a way to confuse the issue.
Note the argument that it is ok to collect everyone's communications records ("metadata") because they are "information that the telecommunications companies obtain and keep for their own business purposes." The implicit premise is that if it is legitimate for a business to amass certain information about those who choose to be its clients, then the government is entitled to systematically seize all that information. This is blatant contempt for the 4th Amendment.
However, it is also true that any data that businesses record about people could be obtained by the state, and amounts to a massive dossier about each person. We must make businesses collect and retain less information about people — regardless of "business purpose".
Reporter James Risen may have to go to jail to protect a whistleblower.
The UK Conservative Party's main election strategist also works, in parallel, as a PR agent for many businesses, including tobacco and fracking.
In effect, he is an embedded lobbyist.
The NSA has announced that it will continue collecting data about all phone calls in the US.
This represents an act of defiance against freedom-minded Americans, meant to make us despair and give up.
Global political organizing, using available satellite data, made it possible to put pressure on Indonesia to take action against massive fires that are set by humans.
Panama reportedly allowed the CIA agent wanted for
kidnaping in
Italy
to return to the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The US has a lot of power over the government of Panama, enough apparently even to spring a kidnaper.
The ex head of the NSA is campaigning to imprison journalists, citing Glenn Greenwald as the base of his campaign.
Charter schools in the US are often an excuse to recreate segregation.
The Gates Foundation is trying to "reform" education by optimizing it
as one might optimize a factory — resulting in
schools
more like factories. Hardly anyone in education dares to express
doubt about whether this is a good thing, because they are all
desperate for Gates' money.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
There would be no need to turn education into a factory for efficiency's sake if we were collecting enough taxes from the rich.
US citizens: Call
on the US not to allow prospecting for oil near Alaska using air
guns that deafen whales.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on the National Marine Fisheries Service to cooperate with state laws that restrict the shark fin trade.
US citizens:
call
on your state legislature to repeal the "stand your ground" law,
if your state has one.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK has cancelled some arms exports to Egypt because the arms might be used to repress protesters.
The US is legally required to do likewise but is ignoring the requirement.
The UK admits that it rejected an inquiry into Litvinenko's death in order to pander to Putin.
The Zimmerman case is a return to the "business as usual" of American racism.
The judge in Bradley Manning's trial upheld the basic concept that informing the American people implies aiding "the enemy", under certain circumstances.
Whether Manning will be punished under this heading remains to be seen, but the United States of America is already being punished.
The OECD has made a list of proposed changes to stop businesses from tax dodging.
My
proposal could also help.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-15 because the old link was broken.]
The Zambian government is blocking access to exile news sites and arresting their reporters.
People who arrive in Australia by boat will be arbitrarily refused asylum.
In other words, asylum is only for those wealthy enough, and unpersecuted enough, to get on a plane.
Corporate Internet surveillance is nasty in its own right, not solely because all the data is available to Big Brother.
California prison guards are retaliating sadistically for the prisoners' hunger strike.
Many of the so-called "gang members" have been "identified" based on coincidences.
Egypt's new government has cracked down on media that don't support it.
This could mean they hope to get away with killing protesters because we won't see it.
Egypt is cooperating with Israel in besieging Gaza. Very little construction materials and fuel are now reaching Gaza, and people find it hard to get out.
Spanish thugs attacked thousands of people protesting against austerity and the government's demonstrated corruption.
Some economists predict that high economic growth rates have become impossible, because resource availability now limits growth, and productivity per worker is not increasing.
Productivity per worker increased greatly in the US from 1973 to 2013, but workers did not get a corresponding raise. This shows that workers' income is not really tied to their productivity. For US workers to get a raise, they need to fight for it politically.
In addition, increases in productivity per worker nowadays tend to go with reducing the number of workers, and that's no good for most people. In the next decade, robots could tremendously boost productivity per worker in the US, by putting millions of Americans out of work, and they will never find another job. The number of jobs in the US has not increased in decades.
I am glad that the article points out how important it is to reduce the population growth in the rest of this century.
Public Citizen fought to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and fought for years to get Richard Cordray confirmed as its head.
US citizens: call on Obama not to nominate New York's notoriously unjust Chief of Thugs to head the Department of Homeland Suppression.
Everyone: call on the AARP to stop sponsoring Rush Limbaugh.
The AARP purports to represent retired people in the US, while lobbying for right-wing policies that would harm their interests. This is why I am not a member of the AARP.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to oppose the "Monsanto & Animal Torture Protection Amendment", the latest perversely cruel Republican measure. It would ban states from regulating farms, whether to avoid inhumane treatment of animals, or to require labeling of GMOs.
A CIA agent has been arrested in Panama, and may be extradited
to Italy where he has been
convicted of
kidnaping for the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK government actively and structurally helps corporations buy influence where it does the most harm.
Texas Governor Perry signed the restrictive anti-abortion law, pretending to the last that it will protect women. In fact it is likely to kill women instead, by forcing them to choose between underground abortion and childbirth, each of which is dangerous compared with a proper abortion in a proper facility.
The law is likely to be overturned by courts, though.
Detroit's bankruptcy will be devastating to retired workers, since US bankruptcy law gives priority to the banks that inveigled Detroit into bad investments.
Gina McCarthy has been confirmed as the head of the EPA.
She wants to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Alas, as long as the president wants to use "all of the above" sources of energy, it is impossible to make enough progress towards reducing them.
The Obama regime refuses to say whether it will continue collecting records of all the phone calls in the US.
Peru will give solar panels to 2 million poor people.
When Egyptian soldiers killed 51 protesters, it was planned and unprovoked attack against civilians who were only praying.
A gay rights activist in Cameroon was tortured and murdered in his home.
ALEC is pushing bills in many states to reduce the compensation businesses pay when they injure people.
If these bills pass, big corporations will do more things that injure people. They are psychopaths by their structure, and too big to be restrained by anyone's human conscience; "I'll sue" is the only language they understand.
ALEC is pushing hard to privatize US public schooling.
How Florida's "stand your ground" law enabled Zimmerman to escape conviction.
I support repeal of these "stand your ground" laws. This would reintroduce the "duty to retreat", so that shooting must be the last resort means for defending oneself, rather than the first priority.
However, it is clear that Zimmerman did not approach Martin in a friendly way, saying "Hi, what's up?" Zimmerman must have tried to threaten Martin in some way — something that gave Martin a motive to fight with him. Perhaps Zimmerman said, "What are you doing here?"
Thus I suggest another change in the law: to make it a crime to approach someone in a threatening way while carrying a weapon, or perhaps while carrying a concealed weapon, outside of certain special exceptions.
Cars can be deadly. We allow people to own and drive cars, but we require them to get training and pass a test, and we punish certain dangerous ways of using them (while drunk, racing on the street, etc). Why not do the same with guns? Carrying a gun could bring with it the special responsibility not to accost people and demand they explain themselves.
Punishing these actions even when they don't result in a death — and they usually don't — would teach most of the Zimmermans of the world to avoid the sort of conduct that led to this killing.
The movement for a basic income aims to give every citizen an income that is adequate for a non-luxurious life.
The more work gets automated, the more necessary a basic income will become. However, in order to make it possible, we need to make sure that the owners of the robots can't dodge taxes.
The UK examined people's phone call and Internet contact data half a million times in the past year.
Many tech companies are pressuring the US to allow them to publish information about the number of users that the US has demanded info about using National Security Letters.
House Judiciary
Committee criticisms
of the NSA's general surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Russia has become a flat-out tyranny that crushes all opposition, even weak and powerless opposition.
Edward Snowden, True Hope for Change.
Could we convince him to run for president?
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to 5 years in prison after an absurd trial.
The Israeli army arrested a 5-year-old Palestinian, supposedly for throwing a stone at a car.
The army says he was not arrested, which I consider a lie. It probably represents a policy of abusing language.
25 Palestinian families are cut off from their olive trees by Israel's annexation wall. They heard chainsaws, but could not approach their trees to see that 1150 of them were being cut down.
Another Palestinian was forced out of his house by fanatical "settlers" who later stole his olive harvest. Recently they set fire to it. The army won't allow him to go there and see what the damage was.
The army says it's all his fault; that his house's proximity to a colony (i.e., "settlement") "causes friction".
3/4 of the bumblebee colonies imported into the UK have dangerous parasites.
Greece's government of occupation has imposed an additional austerity measure.
They do it step by step so that people won't see, at any point, how bad a change it will add up to.
Peasants in Catatumbo, Colombia, are staging mass protests demanding government protection so they can keep their land.
In some parts of Colombia, the "paramilitaries", essentially gangs of thieves connected to the army and supported by the state, have invaded villages and killed lots of peasants to scare the survivors into selling their land very cheap. I suspect that the "land that communities were forced to abandon", which "fell into the hands of businesses", was the subject of this practice. If so, the subsequent owners would have been involved with the paramilitaries.
The previous president, Alvaro Horrible (officially "Uribe"), was found to have connections with the paramilitaries. I don't know of any evidence against the current president, Nonsantos; but since he was previously the minister in charge of the army, I would not be surprised if he had such connections.
A town in Colorado proposes
to pay
a bounty to anyone that shoots down a drone aircraft.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call for legislation to ban neonicotinoid pesticides in the US.
The NSA says it is allowed to investigate anyone up to three degrees of separation from a terrorist suspect. That would be a large fraction of the US. It got this broad permission from the FISA court.
Chinese control of Internet public opinion is becoming more subtle, involving spin as much as outright deletion.
This resembles what businesses do to shape Internet public opinion. John Dvorak presented evidence that Microsoft was doing this to create a favorable attitude towards Windows 8.
A UK thug chief admits that undercover thugs gathered evidence about the relatives of murdered Stephen Lawrence.
There was no reason to suspect them of any crime, but they were campaigning for a proper investigation of Lawrence's death. (Fortunately their campaign was successful, and found the real killers.)
I do not see anything particularly bad about using the names of dead children. It's not as if they could be hurt, and if their parents ever met these thugs, they would think it was a coincidence of names.
A leak suggests that the EU is
about to
abandon network neutrality.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
As Americans campaign against NSA surveillance, we should also limit surveillance of cars by license plate readers.
These systems can serve valid purposes, but they are unacceptable if they surveil everyone. They must be designed so that they don't really "see" a car unless its plate is on a list, and only a specific court order about a specific plate should put it on the list.
It's possible that Intel has given the NSA a
back
door into CPU chips.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
In any case, upgradeable microcode that isn't free software means that these processors require nonfree installed software to run.
A coalition led by the EFF has sued to put an end to massive government collection of Americans' phone call records.
The Free Software Foundation is one of the plaintiffs. Here's more information about the range of organizations.
Sad to say, even if this suit is successful, it won't go far enough to give us privacy rights. We must not allow a complete dossier about every American to be there, just waiting for the government to have some reason to investigate him.
Bills proposed to put an end to massive surveillance also do not go far enough to really solve the problem.
US citizens: phone your senators and say, close the Guantanamo prison and free or charge each prisoner. Don't allow imprisonment without trial. The Senate will vote soon on the issue.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The right-wing Spanish ruling party is accused of corruption, but hopes to survive by refusing to acknowledge it.
Global heating changes ecosystems drastically, in the Southern Ocean and in Missouri.
The Muslim Brotherhood complains of being excluded from Egypt's new cabinet but maybe it is actually boycotting the cabinet.
The Senate has not formally changed the rules for filibusters, but when Democrats showed they would do so, Republicans gave up on obstructing many of Obama's nominations.
I advocate changing the rules so that a filibuster must be carried out physically by senators prepared to speak as long as necessary.
Workers in an Amazon warehouse and shipping center walk all day under the orders of a computer, and are forbidden even to speak to each other.
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to support an amendment to ban the US from spending Pentagon money to arm Syrian rebels.
A spending ban is not airtight. When Congress banned spending money to aid right-wing rebels in Nicaragua, Reagan arranged for private arms dealers to ransom American hostages by selling arms to their terrorist kidnappers, then used the "private" profits to fund those rebels. Obama might try the same thing.
Still, the spending ban is a good step forward.
US citizens: call on Congress
to repair
the Voting Rights Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama
to support
UN efforts toward global nuclear disarmament.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Obama to order government contractors to pay a living wage.
Urgent: US citizens: call on the EPA to prevent the pollution that frequently makes US beaches unsafe.
US citizens: call on Congress to cancel the F35 fighter jet.
Long-term unemployment in the UK has reached a 17-year high.
PayPal blocks payment for books that have "Iran" in their name.
Former Senator Gordon Humphrey says Snowden did the right thing and wishes him success in finding asylum.
On resurrecting the concept of homicide by a corporation in the US.
I am left wondering why the practice ceased. If it was done before under state law, why not now?
Feminism fights to free men as well as women from patriarchy.
10 commentaries on the George Zimmerman verdict.
Everyone: call on
McDonalds to stop making workers pay to collect their pay.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Amartya Sen's new book points out how India has directed its new wealth towards a few. 50% of Indians have no access to a toilet, and 50% of the children are stunted by malnutrition. Poorer neighboring countries have done much better for the poor, and so has China.
Large and increasing quantities of oil are being shipped around North America by rail, making disasters only a matter of time.
Pipelines would solve this problem, but they won't prevent the bigger disaster that burning oil is likely to cause. We need a "none of the above" solution — move away from fossil fuels.
The EU has banned another pesticide to protect honeybees.
Russia blocked the creation of a marine life sanctuary near Antarctica.
This is a victory for the short term over the long term.
Morsi's supporters continue protesting, while talks between them and the government were a failure.
The US is trying to create a world in which
no
one the US wants to get can find shelter.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
ask
your congresscritter to sign the Grayson-Takano letter, promising
to vote against any bill that would cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social
Security.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A mining company, freshly given state permission to pollute water supplies, uses masked armed guards to "protect" itself from imaginary violent protesters.
The World Bank is once again backing big dams in Africa, despite the visible problems of their previous big dams in Africa.
I wonder if the companies that use most of the electricity from these dams are related to mining. If so, these dams could be regarded as another projection of the political power of the mining companies.
The Chinese government
is persecuting
anticorruption activists, thus undermining its own proclaimed
campaign against corruption.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
All EU deals for cooperation with Israel are now required to explicitly exclude Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory — specifically, the West Bank.
US
citizens: write
to Obama against the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on your senators to approve Gina McCarthy as head of the EPA.
'You Can Trust Good Guys to Spy on You': The Difference Between Bush's Spying and Obama's Spying, as Explained by 'Obama'.
A study
confidently predicts
2.3 meters of sea-level rise per degree of increase in the global
average temperature.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Thus, two degrees rise would mean many coastal cities are in big trouble. And it will require vigorous efforts to avoid even worse trouble.
The SEC is prosecuting an underling who was involved in a massive fraud, but shows no interest in prosecuting the higher-ups.
I don't think it is wrong to prosecute Fabrice Tourre if he knew what he was doing. (I don't need to try to judge, for myself, whether he did.) The wrong is in letting the others off the hook, and failing to change banking law so it can't happen again.
Afghan government soldiers continue shooting government troops and NATO troops. One who was caught and arrested has escaped through the help of one of the officers in charge of the prison.
These events demonstrate that the Taliban inspire a kind of loyalty which Karzai's government can't compete with. It is difficult to win a fight against that sort of disadvantage.
Alice Walker's reflections on the killing of Trayvon Martin.
The chain of events that directly led to his killing started when a white racist assumed a young black man was a criminal mainly because of his looks, then pursued him. That must happen fairly often in the US. If it leads to a fight, there is some chance one of the people will be killed (most likely the young black man).
A crucial psychological principle is that the probability of punishment and the frequency of punishment matter more than the amount of punishment. If we want to prevent repetition of this chain of events, it would be more effective to punish or discourage some event near the start, rather than an unusual outcome. Perhaps limiting carrying concealed weapons is a good solution.
GlaxoSmithKline is accused of bribing doctors in China.
I won't say it can't be true.
Demand
that Texas investigate why state troopers confiscated tampons
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Oyster reefs and wetlands provide vital protection from the ocean inundations that global heating will bring.
How the FISA court rubber-stamps massive surveillance.
Palestinian prisoners are still hunger striking.
Those who wish to discredit science operate by attacking individual scientists, with insults and lawsuits. Scientists have organized to defend science from this.
We must directly confront those who pretend that banning abortions is an expression of concern for people.
Russia wants to make multinational Internet companies cooperate with Russian surveillance rather than US Internet surveillance, regarding data about Russia and Russians.
The NSA says its mission is to collect "all" data, and it effectively targets everyone.
US citizens: call on the EPA to release its report about flammable tap water due to fracking.
Australia deposits asylum seekers in a prison in Papua New Guinea while their cases are heard. A committee that is supposed to monitor how these prisoners are treated has never actually met.
DuckDuckGo can't guarantee anonymity for users' searches even given the best will in the world. And neither could any other search engine in the US.
The NSA could be monitoring the search requests before they arrive at DuckDuckGo's servers. Those servers are hosted by Amazon, and Amazon could monitor them too.
BUT, if you visit through Tor, you block that.
The return of bison to part of the former American prairie restores the ecology.
Debunking the lies that try to excuse TAFTA (and other free exploitation treaties).
A further one: the idea that economic growth will benefit most people no matter how it is brought about. If the means to achieve growth serve the rich in other ways, they will get the increased income and the rest may be worse off.
Barrett Brown faces over a hundred years in prison for posting a link to the (already published) data obtained from Stratfor.
Kyrgyzstan, the one democracy in central Asia, wonders why the UK shields the son of the former dictator, who is accused of stealing tremendous amounts of money.
The UK government arbitrarily cancels the citizenship of dual nationals, typically when they are outside the country.
The US government is the principal opponent of tax reforms to prevent Internet companies from escaping taxes.
The Guantanamo prison guards are trying to pretend that fewer prisoners are now on hunger strike.
The acquittal of George Zimmerman could encourage racist whites to attack black teenagers presuming they are criminals, and then kill them.
Black leaders in the US want George Zimmerman to be tried on a federal charge of "violating civil rights."
I don't support this campaign because I think the practice is a sneaky way to violate the constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy.
Something needs to be changed in the law so as to avoid encouraging such killings, but I am not sure what it should be.
The manufacturer of tasers says, don't fire at the chest — it can cause a heart attack. Can you guess what body part thugs usually fire at?
The Australian right-wing "plan" to confront global heating is a phony plan developed by deniers.
Leaked Regulation: Schrödinger's net neutrality on its way in Europe.
To resist massive surveillance, people must learn to reject invitations to use services that surveil their users.
Although the article has a valid point, it undermines itself with the typical defeatist statements that "we" all engage in these surveillance-feeding practices now. Readers might well suppose that if "everyone does it" then there is no point seriously thinking of stopping.
But it's not all of us, only some of us. It is possible to say no. I have never used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Foursquare, Google+ or Path. (I might consider using Twitter for tweeting, if it were convenient for me.) I don't have a portable phone because I don't want to tell a phone company everywhere I go.
How the US pressures Internet companies into cooperating with Prism: by threatening to install their own surveillance gear without the companies' help.
Privacy International is suing the UK government over its massive surveillance practices.
Other human rights organizations are demanding changes in surveillance policies.
Daniel Ellsberg: Edward Snowden was right to flee; the US of today is "not the same country" as the one Ellsberg dared to remain in.
The latest media campaign to smear Snowden is to point out that Venezuela is guilty of some wrongful surveillance too.
Surveillance of people because they are opposed to government policies is no more legitimate in Venezuela than it is in the US. However, that need not stop Snowden from acceping asylum in Venezuela.
There are also reports that the Venezuelan government is harassing a journalist that published reports about Chavez's cancer, much as the US harasses some journalists. This too is no reason why Snowden should go to the US and face even nastier treatment himself.
As a patriotic American, Snowden's focus is how his own government wrongs his own countrymen, but his efforts will tend to help other countries too.
If we can accept that the world's most powerful government sometimes needs to work closely with really horrible states, we should accept that an individual hero fleeing the world's most powerful government can't be expected to choose only spotless states to ask for asylum. He needs to accept shelter wherever he can find it.
Ideally he would get shelter and protection from the US government itself.
US officials have a pattern of making misleading (or outright dishonest) statements about surveillance practices.
How gratis-to-play games psychologically manipulate players into paying over and over to have a chance of winning.
There is nothing exploitative in a chess set, a deck of cards, or an ordinary board game; the company that sells them doesn't manipulate the game you play so as to pressure or trick you into buying more of its product. Those are the standard of comparison by which we can see if some other game is exploitative. When you see how these companies fool people into spending money, I hope you will decide never to deal with them.
John Kiriakou explains what he had to go through to get medical treatment when he broke his finger while in prison.
Once phone call records are saved and made available for later
examination, governments examine them for the
smallest
of reasons.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Nina Paley on limiting mass immigration … of sperm.
The benefit of increased trade from TAFTA is projected to amount to three cents per person per day.
Of course, that benefit won't be evenly divided. It will be for the rich. The rest will get only the fallout from everything else in the treaty, whose name stands for Turn All Freedom To Ashes.
Skanska construction quit the US Chamber of Commerce because that organization is lobbying against green construction methods.
Summarizing the dangers of fracking: polluting the water globally, and increasing heating globally.
Obama plans to keep troops in Afghanistan far beyond 2014.
An experiment found many vertebrate species can't adapt fast enough to survive global heating.
They can adapt to 1C of temperature change in a million years, not 2C (let alone 4C) in a hundred years.
House Republicans have removed food stamps from the farm bill entirely.
Republican leaders met and made a specific plan to sabotage Obama in every way.
However, their sabotage campaign is broader than that. They also try to sabotage everything that contributed to women's rights, the wellbeing of poor Americans. or even energy efficiency.
Obama is easy for the friends of the plutocrats to sabotage, since he never tries very hard to oppose them. A real friend of most Americans would have used the Republicans' sabotage plan to attack them. But since he won't do that, it is up to us to do it.
As the US directs ever more resources into "security", which includes massive surveillance and war, it neglects the activities that could really make the world more secure.
Avoiding global heating disaster is one of those activities. The Pentagon recognizes that the effects of global heating will cause "instability" (wars, mass migration, etc.), but Congress and the President do not pay due attention to this.
Billionaire Koch Brother Says Eliminating The Minimum Wage Will Help The Poor.
He suggests that we judge US wages by comparing them with wages in other countries, which implies a great reduction in US wages. That's an admission of what we figured the US plutocrats want.
A federal judge ordered Microsoft to give Chevron massive amounts of personal data on 30 anonymous Internet activists tangentially related to Chevron's lawsuit against Ecuador.
China, Local Leaders Threaten Hong Kong Press Freedom.
US citizens: call on the
US not
to allow seismic test with very loud noises off the Atlantic
coast. It can kill whales by deafening them.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: call on Starbucks to move to compostable containers.
US citizens: sign this campaign
to reform
the filibuster.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery: the moral dilemmas of Syria and Egypt.
Time Magazine's idea of a discussion on US budget policy was to present two Republicans who disagree on some details.
It could have been worse: they could have presented a Republican and a Democrat like Obama that is little different from a Republican.
At NBC News, the Anchor Has to Remind You You're Not Watching an Ad.
TV pundit David Gregory
treated Americans
with an income under $200,000 a year as negligible.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Many parents in the UK won't let their children wander outdoors. As a result, children hardly ever go outdoors, and when they do, it is like a package tour in a foreign country.
The same thing happens in the US: parents are terrified of allowing children to be alone. These children are totally dependent on parents for transportation, and the parents are stressed by the need to do this.
A UK union leader will suggests that unions drop their support for today's "Labour" party, which has become almost as plutocratic as the Tory party.
US citizens: tell your senators not to weaken the EPA's regulation of toxic coal ash.
Everyone:
tell
UPS to stop lobbying against improved fuel efficiency.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Texas Republicans passed their law to restrict abortion, which will probably be blocked as unconstitutional.
One of the students who talked back to NSA recruiters
writes about
the experience.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Malala Yousafzai addressed the UN on her 16th birthday, advocating the cause of providing education to the 57 million children who are denied schooling.
Overfishing in the Mediterranean is coming back to haunt humans as jellyfish take over many beaches in the Mediterranean.
The Obama regime says it will (for the time being) not get search warrants against reporters that publish leaks to find their contacts.
Unfortunately, this doesn't do as much good as one might hope. Thanks to the massive surveillance that Snowden has revealed, they can find the reporters' sources without a subpoena on the reporters.
The Portuguese Socialist Party has rejected further austerity, which was demanded in return for yet another "bailout".
"Bail out" means "we're pushing your country out the door of the plane".
The EU encourages the corporate land-grab in Cambodia.
Secular and jihadist rebels in Syria are on the brink of fighting each other.
If they do become enemies, that might have the paradoxical result of opening a path for foreign aid to the secular rebels without helping the jihadis. However, that doesn't mean it would be a good idea to get hitched to the FSA.
Latin American countries including Brazil and Argentina will
withdraw
their ambassadors to Spain, France, Italy and Portugal for the
blockage of Evo Morales' plane.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
This will have a real impact. I won't try to guess whether it will be enough.
The US is attacking world standards of human rights in order to get Snowden.
It is also
denouncing
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for standing up for
Snowden's human rights, and for what he did for everyone else's human
rights.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Obama replied to Snowden's statement by rebuking Putin for repressing human rights organizations in Russia.
That is a valid criticism. Putin's regime is not in general a supporter of whistleblowers. It did not just kill whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky in prison; it put him on trial after death. (I am sure Snowden wishes he could go straight to South America without needing Russian help.)
However, that doesn't excuse what Obama is doing to punish an American hero. "Better than Putin" is no standard for judging our own government.
Twitter has given France the personal data about people who posted anti-semitic insults.
These insults are nasty, but censorship is nastier.
The UK government has cancelled plans to require plain packages, based on reasons that can't be serious. The UK government austerity policies aim to reduce the number of jobs, and plain packages in terms of marketing need not be easy to counterfeit.
Senator Wyden says the Obama regime is "considering" reducing the bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
I would not trust the Obama regime to really do so, but what this shows is that the movement against massive surveillance is strong enough to win something real.
ACLU-NJ Praises Newark's Adoption of Stop-and-Frisk Transparency Policy.
I think the celebration is premature. This policy may be a step forward if it makes thugs do that less, or shows people how bad it is. But thugs shouldn't have the power to search you at any time on the street without cause.
Republican "pro-family" policies cause suffering for modern families.
Having a baby in the US is especially expensive and dangerous to the mother, and Republican policies put the safer alternatives such as contraception and abortion out of some women's reach.
If the article's author thinks babies are adorable and something to celebrate, she should not claim we all feel that way. I don't, and you don't have to. When a baby is born, we should help it achieve a good life, but the world would be no worse off if that baby had not been born.
The spread of human activities in India has brought wild elephants and humans into conflict.
The Republicans in the House are killing the immigration bill.
I'm in favor of offering immigrants without papers a path to citizenship, but the immigration bill has another provision which would require employees to have state-issued ID cards, making them in effect almost national ID cards. I think this is a change in the wrong direction.
If we don't want a surveillance state, we must start opposing and reversing surveillance measures.
Alexei Navalny is running for mayor of Moscow, but will most likely be imprisoned on bogus charges for opposing Putin.
Snowden has asked for asylum temporarily in Russia until he can get to one of the Latin American countries that has offered him asylum.
Florida set out to ban Internet cafes, which is unjust, and accidentally banned all Internet connections.
US citizens: call for
an investigation
of oil companies for manipulating the price of oil.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: urge the mayor of Washington DC
to stand
firm against Walmart bullying and sign the living wage law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Any community is better off without a Walmart store. Walmart systematically pushes down wages.
US citizens: call for serious negotiation with Iran about uranium enrichment.
US citizens: support reinstitution of the Glass Steagall Act to separate banking from investment gambling.
Don't celebrate the election of an Iranian president approved by the theocracy.
The election was not free, since candidates were limited by the theocratic regime. The new president is not to be celebrated, as he will not give human rights Iranians. However, he might be open to a reasonable settlement on the uranium refining dispute, and the US should be ready to make one.
In order to do this, the US will have to defy the Israeli hawks' lobby, that want conflict between the US and Iran regardless of the pretext.
Air pollution, mostly soot and ozone, kills 2.5 million people a year.
The soot comes from diesel engines, power plants and coal fires. The ozone comes from engines.
Mining companies are pressuring the Australian government to relax environmental protections on exploratory drilling.
If the drilling finds gas, supposedly it would provide 1/4 of the gas that New South Wales would plan to burn. So what? We already have far more supplies of fossil fuels than we dare use; what good is it to find more?
Some of the large fires in Indonesia are on palm oil plantations.
Some of them are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.
US citizens: support the prisoners on hunger strike in California.
There may be a good reason for imprisoning them, but that doesn't justify cruelty.
Everyone: call on Kellogg to stop supporting deforestation in Indonesia (for palm oil plantations).
US citizens:
support
elimination of the filibuster, for presidential appointments.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The UK put off plans to discourage marketing of cigarettes to young people in order to show it is "open for business".
This demonstrates that "open for business" is the wrong thing for any country to try to be.
Justin Carter, accused of making a threat in an explicitly labeled joke, received a gift of money for bail, but still faces absurd charges.
Organized peaceful protests in Rio de Janeiro turned violent after discovery of a box of molotov cocktails, which might have been planted by thugs so as to be discovered.
Ireland has legalized abortion in some limited situations. This decision, defying threats from the Catholic Church, is an important victory for women and for humanity, even though it does not go far enough.
Meanwhile, the law imposes a harsh penalty on abortions in other circumstances.
San Francisco mounted real opposition to a bid to hold the Olympics there.
So did Chicago, although the campaign failed.
If we are to avoid the other disasters that CO2 emissions will cause, aside from those due to temperature, we need to cut emissions even more sharply.
Palestinian prisoners, imprisoned without trial, have been on hunger strike for months.
Palestinian children chosen at random face life imprisonment after being tortured into confessing to throwing stones. It is not clear whether any stones were actually thrown.
Greenpeace is making a success of a range of civil disobedience campaigns.
The Afghan government has moved to protect people who torture child brides.
Journalism is now a social network rather than a profession.
Burma has convicted 25 people of murders carried out in a pogrom against Muslims.
The US has underestimated the monetary value of the damage caused by the Big Spill.
The deeper corporate crime behind the oil train explosion in Lac-Megantic.
Microsoft changed several systems to help the NSA spy on users. These systems include Skype, web chats, email, and remote file storage.
This means that Microsoft's claims about encryption and privacy in these programs and services are effectively fraudulent.
There is no US law requiring user software for encryption to have a back door. But you can't trust encryption unless it is done by a free program in your own computer.
The UK thugs systematically spied on anti-racism campaigners who were supporting a man they were trying to frame, looking for "subversives".
A study suggests fracking can cause large earthquakes. (It is known to cause small ones.)
The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement.
Journalists should learn to expect surveillance and protect themselves from it.
I find the term "Hidden Wiki" strange and misleading, but Tor is a good thing.
Republicans in North Carolina attached severe abortion restrictions to a bill about motorcycle safety.
US high schools and colleges need to study freedom of speech.
Censorship and repression in Turkey is being copied from traditional media to social media.
Human rights organizations in France have sued tech companies and US agencies for their cooperation in handing over the data of French citizens.
Researchers build an all-optical transistor
My campaign against using Facebook now has support from Venezuela.
It is useful to be able to communicate with people, but let's not use a platform that hands your data to the CIA. What we really want is a distributed system where your data is in your own server and made available to others as you see fit.
A victory in the US against copyrighted laws.
Nationalism,
Tech Giants, and Spy States. Why don't big tech companies lobby to
keep their customers' data private?
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
"Pro-life" Republicans want US children to go hungry.
They value "human" life only before a human is born.
Mexican prisoners (who say they were forced to sign blank confessions) are being treated horribly in a new US-funded private prison.
A Saudi princess living in the US has been charged with
keeping
a Kenyan woman as a domestic slave.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The French parliament voted to give free software (logiciel libre) priority in higher education.
"Priority" is a rather weak preference; it is too easy to justify making an exception. Also, this doesn't apply to primary and secondary schools. However, it is a good step forward.
Egypt's military has arrested journalists from Al Jazeera and other foreign media.
Walmart and other US companies have rejected the binding scheme for improving factory safety in Bangladesh. They have set up their own dummy plan so they can pretend to be doing something about the problem.
The US and China agreed to cooperate on reducing pollution and global heating, but they are only considering nibbling around the edges.
Pesticide Use Spikes as GMO Failure Cripples Corn Belt.
The election in Zimbabwe is rigged again, but opposition leader Tsvangirai has not done a good job of winning support either.
The UK's welfare "changes" (cuts dressed up as a reform) have
tripled
the number of people turning to private charity for food.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
How do we build the
power
to stop NSA surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Nonuniformed thugs attacked a University of Virginia student for buying a six-pack of soda-water. They later said they thought she had bought beer. She did not know they were official thugs and tried to drive away.
They charged her three felonies: failure to read thugs' minds, failure to clairvoyantly recognize them as thugs, and attempted self-protection when attacked by a group of threatening strangers. These are not official felonies, of course. They represent what plainclothes thugs generally do people who try to protect themselves when attacked by an armed group of strangers for no obvious reason.
Fortunately the charges were dropped. But the thugs deserved to be fired at the very least. Firing might be sufficient in this case since they didn't permanently injure the victims.
There is a dispute about whether the 11-year-old Chilean pregnant girl was raped. Her mother said the sexual relations were voluntary. The girl said the man hurt her, which might mean she does consider it rape, or might mean something else.
She also says she wants to have the baby, and was praised by plutocrat president Piñera.
Piñera calls her position "maturity"; I call it childish folly. I won't rebuke her for having sex with anyone she chooses to have it with, as long as they take precautions so it goes no further than that. But I doubt that she is ready to have children, either medically or psychologically, and it seems that she is putting her health at risk if she does not get an abortion (though it is not stated why). In other words, Piñera is urging her to risk grave harm.
To avoid disastrous ocean acidification, ice melt, and decrease of food production, in addition to disastrous global heating, requires a much stricter limitation on the amount of greenhouse gas emitted.
See which US senators and congresscritters support a constitutional
amendment to reverse
the Corporations United decision (to
call
it what it really is).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Tariq Ali: the Pakistani report on Osama bin Laden admits to incompetence to cover up something worse.
Interviews with Syrians about al-Nusra.
The Egyptian military have called for arrest of more leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile imposing a plan to amend rather than replace the constitution that it imposed.
Burning even 1/3 of the fossil fuel reserves is likely to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect through release of methane hydrides from tundra and sea bottoms.
Look at Venus for an example of where that goes.
We may be only 10 years away from this disaster. Or maybe 30 years. Whichever it is, the fossil fuel companies are forcing Earth to disaster.
Apple has been convicted of conspiring with publishers to fix e-book prices.
While I disapprove of fixing prices, we must compare it with what Amazon does. Since Amazon is so close to a monopoly, it can effectively fix prices all by itself. The ban on price fixing makes sense only as part of a comprehensive policy to prevent any one company from being in such a position.
However, the price of ebooks is a minor issue compared with the injustice of most e-books. I wouldn't buy an e-book from Apple or Amazon even for a negative price.
A Swedish agency that wiretaps Russian communications for the NSA also conceals vital intelligence from the Swedish navy.
Modern intensive agriculture can backfire in strange ways. Slugs thrive because their predators are wiped out, so people kill them with chemicals that we then have to ingest.
Now put this together with superweeds and the fact that we're running out of water for agriculture, and compare that with the increasing population and you wind up with a choice, soon, between birth control now and starvation in a decade.
A study finds that tiny Antarctic krill, which are food for a large part of sea life, may die out in a few decades due to acidification of the ocean from the CO2 we are pumping out.
Many species of whales eat krill. We don't have to worry about whaling if the whales will starve.
The Great Barrier Reef's health was estimated as "poor" in 2011 due to heavy rain in the neighboring land.
The coral has declined by 50% since 1985.
A UK government report warns droughts will devastate food production there starting in ten years or so.
A user found that his Motorola Droid X2 phone was transmitting lots of personal data to Motorola.
He could have prevented this if his phone allowed him to install a software load consisting of entirely free software.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose HR 761, which would exempt mines from many environmental regulations.
US citizens: support removal of US troops from Afghanistan next year.
The US has failed to take action to protect endangered marine species.
US citizens: tell your senators to vote to reduce student loan interest rates.
The UN has concluded that the Israeli army used Palestinian children as human shields. Some soldiers have been convicted of this, but they got no punishment.
When Israeli troops take over a peaceful Palestinian village, is it training, or just to show them who's boss?
Two Palestinians face a military trial for a peaceful protest in their village. The army had declared the village a "closed military zone" to provide an excuse. The prosecutor admitted the real goal is to deny Palestinians the right to protest over the theft of land from their village.
Israeli troops arrested Palestinian film-maker Mohammad al-Azza. They didn't fracture his skull, they just hit him where they fractured it last time.
An Israeli colony in Palestine destroyed Palestinians' farmland by pumping sewage onto it.
Fanatics from other colonies carried out a pogrom against Bedouin in Palestine. "Pogrom" is the word that was used when Russians did likewise to Jews. My mother told me about how her mother lived in fear of pogroms.
Soldiers
ransacked another Palestinian village, whose inhabitants are
threatened with expulsion.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone:
tell
Google to stop funding Senator Inhofe and other
global heating denialists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
One aspect of corporate power today is that the managers are never responsible for anything they do wrong. They can always say the system is so complex that nobody could possibly monitor it.
Part of the motive for treaty-imposed globalization of business was to make things so complex that businesses could use this excuse. Thus, cancelling those treaties (needed to restore democracy) would also help with that.
30,000 California prisoners have started a hunger strike to protest long-term solitary confinement, which is a form of brainwashing.
The arguments used by the Obama regime to justify massive surveillance would equally well justify putting surveillance devices in every home.
Of course, that's exactly what is being done, in the form of the portable phone (which can be remotely converted into a listening device) and the Xbox One.
These devices are not mandatory; we have the option to reject them. That does no good unless we do reject them.
UK troops in Helmand alienated the population and strengthened the Taliban, according to a study.
Even Le Carre's latest fiction can't do justice to Snowden's truth.
Irony of ironies, a disabled veteran was told to remove his uniform to enter the California State Capital, where he was invited to a ceremony to honor him. His medals set off the medal detector. But this was hard for him to do, due to his permanent injuries.
Some US cities are banning wearing of pants that sag.
Plutocratic politicians are giving us progress on gay rights so they can dodge the pressure to run the economy for the benefit of all.
Comparing the data collection of the US NSA with that of the former East German NSA ("Stasi", in German).
France has stopped punishing file-sharing with disconnection from the Internet, but has not stopped attacking individuals for sharing.
Meanwhile, Ireland has adopted a similar unjust plan.
French and Irish Internet subscribers, like those everywhere, should run WiFi nets without passwords so as to avoid being instruments of unjust state power. Both file sharing and Internet anonymity are at stake.
The NSA says all the data it collected about you is "secret", even if you are not suspected of anything.
Obama FBI Nominee Defends NSA's Dragnet Surveillance. He also wants to attack protection of journalists' sources.
More about the Electronic Privacy Information Center's lawsuit to end blanket collection of Americans' phone calls.
Right-wing think tanks and media that repeat their stories
allow the most
absurd
arguments to pass as valid.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Indonesia has put limits on what sorts of causes a civil organization can stand for. A wide range of causes are banned, including amending the constitution.
The importance of this is shown by the organizations now campaigning to amend the US constitution to reverse the Corporations United decision. Imagine if that were banned.
Indonesia's official philosophy, Pancasila, demands that everyone have a religion. Thus, this law forbids organizations to campaign for the right to be recognized as an Atheist in Indonesia.
Everyone: protest on July 28 by standing still outside a Turkish embassy or consulate.
Thanks to Snowden, countries in South America, many supposedly friends
of the US, know about intense US surveillance, including
business
secrets as well as military secrets.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Both Christians and Muslims in the US occasionally throw up a
religiously-motivated murderer. More of them have been Christian.
Irrationally, the US heavily infiltrates the Muslims and doesn't
bother the Christians. Meanwhile, a double standard of justice is
applied to the two groups: general statements condemning the
government are recognized as acceptable under the first amendment
when Christians say them, but
put Muslims in
jail.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
call
for replacing the part of the Voting Right Act
that the Supreme Court destroyed.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Rupert Murdoch is being investigated after a recording was leaked in which he said that paying police for information was standard practice.
One small ISP in Utah protects its customers from massive surveillance.
A jury ruled that
guards
killed Jimmy Mubenga while deporting him from the UK to Angola.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Retired Judge Robinson, whose responsibilities including supervising the FISA court, say it has ignored its legal authority and is unable to keep surveillance in check.
China has forcibly relocated 2 million rural Tibetans, forcing them into towns where they have no income.
Google is raising funds for senators that pretend there is no global heating, and has funded a denialist legal harassment organization.
Egyptian troops shot and killed pro-Morsi protesters.
Daniel Ellsberg says that Snowden was right to flee; the Obama regime has no respect for legal rights when it is out to get someone.
No one has an obligation to face unjust prosecution by an evil regime.
Obama talks about the danger of global heating, but has given up on proposing to create jobs by addressing that danger.
My analysis of the reason is slightly different. Unemployment is still a great problem in the US, but Obama sees no need to even talk about trying to address it.
US citizens: tell your senators you object to telling federal employees to report their coworkers for anything that seems out of the ordinary.
Perhaps traditional values in Africa might help stop poaching of elephants.
Another idea that occurs to me, as a last resort: cut off all but the root of the elephants' tusks, and attach ceramic prostheses for them to use instead.
UK thugs tased a man, then kicked him after he fell on his face. Apparently he had not complied with an order to "put his hands up". Perhaps the tasing left him unable to move.
Reportedly the man was trying to steal food. Stealing is bad, in general; but there is an exception: anyone unable to get food to eat, in a land with plentiful food, is entitled to take food to eat.
It's possible this man had food to eat, and was taking something fancy that he did not need. That would be wrong. But if he was going hungry for want of food, that is the state's fault, and there was no reason he should starve when food was to be had.
Chinese thugs
shot
Tibetan monks who were carrying out a ceremony.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Many Egyptian men, and even religious authorities, say women deserve and want to be raped, if they don't stay at home.
Many Western men make claims of a similar spirit based on different actions women take.
European clothing labelers have committed to improving safety in factories in Bangladesh, but US companies have mostly refused to support this.
1/4 of all people surveyed, world wide, paid a bribe last year.
The probability of extreme heat waves in Australia is five times what it was years ago, due to global heating.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
1/4 of rivers and lakes in South Minnesota are so polluted by agricultural nitrogen fertilizer runoff that they could not be used for drinking water.
With Windows 8.1, Microsoft is moving step by step closer to forcing every user to make a Microsoft service account. And it will spy on users' searches, Ubuntu-style.
We could call it Windows Prism Edition.
500 million Chinese lose an average of 5 years of life due to burning coal.
I think that some of the coal they are burning is exported from the US.
Republicans say schools should keep students safe by giving arms to their staff. Insurance companies refuse to cover schools which do that, saying it is too dangerous.
A Chilean girl, 11 years old, is pregnant due to rape, but she cannot have an abortion there.
Privacy Is Lost, And We Are All To Blame.
Actually, it's not all of us. I refuse to do many of the foolish things the article says that we "all" do. But if you don't refuse, you are partly to blame.
So redeem yourself by fighting hard now!
Why GOP Wants to Tax Students and Not Polluters.
(It wants to discourage studying and encourage polluting.)
The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued to put an end to the FBI's collection of all phone call records.
A great step backward: the UK will convert wheat into ethanol, not very useful as wheat production is endangered by global heating.
Capacity to grow staple foods, in Europe and Asia, is reaching physical limits.
A Pakistani government report condemned Pakistani intelligence for failing to find Osama bin Laden, and the US for invading Pakistan to kill him.
The Australian opposition wants to cut taxes on mining and carbon emissions.
Why tax mines if you can dump on poor people instead?
The UK plans to ban two organizations without trial.
To ban an organization without trial is a violation of freedom of association. The fact that other countries (including the US) do it too is no excuse whatsoever. Boko Haram is a terrorist group, responsible for horrible atrocities, according to what I have read; but there should be a trial to establish this and not merely a political decision.
This ban will result in sentences of 10 years in prison for wearing certain forms of clothing. I am going to the UK soon, and I don't know what forms of clothing they are; am I in danger? Can someone tell me what I need to avoid? And can someone try to demonstrate that this doesn't infringe freedom of expression?
The US has applied such bans to charities that had bent over backwards to follow US rules in order to aid the poor and not terrorism.
Pope Francis visited Lampedusa to call attention to the suffering of those that try to get to Europe by boat — and the poverty in Africa which impels them to do it.
The Xbox One's great new feature is advertising targeted based on monitoring users.
The US has agreements with non-US telecom companies to retrieve data at will.
Empirically, copyright makes books and songs disappear after a few years.
Nick Turse tried to interview US soldiers at a base in Qatar (which in
the Obama fantasy world is not called a base). He got a runaround,
and on returning to the US
was harassed
with accusations that he was a jihadi.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Four Contemptible Examples of Corporate Tax Avoidance.
The US is now number 27 among countries in median wealth, reflecting the effects of austerity and catering to the banksters.
Although blasphemy charges were dropped against Rimsha Masih, she still faced the danger of lynching by Muslim fanatics. She has been brought to safety in Canada.
Citizens of Massachusetts: ask your state legislators to restrict surveillance using drones.
The witch-hunt against people who watch "child pornography" may provide an excuse for US to start ordering people to decrypt their files.
Note that "child pornography" in the US includes images of people who are old enough that they can lawfully have sex in many states.
The UK government proposes to scrap the protections against torture that blocked its attempts to deport Abu Qatada. He returned to Jordan when UK negotiators obtained assurance he would get a fair trial there.
It seems to me that if the UK stopped promoting and facilitating torture, it might have more success in discouraging other countries from practicing torture, and then it would have an easier time deporting unwanted visitors, or even convincing them to leave, without trampling human rights.
Hundreds of prisoners in Italy, sentenced to life in prison, asked to be executed instead.
The death sentence is an injustice, but anyone should have the right to die (and to ask for help in dying, in case they can't bring themselves to commit suicide). There is no reason to deny prisoners that right.
There is a valid concern that, if prisoners have the right to get help in dying, the prison may be set up so as to drive prisoners to want to die.
However, prisons can be set up that way in any case, and often are, in the US. A number of prisoners in Guantanamo have killed themselves — but it's not just there.
Snowden describes how Germany cooperates with NSA spying on Internet traffic passing through Germany.
Me and my metadata — thoughts on online surveillance.
AT&T plans to sell use of the data it gets about cell phone customers.
The UK has finally succeeded in deporting Abu Qatada to Jordan, but it is not clear whether there was any reason to do so, as he was never accused of a crime except based on evidence obtained by torture.
It is especially strange to say the goal was to get him out of the UK, then oppose bail on the grounds that he might leave the UK.
An interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson of WikiLeaks.
We have not taken care of trees well enough, and now the effects of global heating are killing whole forests.
Ye Haiyan, women's rights activist in China, has been evicted and harassed by local governments, including sending people to beat her up, accusing her of injuring her attackers, and kicking her out of her home.
How Do You Know When President Obama is Lying? MSNBC Won't Tell You.
Snowden says that the NSA works with intelligence agencies in Germany
and various Western countries on a
"no
questions asked" basis.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
95% of people can be identified from hourly location traces from their mobile phones.
This is why I don't think getting a prepaid phone anonymously is acceptable.
Get a picture of how thoroughly Big Brother knows about your life by looking at your email metadata.
The history of
Morsi's
downfall.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Violating the Egyptian Constitution is not such a grave thing, considering that it was imposed by Islamists, not long ago, over the objections of the Secularists. What is crucial is to establish a democracy that the people accept and that respects human rights.
US law requires
cutting off aid to Egypt until a democratically elected government
takes office.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Russia's libraries protested a new law allowing the state to block web sites accused of sharing.
The US already practices a form of such oppression, through seizing domain names without a trial, and has narrowly escaped laws such as SOPA/PIPA which would extend it.
68
dissidents in the United Arab Emirates were convicted of dissent,
in a bogus trial.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
The Intelligence Lies Just Keep Coming…
The first decade of this century was the hottest and wettest on record.
US citizens: call on your senators to confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The Observer published a story reporting that various European countries
share personal data with the NSA, then
removed
it after concluding that the source was not dependable.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I had a political note pointing to that story, which I removed after the story disappeared. Until seeing this, I didn't know until now why it had been deleted.
If the report was based on documents posted by the NSA, I think that is sufficient basis to say that the NSA claims that other countries cooperate with it in the reported ways, and never the nondependable intermediate source.
The NSA went to a college to recruit, and students gave it some hard questions.
The Obama regime has
reimposed
secrecy on the number of nuclear weapons the US has, after
publishing the number once.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Google search has been changed to give overwhelming precedence to
search results that somehow have a
special
preference from Google. In one case, only 7% of the screen was
used to display anything else. In another case, one had to scroll
down four screens to find anything else.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
I think that my occasional searches will be less vulnerable to this problem that most people are. I rarely search for a product or service in the first place. I search for other sorts of things that are less business-oriented.
It seems silly to use a search engine to search for "Italian restaurant" — that is not the way to find a good Italian restaurant. I would not make the decision to "eat in an Italian restaurant" in the absence of knowing about a specific good Italian restaurant that is feasible to eat in. If there isn't one, I'd rather eat in a good restaurant of some other kind.
However, this doesn't make the article's issue unimportant. A biased search engine is no substitute for an unbiased one.
Someone did a similar study in 2015 and says things are not as bad.
Jeff Olson was acquitted of vandalism charges brought because he had written slogans condemning Bank of America in chalk on the sidewalk.
However, fear of the hassle of being prosecuted may still have a chilling effect on what people say. I suggest holding a mass chalk-in in San Diego to uphold freedom of of expression.
John Kiriakou writes that the FBI tried to entrap him to give them an excuse to prosecute him.
He warns people never to cooperate with the FBI in any fashion.
Obama has kept the public in the dark about crucial points in Bradley Manning's trial.
However, we know the crucial point: Obama is out to get him because he was loyal to the American people.
The case against Bradley Manning has gaping holes.
Even if it fails, he will still be imprisoned for the lesser charges to which he pled guilty. I suggest we celebrate Bradley Manning Day annually on Dec 17 (his birthday).
The UK government claims to be powerless to do anything about Guantanamo, but it could demand release of Shaker Aamer if it wanted to.
Where should Snowden go to be immune from US authorities?
MasterCard has voluntarily resumed allowing donations to Wikileaks.
Speculation: Google shut down Google Reader because RSS does not fit with server companies' idea of controlling everything a user does.
You shouldn't use Facebook or Google+, or any communications service that demands to know your "real name".
Amazon's Mechanical Turk service is a distributed sweatshop.
It's not the only sweatshop that Amazon runs. Amazon mistreats independent bookstores, publishers, authors, the national treasury, and its workers — as well as readers that use the Amazon Swindle.
Republicans are campaigning against a fictitious "war on coal".
We should have a war on coal. Coal mining is done today by removing the top of a mountain, which poisons the surrounding streams permanently. Burning the coal produces pollution that kills people, too. And it contributes greatly to global heating.
Therefore, it is no surprise that the corporatocracy in the US has no "war on coal". Coal mining continues as before; as the US burns less coal, it exports more to be burned elsewhere.
Joseph Nevins regrets that he listened to Senator Gillibrand speak
without protesting
her support for US wars and proxy occupations.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
sign
the Anti-Corruption Pledge.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call for protection of Atlantic herring; overfishing them leaves many other fish and whales insufficient food.
Another UK undercover thug infiltrator that spied on dissident groups, and later managed the whole group of them, has confessed.
Amnesty International calls on Israel
to stop
judicial bullying of Palestinian activists.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Egypt's
army shot
protesters supporting Morsi and shut down TV stations that support
the Muslim Brotherhood.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
A Christian priest was shot, perhaps sectarian violence.
The suppression services of Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asian countries collude regularly in kidnaping, disappearance, and torture.
They also extradite accused people rapidly, disregarding objections from the European Court of Human Rights that they are supposedly committed to obey.
The US and EU countries are so deeply involved in similar outrage that they don't dare criticize when Russia does it.
South Korea's spy agency sabotaged the last presidential election with a massive attack campaign against opposition parties using large numbers of sockpuppets.
The campaign was criminal but its leaders have not been punished, and it is destroying evidence.
If South Korea doesn't make sure this can't happen again, its will not have a fair election again.
Jay-Z (a rapper, apparently) released a song through a nasty app that spies on users and extorts them into advertising the song to others.
If people don't push back hard, in two years this will become "normal", as have so many other nasty practices.
The Wall Street Journal says Egypt needs a murderous dictator.
The world is approaching "peak water", when the supplies of fresh water for growing plants will decrease. Countries including the US, India and China are exhausting the aquifers they use.
We could make enough food with considerably less water, if we ate a lot less beef. However, in the long them, the regions that can't grow food any more need to stop their populations from growing.
Updates to the Internet Music page.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have offered asylum to Edward Snowden.
Shamai Leibowitz
was convicted
of espionage for telling the public about FBI crimes. He believes
that Obama punished him in an attempt to teach whistleblowers a lesson
— and thinks that Snowden learned useful lessons from it (though
not the ones Obama had in mind).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Leibowitz cites "the obligation to our consciences and basic human rights" as the justification for doing his duty despite laws against it, but he could also cite the US Constitution.
Commentary
on Morsi's
ouster.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Saudi activists face jail for taking food to woman whose husband left her effectively locked in the house without enough food or money to get it.
The Muslim Brotherhood's supporters held a large rally in Cairo, and soldiers shot at them.
Elsewhere in Cairo, Secularists and Islamists fought, and someone started shooting. Perhaps that was the army too.
Rebooting democracy with new elections might be the best thing under the circumstances; repressing the Muslim Brotherhood would make it much worse. Excluding them from democracy for a substantial time would be oppression; however, what they do when they get power is also oppression. It is hard to choose between them.
One article suggests this might convince Islamists around the world to give up on seeking power through democracy, and use violence instead.
This might occur, but what they do when they gain power includes violence too.
The second article suggests a stratagem that might have avoided both of the repressive outcomes. I don't know enough to judge whether it would work.
Right-wing UK policies have made it impossible to buy a home in London if you're not rich, and hard to rent one either.
Allowing people to buy their apartments in public housing was a fundamental mistake, unless the state was going to build more public housing apartments as fast as they were sold.
A UK thug that shot a man dead for no reason may finally face a murder prosecution.
The government went to great lengths to prevent an inquiry.
The TPP aims
to ban
the advantages that public medical systems offer, and require
patents on surgical and other medical treatments.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
Dissident Alexey Navalny, in the closing arguments of his trial, condemned Putin's "feudal" state.
US politicians and even journalists are trying to smear Edward Snowden by fabricating the claim that he specifically collaborated with enemies of the US.
What he did was collaborate with the American people; but perhaps the American people qualify as enemies of the US state, considering the plans for the TPP.
The US makes a habit of labeling the Haitian people's leaders as "bandits" to excuse killing them.
The Haitian revolution made US leaders uncomfortable because they feared slaves in the US would rebel next.
Verizon wants to stop providing land-line telephone service in some areas, and force people to use a wireless service that is technically limited, unreliable in disasters, and imposes nasty conditions.
UK thugs secretly recorded a meeting between Duwayne Brooks and his lawyer.
The thugs were trying to frame Brooks for the murder of his best friend, rather than find who really did it.
Supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership call it a "trade treaty",
but most of it is not about trade at all. It's
about giving
corporations more power.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
For instance, the TPP would ban the sorts of
regulation needed
to keep banks from cheating their clients and causing a financial
crisis.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
University financial aid staff have been corrupted by banksters to steer students into disadvantageous loans.
There Is Nothing Innovative About Privatizing Our Water.
There is no difficulty investing public funds in water infrastructure. We just need to tax the rich and businesses enough.
Draft EU documents reveal
plans to use
"trade treaties" to exclude the public and democracy from regulatory
issues.
European companies may
stop
hosting their data in US servers, thanks to Snowden's disclosures.
It's about time!
The purpose of the term
"cloud" is to create a
cloud in your mind, that you will use Internet services indiscriminately without posing
crucial questions such as, "Which companies and countries would I be
trusting this data to? What data would they get? Would they get
control over how my computing is done?" If you think about Internet
services with your mind in a "cloud", you will surely make bad
choices.
There are some Internet services that are acceptable to use, but
companies (and governments!) in Europe must never entrust any of their
data to servers outside Europe.
What the TSA has in common with the NSA: unreasonable searches.
I don't object strenuously if someone touches my genitals while
searching me. I don't see why other people care so much about this.
Rather, I object to searching people and their baggage for anything
other than weapons that could endanger the safety of the plane. Being
stabbed with a tiny knife is a tiny danger. Someone with a tiny knife
could stab you on a plane, or in a store, or on a street. Where is it
more likely to happen? On a street. To trample our rights to avoid
this tiny danger in planes is unjustified.
The fact is, the TSA searches for anything it can find that can be
used to arrest people — and then tries to fool you about this
with the same sort of dishonest language that the NSA uses. "We don't
intentionally target your marijuana, etc.. However, if we notice it
inadvertently while checking to see whether you have a forbidden tiny
knife, we inform the [thug] who is waiting near by to arrest you."
Morsi may be prosecuted for
"insulting the presidency".
There is no insult to the presidency like the president's own actions.
If insulting the presidency were a crime in the US, we would prosecute
Dubya and Obama.
However, I have a hunch that the Egyptian military does not see the
irony of this, and must have dredged up some words Morsi spoke as an
excuse to prosecute him.
Freedom of speech includes the right to insult any one, any thing, any
view, and any institution. Including, of course, the presidency of
any country.
Limited available supplies of phosphorus and potassium for fertilizers
could make today's farming impossible in 40 years.
A whistleblower reports that oil companies operating in the North Sea
between the UK and Norway make a
mockery
of safety.
New York is reducing the number of prisoners and the crime rate,
and it seems to be due to the use of
alternative
forms of sentencing.
Private prison companies try to prevent such success.
In fact, some of them fine the state if it doesn't
imprison a certain number of people.
Meanwhile, the whole US could tremendously reduce the amount
of incarceration by legalizing possession of drugs. It would
probably reduce the rate of other crimes too.
A campaign to eradicate mice and rats on South Georgia
island may
allow seabirds to return.
The floods that global heating will bring are likely
to destroy
valuable farmland as well as people's homes.
Oil companies
are rushing
to search for oil in the Arctic, which will constitute an
additional positive feedback in global heating.
France
practices massive surveillance on people's communications.
The Egyptian military is trying
to arrest
300 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Although I condemn their theocratic views, they have a right to
express them.
Restore
the 4th! A movement to opposing massive government surveillance.
Americans: This Independence
Day, Thank a
Protester.
Payment companies
are blocking
payments to VPN companies.
It looks like a systematic attack on people trying to get around
national censorship or surveillance.
US citizens: call on Aida Alvarez, a director of Walmart, to get
the workers
fired for striking rehired.
US citizens: call on the EPA to adopt
the strictest
proposed standards for power plant CO2 emissions.
US citizens: support Rep. Ellison's call
for raising
the minimum wage to a living wage.
The Clergy Project gives religious
preachers support
in coming out as nonbelievers.
The
US photographs
the covers of all snail mail in the US, which fills the gaps in
the complete communications dossier for every American.
US citizens: call
on the US to protect orcas from plans to export
100 million tons of coal per year.
Of course, burning that coal would endanger all of us by boosting
CO2 emissions.
The UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy
have all had formal
agreements to provide communications data (about their citizens)
to the US.
US citizens:
call
on your congresscritter and senators not to allow US intervention
in Syria.
US citizens:
call
on McDonald's to stop using bank cards with imposed fees as the
imposed system of payment.
Austerity in Portugal has failed in its ostensible goal, as
bond
interest rates have shot up.
The plutocrat's response,
as
usual, is to complain that wages haven't been driven down enough
and demand further cuts.
The Egyptian army has
removed
Morsi as president.
Intervention of the military in politics is always dangerous, but in
Egypt the alternative was dangerous too. The army says it will make
the head of the constitutional court an interim president to hold new
elections for president and congress. On the other hand, I have read
it has shut some TV channels, including the Egyptian branch of
al-Jazeera. I don't think I can tell whether this is heading
for democracy or tyranny.
A UK thug who called an arrested man a "nigger" has been
fired.
In general, expressions of racist views should not be a crime.
Freedom of speech must include the ideas we disagree with.
However, public officials dealing with the public are a
special
case,
because they represent the state. They must conduct themselves
without prejudice — not only in their words, but in their acts
(such as searching people on the street).
Westerners made a grave mistake in accepting the creeping general surveillance
that authoritarian states say
"keeps
us safe".
Fallout from French nuclear tests in Polynesia
spread
plutonium over Tahiti and all of French Polynesia. Increased
levels of cancer have resulted.
Parents whose child died as a result of eating their heroin
have been sentenced to
long
prison terms.
It is gratuitously cruel to punish people harshly for not preventing a
tragic and unusual accident (tragic for them!), the danger of which
they didn't recognize. If the goal is to teach other parents to
prevent such dangers, merely publicizing the events of the child's
death would do the job.
The doctrine of legal negligence has a valid place. There are common
dangers that everyone is supposed to know about and actively prevent.
But this one seems too unusual to claim everyone should know about it.
I wonder if the doctrine of legal negligence should be accompanied by
a state responsibility to inform people from time to time of their
responsibilities to avoid accidents. Not only could that help
legitimize punishing people who fail to carry out those
responsibilities; it might also in practice do far more to reduce
these accidents than the remote threat of punishment.
Giant US food companies are
preparing
to spend millions, perhaps billions, in many states to block laws
to require labeling of GMOs.
The US border patrol is considering putting not-usually-lethal weapons
on drones to operate
near
the US border.
A bill in North Carolina would
shut
most abortion clinics in the name of preventing the imposition of
Shari'a law in that state.
Thus, opposing vicious Muslim theocracy (fortunately no threat today
in North Carolina) is used as the excuse to impose vicious Christian
theocracy.
The NSA ingratiates itself with US children in school by
putting
its name on educational materials with various sorts of advice.
Many of these seem to be good advice, but the side lesson is "The NSA
is your friend".
It also recruits through the
Cryptokids
program.
A US drone attack killed 17 people in Pakistan. The many wounded had
to wait for medical care because
first aid
workers were scared to approach them, lest they be bombed in turn.
The practice of attacking the first aid workers was started
by terrorists, then picked up by the US.
Killing tourists in retaliation is not legitimate guerrilla war; it
is attacking civilians deliberately, which is even worse than what
the US does with the drones.
Why European
Nations Must Protect Edward Snowden.
Individual Germans are
filing
criminal charges against the US over NSA spying.
I agree with what the German Pirate and Green politicians say.
The government should have the authority to impose these limits,
even if Nestle has a contract to buy water.
The ACLU is
arguing
in an amicus brief that the state should need a warrant to access
a cell phone's location data.
Some
states are passing laws requiring this.
These laws are a step forward, but they are inadequate.
A GPS tracker on a car collects data only once it is placed.
Requiring the state to get a warrant before placing a tracker on
someone's car is adequate protection of privacy in regard to that
technology, because it prevents the state from tracking everyone's car
all the time (at least, doing so this way).
By contrast, requiring the state to get a warrant in order to access
previously recorded cell phone location data is inadequate, because
the system builds a dossier about each person advance, and
the state could take it later if it presents a reason to investigate someone.
This is ideal for fishing expeditions against whistleblowers, or
anyone the state wants to get. Cell phones perform dangerously
excessive surveillance by collecting this data in the first place.
To restore privacy rights we must prevent the collection of so much
data about a person unless there is already a warrant.
FISA spying criteria were designed carefully to
allow
the NSA to collect lots of information about Americans while
creating excuses to say it was "inadvertent" and we were not
"targeted".
If They Can Lie
About NSA/Snowden, They Can Lie About Syria & Iran.
If the US security state resembles a government of occupation, that's
because
its origin
was in the occupation of the Philippines.
Biometric ID cards were a central part of this, which is why we must
fight to prevent their adoption, or to put an end to them.
I support in principle the idea of offering a path to amnesty and
citizenship for the many illegal immigrants in the US; but I oppose
the current immigration bill because of its requirement to increase
the need for a government-issued photo ID card, in effect converting
them into national ID cards.
In Venezuela, a recording, supposedly of government-aligned journalist
Mario Silva in conversation with a Cuban
agent, describes
alleged corruption and infighting in the government.
However, Silva says the conversation did not occur, and the recording
was faked by editing snippets of other conversations.
Stores are
using mannequins
with cameras to track customers.
I think there should be laws to limit the ways stores watch their
customers. Security cameras should be allowed only if their
recordings are not available on the Internet and are deleted within 2
weeks unless there is an incident or court order to justify checking
them.
Amnesty
International condemned
US attempts to stop Snowden from gaining asylum, and says that no
country should return Snowden to the US because he might be subject to
inhumane treatment.
In addition, Amnesty said that Snowden's "crimes" consisted of
revealing violations of human rights and that they must not be
prosecuted at all.
A hidden microphone
was found
in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Military sonar has been connected
to mass
strandings of whales.
New Zealand is considering a law
to permit
increased surveillance.
The European Parliament approved steps to try
to improve
the broken European carbon emissions trading system —
temporarily.
How global heating is making wildfires
go beyond
what our methods of containment can handle.
Vienna forced President Morales to submit his plane to
a search
for Snowden. The result is a diplomatic crisis as other South
American countries support Bolivia.
Countries that condemned US spying revealed by Snowden nonetheless
denied
him asylum, and even blocked President Morales' flight alleging he
might have Snowden with him.
Morales should show his firmness against this intimidation by going
back to Moscow now to pick up Snowden.
2001-2010 was
the warmest
decade since records started.
US citizens:
ask
your senators to vote for keeping student loan interest rates
down.
US citizens: call and ask your congresscritter to fix the voting rights act
by setting up a new criterion for "pre-clearance". Also send a message through
this
page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
Poverty among children has been
rising
in the US, showing that the "recovery" is a misnomer.
Most "think tanks" get funding from companies and this directly
shapes
the positions they take.
Many parts of the US make parents
pay
for school buses. When this is applied only to magnet schools, it
can have the effect of excluding excellent but poor students from
magnet schools.
While reporters are losing their jobs, a few media executives and
pundits are
getting
rich by supporting plutocracy.
Clapper said he gave a false answer because
he
"forgot about" the PAT RIOT act.
No one could "forget about" something so important, for testimony
before Congress, when he had been informed of the question in advance.
His statement is really an expression of contempt for the Senate and
the people. It says, "I am prepared to tell even the most incredible
lies."
US citizens:
call
on Obama to negotiate elimination of nuclear weapons.
We
have relied on technical and economic constraints to the extent of
government surveillance of everyone, so technological advances have
led to more surveillance.
Republicans have switched from denying that human activity causes
global heating to obstructive
quibbling
about the expense of stopping it.
"Cap and trade" might be effective if it worked as intended, but the European
experience shows that the system is too easy to game or defraud. I support
a simple carbon tax.
Senators accuse NSA officials of
misleading
them on additional points.
Massive
surveillance is making some Americans hesitate to sign petitions
lest they be punished by intensified personal surveillance.
This is the result of the state's demonstrated practice of treating
dissidents as "terrorist suspects".
The US is not close to being a dictatorship with one tyrant at the
top, but that's not the only nondemocratic form of government. What
rules the US now is a plutocracy — government of the people, by
the flunkies, for the rich and their businesses. It steadily eats
away at what remains of our democracy, while increasing the repression
against those that try to defend it.
Thus, the fact that a one-dictator state is not likely in the short
term is of less significance than one might have wished.
Some Egyptian Islamists say they
will fight
to impose their religion's cruelty on the country.
As e-commerce makes retail more
efficient, lots
of jobs are disappearing in the US.
If retail were the only sector increasing efficiency by eliminating
jobs, it might not be a problem. But it's happening, or will soon
happen, in
many other sectors, resulting in a large pool of people who can't
ever get work. Of course, the plutocrats want to get rid of those
people by condemning them to sickness, or pushing them into crime so
that they can
be locked
up and turned into slave labor.
The school-to-prison
pipeline is part of that scheme.
Calling on the US government
to respect
the rights of all participants in journalism.
Doctors in some Catholic
hospitals secretly
perform medically necessary abortions, hiding the practice so that
bishops can't stop them.
I wonder if it would be possible to pass an initiative in the State of
Washington saying that hospitals may not impose a policy of refusing
to provide a lawful life-saving medical procedure for non-medical
reasons. This might make the Catholic Church sell its hospitals
there, which would be a decisive victory.
Thugs in a town near
Chicago shot
Randy Green's dog for no reason. The dog had got loose in the
yard, but never showed any hostility towards the thugs.
I read in an article I don't want to link to (because it focuses on a
video in YouTube) that thugs in California shot a man's dog because he
made a video of them.
A brain-eating
amoeba is spreading in range, apparently due to global heating.
Rehan Motiwala was
eventually allowed
to fly back to US, but does not know whether he is still on the
no-fly list.
The no-fly list is a form of punishment without trial, and should be
abolished. If these people were searched very carefully before
boarding a plane, that would achieve the same supposedly intended
result. Anyone that is not a US citizen and not in the US can simply
be denied a visa.
US
officials are teasing the press with vague stories claiming
terrorist groups have somehow learned from Snowden's revelations to
change their communication methods. But they won't say how, even
though the terrorists presumably already know.
There are several reasons to suspect that this is manipulation, and
that we wouldn't reach the intended conclusion if we knew all about
it.
Discussion in China about US massive
surveillance sparked
concern there about China's massive surveillance.
Of course, China's massive surveillance is worse — it does not
have the flimsy limits that apply to the NSA. This does not make US
surveillance legitimate. We must hold a "free country" to a higher
standard than that defined by China.
The idea that a corporation's prime duty is to make money for its
shareholders is presented as an unquestionable given, but
it comes
from an article published in 1970.
Since stopping drivers to check for drugs is illegal, thugs in Ohio
are using
a fake
drug checkpoint to see if anyone gets worried about it.
There seems to be no limit to the level of dishonesty thugs will
practice to trample people's rights.
Of course, imprisoning people for possession of drugs is an injustice
no matter how they identify these people.
When all the political parties are
lousy, they
trigger protests, but it's hard for protests alone to bring about
a better government.
Six Months Later,
U.S. Still Importing
Contaminated Meat From Australia.
The US government pretends that Australia's self-inspection system is
adequate because it wants to introduce the same inadequate system in
the US.
US citizens: call your congresscritter
to demand
an investigation of massive surveillance like the Church
Committee.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
BP's 20 billion dollars for damages from the Big Spill will
be exhausted
in a few months.
I hope it will have to pay more, because the damage is ongoing, and
having to pay more will scare oil companies a little.
Iran's new president wants
to reduce
censorship and improve human rights.
That would be a welcome rejection of the worldwide trend. However, I
think he won't be permitted to go very far in this direction.
The
Dictionary of the Global War on You (GWOY).
Even
as Alberta is
flooded, its politicians still push accelerated global heating.
The US government
has blocked
access to the entire Guardian web site from military bases in
Afghanistan, South Asia and the Middle East.
Perhaps they want to keep the troops ignorant so they can be
manipulated into carrying out atrocities and imagining that they are
"serving their country". Or perhaps they are simply trying to prove
on principle that truth cannot overcome their wall of ignorance.
In the US:
rebuke
the Texas legislature for trying to ban abortions.
A community currency in a slum in Kenya
was
working well for alleviating poverty, but the organizers have been
charged with "forgery".
These charges are obviously absurd, but I fear that the state will
excuse them based on a legal lie.
A UK government agency knew for years that companies were regularly
breaking into other companies' computers, and
decided
to suppress the issue.
A US military study found that, empirically, drone attacks in
Afghanistan are
ten
times deadlier per attack to civilians than attacks using
manned bombers.
Meanwhile, the US has little ability to tell whether the casualties
from drone attacks outside Afghanistan were civilians.
Snowden has dropped his request for asylum in Russia
in
response to Putin's statement that the condition would be to shut
up.
French right-wing candidate Le Pen
faces
prosecution for comparing the presence of Muslims praying as an
"occupation".
This demonstrates how France fails to respect freedom of speech.
Due to widening inequality,
hundreds
of millions of children remain poor in countries that are not
considered poor overall.
Part of the cause of this problem is that poor people have too many babies.
However, that's partly our fault for not giving them the reliable
contraception which they can't afford.
Rapid population growth, caused by
bad
government policies on birth control and abortion, will push the
biosphere closer to disaster.
We need to slow this down.
Twitter is being used for
advertisements
that pretend not to be advertisements.
The Republicans pretend they can get Americans back to work by
punishing
the unemployed.
That's like trying to squeeze blood into a stone, when there's no
space in the stone.
The US Treasury Secretary is trying to undermine and destroy Europe's
planned tax
on financial transactions, by getting an exemption for the big US
banks.
Sad to say, under a government that basically represents the rich,
the question is not whether but how it will betray the rest of us.
The investigation into the death of 19 elite firefighters in Arizona
will focus on the
immediate
causes, which might enable avoiding putting teams into such
conditions in the future.
However, the underlying cause is well understood, predictable,
and correctable with sufficient will:
global
heating.
The UK government cuts aid for the poor, but
fights
to maintain farm subsidies for the rich.
This is entirely consistent, since its policy is to help the rich and
crush everyone else.
Snowden denounces Obama's efforts to block him from receiving asylum,
saying they are
meant
to frighten future whistleblowers.
Clapper is trying to get away with
lying
to Congress by saying it was the smallest possible lie.
That excuse could apply to any lie he wants to tell, so we must not
believe anything he says.
US citizens:
call
for an investigation of the NSA and FBI like the one carried out
by the Church committee in the 70s.
Large
protests in Hong Kong demanded real democracy, despite heavy rain.
The Egyptian Army
gave
Morsi an ultimatum: deliver "the demands of the people" in 48
hours or (it isn't clear what).
Morsi has
not yielded to this.
Young, educated Europeans find that their skills are of
no
interest to any employers.
One side effect, falling birth rates, is good for society. But that
can be achieved in other, less damaging ways.
I don't think this problem will ever get better as long as the
plutocrats remain in power. In a few decades, the poverty of
austerity will merge with the increased poverty of global heating.
US citizens: call for offering
subsidized
quality education to all.
Campaigning to change the traditional
scorn
for widows in parts of Africa.
There is no stigma on widows in the US or Europe, so this one seems
absurd to us. However, we do have a tradition of scorn for other
groups, such as homosexuals, prostitutes, and ephebophiles, and most
people in the US and Europe find that as natural as scorn for widows
seems in parts of Africa.
Putin offered Snowden asylum
if
he stops revealing US dirty secrets. Putin realizes that Snowden
won't want to accept this offer, because he does not seek personal
safety at the cost of letting his country down.
President
Correa rejected helping Snowden reach Ecuador to apply for asylum.
He also said he would consider a US request to deny him
asylum. I find this extremely disappointing.
Here is the private (leaked)
letter
that Snowden sent to Correa.
Many in England tell the Welsh nationalist party they wish it offered
to represent them in England, because of its
progressive
position.
Perhaps its Welsh supporters could be persuaded they don't need to
separate from England, if they could instead govern England with their
English allies.
Everyone:
call
on San Diego to drop its prosecution of Jeff Olson for writing a
protest slogan on the sidewalk in wash-away chalk.
All US army bases are
blocking
access to all reporting about Snowden's revelations of mass
surveillance.
The authoritarians who have hijacked our government would block access
for all of us if they could — and this blockage may be a
precursor to that.
Glenn Greenwald called this a "prestigious award for good journalism",
and he's right. But it is more than an award — it is an
opportunity for activism.
Is there a US military base near you?
Print many copies of a few banned articles giving lots of substance
about the issues, showing clearly the well-known newspapers or
magazines they came from, and make a big sign saying, "MASSIVE SPYING:
THE US WANTS TO STOP YOU FROM READING THIS". Stand near the road, far
enough away from the gate of the base — perhaps around the next
corner in the road, so that soldiers driving by can stop unobserved
— and hold the sign. Give copies to the people who stop and ask
for them.
Bring a friend with a videocamera to discourage anyone from messing
with your constitutional rights.
Twelve True
Patriots for July 4.
The online tracking-and-advertising industry is
very
troubled by Snowden's revelations, knowing that if people get mad
enough at massive general surveillance, they might demand laws that
really put a stop to it.
I don't mind seeing ads. I would not bother to block ads on the
Internet if all they did was present a message to me. However, I find
the tracking done by today's digital advertising unacceptable.
So how should we support web sites and their services, when those
cost money?
We should be able to make an anonymous payment to use the site.
2000
supporters of Bradley Manning marched in the San Francisco Gay
Pride Parade.
Republicans
blocked
action to keep student loan interest rates down.
Fighting Roundup-resistant weeds requires
ever-higher
dosages of highly toxic herbicides.
Prisoners in a US jail, locked in their cells for 23 hours a day with
little to
do, communicate
using toilet pipes as speaking tubes.
US officials including Obama have
a history
of using deceptive language to mislead the public about massive
surveillance, and even flat-out lies.
Congress should jail Clapper for this.
Many countries in the EU
are not
on track to meet their renewable energy targets for 2020.
It is difficult to achieve substantial changes by setting a distant
target first. Success comes from firm policies whose effects can be
predicted.
Tons of
plastic trash
pile up on remote beaches in Alaska, as measured by volunteers who
travel there to collect the trash. In some cases, it's a ton per mile.
And it kills birds and fish.
If we made some of this stuff biodegradable, it would not pile up so
high.
Many Americans want to believe that Hillary
Clinton would
be a good president.
I see no indication that she would try to do what America needs any
more than Obama does. She has not shown an inclination to fight the
authoritarians and plutocrats on any of their major attack fronts
(fossil fuels, banksterism, copyright, austerity/unemployment,
privatization,war on drugs, surveillance). She's just another bought
politician, another right-wing Democrat.
Thus, while I would be glad to see the US capable of electing a woman
president, I will not support Ms Clinton just because she's a woman. A
candidate's gender is as unimportant as a candidate's skin color.
Timbuktu has been saved from theocratic rule, but it
is not
back to normal or even close.
Euro-austerity
continues making
unemployment rise.
A
"hotshot" crew
of elite firefighters was killed, every last one, because the
Arizona fire spread too fast for them.
High heat and drought and dead trees, which global heating tends to
cause, make fires spread faster. In effect, these men were killed by
global heating, and it's going to kill a lot more as it gets hotter.
UK PM Cameron contemptuously brushed
off concern
for human rights in Kazakhstan, saying that his reason for going
there was oil and profits, not human rights.
Of course, we knew already that he puts money above people, but now he
has admitted it.
Cameron thus gained the
personal endorsement
of the strongman of Kazakhstan:
That's a strong recommendation for Britons to vote for some other
party, but which one would be better? Not New Labour, which says it
will not try to reverse most of the harm that the Conservatives have
done. Perhaps the Green Party.
Private initiatives show it is possible
to reduce
the use of palm oil, the production of which is ecologically
destructive.
However, I suspect that it will require government actions such as
tariffs to make a big dent in the use of palm oil. This would require
defeating free exploitation treaties.
Chinese herbal medicines sold in Europe and North America often have
small amounts
of highly
hazardous pesticides.
Sumatran tigers
are half
as numerous as was supposed; human activity is the main problem.
Peru received a grant to create a reserve for wildlife and "isolated"
tribes, but
now plans
to drill for oil there.
In the US: rally for the
Fourth Amendment (limiting searches and seizures) on July 4.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to guarantee due process for Snowden.
I hope Snowden never falls into US hands, but that is a different matter.
Morgan Stanley
corrupted
bond rating agencies so they would certify collections of bad
mortgages as super-safe AAA-grade investments.
Matt Taibbi's long article shows that
there
have been no reforms and there is no reason to think that
bond-rating companies will be honest in the future.
Globovision, the pointedly anti-government TV station in Venezuela,
has been sold to
new
owners that won't criticize the government strongly.
Nonetheless, there remains opposition press in Venezuela.
A Bush forces soldier who was convicted of murdering an Iraqi will be
freed because he was
held
in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer.
US citizens:
call
on the government to stop the massive logging of old-growth trees
in Alaska's Tongass National Forest.
US citizens:
sign the
NAACP's petition to restore the Voting Rights Act.
Edward Snowden
Isn't on the Run… We Are.
Why
do politicians push for genetically modified food, when there are
other good methods to produce desirable food varieties?
The article speculates, and I agree, that the push comes from
companies such as Monsanto. It is unfortunate that the article
uses the misleading overgeneralization
"intellectual
property" rather than being clear and specific by saying
"patents".
Global heating protesters were arrested after blocking a train carrying
very
toxic oil obtained by fracking in the US, for export to Canada.
Reportedly the UK government is concerned that Pakistan
may "neglect"
relations with Afghanistan.
Contrast this with the article that says Pakistan's powerful intelligence service regards
Afghanistan as a proxy for India.
Further details of Prism have been published, showing that the NSA's
equipment can fish directly and arbitrarily in the
data
bases of companies such as Google and Microsoft.
What (later president) James Madison said about
maintaining
liberty versus ceding control to the forces of order and
submission.
India's new surveillance network is
even
worse than the NSA's.
Italy's and Canada's are too.
This doesn't make the NSA's spying acceptable. We must demand that
our governments respect our rights. It is not enough that some other
state is worse.
Everyone:
tell
McDonald's to stop forcing workers to take their pay
in debit cards that charge them fees.
This practice ought to be illegal.
Massive protests
call
for Morsi to leave office.
The US has
focused
its spying on EU officials, including the embassies of many
"allies"
of the US.
Comparing Snowden and Greenwald to
Gandhi the
journalist.
HRW: EU
Should Demand Release of Activists (in Bahrain).
A high school student was sentenced to a
year in prison for a
tweet that criticized the government.
Unfortunately, the US is
not
free of such oppression.
A radio system can
track
people behind walls.
We have to prohibit the state from tracking us all this way.
Jeff Olson is being prosecuted for
writing
in chalk on the sidewalk to criticize Bank of America.
He faces 13 years in prison, and his lawyer has been
forbidden
to talk about the first amendment in the trial.
The judge apparently realizes how shameful this is, because he has
ordered Olson not to talk about it.
I moved some IRA money out of Bank of America a couple of weeks ago.
The FSF moved its money out of Bank of America a year or two ago. If
you have any money there, please move it out.
The latest insane step in giving US corporations human rights
is to
claim
they can be religious.
Activists
Leverage Stronger EU Privacy Laws to Seek More Information on PRISM.
Amazingly, WIPO has finalized a treaty establishing a
copyright
exception for blind people.
Although the copyright industry has become so greedy that it opposes
the treaty, I fear that they will accept it, and use it to show
that DRM is ok because it no longer shafts blind people.
How
Dangerous is the 'Security/Digital Complex'
Unanswered
Questions in NSA Disclosures
The Japanese government was unable to decontaminate an area near
Fukushima to the planned safety level, so it told the inhabitants to
go
home with dosimeters to see if they are getting dangerous amounts
of radiation exposure.
The idea is not necessarily misguided. The purpose of decontaminating
the ground is so people don't get high exposures of radiation. If the
ground isn't decontaminated, but people lower their exposures to the
same intended level by staying indoors, they will be just as safe.
However, some may be rather unhappy about having to spend their lives
indoors. Perhaps Japan should pay nonathletic geeks to move to
Fukushima, because they will stay indoors and not mind it.
Meanwhile, we should stop making plans that suppose it is feasible to
decontaminate areas covered with fallout from reactor explosions,
because apparently that can't really be done.
Mairead Corrigan-Maguire, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize,
says Bradley
Manning deserves one.
In
Wales, everyone
will be an organ donor unless he says no in advance.
This is a good policy and we should copy it. Meanwhile, if you live
in a place which doesn't have this policy, please fill out the form to
be an organ donor, as I have done.
I don't think a person's relatives should have any say in the matter.
What happens to that person's corpse might affect their feelings, but
nothing else, and their hurt feelings don't count for much compared
with saving lives.
Jeremy Forrest's girlfriend
says their
relationship was her initiative, she still loves him, and she
wants to visit him in prison and marry him after he gets out.
I would not bet on their relationship's lasting till he gets out of
prison. Forrest has not been good at making relationships last, and
most 16-year-olds aren't either. However, she is doing her best to
defend his name against the legal fiction that he kidnaped her.
The dishonest basis of the prosecution shows clearly in the rebukes of
the judge, the detective, the mother, etc., that Forrest (actually
both of them) perturbed their families. That could equally well have
been said about Romeo and Juliet, which is a reductio ad absurdam.
(The refutation does not depend on assuming that this couple is like
Romeo and Juliet in any other way. It's enough that the same argument
would have applied to those two.)
The court pretends, contrary to all the facts, that Forrest did
something wrong to his girlfriend, while in fact punishing him for how
their relationship made her parents and other people feel.
After the two were captured, she was forcibly returned to her parents,
and while the articles claimed they were giving her some sort of
support, it is clear they tried to brainwash her into supporting their
way of seeing things. It is good for her that they failed.
She should demand a conjugal visit in prison. That will give those
cruel prudes apoplexy.
RSF: Ecuador's new media law
— mix
of good principles and bad provisions.
Ecuador's new election law bans media
from promoting
candidates for 90 days before an election. If interpreted
strictly, this could chill coverage of the campaign and the
candidates.
The CPJ has many criticisms of Ecuador, some of which are valid while
others seem exaggerated based on the facts I have found.
Racist Republican politicians are charging ahead
in implementing
voter-suppression measures that were blocked under the Voting
Rights Act before the Supreme Court threw it away.
The imprisonment of a large fraction of the American black population
— mostly for possession of small amounts of drugs —
amounts to a
disguised replacement
for the racist Jim Crow laws that were abolished in the 1960s.
Obama's climate plan
is too
little, too slow.
Instead of an "all of the above" energy plan, we need an "all of the
above" greenhouse gas reduction plan.
We know the US considers dissidents "terrorists". What's news is that
some
specific nonviolent
activists were put on the "domestic terrorist list".
The no-fly list is a kafkaesque excuse
to stick
US citizens in foreign prisons.
Thousands protested in Istanbul
after Turkish
thugs killed a Kurdish protester.
The Turkish government has repressed not only Kurds but people who
supported human rights for Kurds.
The Supreme Court
has opened
the door to stealing elections.
UK
thugs stripped
a woman and kept her handcuffed in a cell for 11 hours. They also
beat her up, causing premature birth of her baby.
It could have been worse — they might have killed her, as they
have done to many others.
Legal resistance
to privatization is starting in the US.
Anonymous US officials want us to believe that terrorists will
benefit
from knowing about how the US government spies on us all.
The danger from these terrorists is too small to worry about, and even
if it were doubled, it would still be too small to worry about. Thus,
if this means Americans might actually be able to protect our privacy
through our own actions, it is good news.
However, I don't think we can do the job individually. We need to
organize to limit surveillance.
US citizens:
tell
Energy Secretary Moniz not to encourage more fracking.
Uri Avnery: Netanhayu would get
immediate
political benefits from starting negotiations with Abbas. Then he
can spin them out forever with no agreement, to ensure he loses
nothing.
It's wrong,
and unconstitutional, for the government to track all your contacts
without specific grounds, even if it does not proceed to repress you
in additional ways.
A Wikileaks participant
gave
information to the FBI for money. He seems to have done other
nasty things for money too.
Traffic
Cameras Bring Tiny Ohio Village To A Stop.
The US Conference of Mayors unanimously called on the Obama regime
not
to impose its War on Drugs against state legalization of
marijuana.
Justin Carter is threatened with 8 years in prison for
a "threat"
that was followed by "lol, just kidding".
Note how the "authorities" look for excuses to disregard part of the
truth in order to twist something into a crime.
US film
studios collaborated
with Hitler's regime in the 30s, changing films to avoid losing
revenue from Germany.
We've seen a similar pattern of US businesses' catering to China and
Chinese censorship in the past decade.
The people of southern Sudan won freedom from the government of Sudan.
Now the government of South Sudan
is oppressing
journalists that criticize it.
The island of Barbuda
is destroying
itself by sand mining to get short-term income.
Lots of irreplaceable things on Earth will be destroyed forever in
this century, on the same logic. If we invest in sustainable
activities, we can reduce this — but part of that is having
fewer children.
Besides which, these beaches, this sand, will probably be inundated in
this century anyway if we don't stop causing sea level to rise.
Now that Republicans and Democrats have created a shortage of jobs in
the US,
Republicans blame
individual Americans for having no work.
What It's Like to Get
a "National-Security
Letter"
(that is, a demand to give data to the state secretly and you'll be
imprisoned if you ever tell anyone).
Some plutocrats are drawn
to geoengineering
schemes to try to compensate for our CO2 emissions.
The sulfate scheme is toxic and fails to prevent the other harm done
by CO2: ocean acidification, which
can kill
a large fraction of the life in the oceans.
Removing CO2 by fertilizing plankton would prevent both problems. It
might be better than allowing the disaster to happen.
However, we could still probably prevent the disaster through
renewable energy, which would be better than stopping it using drastic
measures.
Republicans' response to Obama's climate plan is
to extract
more fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, Obama's
plan isn't
very different from that.
New York's night-mayor Bloomberg, and the thug chief Kelly, are still
trying
to defeat
the bill to limit arbitrary searches.
The bill would also increase civilian control over the New York thugs,
who have been found to
systematically repress
human rights.
Bloomberg
explicitly advocates
increased racism in these searches.
Such racism is wrong, but it's a secondary aspect of the wrong. The
root of the wrong is allowing thugs to search people arbitrarily.
The UK says that anyone carrying out a demonstration at the site where
a soldier was
killed will
be arrested. So much for political freedom in the UK.
Whether we agree with those people's politics is beside the point.
Hospital
patients throw
away 82,000 meals every day in the UK, because the food is so
lousy they don't want to eat it. The staff say they would not eat it
either.
This is the result of the budget cuts which are intended to ruin and
then destroy the NHS.
US national security advisor Susan
Rice downplayed
the effect of Snowden's revelations. We will cite this when
someone says they "hurt the US".
Of course, what such officials mean by "the US" is the power of the
state, not the collectivity of Americans. We Americans are "the
enemy" that people
like Bradley
Manning are accused of aiding.
"Biometric cars"
will monitor
their users in many ways, and of course the data will be
warehoused for companies to hand to the NSA via PRISM.
We must insist on free software in our cars.
Iran's new president
says
he wants to reach a nuclear settlement with the US.
I hope the US looks for a settlement, and offers an end of sanctions
as part of the deal. We can't take this for granted. Netanyahu will
use his influence to prevent any settlement, because he wants the US
and Iran to go to war rather than resolve differences peacefully.
The Iranian regime is a disgusting tyranny, which oppresses women and
sometimes men too. But the US can't change this by conflict with
Iran; the sanctions drive Iranians into supporting their government.
Resolve this dispute, and the state will have nothing to distract the
people with.
Everyone: thank
Wendy Davis for defending women's rights with courage.
The New York City Council adopted
some
limits on arbitrary searches of people's persons by the municipal
thugs.
"Stop and frisk" without reasonable grounds for suspicion should not
be allowed at all.
Everyone:
please sign the
Washington Statement on privacy rights and data.
In the US: join
a human
chain protest on Tuesday against disguised cuts in Social
Security.
Wendy Davis's filibuster won't permanently stop Texas Republicans from
passing the law
to close
most abortion providers. But it may reinvigorate supporters of
women's rights in Texas.
Germany and the
UK blocked
stricter EU fuel economy standards.
The German PM was obeying orders from car companies — a form of
corruption common in the plutocracy. Companies powerful enough to
issue such orders must not be allowed to continue to exist.
26 senators have demanded that
the NSA
come clean about its massive surveillance based on "secret law".
[Reference updated on 2018-03-10 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2022-07-11 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2018-03-08 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-03-08 because the old link was broken.]
The mother of murder victim Stephen Lawrence says it will take time for the thugs (who tried to smear her and her relatives) to regain her trust.
Mere time should not suffice: unless they stop their violence and lies, and their sabotage of democracy, nobody should trust them.
The US mainstream media are pushing a federal shield law that would protect only the journalists of the mainstream media.
These are the same media that call Snowden a traitor; not much use for telling us what the government is really doing.
Global heating is wiping out forests in Oregon. When trees burn, they don't come back.
Obama is finalizing a rule that will require insurance to cover contraception for employees of most employers.
The policy as originally proposed was better, but this is pretty good.
The issue of "religious" employers would not exist if not for the misguided US policy of associating health care with employment. This causes several problems:
We
should tax
companies based on their income, and use the money to provide
health care for all Americans whether employed or not.
[Reference updated on 2022-07-15 because the old link was broken.]
With a big effort, one very harmful US software patent was invalidated.
One down, hundreds of thousands to go. It is a shame to talk about "bad patents" as if only some computational idea patents might be good.
Trying to make software safe from patent extortion by fighting patents one at a time — under the patent system's current rules — is like trying to make people safe from malaria by swatting mosquitos (and only the ones that come within reach of your hands). We need to get rid of them all, and I've proposed the way.
A Liberal like
me responds
to a mailing he received from Rand Paul.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-08 because the old link was broken.]
I agree with most of his points, but I disagree on one of them. I don't think we should disparage abortion as "the last resort", because human population growth is a big danger to life on Earth. I encourage people to have an abortion rather than a baby.
NYC fast food workers accuse their employers of stealing pay and obscuring it by making it hard to determine what what they were owed.
The US Army is blocking access from its computers to the Guardian's coverage of the NSA spying scandal.
It is afraid that soldiers who see the unapproved side of the story will be tempted to take the people's side instead of the government's side.
If you know anyone in the US military, offer to show that person the pages that are blocked.
Why Ecuador Would Be an Ideal Refuge for Edward Snowden.
Criminalizing libel is an injustice, but lots of countries do it, including the UK, France and Italy. A man was arrested in France just for saying "Sarkozy I see you" when he witnessed an injustice. We should campaign to abolish these laws, in whatever country suffers from them, but in the mean time this is no reason to condemn Ecuador.
Heavy rain in the Indian Himalayas is not unusual, but human construction and deforestation turned it into a disaster.
The UK says it will draw up a "national pollinator strategy".
I hope it is a serious attempt to protect pollinators rather than an excuse to keep using neonicotinoids for longer.
Dependence on fracking is a foolish policy even if it offers riches to those who get the profits.
President Rousseff has abandoned Lula's commitment to participatory democracy, human rights and popular movements, while focusing on increasing Brazil's economic strength — which has the effect of increasing the wealth and power of Brazil's rich.
UK citizens: sign this petition against the expulsion of Trenton Oldfield.
The NSA extracts data from the whole world, often through the idiotic cooperation of other governments.
Please don't call this "hacking" — it's an insult to us hackers to compare us with the NSA.
Everyone: rebuke Walmart for firing striking workers.
http://action.sumofus.org/a/walmart-firings/2/3/
http://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4023/c/33/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=6782
[Reference updated on 2018-03-08 because the old link was broken.]
(Why not sign both?)
Obama is trying to punish
someone
who told us about the Stuxnet cyberattack.
The dead zone in Gulf of Mexico has reached the
largest
extent ever observed.
It is caused by nitrogen from sewage and fertilizer.
A cell
culture from an aborted fetus has "no doubt saved the lives of
millions of people" through development of important
vaccines. However, even if the abortion had not led to such tremendous
benefits, it was a good thing, because the woman who was pregnant did
not want another baby.
We must firmly reject the idea that there is something ethically
dubious about using aborted fetuses for research. These ideas come
from people who want to ban abortions, typically based on religious
dogma; they hope that tainting everything that relates to abortions
can help them achieve that nasty goal. If they kill millions of real
people along the way, that's just collateral damage.
I don't think there is any reason to require a patient's consent for
research use of removed tissue unless that research might somehow hurt
the patient. That is starting to become a possibility, since genetic
analysis of that tissue might reveal things about the patient which
could cause that patient to be denied health insurance or denied
employment. However, the same analysis can be done for other reasons
and cause the same dangers; meanwhile, those dangers can be prevented
entirely with proper health care laws.
Likewise, the idea of paying the patient from whom the tissue was
removed is absurd. What we need from medicine is not the chance of a
windfall on the rare occasions when our cells are used in a big enough
way that we'd get a significant sum. What we need is for important
research to be done, and for the resulting treatments to be available
to all those that need them. We can easily have this, if we resume
taxing businesses and the rich sufficiently.
The demand for this income comes from people who face the effects of
growing inequality that forces many down into poverty. If they joined
the campaign against plutocracy instead, we might all win.
One way to block a cell phone listening device from listening to you and
transmitting the conversation is to put it in a refrigerator, which
blocks
the radio signal.
However, if the programmers of the spy software are clever, they might
make it compress and save the audio and transmit it later when it gets
signal. Thus, blocking the signal is not reliably sufficient.
Blocking it from hearing you is more reliable, if you can be sure the
audio blockage is adequate.
George Orwell's birthday was celebrated in Utrecht by putting
party
hats on the surveillance cameras.
Foreign protesters released from prisoned in Tunisia describe the
horrible
conditions of the prison there.
Their apology deserved to be withdrawn, since it endorsed the idea
that their protest was wrong. However, it was bad that they
apologized for it at all. I understand how this might have required a
sacrifice they could not make, but it still would have been better to
refuse.
President Erdogan
accused
a reporter of treason for covering the protests in Turkey.
I wonder if examples of similar claims from the US against journalists
such as Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald encouraged him to think he can
get away with this.
A Sustainable
Energy Future is Within Our Grasp.
However, governments that kowtow to fossil fuel interests
won't grasp it.
The surveillance state, faced with inevitable unrest because of the
increasing poverty it encourages combined with the effects of global heating,
will almost inevitably become a
terror
state.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to pardon Snowden.
Facebook shut down some pages about protests in Turkey
because they had
"fake
profiles". No surprise that people protesting in Turkey may not
want to tell the Turkish state who they are.
This shows why any communication system that requires users to
identify themselves is inadequate for democracy. That means Facebook
and Google+ are no good. (Google+ allows pseudonyms, but since Google
has an office in Turkey, Google would have to tell Turkey the user's
real name.)
Chilean thugs
removed protesting students who had occupied schools that are
supposed to be used as polling places.
Even if there are problems with the electoral system, or no good
candidates, I don't think occupying polling places is a good idea.
The Support, Don't Punish campaign aims
to restrain
the War on Drugs from boosting the spread of diseases.
Massive US infiltration of dissident groups is covered by limits that
turn out to
be quite
weak. And there is evidence that infiltrators have intentionally
started violence to discredit protests.
The New York Thug Department gave CIA agents
an excuse
to spy on Americans. And their attitude is, the more people they
spy on, the better.
Ecuador stood up to US threats to cancel a trade treaty
by cancelling
it unilaterally.
In addition, Ecuador offered the US aid in human rights training.
Mass
protests are called for Sunday in Egypt, by the group that has got
15 million signatures on a petition for Morsi's resignation.
James Comey's threat to resign blocked the NSA's massive surveillance
only until
it found
another legal excuse for that surveillance. That one, he
accepted, it appears.
The NSA
systematically collected
email metadata about everyone in the US for two years under Obama.
This apparently included every communication between people whose
identity the NSA did not know (since in that case it would not have
known that either party was a US citizen).
The UK's program to get disabled people to work
is failure
at its stated purpose. However, it was quite effective at
fabricating excuses to cut off benefits
by falsely
claiming that people were not disabled.
Glenn Greenwald gives suggestive evidence
his Skype
conversation was monitored.
Someone started violence before 100,000 started a
peaceful mass
protest in Chile.
I wonder if the violence was organized by thugs as a provocation.
That is standard thug tactics.
US citizens: call on the EPA to follow its own conclusions
and protect
Bristol Bay, by banning Pebble Mine, if you haven't done so
already.
The Koch brothers are recruiting lots of people to submit comments in
favor of the mine. Please help cancel them out!
Deregulation of logging in part of Australia
could wipe
out endangered species.
A report suggests that people across
Russia dislike
their government, but the Moscow-centered opposition failed
because it lacked a connection with people elsewhere in Russia.
The article seems to present this as a personal failing of the
opposition activists. I think that criticism is unfair; they can only
use what they have. However, this is something that activists in
Russia should think about.
Turkey
threatens to block Twitter unless it submits to Turkish
censorship.
It is ironic that "insulting Ataturk" is cited as a reason for Turkish
government censorship, since President Erdogan is the worst insult to
Ataturk that there could ever be.
This example shows that German censorship of Nazis sets a dangerous
precedent for other censorship. I detest the views of Nazis —
they would kill me just because of my ancestry — but censoring
any political views leads to spreading repression.
Texas Governor Perry called a special session of the state legislature
to try again
to pass
the anti-abortion bill.
If companies know all about your purchasing practices, and can offer
you prices based on that
knowledge, they
will stop competing. They will each arrive at the same price to
offer you.
Everyone: call on CNBC
to stop
denying global heating.
Everyone: ask President Correa
to give
Snowden asylum.
US citizens: call
for repeal
of the dangerous parts of the PAT RIOT Act.
Texas continues
eagerly executing people even though some of the people executed
were almost certainly innocent.
The EU has made provisions for future bank bailouts to be done at
the expense
of the banks.
This is how it should be, but a proper system also requires (1) making
sure that no bank can get too big, and (2) limiting the ways they deal
with each other so that failure of one bank can't pull down other
banks.
Almost 1/3 of the campaign funds in US elections now come from
the richest
.01% of Americans.
And this is without considering all the corporate money allowed by the
Corporations United decision; a large fraction of that is surely under
these people's control too.
Brazil's president Rousseff has
proposed transport
improvements and other reforms to try to satisfy the protesters.
Snowden
Saga Reveals a Broken Whistleblower System.
The NSA deleted the dishonest "fact sheet" from its web site
but refuses
to acknowledge this.
A UK politician says that UK spies have found excuses to
ignore
legal limits on what they can do.
Mother Teresa exploited India's poor sick people,
raising
money but spending none of it on medical care for them.
It would not
surprise me if spies are just as bad.
US citizens: call
on Congress to approve Obama's global heating reduction plan.
It is not sufficient, but it is necessary.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to repair the Voting Rights Act.
Glenn Greenwald presents the
minor
issues that mainstream "journalists" want to use to smear him,
hoping we will be distracted from important issues such as how the
government spies on us.
The civil war in Afghanistan has an
ethnic
dimension, and is also a proxy for the rivalry between India and
Pakistan.
US citizens:
Thank
Wendy Davis for blocking the Texas anti-abortion law.
US citizens:
Support
Obama's plan for reducing global heating.
It is not enough, but we need to fight those who will oppose it anyway.
Please sign
this
one too.
The Supreme Court
gutted
the Voting Rights Act, opening the way for Republicans to block
millions of Americans (mostly black, Hispanic or poor) from voting.
The election of Obama has
mistakenly convinced many Americans that
there is no racism.
But even if Republicans are not racist, they are unscrupulous.
They don't need to hate blacks or hispanics or poor people
to try to disenfranchise them.
Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, contractors employed for
torture in Abu Ghraib
can't be
sued in the US by their victims.
Drones make war, or assassination, so easy that leaders are very
tempted
to do it.
The article also shows in detail how Obama's criteria for approving
drone assassinations are deceptive and mean the opposite of what
they appear at first glance to mean.
Guatemalan peasants are being
uprooted
by big companies that grow sugar cane.
The EU proposes
substantial
penalties for the individuals and firms that distort market
indices such as Libor.
The Supreme Court
invalidated
the Defense of Marriage Act, saying that same-sex couples legally
married in any state are entitled to whatever benefits the US
government gives to married couples.
Republicans want to force Americans to go to work when sick,
and skip visits to the doctor
so
they won't be fired.
Clapper must be fired for
intentional
premeditated lying to Congress and the public.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
oppose
relaxing requirements for wiretapping.
The UK needs
a public inquiry into the thugs' systematic practice of spying on
and smearing people who get in their way.
Texas State Senator Wendy Davis
personally
spoke for almost 11 hours to block approval of an anti-abortion
law.
I have supported the campaign to reform the filibuster in the US
senate to require senators to personally speak on the senate floor as
long as it takes. I have not supported abolishing the filibuster
entirely, because it's a good thing that this form of resistance is
available when legislators are willing to go to great personal lengths
to do it.
The UK adopted long-term CO2 emissions targets but its actual policies
are insufficient
to achieve them.
A long-term target is a handy a way to avoid real action.
The Supreme Court made
it harder
for states to protect wetlands and other aspects of the
environment, giving landowners priority.
If taxes on the rich and business were high enough, we could afford to
"compensate" landowners when their land must be protected.
The German government objects strongly
to UK
spying.
It has a duty
to protect
its citizens from this spying.
The Espionage Act in the US
is much
harsher than the laws of other countries about leaks to the
public.
For the NSA, having an EFF sticker on your computer is considered a
"warning
sign".
Australia has taken Japan to the World Court for
its "scientific"
whaling.
US citizens: support a constitutional amendment
to assure
voting rights.
US
citizens: sign
this petition in favor of a constitutional amendment to reverse
the Corporations United decision.
(It is hypocritically referred to as the "Citizens United" decision,
but I prefer to call it what it really is.)
300 untested recreational drugs are
now being
sold, legally.
Some of them might be safer than tobacco or alcohol. Some might even
be as safe as marijuana or MDMA, but some might be more dangerous than
those. It would be better to steer people towards the safer drugs
that are now illegal.
US mainstream media
choose state
power over journalism, featuring "journalists" that demand the
arrest not only of Snowden but even of Glenn Greenwald.
US citizens:
tell
Israel's ambassador to the US that you oppose Israel's plan to
force 40,000 bedouin out of their homes.
Everyone else:
sign
this petition about the same point.
The UK government persistently
sends
asylum seekers back to be tortured, even if they were tortured
again since the previous time they were denied asylum.
If the state would rather not give them asylum, it should do more
to discourage torture in their home countries.
Obama stated possibly significant
plans
to reduce CO2 emissions, but the details will determine
whether they amount to anything.
If he is honest, he cannot deny that the Keystone XL pipeline will
greatly increase CO2 emissions. But he may yet look for an excuse to
pretend it is not so.
The Natural Resources Defense Council
supports
the plan, and so does Greenpeace,
but even if it is carried out in a substantial way, it
won't
go far enough to prevent global heating disaster.
A former Bush forces soldier in "intelligence" committed suicide
because he could
not bear to think of the suffering of the widows and orphans he had
made.
His guilt makes rational sense (I won't claim to understand it
emotionally, since I have never had an occasion to feel that way),
but I think if he had thought more calmly he could have found a better
response. For instance, he could have published the details of the
atrocities he felt guilty for, before committing suicide. Then his
death would have helped to make the world better. It's even possible
that the awareness that he was doing something to compensate for his
past wrongs might have assuaged his guilt enough for him to face
continuing to live, perhaps in Ecuador.
The sad general point is that so many soldiers sign up for the US
military based on the myth that they are going to "serve their
country". Many naive teenagers have never heard anyone question this.
If the idea of serving their country were 100% false, it would fade
away; but occasionally it is true, and that real complexity keeps the
simplistic myth alive. Young people who are indoctrinated in it are
easy to manipulate into thinking that's what it's going to be like for
them, and when they find out the truth they are caught and their lives
are more or less ruined.
The main witness in the murder of Stephen Lawrence suffered a many-year
campaign by UK thugs to
smear
him and frame him.
The Supreme Court made it
much
easier for states to disenfranchise minority group voters.
The Supreme Court not only denied the existence of racism, but the existence
of callous Republican by-hook-or-by-crook
voter
suppression efforts.
That's the Republican strategy for holding power: by turning US
elections into a sham.
Assad continues
prosecuting
nonviolent dissenters as "terrorists".
If only the US were an example of something better.
Lithuania:
Reopen Investigation Into Secret CIA Prisons.
A rally in Egypt for nonviolence was the opportunity for
violence
against journalists.
Recent "advances" in computing technology
deny
any possibility of privacy. But fools will tell you to rush to
use technology that spies on you and controls you, because otherwise
you'll be left behind in the 90s.
If you're foolish, you can heed their advice. I don't use these
"advances" — I think about the freedom and privacy implications
of Internet services before I use them.
The article uses the term
"cloud"
to encourage people not to think carefully about new technology. For
the sake of clear thinking, please don't use that either.
Arguments for banning tipping and
paying
staff a decent wage instead.
A senate amendment to the immigration bill calls for
extreme
militarization of the US border with Mexico.
I have to oppose this bill now, because of its requirements
for every American to be listed in a government data base
to be able to have a job.
Postcard from
Ecuador: A Living, Breathing Democracy.
With UK thugs,
innocent
people have everything to worry about. A special unit was set up
to smear innocent people, to suit the state or the thugs themselves.
The UK's banksters are setting up a
new
tax haven in Kenya, even as they veto serious action against tax
havens in British territories.
This uses the pretense of denying the power that the UK government exercises
over those territories.
Israeli
authors campaign against expulsion of Palestinians from their
villages in the South Hebron hills.
US citizens: call on Congress
to ban
the toxic pesticide atrazine.
Netanyahu demonstrated his contempt for Kerry and the US-supported
"peace process"
by visiting
a school in an Israeli colony in Palestine a few days before Kerry
came to see him.
Saeb Erekat: The Israeli government has officially declared
the death of the
two-state solution, and says the international community must
"face reality".
Netanyahu acknowledges that Israelis who engage in pogroms against
Palestinians qualify
as terrorists, but says it would be disadvantageous to admit this.
I don't like stretching the word "terrorist", so I'd call them
"violent bigots".
In any case, the official Israeli
thugs protect
these unofficial thugs.
Demolition of Palestinian homes is the constant
background noise
of the occupation.
The UN
accuses Israel of killing and wounding Palestinian children, using
them as human shields in battle, and torturing them in prison.
Israeli journalists condemned the army
for arresting
Palestinian journalists.
GM Crops:
the Genetic
Colonialists.
Senator Warren attacked the head of the FHFA for
supporting high
interest rates for student loans.
The EU's broken emissions trading system
will negate
progress towards renewable energy.
A race rower opposes expulsion of the man
who protested
by stopping a UK boat race.
The US subpoena's Herbert Snorrason's email from gmail.com because of
his past
connection with Wikileaks.
Thousands joined the
latest Moral
Monday protest in North Carolina.
A Chinese state-run newspaper praised Snowden for
"tearing
off Washington's sanctimonious mask".
US condemnations of China's human rights abuses are typically valid,
and China's condemnations of US human rights abuses are typically
valid too. These two governments increasingly resemble and deserve
each other, but both Americans and Chinese deserve something better.
The IRS used various phrases to choose groups to study carefully,
but studied them all by the
same
criteria.
The IRS also looked for some
keywords
associated with progressive groups for special scrutiny.
The US infiltrated anti-war activists as "domestic terrorists";
this is proved because
one
infiltrator confessed.
UK thugs infiltrated
groups
that criticized the behavior of thugs (for instance, corruption
and apparent killing of prisoners).
The UK human rights group
Liberty
demands an investigation of whether it has been spied on.
Berlusconi has been found guilty of paying an underage prostitute,
and then
using
his official powers to cover it up.
I don't think it should be a crime to pay an underage prostitute. (It
should be a crime to force anyone into prostitution, but Ruby
Heartstealer was not being forced.) However, his misuse of power
deserves punishment.
It is important to treat prostitution as a normal part of society
because that will help protect prostitutes from violence, disease, and
extortion. In addition, reducing the stigma on prostitution will make
it easier for prostitutes to switch to some other line of work.
A 100-sq-mi wildfire in Colorado was
fed
by global heating in three ways: lots of hot weather, drought, and
trees killed by beetles that have spread due to higher general
temperature.
A UK man has been sentenced to prison
solely
for having copies of publications.
This is tyranny.
Senators demanded the NSA correct
misleading
statements in its "factsheet" about surveillance.
The US is threatening countries around the world to try to
stop
Snowden from reaching asylum.
The US seems to have
known
for a long time about oil in Haiti. Its puppet government in
Haiti may be intended to help the plutocrats take that oil for a
pittance.
Senator Sanders has proposed a
bill
that would narrow some of the PAT RIOT act surveillance powers.
I can't tell without more information and advice whether this would be
sufficient to make that law good, but it looks like a substantial
change in the right direction.
Bob Brown faces
100
years in prison, either for exposing a conspiracy to falsely smear
Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald, or for the rant he posted when he
couldn't bear the government's threats about that.
There has been no investigation of the conspiracy he exposed.
This selective prosecution shows the government regards laws
as means of imposing its power.
Genetically modified crops
destroy African agriculture by trying to impose inappropriate US
agriculture in its place.
Banksters in Ireland
lied
to sucker the state into giving them a bailout.
A Palestinian children's
puppet
festival in Jerusalem was shut down by Israel because it was
funded by the PA.
"Don't
tell me my affair with a teacher was abusive — I'll be the judge
of that."
The author dares to resist the pressure to pretend that Forrest is a
predator and that his lover was his victim, saying that we should
listen to her (she does not think so).
Everyone:
call
on Obama to refrain from foul play against Edward Snowden.
In the UK:
support Defend
the Right to Protest.
Misleading articles say global warming has slowed, but really
it's just that the
heat
retained by greenhouse gases is mainly going into the oceans in
recent years rather than into the air.
America's worst charities are less than 10% efficient in serving
the causes they raise funds for. Here's
a list.
UK massive surveillance violates
the
European Convention on Human Rights, and EU law may make it
possible to force the UK to stop.
Arguing that the hardened power structures today's states are based on
make public opposition
inevitable.
The long drought in the US southwest is
destroying
forests there, through fires and through sheer dryness of the air.
A large fire can replace forest with grassland, and it can take
centuries for forest to spread back in, even assuming the climate
still permits trees to grow there.
The Heatland institute is
using
concern about bald eagles and condors to try to block wind farms.
We should make sure to protect eagles adequately as a species,
but if wind farms are not a significant threat to them, that is
no reason to stop building wind farms.
The biggest threat to California condors is the
lead
bullets in the carcasses they eat. That is where we need to put
the effort to protect them.
Oil companies will cease using noisemaking devices that injure marine
mammals' hearing, in some areas of the Gulf of Mexico, for
2.5
years.
Well, it's a start.
David Mery writes about how London thugs arrested him because they
found it suspicious he was wearing a jacket in summer and did not look
at them when entering the train station — then
charged him with
"public nuisance" because they overreacted and shut the
train station.
The mere fact that "public nuisance" carries a potential
sentence of life imprisonment is already a reason to
convict the UK state of the crime of repression.
Radioactive waste has apparently
leaked
out of a double-shelled tank at Hanford, WA.
Increasing human population is leaving
no room
for many mammals and birds.
An Australian who was jailed for a nonviolent protest in the UK
will be further punished by
expelling
him.
I suppose his British wife and child will follow him into exile.
This is the War on Democracy at work.
The German parliament voted for a
resolution
against software patents.
Banks point out that they can't keep stimulating economies through
artificially
low interest rates.
The right way to stimulate the economy is with deficit spending.
A pregnant woman in Spain dropped her baby down a drain, because
she could
not afford an abortion.
It should not cost anything for a poor person to get an abortion.
An undercover UK thug infiltrator says the state asked him to find a
way to smear
the family of a black teenager who was murdered by racists, so as
to blunt the pressure for a proper investigation.
The Egyptian army threatens proposed mass rallies against Morsi,
"if
they become violent".
The army can make them "become violent" whenever it wishes, and
has made a practice of
trying
protesters in military courts.
The population of Egypt is estimated at 84 million.
For 15 million to sign a petition is amazing.
Miami will be
inundated,
probably before the end of this century, due to the CO2 we have
already put into the air.
At least a third of south Florida will vanish with it. And if we don't
curb the greenhouse gases soon, more of Florida will vanish. And good bye to
any chance of restoring the Everglades, too, if they are under water.
The State of Florida does not recognize this, and I can guess why: the
current landowners want to sell their land to someone who doesn't
realize it will melt away. This is comparable to the
carbon
bubble.
Margaret Doughty was
given
US citizenship.
She was
in
danger of being refused it because regulations say that
conscientious objectors have to present an endorsement from a church.
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