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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
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3500 square miles of the Siberian forest is now on fire due to rising temperatures there.
Biden leads the cheater with voters over 65 in battleground states.
The cheater surely knows that. Could that be part of why he is trying to spread coronavirus as much as possible?
The Oak National Academy, a UK government operation, plans to make 10,000 digital lessons for use in teaching over the internet.
If these are free/libre, they will revolutionize online education. If they are free/libre and copylefted, they will liberate online education. Otherwise, they will be more bait for exploitation.
If you are British, how about writing to the Oak National Academy to urge them to make these lessons free/libre? Please spread the idea on social media and with letters to the editor, too.
The UN refrains from criticizing Salafi Arabia for attacking Yemen so as to encourage Salafi Arabia to give humanitarian aid to compensate for part of the damage that it does.
*Getting Real About the Job of Police: A Letter to Barack Obama.*
When thugs kill, main, or bully people, they are doing their job — their real job. And that is the underlying problem.
Someone shot two protesters at a rally for justice for Breonna Taylor.
I suppose the killer is one of the violent right-wing extremists that the extremist-in-chief has stirred up.
New York City thugs went berserk during the curfew, mauling people who were minding their own business in their back yards.
Naturally, they made up absurd accusations against their victims — that's standard thug procedure.
*We are what we eat, so we’re right not to trust what goes into American food.*
30% of Americans have decided, never mind if we catch Covid-19 and never mind if we transmit it to other people. The result is a swelling outbreak.
Republican politicians are pushing this, and surely they can't be unaware of where things are going. Therefore, they want that, and it is surely for the sake of their power. But what is their strategy?
In Brazil, a campaign to show support for democracy and teach young people what dictatorship was really like.
*Australia could create hundreds of thousands of jobs by accelerating shift to zero emissions.*
Some US schools have installed Summit Learning, Facebook-sponsored proprietary software which sends students' data to a servers so as to give them "customized" lessons.
Students say it is tiresome and they don't learn much.
The company's PR chief says, “I want to make clear to you that we are in no way misusing student data.” Whatever it does with the data is, apparently, just fine in the organization's view.
My view is that none of that data should ever leave the school itself.
The two main armies in Libya are about to start fighting for control of Libya's oil fields. One has support from Egypt and the other from Turkey.
Someone should propose a deal by which both sides get paid to leave the oil in the ground. Then maybe they could make peace.
Afghanistan defeated Daesh as a field force, leaving only scattered underground terrorists. (Hooray!) About 600 of them surrendered, of whom around 1/3 are radicalized women.
Here's an idea, for some, those who are not full of hatred: send them to live in villages with people who suffered Daesh's atrocities, but who do not see them as targets for revenge, so they can learn to understand what it was about Daesh that was so bad.
This might be good for some American supporters of imperialist wars, too.
The word "whitening" is becoming taboo. A company said it will stop describing its skin creams with that word. It will still sell them, though.
Is it wrong to aim for better treatment by trying to lighten your skin color? Is it wrong to sell whitening creams that purport to do that? I don't see how.
Is the idea that people should organize to reject the idea of lightening their skin, to insist that skin color should not matter? I can see the sense in that idea, if people do it. But I do not think making it taboo to say "whitening" will help matters.
Covid-19 is spreading faster in Florida, and filling the hospitals, and Rebekah Jones (who was fired for refusing to falsify figures) accuses Governor DeSantis of falsifying them again now.
Since he is a firm supporter of the saboteur in chief, I wouldn't put that past him. But it raises the question of why he seeks to spread Covid-19 in Florida.
Published warnings about global heating go back at least to 1912.
*Greta Thunberg hits out at leaders who use her fame to 'look good'.*
It's easier to ask for a photo with her than to champion climate defense.
Political correctness threatens to put the word "master" under taboo regardless of the meaning.
Opposing slavery and racism does not require that we blot out every word that had a use in relation to slavery or racism.
How Rojava reorganized the police, so that most patrolling is done by volunteers from the community.
What it says about the rest of Rojava's system is fascinating too.
The three thugs that killed Elijah McClain for looking suspicious (including wearing a mask because he was shy) will perhaps now be prosecuted.
When thugs are allowed to start violence because of vague fears, that will systematically lead to killings based on no reason except their imagination.
*Charter seeks FCC OK to impose data caps and charge fees to video services.*
While reminding us that we should never give big companies anything on credit because they do often cheat on the deal, the main reason this merger should not have been allowed is that we need more competition, not less.
Thousands of fools having street parties have started raising London's Covid-19 infection rate.
Covid-19 has effectively nationalized the UK railways, but it remains to merge the systems and realize the benefits of nationalization. Meanwhile, it won't be feasible to keep them running if masses don't return to using them.
Large corporations are donating funds to anti-racism campaigns, but mostly not changing the harsh working conditions that they impose.
One exception to this picture is that Target announced a $15-per-hour minimum wage for the whole US.
Scientists are taking the first steps that might some day lead to artificial wombs. (Not that the road will be quick or easy, even for nonhumans.)
If it becomes possible to move a 9-week fetus to an artificial womb and bring it to term, what moral implications should that have?
Except for the benefit of protecting the health of gestating women (and, ideally, fetuses also), not much. A fetus is not a baby, regardless of where it happens to be located at the time.
To protect Women's rights from theocratic oppression, we will need to reject, clearly, the idea that once a fetus is outside the mother, it has been "born" and is therefore a human being.
Chemical pollutants combine with Covid-19 to cause deaths.
"Fusion centers" and other government "intelligence" agencies sent thugs in Minneapolis and later elsewhere warnings of violent protests, which were not based on facts, and may have encouraged the thugs to be violent.
*'Huge Win': Court Orders DeVos to Cancel Loans for Mass. Students Defrauded by Corinthian Colleges.*
I suppose the cheater will appeal this decision.
The House of Representatives passed a bill that would make Washington, DC, a state.
I think that residents of Washington, DC, should have representation in Congress. There are various ways to give them that. Making Washington, DC, a state would mean two more Democratic senators, probably progressive senators. That would be a change for the better, but it ensures that Republicans will block DC statehood.
Another way is to have Washington, DC, vote as part of Maryland. That is natural since it was originally carved out of Maryland to create the capital district. This would not change the balance in the Senate, but it would enable the residents of Washington to vote for Congress.
Animal rights activist Regan Russell was killed, in a protest, when truck carrying pigs hit her. The protest was against an ag-gag law criminalizing various kinds of protest and journalist activities.
I do not support the animal rights movement, but I support journalism and freedom to protest, and condemn ag-gag laws.
Brazilians are studying how to regrow forest where it has been cut down.
The Antelope Valley of California is a center of white supremacism, and the thugs there have a history of murdering blacks.
The Movement for Black Lives aims for more than getting thugs to stop killing blacks. It includes advancing equality along many fronts, described here.
I support all of them.
US citizens: call on Congress to keep up a high rate of coronavirus testing.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to promote safe storage of guns.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word
US citizens: call on Congress to prohibit face recognition.
Here is the message I sent.
If "law enforcement" agencies can use face recognition to track and find people, that creates opportunities for oppressive surveillance. We need to prohibit that &mdash but not only that. If other government agencies such as the NSA are allowed to do it, the FBI will get the data. If the UK is allowed to do it in the US, the UK will give the US that data. If businesses such as Clearview AI are allowed to systematically track Americans, that data will be so widely available that police departments will surely get it. (Police departments are not known for obeying laws.) But even if only businesses use the data collected by Clearview AI, that can still amount to oppressive surveillance. I therefore urge you to prohibit the installation of systems that systematically collect Americans' images, or any biometrics that enable recognition of individuals in general as they move around the US. The same should apply to vehicles — for instance, systematic recognition of car license plates, or other tracking of cars, should be legally limited to when the system sees an offense, or when there is a warrant to track a particular car. Digital toll payment should be done by anonymous payment systems so that they do not create a database of people's movements. I can tell you about these systems.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you contact them, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to choose a progressive new leader for the Foreign Affairs Committee — replacing Eliot Engel.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on advertisers to stop advertising in Facebook, as pressure for it to remove hatred.
The principal terrorist threat in the US today is from right-wing extremists.
The study does not count terrorism by the president, such as sabotaging the response to Covid-19, but that dwarfs casualties of the September 2001 terrorist attacks and I think it should be counted as a terrorist attack.
I agree that we should not further attack human rights in the name of "anti-terrorism". The PAT RIOT act authorizes too much surveillance and it needs to be weakened. Most of the right-wing terrorism is not susceptible to being prevented. But we could cut back on the spread of right-wing extremist recruiting with suitable changes in Facebook's algorithms for what postings to propagate.
Thug departments are fond of harping on minor wrongdoing, claiming that this will discourage all crime. (There is no evidence it works.) But when they commit nonfatal wrongdoing, such as minor false accusations, they want us to disregard them.
I think that cops, because of their special powers and privileges, should be held to an especially strict standard.
Countries where the US is perpetuating an endless civil war now face war together with Covid-19.
Reportedly, many Hong Kong protesters are giving up in despair on seeing the arbitrary power that China is imposing on Hong Kong.
China can accused anyone of a "national security crime", which means anything China wants it to mean, and the trial will be conducted by puppet judges chosen by China.
Hong Kongers struggled so valiantly, hoping that China would be dissuaded from blatantly crushing Hong Kong's autonomy, or else that China would pay a price for doing so. They did not attain the first. Let's help them attain the second.
It looks like Biden is planning to escalate the US economic warfare with Venezuela.
Replacing Maduro's dictatorship with the crushing international plutocratic empire (which will get worse with time) is not a solution to Venezuela's problem.
US economic sanctions on Venezuela are killing people just as sanctions on Iraq did.
They are deadly in Yemen, too.
Congress should investigate the Drug Enforcement Agency, then eliminate it.
Let's decriminalize possession and use of any and all drugs. Clinics should distribute dangerous, addictive drugs to registered addicts, to kill off most of the black market. This works in other countries.
*Judge orders US to free migrant children from [immigration prison], citing virus spread.*
I suspect the article uses the term "children" to mean "children and teenagers."
Plutocratist politics in the US is making household water more expensive. Many Americans can't afford their water bills. By 2030, with current trends, that will happen to a considerable fraction of the population.
*The FBI has a history of targeting black activists. That's still true today.*
*The bill HR4 would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. For the sake of racial progress, the Senate must pass it.*
If sick leave pay is much less than normal pay, workers are compelled to go to work when when sick. They can die from that.
Those that do decide to stay home may face pressure to work even while sick.
The UK's CO2 emissions went down because of lockdown, but they will go back up if it doesn't adopt more green policies.
An anonymous gay man, after a man tried to push sex on him and eventually relented, looks for another choice besides prosecute, denounce, and do nothing. One that would not "preclude the possibility of rehabilitation and restorative justice."
*California governor grants clemency to 21 prisoners as thousands infected with Covid-19.*
*Controversial Data-Mining Firm Palantir Vanishes From Biden Adviser's Biography After She Joins Campaign.*
*Now Is Still a Good Time to Raise the Minimum Wage.*
Boston has ordered city officials not to ask for face recognition data from any source. However, you can't expect thugs to honestly obey the rules.
What if the data is given to officials without their asking? What if it is not explicitly identified as based on face recognition?
Companies such as Clearview AI can oppress people even if they give their data only to businesses. We need to prohibit systematic tracking of people by any means whatsoever. Only a government agency with a specific warrant should be allowed to do that.
Egypt made Alaa Abdel Fattah a political prisoner last year. Now they have jailed his sister, Sanaa Seif.
(satire) *… law enforcement officials warned Wednesday that defunding the police could lead to a spike in crime from ex-officers with no outlet for their violence.*
*Leadership That Neglects Science Led to Worst COVID Crises in US and Brazil.*
Environmental activists delivered a box of toxic plastic pellets, fished out of the Gulf of Mexico, to a lobbyist for a company that wants to build a new factory to make more such pellets. For this symbolic act, they are being prosecuted for an imaginary felony.
In a victory against euphemism, a New Zealand supermarket company has decided to remove a level of euphemism from descriptions of its products for menstruation.
Bunnie Huang reports on the stand-alone contact tracing device, the TraceTogether Token, in a pre-release version.
I respect Bunnie highly; if he says something respects privacy, I suppose it does.
One issue the report does not discuss: the device is meant to be used for months — does it delete information about past contacts after a few weeks pass? Older contacts should not be relevant to Covid-19, so there is no justification for reporting them.
Bunnie explains why using mobile phones for contact tracing gratuitously puts privacy in danger. In brief, it's because carrying a mobile phone gratuitously puts privacy in danger, and running an app gratuitously puts privacy in additional danger.
An AI system claims to predict who will be a criminal based on people's photos. Actually it predicts who will be accused of crimes, using a simple heuristic: black skin => more likely to be accused.
The heuristic gives valid results because of the racism in society's systems.
Yahoo did not pay its taxes, and the IRS is suing, but has given up on billions of what was owed.
*For the Rich to Keep Getting Richer, We Have to Sacrifice Everything Else.* Excuses that the rich give for dooH niboR.
The main source of disinformation attacks against the US is the bullshitter and his army of eager liars, though various other countries do it too. This article surveys their methods and targets and explains typical signs to recognize disinformation by.
Thugs confiscate bicycle repair tools from protesters, then make announcement that these tools were "the tools of criminals".
I suppose some criminals ride bikes, and would carry the same repair tools that other bike riders carry. People who recognize the tools will laugh at those idiotic thugs. But people like me, who don't ride bikes, might believe the thugs because we don't know any better.
(satire) *Heaven Flush With Cash After Trump Administration Sends $1.4 Billion In Stimulus To Dead Americans.*
*Movement to Remove Police From Schools Gains Momentum as Seattle and Oakland [school] Boards Sever Ties With [thug] Departments.*
However, Chicago and Los Angeles rejected the proposals to do that.
Boston's thug department commissioner had a meeting with Barr, and pleads incredible naive excuses to deny it had the effect of political support.
The fact that the commissioner is black is not actually relevant. The moral imperatives of the situation would be the same for anyone in it.
The murderer of Americans just told medical insurance companies they are not required to pay for Covid-19 tests for people that work in nursing homes.
The result will be that workers (not very well paid) skip testing, and thus risk infecting inmates. Some nursing homes will have outbreaks and many of their inmates will die.
Various right-wing extremist rulers of various countries are taking absurd approaches to Covid-19, and there is no obvious explanation.
Could it be that they want many deaths as an exciting background for their lives?
Chomsky: *The pandemic is serious enough that we will emerge from it at terrible cost. The cost is greatly amplified by the gangster in the White House, who has killed tens of thousands of Americans, making this the worst place in the world [for the coronavirus]. We will emerge [from the pandemic, but] we’re not going to emerge from another crime that Trump has committed, the heating of the globe. The worst of it is coming — we’re not going to emerge from that.*
Bayer-Monsanto will pay ten billion dollars to 100,000 people who sued, claiming that Roundup gave them cancer.
It is too bad that a court eliminated California's requirement to warn other people so that they can avoid Roundup and not get cancer.
Australia is considering building up medical manufacturing capacity so that it won't face a shortage in the future.
Every country should do this! Surplus capacity, distributed around the world, may seem like a waste, but in an emergency it is crucial.
Now that the saboteur in chief has made Covid-19 spread rapidly in the US as never before, his next step is to cut back on testing.
Perhaps he is trying to infect a lot of people and make voters scared to vote.
The cooling system in a meat factory seem to have spread Covid-19 among the workers.
Three North Carolina thugs have been fired for expressing bigotry.
Ordinary citizens have the right to express those views. We must defend the right to state views we find disgusting, lest powerful people who feel disgust for our views censor us.
However, cops (whether they are thugs or police officers) are given special powers over the public. With special power goes special responsibility, including the responsibility not to give in to bigotry even when under pressure. If some thugs blame the stress of the job for their expression of bigotry, in effect they are saying they are not up to the requirements of the job.
I think it is important to make a distinction between the one who advocated a civil war to massacre blacks, and the two who did not (especially the one who opposed the idea). Those two should get a second chance to show they can do their job.
What are the consequences of the heat wave in the Arctic?
*New York police officer faces charges over apparent chokehold.*
Finally the impunity ends.
*Atheists and humanists facing discrimination across the world, report finds.*
This prejudice is found in the US as well. A substantial fraction of Americans believe that Atheists are bad people. Some states nominally do not allow nonreligious people to run for office, and an avowed Atheist would be unlikely to win.
WWF says that the Australian government is not bothering to enforce laws to protect wildlife habitat.
The UK government's Committee on Climate Change recommends a list of policies.
*Honduran Family Sues US Govt for Separation Lawyers Say Was Deliberately Meant to 'Torment and Traumatize'.*
*Rise of Iran hardliners threatens nuclear diplomacy, Europe warned.* The leader of parliament says that negotiation with the US is "harmful and forbidden."
What a shame if the US becomes willing to resume the non-nuclear deal and Iran's right-wing rulers would rather keep the sanctions up.
Militarist Democrat Eliot Engel has been defeated by a progressive challenger.
Being against the conman is too low a standard to judge candidates by.
*Zara and Primark factory workers say they were fired after forming union.*
Their factory is in Burma. Overseas production sure works wonders for evading workers' rights.
Students call on universities to defund their cops.
Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was arrested and accused of theft specifically because a computer matched a photo of the thief to his face. It was mistaken.
Once the thugs got the computer's answer they believed it with total faith, That often happens with prestigious technical systems.
To be falsely accused is annoying, occasionally disastrous, but it is not a new danger. It happens plenty often without a computer. That is why I believe the main danger of computerized identification of people is not that it may make mistakes, but rather that it may function correctly. Suppose the system correctly recognizes you as a protester, or as a journalist. Suppose the system recognizes you repeatedly as you walk along the street.
Suppose businesses set up millions of cameras and recognize everyone.
We must ban face recognition, and systematic tracking of people, not only by the state but by any entity whatsoever.
Under the influence of Covid-19, 1/3 of US women want fewer children and/or later.
A smaller human population will make dealing with environmental problems easier, and that includes global heating.
Rich countries donate vaccines to poor countries, through a system designed to preserve the exploitative monopolies. It has the effect of preventing the systemic changes we really need, and it keeps the production down so that we're helpless against a pandemic.
Google says it will delete old search records after 18 months. I am not impressed. That is plenty of time for the NSA to look at them.
*Global Health Experts Alarmed at Signs US Has “Given Up” Fight Against COVID-19.*
Massachusetts has not given up — the R value is less than 1 — but many state governors, as well as the conman, seem to have opened the gates and welcomed the enemy in.
Due to the conman's sabotage (beyond mere incompetence), the Americans will probably be barred from going to Europe for a long time.
The New York City thug department focuses heavily on minor offenses, and this is useful chiefly as an opportunity for repression.
*America Is Exceptional in All the Wrong Ways.*
Israeli, particularly the "settlers" continue various forms of violent harassment and destruction against Palestinians.
Israel continues seizing Palestinians' land and building more colonies on it. Colonies cut Bethlehem off from the rest of Palestine.
In Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, an Israeli argues that both the Jews and the Palestinians are peoples indigenous to Palestine.
Nearly all Americans want to prosecute thugs for unjustified violence, but but only 1/3 support transferring funds from thug departments to other ways of dealing with emergency calls.
Reportedly the bullshitter wants to blame the CDC for his bad decisions about Covid-19.
The Earth's worst mass extinction was caused by global heating, which resulted when giant volcanic eruptions burned large amounts of coal.
It is clear that Attorney General Barr is morally unfit for his office. Should the House vote to impeach him? Rep. Nadler says it would be ineffective and useless. His primary opponent disagrees.
We ought to remove Barr from office, but since impeachment can't do that, is it worth the effort? I don't think it would influence the outcome of the election very much, given that impeaching the conman failed to do so. On this question, I agree with Nadler.
I've read that Nadler is more plutocratist than progressive, on policies. If so, replacing him in the primary might be a good thing to do.
A US appeals court ruled that California can't require glyphosate to carry a cancer warning, because the evidence for that isn't completely conclusive proof.
There is lots of evidence that Roundup causes various kinds of harm. Something needs to be done to discourage its use.
As China prosecutes Canadians as hostages, what should Canada do?
Canada cannot rescue those two hostages, nor stop China from taking more hostages. So Canada should warn Canadians against going to China.
It can also invite Hong Kongers to move to Canada.
Above all, Canada should cancel with immediate effect the business-supremacy treaty that would require Canada to pay billions in "compensation" to some Chinese company if it doesn't build one of the tar sands pipelines.
It was over 100F in the Arctic.
*"Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis": Climate Breakdown And The Corporate Media.*
If we did climate disaster protests the way we now do thug violence protests, maybe we could limit the disaster so that civilization survives.
*Improve water supply in poorer nations to cut plastic use, say experts.*
There should be a substantial tax on small water bottles, of the size that are normally not reused with another batch of water.
According to a defector, the egg on the GRU's face after exposure of its botched attack on the Skripals reflects the essential incompetence of that organization today — and its inability to cope with the modern world of big data.
In rural Afghanistan, the wives of opium addicts have to earn money for their children and their addict husbands who won't let them leave the house.
* On Public Service Day, don’t just thank all the workers combating Covid-19. Help them fend off punitive budget cuts.*
*US nurses at for-profit hospital chain to strike over cuts and PPE shortages.*
*Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, nearly 14m US households were unable to afford their water bills.* Soon it will be far more.
Mexico is cutting funds for protecting ancient sites from looting.
Such damage is impossible to repair. Artefacts stolen before being scientifically examines lose their context, so that even if scientists have a chance to look at them later, what they can learn is much less.
*'We can stop the cycle': crime survivors work toward prevention, not policing.*
Thug unions in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles spend million of dollars a year on lobbying. Much of that lobbying is so that thugs can get away with the occasional murder, lots of lesser crimes, and frequent lies.
Parisian thugs put a delivery driver in a choke hold, which mortally injured him. Then they lied about what they did.
They offer the excuse that the victim called them "fools". "Disrespectful", they called it. That is no excuse for violence.
The great oppressors of history had as their base a society in which people generally supported the oppression they did, got a share of hate profits, and chose not to question. Germany, in the 1960s, chose to try to root this out.
Extra, extra! The bullshitter told the truth! It was just where we wished he had been lying — saying he had cut back on coronavirus testing so as to cover up how much it had spread.
The Department of Harm and Human Suffering received 14 billion dollars for expanded coronavirus testing, and did not spend it.
Facebook's management knew in 2018 that it profited by stirring up division between users, and decided to continue.
When your furniture doesn't move smoothly.
Thugs in Columbus, Ohio, hit a protester then sprayed him with mace. Since his legs were prosthetics, he was unable to remain standing and fell on the ground. Then they tried to steal his prosthetic legs.
*New Research Suggests Racial Justice Protests Have Not Led to Covid-19 Transmission Spike.*
Uniformed thugs often do not wear masks at protests, and that threatens to make the public sick — literally, this time. City governments should impose a strict requirement for thugs to wear masks, with specified punishment for every thug found near the public without a mask.
*House Dems Introduce Bill to Prevent Big Pharma Price-Gouging During Covid-19 Pandemic.*
(satire) *White House Announces Entire U.S. Populace Of 6,200 Attended [the bullshitter]’s Tulsa Rally.*
(satire) *Facebook Announces Plan To Break Up U.S. Government Before It Becomes Too Powerful.*
One irony is that pervasive decentralization was designed into the US constitution, and still exists.
Another irony is that another function of the state is to be powerful enough to defeat threats to subjugate people — but it is too much under the control of those threats.
*115+ Groups Urge Biden (and Trump) to Support 'Fair and Just Foreign Policy Regarding Israel and Palestinian Rights'.*
*William Barr Has Turned the Justice Department Into a Law Firm With One Client: [the conman].*
Covid-19 is spreading twice as fast in Texas as one month ago.
California has had a jump in new Covid-19 cases because of people who refuse to wear masks.
Some advertisers are boycotting Facebook demanding that it block "hate speech".
That they have influence, and people do not, strikes me as a problem.
*The Trump administration’s engagement in misinformation makes it harder for other nations to counter disinformation campaigns waged by China.*
Give his kowtowing to Xi, why would he mind that?
The Tories' "universal credit" system which combines various welfare payments was ruled illegal by a court, for arbitrary rules that screw poor people.
In the New York Thug Department, a chokehold no longer needs to kill someone to provoke punishment for the thug who did it.
This is important progress, because this can start teaching lots of thugs not to use chokeholds.
In the 1920s, a plutocrat used his political influence to get the US estate tax reduced. As a result, his heir has a giant fortune and used it to get the conman elected.
Birthday parties made a new Covid-19 hotspot in Melbourne, Australia. In response, lockdown has been reimposed.
People in the houses next to mine seem to have family parties every weekend. I am sure they will get sick one of these days.
*Report finds not one police department in the 20 largest American cities are compliant with international rights laws.*
These failings relate directly to the killings that Americans are protesting now.
*Fear mounts bullshitter may pressure FDA to rush Covid-19 vaccine by election.* In other words, approve it without proper testing.
You can see how powerful the anti-vax conspiracy theory is even with no factual basis. Imagine would would happen if the saboteur in chief contrives to give it a factual basis.
Since the Tories took power in 2010, they have cut local government funds especially in the poorer areas, which (perhaps not coincidentally) had elected local officials from the Labour party.
The Tories did this by making numerous changes in the formulas, and most of the changes tended to privilege wealthier areas. So they could punish Labour — or was it, punish the poor? — in a disguised way.
The UK recognized after 5 years that Anthony Williams was a British citizen all along. But it has delayed two years in paying him any compensation.
Racism may well contribute to this mistreatment, but it's also part of the general right-wing and contempt stinginess towards the poor. Whenever there is uncertainty, they prefer to err in the direction of shafting people.
Federal Attorney Berman resigned in favor of another tough prosecutor, so that the conman gets no benefit.
The numskull and Republicans have surrendered the US to coronavirus. We may have to suffer its effects forever. The rest of the world is shocked.
Modeling predicts another 85,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US by October 1.
At this rate, it will take us till October 2021 to reach herd immunity, and then the disease might mostly disappear.
UK thugs show a pattern of mauling blacks before searching them, which they don't do to whites. A witness made a video of one example, and the department at least says it is investigating the way the thugs acted.
To get a US thug department to go that far would require a week of protests.
The author of The Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key, was an ardent champion of slavery. What does that imply about his lyrics?
In my opinion, nothing at all. When one person does something good and something else bad, which ironically conflict, let's reproach the bad and respect the good. Let's reproach Key for his support for slavery, while admiring what his lyrics say.
Deepfake videos are starting to provide an extended opportunity for fake news.
David Brin predicted in 1998 that this would happen soon. Now, 22 years later, it has happened, and I wonder whether it will make a big difference, as was expected. Fake news is already widespread, and it does not need to be indistinguishable from truth because so many people are eager to believe it. The long-predicted new method of falsification may turn out to add little to the initially-surprising old method.
Opposition to face recognition has recognized that its racial problems go beyond being less accurate for blacks. Perfectly accurate face recognition makes it easy to implement policies of bigotry.
The extreme example is bigotry against Uygurs, in China.
The UK's plutocratist government will use the heavy spending on relief measures as an excuse to sell public assets to businesses very cheap.
The US is short-circuiting that process by giving away trillions to big businesses.
Automation in work is aimed at atomizing work, making workers fungible, and running them to exhaustion.
I think these practices ought to be prohibited, even if it requires imposing stiff, harsh penalties on employment systems. It is wrong to apply such laws to people, but an employment system is not a person, even if it is part of a business that belongs to a person.
Voting machines made by ES&S conceal data against independent audits, so it is hard to investigate why some ethnic groups' votes sometimes mysteriously get dropped.
By 2050 the Winter Olympics may not be feasible, as temperatures may not be suitable. The article predicts other obstacles too, such as flooding.
By 2070, I predict, the idea of organizing a global activity involving travel will be laughable. Local leagues will divide players into diet categories based on how much food each player has access to.
France's constitutional court overturned a law that required platforms to delete "offensive" postings so quickly that no appeal or thought would be possible.
This was the law under which France ordered the Internet Archive to delete thousands of works.
Women who are denied abortions often fall into poverty, and 6 years later they are still in poverty.
The Chinese companies that have implemented the total brainwashing life for Muslims in Xinjiang are closely connected with American businesses, and got some of their ideas and technicals from the (itself evil) US reaction to the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Even some school district thug departments have received armored vehicles and heavy weapons.
Apparently US right-wingers see students as possible rebels.
The Boston City Council is considering having some other agency handle a large fraction of 9-1-1 calls, to avoid the danger of involving thugs.
The bullshitter's big Tulsa rally failed to fill the stadium.
Either many of his supporters have changed their minds, or they are disregarding his advice by protecting themselves from coronavirus.
*The Room Where It Happened review: John Bolton fires broadside that could sink Trump.*
*… it will be [the conman], not Biden, who will be catching grief for being the Middle Kingdom’s poodle.*
*What Defund the Police really means: replacing social control with investment.*
This would reverse a decades-long harmful trend of replacing aid with repression. That goes with Reagan's ideology that the government can't help the public. To ack up that claim, he started undermining and then eliminating the government activities that did help people.
The existence of a permanent police department is a fairly new thing in Europe and the Americas, and in many places they have been thugs all along.
A UK court ruled it was illegal to support Salafi Arabia's fighter planes since they were used in fighting in Yemen. The government disregarded the ruling.
*Saudi dissident warned by Canadian police he is a target.* Target of Crown Prince Bone Saw, that is.
There is a racial disparity in the UK's jailing of unauthorized immigrants.
The bullshitter wants his supporters to admire him for (according to him) covering up the spread of Covid-19 in the US.
Whether he actually did that, I don't know. He said he did, but that means nothing. Then his staff said that statement was a joke, but that means nothing. What we can be certain of is that he would not scruple to do that — and that's all we really need to know about him.
Over a million children in Britain are expected to go hungry in the next few months. Over two million are being abused at home.
The article proposes how the UK could help children and young people recover from the harm done by lockdown. It does not mention, though, the need to stop global heating, lest its effects kill most of them before they get old.
*Culture wars risk blinding us to just how liberal we've become in the past decades (in the UK).*
Now if only people didn't get so distracted by identity politics.
China seems to have engineered a bizarre gunless border skirmish with India. Medieval weapons that were deadly hundreds of years ago can still be deadly today.
My theory is that Xi figures that the world is already disgusted with China, and can't get much more disgusted, so why not do every disgusting thing he would like to do, right now?
*Last chance for the Persian leopard: the fight to save Iraqi Kurdistan’s forests. Minefields left over from the Iran-Iraq war are one of the last bastions against illegal logging and poaching.*
*Florida’s Covid-19 surge shows the state's reopening plan is not working.*
*San Francisco protesters topple statues of Ulysses Grant and other slave owners.*
In regard to President Grant, I think they have rejected the idea of weighing the bad someone did against the good.
The Conman claims to have fired the US attorney for Southern New York, but he may not be able to actually do it.
I think this is another step in the conman's plan to intimidate and corrupt every part of the US government.
At last, a privacy bill that starts to take the right approach: limiting the collection and acquisition of data, not merely "protecting" it.
*Those Who Exercise Free Speech Should Also Defend It — Even WhenIt's Offensive.*
This is why I generally do not suport campaigns to shut down some sort of expression; only a special aspect of the situation that would make that legitimate. For instance, I do support campaigns calling on companies not to advertise in a right-wing show, or people to boycott it.
If it were forbidden to say things you or I find disgusting, saying things that the bully finds disgusting will be even more forbidden.
Some of the refugees that arrive in Greece from Turkey find that Greece denies that they ever arrived. What really happens to them is not known.
Bolton's book describes the conmen as betraying the US, now to Russia, now to China. There is almost nthing to prevent a president from doing this except if per party will desert per for it.
*Coronavirus has widened America's vast racial wealth gap, study finds.*
US citizens: email or phone your congresscritter saying to preserve the Open Technology Fund, which develops free/libre programs to protect freedom from the repression of many governments.
It can't hurt to contact your senators as well.
There is an organized campaign to preserve the Open Technology Fund. Although I was put off by its use of the term "open source", which is a philosophically weak substitute for "free software", its arguments for the OTF are valid and look effective. So I decided to sign it.
Alas, to sign one has to run nonfree Javascript software, which I refuse to do. Likewise I am morally bound not to encourage you to sign it, which is why I do not post a reference to it here.
You can probably have as much influence with your own direct emails as you would by signing a petition, and with phone calls even more influence. Please show your support.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
UK citizens: phone or write your MP to insist that any register of who has visited a pub or restaurant be stored offline, in that place, to prevent the state from using it for other than the ostensible purpose. Each day's records should be sent separately when needed; if contact tracers inquire about June 5, they should not receive data about June 4 or June 6.
You may wish to add that you do not trust Boris and Dominic to follow any rules they may make about use of the data.
Please spread the word!
*Croatian police officers arrested over beating of Afghan asylum seeker.*
One of them is charged with the beating, and the other with covering it up. To charge thugs for covering up the crimes of other thugs a direct challenge to the conspiracy of silence.
England is in the process of getting rid of the practice of "restraining" children in ways that cause them great pain or danger of injury.
Corporations fund thug departments' military weapons indirectly by donating to "police foundations" that in turn donate to the thug departments.
This is another reason why we need to regulate whether thug departments can have or use military weapons — not merely the funds they use to get those weapons.
If you get a phone call asking you to donate to the local "police foundation", it could be your opportunity to add to the funds for those weapons. Please don't give!
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the CORE Act, which would strengthen accountability for the executive branch (in particular, for the corrupter).
A trumpet was appointed to run of the US Agency for Global Media, and fired the heads of Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund.
US hospitals with lots of black or Hispanic patients tend to be badly funded.
Robert Fuller, a black man, was found hanged in a park. The thugs quickly called it suicide. That could be true, but people are skeptical.
Now his half-brother, Terron Boone, was shot dead by thugs. The thugs said he fired at them first, making this "suicide by cop". That could be true, but people are skeptical about this too.
*This is what defunding the police is all about: defunding a system that sees social order as obedience to armed authority; that is growing increasingly militarized; that has no complex understanding of human behavior; and that has deep roots in white racism, which not only goes back centuries but is alive and well in the present moment, in the form of poverty, voter suppression and endless forms of discrimination.*
*We Need Solidarity, Not White Guilt, to Fight Racism.*
In 1946 a group of British Jews, many of them veterans who had just helped defeat the Nazi regime, encountered violent right-wing British extremists and organized to fight back.
PISSI once again has the strength to attack in Syria and Iraq.
As is usual with underground rebel groups, killing its leader did not incapacitate it for long.
When PISSI was thoroughly defeated but not entirely crushed, the Kurds could have wiped it out, but the numskull instead decided not to turn against them. This result is no surprise.
Viktor Frankl's lessons from Auschwitz, related to today.
* International Energy Agency chief warns of need to prevent post-lockdown surge in emissions.*
*"Women are not paid less because they are less educated, less motivated, less ambitious, less willing to ask for more money, weaker, more cowardly, lazier, meant to be stay-at-home mothers, or any of the hundreds of 'blame the women' excuses that popular culture spits out," runs one blistering passage. :They are paid less because hostile men, and the institutions they create, keep finding ways to frustrate gender inequality."
*[The conman's] rally in Tulsa spurs renewed call for 1921 racial massacre reparations.*
I've advocated reparations for the victims of slavery and their descendants, and for the targets of Jim Crow laws, and their descendants.
If we make Juneteenth a national holiday, it would give us a commemoration of the victory over slavery and the Confederacy.
* The coronavirus crisis is making organization efforts difficult for unions and bosses seem keen to take advantage.*
Human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng has been sentenced to 4 years in prison for defending human rights in accord with China's constitution.
The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the DACA program which permits many immigrants who were brought to the US as children and grew up in the US to remain here.
The DACA program is the right thing to do. It is cruel and unjust to deport someone to a country which perse never knew except as a child.
Now if only people would stop using the hokey, oversentimental term "dreamers" to refer to refer to them.
The Biden-Sanders climate policy council published a recommendation which would make some real progress. Democratic Party leaders (plutocratists) don't like that.
Cubans voted to approve a new constitution, about 84% in favor. Some volunteer poll watchers reported seeing that local totals were in line with that figure, suggesting the election was honest.
The new constitution takes a step towards more support for democracy and human rights. How big a step, I don't know.
A US soldier associated with right-wing extremists has been charged with two murders: one of a sheriff's deputy and one of a federal court guard.
Reagan was wrong: The nine most terrifying words, for the wise, are: "Conservatives rule now. We won't let government help people."
Maybe Americans will understand that now.
Groups call on Congress to reduce thugs' surveillance of protesters.
As usual in the field of surveillance, this does not go far enough. But it is heartening to see that it is now on the political map.
I've warned that if the UK leaves the EU under Tory rule it will sign business-supremacy treaties that put Britons under the power of foreign companies and negate their democracy. Now it is not a mere prediction. The Tories want to join the Treacherous Plutocratic Poison.
(satire) *… heavily armed fans reportedly guarded a statue of Yogi Bear Wednesday on the off chance that he turned out to have supported the confederacy.*
In response to public pressure, the thug that shot and killed Rayshard Brooks has been charged with murder and other crimes, including attacking him rather than getting him medical attention when he was lying on the ground dying.
The other thug was given lesser charges. If he does turn state's evidence, it would be a tremendous breakthrough against thugs' >mafia-like bonds to each other.
US meat factories falsely claimed there was a shortage of meat, in May, when in fact they exported a record amount of pork to China.
I don't see anything wrong about selling meat to China, as such. But it is hardly so essential that it justifies operating while workers are transmitting viruses to each other.
More extensive details of a few of the conman's scandals as described in Bolton's book.
Protester Martin Gugino suffered a grave brain injury when a thug knocked him down.
It will take him a long time to regain the capability to walk up to a thug. Maybe he never will. At least his capacity to think is unimpaired.
Now I will follow his advice and focus on issues, not him.
As part of the "War on Terror", US thugs (and CIA torturers) started modeling themselves after the way Israeli thugs and soldiers treat Palestinians.
Bolton's reports of the conman-bully's crimes are very useful, but don't admire Bolton too much. He helped conceal those crimes, including during the impeachment.
A German MEP tried to film Belgian thugs harassing some blacks. The MEP was also black, so the thugs attacked her and took her phone.
They refused to believe the documents that said she was an MEP, but that's a side issue. You shouldn't have to be an elected official to have the right to film the thugs.
Georgia claims to have arrested an assassin sent to kill a TV host who presented condemnation of Putin.
*Officer who killed Rayshard Brooks accused of covering up 2015 shooting.* He and other thugs shot a black man who allegedly was driving a stolen truck, then they concealed the fact that they had shot him.
South Africa has arrested the executives of a bank accused of corruption, together with politicians.
Mowing a lawn just once a month allows many small wildflowers to grow and feed bees.
US citizens: call on Congress to adopt Medicare for All.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: take these simple steps to block common methods by which your vote could be stolen.
When Tacoma thugs killed Manuel Ellis in March, they used a chokehold and put a knee on his neck or back.
Barr's department claims that Bolton's upcoming book contains government secrets and has sued to block publication. However, the conman claims, falsely, that everything he says is a "government secret", so he's probably making it all up.
Bolton claims to have thoroughly checked what government secrecy laws require, and I am sure that he did — it would have been foolish not to. Therefore, I suppose the conman is making a bogus claim hoping to delay the book till after the election.
Some scandalous nuggets from the book.
The conman wasn't entirely wrong in thinking that Finland was part of Russia. That was true until around 100 years ago. Perhaps he has not caught up to modern times.
At an Oñate statue protest in Albuquerque, a right-wing extremists started shooting and wounded a protester. Cops then arrested some of them, suppressing their thuggish nature because the shooters were white.
Organized violent right-wing militias in New Mexico work in cahoots with various groups of official thugs. They refer to each other as allies and protect each other.
One such gang protected the man who shot a protester. A prosecutor seems to have tried also to protect him. Now the forces of law and order face the challenge of defeating those militias, as well as the thugs and officials that protect them.
The rate of Covid-19 infections in US prisons is increasing rapidly.
These outbreaks tend to include prison thugs, who bring the disease home to their families. That turns the local area into a hotspot.
The conman is telling his followers to get ready to fight "Antifa". When they do this, naturally there is no sign of "Antifa", and they say "It worked."
*Trump Willing to Kill Hundreds of Thousands of Americans in Effort to Win Election.*
20,000 Americans are dying each month from Covid-19 because of the government's totally wrong-headed response. But it could easily go back up to 30,000 a month, as Republicans "reopen the economy" without having prepared to make that safe to do. Meanwhile, the mad killer encourages Americans to stop wearing masks and spread the disease more.
This could add up to more than 200,000 before inauguration day, at which point (assuming the election wasn't rigged and doesn't get overturned) the new president can start adopting the policies known to stamp out Covid-19.
Until that gets done, we are in the position of competing with everyone else to be among the last ones that remain uninfected until herd immunity protects us, perhaps 18 months and 600,000 deaths further along. (Assuming we have around 10% exposure and need 70% for herd immunity.)
US sanctions are sabotaging medical care in Cuba, even as Cuba sends doctors to help other countries that are hard hit by Covid-19.
*With no plans to raise clean energy investment, demand [for oil] will soon reach pre-crisis level.*
Rep. Barbara Lee has proposed 350 billion dollars in cuts for the US military budget.
That is almost half the total — but since the US spends more than 7 (or is it 10 now) largest other militaries, it would still have the advantage over any of them.
The saboteurs are working to neutralize enforcement of laws on coal mines in the US, to make sure they can continue polluting land and water unhindered by those laws.
A phony "consumer group" has asked the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission to stop states from managing programs to promote home solar energy installations.
If the FERC manages them instead, it will easily be able to mismanage them to prevent new solar energy installations — and the saboteur in chief will make sure that gets done.
9 independent fishery observers have died inexplicably on ships since 2015. Very likely they were murdered by the crew.
With so many native species now close to extinction after the giant fires burned much of their habitat, the Australian government sees a great new opportunity to wipe them out once and for all, by eliminating environmental review of large activities that can take additional steps towards extinction.
*Iran bans vasectomies and contraceptives to improve birth rate.*
Competing for bigger population means competing for a bigger disaster. See the four factors of the apocalypse.
(satire) *[Dallas] Mayor Eric Johnson told Dallas residents Friday that they would soon officially be entering Phase 4 of pretending the coronavirus was over.*
A discussion over renaming US Army bases named after confederate officers includes an illuminating disagreement between a whites vs whites perspective and a freedom vs slavery perspective.
Two black men died in California in what looked like suicides, but there are reasons to suspect white supremacists murdered them.
Republican donors are supporting plutocratist Democrat Eliot Engel against a progressive primary challenge.
New Mexicans are removing statues of Juan de Oñate, a Spanish colonial leader of Biblical cruelty.
Oñate killed around 1000 people of Acoma after a dispute, then amputated a foot from many of the captured survivors.
*'It's not about bad apples': how US police reforms have failed to stop brutality and violence.*
Policies prove ineffective because thugs make excuses to disregard them. Body cameras prove ineffective because the system usually fails to punish thugs for the observed wrongs.
The New York Thug Department proposes to shuffle personnel and calls it a "seismic shift".
Advocates for the deaf want transparent masks to be available for their companions.
In the US, surviving Covid-19 could leave you with a million-dollar hospital bill.
It's not inconceivable that this would result in seizing your future wages, and perhaps therefore cause your death.
*Britain needs a truth and reconciliation commission, not another racism inquiry.*
Perhaps the US as well.
Bogus Johnson continues a long-standing British tradition of lying about its history, especially atrocities and injustices. He is hardly entitled to criticize anything like removal of statues in the name of honesty.
Proposing to rename the ten US Army bases named after officers of the Confederacy, after ten foreign that came to the US to fight as officers for the independence of the United States.
Here's another proposal with American soldiers of the past.
(satire) *ExxonMobil announced Friday that they had developed a simpler process of extracting oil that involved cutting the Earth in half.*
*Tulsa newspaper and top health official call on [the exploiter] to cancel rally.*
Italy decided to overlook Egypt's murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni and sell arms to Egypt's military rulers anyway.
Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, is facing aroused public opposition and arrested one opposition candidate already.
Protesters pulled down Jefferson Davis's statue in Richmond, Virginia, which was the capital of the Confederacy.
Good riddance — Davis did nothing to deserve admiration from people who are not right-wing extremists.
Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, editor of the dissenting web site Reppler, was sentenced to prison for an article published in 2012, under a law of criminal libel.
A law that makes libel a crime is always unjust; it is a fine tool for crushing dissent.
The TransMountain pipeline has had yet another oil spill. This has happened at least 80 times.
If that spill happened in your town, or its river, you'd call it large. Compared with the amount of oil the pipeline carries, it is tiny.
But the spills remind us that the oil which does not spill is likely to be burnt — and that endangers the whole world.
(satire) *Amazon Temporarily Halts Police Use Of Facial Recognition Software Until It Can Perfect ‘Other Faces You Might Be Interested In’ Feature.*
*Amazon had reportedly offered as a concession free same-day shipping on any evidence police forces might need to plant until the issue was resolved.*
Cambodian garment worker Soy Sros faces criminal charges for posting true information about her employer's illegal plans to dismiss workers.
The Australian government set up a system to demand that poor people "repay" supposedly erroneous "excess" welfare payments. The system imposed false charges on many poor people, and the ministers let it continue until a court made it stop. Now it looks like the court may require the government to pay interest as well as returning the false "excess".
Dunning poor people for money you said you were giving them is cruel, stingy and vile, even if you really had given it by mistake.
Will the ministers learn their lesson from this? There is nothing more stubborn than a right-winger demanding money from a pauper.
Camden, New Jersey, abolished its thug department seven years ago and replaced it with a new department that, from these reports, seems to train and employ police officers rather than thugs.
Some protesters in Atlanta brought water in case anyone started a fire.
That is a good humorous way to defuse tension.
Rebekah Jones, who was fired by Florida's Department of Health for honestly reporting statistics of Covid-19 in that state, has continued making honest reports so people can compare them with the state's official reports.
Her figures say that only one county in the state meets the criteria for reopening businesses. The reopening is premature and will spread Covid-19.
The thug that killed Rayshard Brooks knew that Brooks had a taser in his hand, and could not threaten his life with the taser.
If one can believe the thug, Brooks started fighting to grab the taser after he failed a sobriety test. I supposed Brooks feared arrest as a consequence, but why? The thug did not find him driving the car, only sitting in it, and that is not a crime.
Brooks' theft of a taser called for some action, but it did not have to be immediate. So did his being drunk and in possession of a car, since he could have started driving it and killed someone. But towing the car should have been sufficient to prevent that. If the key was still in the ignition, a faster and cheaper solution would have been to move the car to where it was not in anyone's way, then hold the key until Brooks came in, sober, to claim it.
The US indictment of Julian Assange accuses him of publishing many secret US materials, but strangely omits the best known example: the Collateral Murder video.
It appears the US would rather people forget about that one while the British government absurdly distorts its legal system to extradite Assange.
Sudan kicked out its dictator al-Bashir a year go, but the US continues to impose the sanctions that it placed to push al-Bashir out.
Faux News published edited and mislabeled photos to make Seattle's protests seem violent.
*Fear of coronavirus, not lockdown, is the biggest threat to the UK's economy.*
In other words, the Bogus Johnson screwed the pooch when he failed to aim aggressively to stamp out Covid-19.
Wild salmon in Canada's Pacific coast are mostly wiped out, and many species of animals and plants are suffering as result.
*Covid-19 pandemic is 'fire drill' for effects of climate crisis, says UN official.*
*US supreme court rules employers cannot discriminate against LGBTQ+ workers.*
I approve of the decision, but what is most reassuring is that this was not a partisan vote.
Americans are rapidly becoming aware of systemic racism and the systemic injustice of the thugs.
*Republicans are hypocrites. They happily 'de-funded' the police we actually need.*
Strictly speaking, those are not police. They enforce other laws, which regulate business activities that can put thousands or millions of people in danger.
A thug in Seattle maced a 7-year-old child who was at a protest with his father. Another protester posted a video of this. A week later, thugs sought him and arrested him on made-up grounds, apparently just for revenge.
*He now feels there is a target on his back, which has given him a very small taste of what black people deal with every day.*
Mere hundreds of right-wing racists held a protest in London, and went in heavily for attacking the thugs.
It is not a good thing for decisions (even decisions about which statues to pull down) to be made by contests physical force. That is not how to make valid decisions or wise decisions.
Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop.
The article explains how police academies teach cops to be thugs and says that there are no exceptions. He is in favor of "defund the police".
He uses the term "bastard" where I say "thug." I don't think it is right to insult people because their parents were not married to each other.
*The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.*
So many problems on top of the injustice of nonfree software and snooping.
US plutocrats hope that we will get so preoccupied with racism and its symbols that we won't notice dooH niboR.
The new broader awareness of thugs' violence gives us an opportunity to make progress against the systems that perpetuate thugs' violence, and we should take advantage of it. But in order to make headway against the harms of racism in general, we must follow its connections to plutocracy.
Institutions of racial subjugation tend to change form when you think you've eliminated them.
*I Saw My Friends Beaten by [Chicago] Police. This Is What Happens When Cities Prioritize Property Over Black Lives.
I am not convinced that the reason the author gives is the main reason these thugs rioted.
US citizens: call on Congress to prohibit funds for nuclear testing.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
Massachusetts citizens: call on state legislators to end racist policing.
Why did Martin Gugino walk towards the thugs that shoved him? His friend says, *What I think he was doing was trying to offer them something to read on his phone: about the law, about the right of people to assemble. Or asking why they were preventing people from exercising that right.*
In Albania, tearing down statues of the Communist regime made it harder to remember, and notice the aspects of injustice that persisted, or got worse.
Statues of the champions of injustice call attention to them and lionize them. Tearing down the statues ends the lionization but makes it easy to forget what they did. How can we end the lionization and encourage attention to political issues about them.
Would building prison cells around the statues be a useful approach for some of them? For many of them, there are grounds to sentence them to tens of thousands of years in prison, even in some cases millions of years. The prison cell could be permanent.
Another idea is to replace the statues with a holiday celebrating the end of the bad things they did — for instance, in the US, an annual holiday to celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy.
Disputes are developing over whether to remove statues of controversial people who are mainly known for doing something generally agreed to be good, but also professed bigotry — for instance, Baden-Powell who founded scouting, and Winston Churchill who, more than anyone else, defeated Hitler's empire.
I think Churchill's statues should remain. He was racist and a colonialist (almost everyone in the UK was that), he defended the power of the rich (most Britons disagreed, and voted in Labour before the end of the war), and his decisions caused a deadly famine in Bengal. Those are large wrongs. Yet he did an enormous good: Churchill, more than anyone else, defeated Hitler's empire. On the balance, I think he still deserves admiration, with attention also to his wrongs.
Canada experienced enslavement of Africans, and later treating them as second-class citizens. Meanwhile, its legal repression of indigenous people continued till just a few decades ago. Canadians are just starting to recognize that this has given Canada systemic racism fairly like that of the US.
The RCMP are also famous for violence against protesters.
Should we call for impeachment of Attorney General Barr?
I think the situation is similar to that of impeaching the bully a year ago. In justice, both should be removed from office. But that can't succeed. I said that it was a tactical question and I would leave it to the Democrats in Congress.
They impeached him, partly because many people demanded it. Republican senators responded with blatant contempt for justice. Did that do any good against him? I don't think so, but I am not confident I can judge. Does anyone know of objective arguments to judge by?
Something to show your state legislators: why voting over the internet cannot be trusted.
Online courses dishonest practices that a physical school would have trouble carrying out.
That school seems to be getting in trouble, as it ought to. But the article does not mention the injustice that most people won't recognize: making people run nonfree software and get ephemeral access to what they are supposed to learn from. I doubt any watchdogs are going to investigate that.
I hope you have the wisdom to reject opportunities to "learn" that way.
The US military has a strong tradition of refusing to obey orders that violate the constitution, going back to the founders of the country. If the conman ordered the military to intervene in politics, there is a good chance generals would refuse.
I interpret General Milley's apology for walking with the conman to his church steps photo op as a reminder that generals are very much aware of this aspect of their duty.
Americans adults of all ages have been having sex less in recent years. The data extended through 2018.
Some of the decrease may represent fewer people having reluctant sex. I'm glad for people who can avoid what they don't want to do. But I am sure that in most cases this represents rejection and loss, not an escape, one that has gone on so long that it turns the world gray.
The survey did not cover teenagers, but I expect this decrease extends to them too. The new wave of prudery is part of the cause, but the general infantilisation of teenagers (epitomized by calling them "children" even when they are 17 years old) may be a bigger part.
Society should lead teenagers how to please their lovers and themselves; how to do well in joyous sexual relationships. Leading people to be confused and left out is society's failure.
A new technique of planting forests with diverse trees enables them to grow faster.
Vultures are being wiped out in large parts of Africa, and that allows animal carcasses to rot slowly and spread germs.
*Amazon’s Facial Recognition "Moratorium" Is a Public Relations Stunt. Lawmakers Should Ban this Dangerous Surveillance Tech.*
I agree, but the phrase "using face recognition for surveillance" can be interpreted in various ways. Some interpretations would permit dangerous data collection by face recognition, because organizations will claim that what they do is not really surveillance.
Big Tech is starting to recognize that face recognition is too toxic to be involved with.
When even a commentator such as John Naughton, who doesn't like to be very far ahead of the opinion makers, can say this, that shows we are making progress in the fight to prohibit it.
Isn't it amazing that the US Army runs bases named after traitors?
It's not as if those traitors worked for Russia, China, or the Axis. It was even worse — they worked for slavery!
Atlanta thugs found Rayshard Brooks sleeping in the right front seat of a car, blocking a store' drive-through lane. This nuisance to the public called for some sort of action, but it should not have involved shooting him dead.
The idea of Defund the Police is to send helpful nonviolent teams rather than armed cops to situations like this. Imagine if he had been visited by a homeless aid team instead of armed thugs. They would have unblocked the lane by helping him rather than by trying to arrest him.
The Lancet explains why Medicare for All is essential for the US to stop Covid-19 and future pandemics too.
New observations about global heating and clouds shows that global heating will be much worse than predicted. The same amount of greenhouse gas will produce a larger amount of heating.
As a result, there is no chance of avoiding 2C of global heating, the level at which disaster will be widespread.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect workers' rights to publicly report unsafe working conditions.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to enact a new federal holiday on April 9th, to celebrate the defeat of the confederacy (and slavery).
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
OmniBallot, a system for voting over the internet, is insecure in all the usual ways such systems are. But it's even worse: it snoops on piles of the voter's personal information.
As big email companies take over email, they start blocking senders unaccountably.
Several months ago, yahoo.com started blocking my mail from gnu.org. As far as I could tell, they only fix was to inform those people (if I could reach them) that they should switch email providers.
The conman declared a national emergency because the International Criminal Court plans to investigate Americans for war crimes.
The ICC investigates people for war crimes when their own countries fail to do so. The real shame here is that the US has not done this, not under Dubya, not under Obama, and still not under the bully.
*Corporate Media Are Focusing on Race — and Dodging Class.*
Not just the corporate media. Just about every organization that posts about an injustice nowadays feels obligated to talk about how it hits blacks more often.
Suppose an injustice fell on people randomly in an unbiased way — would that make it less bad? If racism did not exist, and people of whatever race were equally likely to suffer hunger, homelessness, lack of medical care, and persecution, would that make those afflictions acceptable? I'd still campaign to end them.
The US Constitution presumes that the elected officials are honest people of good will, at many points in the electoral procedures. This gives a crook like the conman many points at which to try to discard an election in which he loses.
That is assuming he did not arrange to "win" the election by voter suppression.
*New Campaign Prepares Mass Mobilization Should Trump Refuse to 'Leave Willingly' If Defeated in November.*
ACLU: US schools have too few guidance counselors. They have hired thugs instead. Instead of counseling, students get arrested. That sucks them into the school-to-prison pipeline.
Everyone: call on Walmart to give workers hazard pay and a seat on the board of directors.
The BBC deleted an episode of Fawlty Towers which mocked an old officer's racist views.
John Cleese: If you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of, you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them. The major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that – if people are too stupid to see that – what can one say?
I read that this convinced the BBC to retract the deletion.
I think that that episode is the only one I ever saw. I felt it painted the principal irony ("Don't talk about the war") too thick, so I did not like it.
There are many forms of irony. Nowadays, right-wing bigots slather some irony over their real bigotry to pretend they don't mean it. But Fawlty Towers was many decades ago, and people did not do that then.
Senator Warren and Rep. Khanna have introduced a bill to make the US military approach investigations of killing civilians in a more honest way, and make the results available.
This may be a helpful step, but it won't make a big difference if the army just clams up.
Please don't use the term "war on terrorism" seriously.
*Louisville Lawmakers Ban No-Knock Warrants as Advocates Escalate Demand for Arrests of Three Officers Who Killed Breonna Taylor.*
No-knock home invasions are a regular path to homicides. The thugs also tend to damage people's houses and kill their dogs, sometimes before the people inside know their is a raid.
If Covid-19 spreads at protests, it will be largely the thugs' fault. They go unmasked, refusing to protect protesters or even each other, and they spray tear gas which makes people more susceptible.
Hate-ridden machista fools!
Apple still censors for China — and acts as China's enforcer to make other companies censor for China.
Apple is responsible for its actions, but one general problem that tends to encourage this behavior is the fact that companies are multinational. China will always find a way to censor companies that do business in China. And so will many other countries.
I think we must limit a forum to doing actual business in one single country. It could allow people to post and read without asking them what countries they are in. This way, other countries would have no levers over the company, no way to make it censor anything.
Violent protests open a door to violent racist provocations.
Community defense groups can substitute for official thugs, but they face the same temptation to slide into gang warfare.
*The US is still segregated — but is our democracy up to the challenge?.*
The underlying cause of the Siberian oil spill was global heating, but the immediate cause was the lack of proper required maintenance on the facility.
The spill has reached a lake which is an important regional water supply. Next stop, the Arctic Ocean.
Facebook has developed a chat system for coworkers which allows the company to censor words of their choice. For instance, "unionize".
Protesters have turned a region in Seattle around Capitol Hill into a friendly cooperative no-cops zone.
Arizona is having a big, predictable increase in new Covid-19 cases as a result of "reopening" the economy.
Full intensive care wards cannot be an artifact of increased testing.
Microplastics in enormous quantities rain down in remote national parks.
*As Calls to Defund the Police Grow Louder, Joe Biden Wants to Give Them More Money.*
Sanders says that Biden is listening to what progressives tell him, more than usual for a plutocratist Democrat. But evidently there is a long way to go.
Syrians are again protesting because they are hungry, as in 2011.
The 1900 New York City Anti-Black Police Riot.
Essentially all the thugs attacked blacks indiscriminately on the street and in their homes, without the slightest shame or self control.
Most businesses do better if they have an office and the staff actually see each other for a while every week.
Sanders Demands Congressional Ban on Police Use of Tear Gas and Rubber[-coated] Bullets Against Protesters.
Amazon has told thug departments that for one year they cannot use its face recognition system.
However, there are other face recognition systems that thugs can use.
To ban thug departments from using face recognition directly is insufficient. What about when Clearview AI turns itself into a general service for tracking people, without saying how it localized them?
We have to make it illegal to set up a system to do systematic face recognition or other biometric tracking.
The danger of false matches is a secondary issue. As long as such errors are common, they will make it easy for anyone to argue, "That was a false match &emdash; I wasn't there." To understand the real danger we face, imagine that someday computer face recognition is perfect.
Suggestions for going beyond the bill proposed in the House of Representatives.
I agree with most of these suggestions, but the one for body cameras needs to be more selective. We want body cameras to record when there is violence but not when there isn't. If they recorded all the time, they would turn every cop info a surveillance system.
We can't depend on the good will of cops to turn the cameras on and off when they ought to be on and off. So I've proposed a technical system to do it automatically.
See When Should Body Cameras Record.
Family farmers reject carbon trading as a tool for greenwashing.
1,250 Former DOJ Officials Demand Investigation Into Barr's Involvement in Violently Dispersing Demonstrators Near White House.
US citizens: call on Congress to go further against dangerous thug
practices.
Here's the message I sent:
I urge Congress to take stronger action against dangerous police practices. For instance, to entirely end the provision of military weapons and vehicles to police departments, and make them get rid of most of the military weapons and vehicles they now possess.
Each SWAT team must be used, to keep its skill up, and that means many opportunities each year for it to kill or wound. We should eliminate most of the SWAT teams, leaving just enough that one can reach any necessary location by helicopter in 90 minutes. Then they will be used only when that is truly necessary.
In addition, it is vital to put an end to no-knock and quick-knock raids at all levels of jurisdiction.
US citizens: call on the CEO of Faux News to fire Tucker Carlson.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass legislation to deliver direct aid to families who need it most, not more handouts to corporations and the rich.
FAIR: the US mainstream media are starting to recognize that the violence at protests comes chiefly from the thugs.
Since 1970, Republicans have used veiled white supremacism to convince non-rich whites to support dooH niboR, even though they are among the victims of it.
The International Criminal Court wants to investigate Israeli crimes that violate international law, but US threats may instead destroy the ICC.
Large, expensive weddings are now forbidden, which makes it easier to avoid wasting lots of money that you will soon need for other things.
It is interesting that an expensive wedding goes with a short-lived marriage. I wonder why. Perhaps saving your money helps the relationship last. Perhaps rejecting the social pressure to do something foolish is a sign of people who are wiser and capable of making it last. Perhaps it indicates that they feel secure about their relationship and don't feel a need to burn money to "cement" it.
Georgia Republicans made an all-out attack on voting while black. *"It's their test run for November," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.* * What Georgia did yesterday was criminal, a racist crime against our democracy, and it’s time to criminalize voter suppression once and for all.*
The UK's protected marine areas are effectively negated because giant trawlers are allowed to fish in them.
*Coronavirus nearly ended homelessness in the UK. Why can't we end it for good?*
Australia forced tens of thousands of aboriginals and Melanesians into a system that was little different from slavery, though it was disguised.
Malta prohibits abortion, and due to Covid-19 it is very difficult for women to leave the island to get an abortion.
The National Writers Guild, a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, called for that organization to expel thug unions.
I support the campaign, but I think slightly different tactics would do more to stop those unions from protecting violent thugs. I call on the AFL-CIO to adopt rules that an affiliated union cannot make demands that tend to give its members immunity from prosecution for acts of corruption, dishonesty, or violence, and cannot encourage bigotry.
Under those rules, the thug unions will either reform or be expelled for violating them. Either of these outcomes will be better than expelling them directly.
Hong Kong is setting up a special thug branch to attack political crimes.
The UK will undo the privatization of probation officers.
One privatization down, dozens or hundreds to go. Tory privatization was a blind ideology underpinned by dooH niboR.
Occasionally the state does something there is no need for the state to do, because it works for people to get that something privately from a competitive market (properly regulated, to be sure, and assuming that the state makes sure people don't fall into poverty). In that case, the state can simply stop that activity and leave it to private business.
However, outsourcing a state activity to a business is never a good policy. It leads to low pay for the workers and bad, unaccountable service for the public
*How do you stop the far-right using the Punisher skull? Make it a Black Lives Matter symbol.*
Iowa's legislature has passed a new ag-gag law, imposing a two-year prison sentence on trespassing in a farm.
Zimbabwean thugs arrested some political opposition leaders and tortured them, as was demonstrated by their injuries. Now the thugs have arrested them again, and accused them of lying about being tortured.
Zoom enforced Chinese censorship against commemorating the anniversary of China's murderous repression of the protests at Tien An Men square in 1989.
The Palestinian Authority says it will declare itself a state covering the whole of Palestine's territory, including Jerusalem, if Israel claims to annex any more of Palestine.
New York City will cut some funds from the thug department.
It's a start.
The EU accused China of running disinformation campaigns against the EU.
Why in the world would China refrain from doing so?
The US deportation thugs want to buy thousands of tasers.
How often do immigrants physically resist arrest by the deportation thugs? That must happen almost never.
Taking down statues of people who traded slaves or fought to own slaves punctures a one-sided false picture of history which was constructed for motives of bias.
In Britain that false picture included the convenient side of empire and forgot the oppressive side. In the US, it romanticized the defeated Confederacy and its slave-based plantations.
People now seek to take down other statues in Britain.
Columbus and King Leopold carried out enormous oppression, and that was a large part of what they did in their lives. I support changing or removing monuments to them.
French thugs are being prosecuted for making false charges against an aid worker who complained about their brutality. First they knocked him down onto a busy highway, then they lied to make an excuse.
What is exciting is that some are being prosecuted specifically for bearing false witness. If France can do it, other countries can do it.
New York City thugs have arrested 2000 people in or near protests. Many are held incommunicado in filthy jails without water and without face masks.
*It's time for Britain to think seriously about reparations for slavery.*
A gang of local man tortured a Maya healer and burned him to death, apparently accusing him of witchcraft.
Superstition can kill.
*[Bogus] Johnson's US trade deal will make Britain a paradise for disaster capitalists.*
*Burundi president dies of illness suspected to be coronavirus.*
*Amid Easing Restrictions, Study Estimates Shutdowns Prevented 60 Million Covid-19 Cases in US Alone.* 60 million cases would have meant millions of deaths.
The question now is whether the US converts that temporary preservation of lives into a permanent preservation of lives. Careless reopening is likely to causes those 60 million avoided cases to happen now.
Measures that could help keep thug departments from being oppressors.
The founding principles of London's police force make an exemplary contrast with how thug departments in the US behave.
Minneapolis and Minnesota thugs slashed tires of specific people's parked cards during a protest, then told some of the victims, laughing. Some were caught on video carrying out this vandalism.
The thugs later claimed they had done this to prevent dangerous driving and other unspecified sorts of "harm". One must suspect that in some cases the harm that they feared was journalism. If such concerns justified slashing tires, slashing cop cars' tires would always be justified.
In some cases, the thugs did this indiscriminately to every car in a lot. If you define the people as the enemy, you can justify vandalizing any car.
As Bolsonaro tries to destroy environmental protection organizations, Brazilian journalists continue to protect them.
New Zealand cops can't shoot innocent people because they don't carry guns. New Zealand tried having a few armed cops but has dropped the plan,
Black video journalist Christopher Frierson was pepper-sprayed by a thug who apparently paid no attention to what Frierson was doing: standing with a camera and a press badge. He didn't avoid the spray, but he got the video.
*Minneapolis lawmakers vow to disband police department in historic move.*
Starting a new agency with new personnel provides an opportunity to start a different culture, one that doesn't treat the public as an occupied people.
However, the city council does not plan to entirely eliminate the existing thug department, only to make it substantially smaller and have other agencies attend to many of the situations that thugs deal with now.
Protesters in the US have faced a series of violent right-wing attacks, using cars and guns as weapons.
The bully has lost a significant amount of support in his base since Black Lives Matter protest swept the US.
In Brazil, where the government has done nothing to try to control Covid-19, some people are having parties where they figure they are risking getting sick.
Perhaps they figure that they will catch it sooner or later so there is no use trying to avoid it.
Well-governed countries such as Taiwan and New Zealand have prevented most of the people from ever catching Covid-19. In such a place, society has a real option to keep most people safe from that illness. In Brazil, Bolsonaro has eliminated that option.
*IBM quits facial-recognition market over racial-profiling concerns.*
That one particular company doesn't develop face recognition won't make us safe from face recognition, but can influence the society's decisions about face recognition.
We need to recognize that racial profiling is only one of many dangers that face recognition can cause.
Derrick Sanderlin gives de-escalation training to San Diego thugs. During a protest, a thug shot a rubber-coated steel bullet at his groin, which is prohibited because it tends to cause grave injury. That's exactly what it did.
The UK has charged another suspect with suspiciously resembling a terrorist.
The UK jails people on suspicion, but disguises that as criminality by declaring that being suspect is the crime. This suspect may be imprisoned without any attempt to determine whether he ever planned to hurt anyone or anything.
The New York Times acknowledged that the OAS's claims that Evo Morales committed electoral fraud last year were false. The election appears to have been honest and he was going to win.
This affirms the conclusion that the OAS helped perpetrate a coup in Bolivia.
The people have covered the bully's new wall around the White House with protest signs and art.
*By "elevating" us as warriors, the elites conspired to reduce us as citizens, detaching us from a citizen’s code of civics and moral behavior. By accepting the conceit of such an identity, we warriors and former warriors became, in a sense, foreign to democracy and ever more divorced from the citizenry. We came to form [51]foreign legions, readily exploitable in America’s endless imperial-corporate wars, whether overseas or now here.*
When veterans become cops, and when they are taught the same spirit, they too can think of the public as "the enemy".
Governor Cuomo thinks it would be unconscionable to tax billionaires to pay the expenses of dealing with Covid-19.
Greg Palast explains several ways that Republicans have blocked people from voting in recent elections.
That in addition to gerrymandering, which affects the election of legislative bodies but does not function through voter suppression.
(satire) *Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they didn’t spend millions on an awesome tank just to let protests stay peaceful.*
Given how willing thugs are to violate thug department policy with their violence, criminal penalties seem to be the only way to restrain them, under current circumstances.
Replacing the department entirely might bring in a different culture which would achieve this.
US citizens: call on Biden to ditch his plutocratist advisor, Larry Summers.
Seattle's mayor told the city thus that they were forbidden to use tear gas on protesters unless they want to use it.
Radical city council member Kshama Sawant was one of the protesters who was gassed; she calls for the mayor to resign.
The staff of a McDonalds in California have been on strike two weeks demanding protective equipment. 11 of them now have Covid-19. It is clear they were spreading it to each other, because they could not help it.
All workers that work in proximity to other people should have protective equipment, and employers should be legally required to provide it,
What about when there is a shortage, as now? We could make the employer pay hazard pay on top of the usual wage, plus the full costs of treatment as well as lost wages to all workers that get sick. Then employers would push our plutocratist government to make sure enough protective equipment gets made.
The Justice in Policing Act, proposed in Congress, would help restrain violence by thugs, but it doesn't go far enough.
Eliminating qualified immunity will do some good. Reducing the standard of intention will, too. Keeping track of thugs that have been dismissed for brutality could do some good but only if violent thugs are more likely to be fired than they are now — and none of the provisions seem designed achieve that.
Nothing in the bill, as far as I can see, would directly affect whether prosecutors protect violent thugs.
Helping the Department of Justice investigate violent thug departments would do some good if someday we have a Department of Justice run by someone that aims to reduce wanton violence by thugs, rather that promoting it as now.
The bill would not make thug departments give up any of the heavy weapons that they already own, or reduce the number of SWAT teams, nor stop the no-knock raids carried out by state and local thug departments to give SWAT teams practice.
*Group Warns USDA May Be Quietly Trying to Outsource Chicken Processing to China.*
The idea is to let Chinese companies inspect them, or claim to inspect them, to bypass the already-weakened US inspection requirements.
Almost a million Britons signed a petition to stop the export of tear gas, rubber-coated metal bullets, and other instruments of repression to the US.
I wish change.org would enable people to sign without running nonfree Javascript code. That requirement is why I never post change.org petitions.
Quebec's government hesitates to require masks for disease protection, in the name of personal liberty. It should apply the same principle to masks worn for other purposes.
In particular it should apply to hiding one's identity from face recognition and other tracking.
Britons are demanding, and getting, the elimination of memorials to rich slave owners that are found in the cities where their wealth bought them local admiration.
People comment on the pulling down of one slave-trader's statue.
*US and UK 'lead push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs'.*
Murder of tens of millions to extort from a few hundred millions.
If New Zealand has eliminated Covid-19, what should it do to keep it eliminated?
The idea of developing a special bluetooth device for contact tracing, rather than trying to adapt snoop phones to that purpose, offers the possibility of making it properly respect privacy. This means that unless and until you test positive and are quarantined, the device gives no data to anyone. Anything less will have loopholes that will be used for purposes unrelated to public health.
A car company's vision of travel in the future is total surveillance. Your snooper phone will let you combine all sorts of transportation modes, and Big Brother/Big Tech will follow you everywhere.
It's not too late to stop this, but we must start pushing. There are two ways to push against a product that mistreats you: condemn it so others will see you, and refuse to use it.
Is it sane to trust Huawei equipment in the US and Europe?
Senator Cotton's example seems absurd to me. It must be fairly easy for China to determine where F35s are stationed — no need to track their supply chains. But the basic idea is valid: no company in China can refuse to follow the state's orders. In principle, there is no basis to trust their products.
That includes the companies such as Foxconn that manufacture digital products for "US" companies.
Unfortunately, we can't trust the US in principle either.
*Koch-Funded Americans for Prosperity Opposes Bailout of State and Local Governments Hit Hard by COVID-19 Pandemic.*
*A Short History of U.S. Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests.*
Thugs in Phoenix rioted and arrested people for being somewhere near a protest, citing made-up crimes. Some of them are unauthorized immigrants, and may now be deported due to false accusations.
6000 Jews and Arabs demonstrated in Tel Aviv against Israel's plan to claim to annex parts of Palestine.
Some US schools plan to track the movements of students within the school, for contact tracing. This is on top of demanding they be used by proprietary malware (it spies on them) to do their work, and giving their personal data to companies that profile them.
Contact tracing is legitimate if it collects no data about contacts between people when neither of them is spreading the virus. But if the system is tied to a snoop-phone, it is sure to be an additional injustice.
Thug unions defend a broad range of crimes by thugs — even extortion. In effect, they are mafias.
By the way, mafias get their power by protecting people lots of people who can't get anyone else to do that. In Italy, this year, mafias have been feeding poor people.
Hinduismist fanatics in India used Covid-19 quarantine as cover for a pogrom against Muslims.
In Mexico there are protests against the murder by thugs of a man who was arrested for not wearing a mask. Many thugs began kidnaping protesters and robbing them.
Thugs have arrested over 10,000 protesters at protests over the murder of George Floyd.
Sometimes they make far-fetched excuses.
How foreign occupation practices contributed to the thuggery of modern practices and training of US cops.
*Sandinista leaders fall victim to coronavirus outbreak they downplayed.*
It was more than "downplaying"; they mocked it like the conman.
Ilhan Omar plans to introduce four bills for criminal justice reform.
The first one, for the National Police Misuse of Force Investigation Board, should go further. It should not be limited to the killings by thugs; it should tackle also the lesser acts of violence, and false accusations.
Also, we should require thug departments to divest themselves of military weapons, with few exceptions, and to eliminate most SWAT teams.
Cuba is defeating Covid-19 with lots of attention and strict isolation measures.
They are not very different from Taiwan. Although Cuba disrespects human rights — even occasionally to the point of murdering dissidents —
I think these measures are legitimate when used temporarily in an emergency.
*America for the Rich or the Poor? Which America will be ours after the pandemic?*
*Vallejo police kill unarmed 22-year-old, who was on his knees with his hands up.*
Killing unarmed blacks is a long-standing tradition there.
*Protests about police brutality are met with wave of police brutality across US.*
*Police — Not Protesters — Are Overwhelmingly Responsible for Attacking Journalists.* 80% of the reported attacks were by thugs.
(satire) *Calling the various geriatric protesters the "greatest threat to officers thus far," the Buffalo Police Department requested reinforcements Friday until the frail elderly men rampaging through their city were fully contained.*
Philadelphia thugs welcomed a gang of 50 - 70 white men who threatened Black Lives Matter protesters with various sorts of weapons, and attacked journalists.
A thug that tolerates partisan violence or threats of same ought to be fired, at least. Will Philadelphia fire them? And the officer in charge of that group?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian of fascism, says that the bully is not exactly a fascist, but rather an authoritarian — a somewhat broader category.
She says that he will try to set aside the election, but that history shows that mass protest can stop an authoritarian.
Covid-19 is dangerous, but thugs are. too — protesting is necessary. But while you are at a protest, never take off your mask.
Surveillance is dangerous, too. There are no physical protests against surveillance (I wish there were), but you can protest against surveillance by refusing to run nonfree software (always likely to spy on you), and refusing to use snooping dis-services. Stand up and say no!
Everyone: consider demanding that Netflix cancel the video programs that glorify thugs.
I signed the petition after some hesitation, because I condemn Netflix totally for its injustice to its users. To watch anything via Netflix entails surrendering to injustice.
I cannot envision Netflix as ever doing any sort of business in a way that doesn't mistreat the customers. I think the right campaign goal is to eliminate Netflix entirely, not just a subset of the videos it streams.
However, eventually I concluded that the petition does not explicitly legitimize Netflix's business practices, so I could sign.
Whether you sign the petition or not, please join me in >rejecting Netflix yourself.
*Court overturns EPA approval of popular herbicide (dicamba) made by Monsanto.* The court saw that the Environmental Poisoning Agency knew it was dangerous and decided to ignore than fact.
A Canadian chief of an indigenous group says that national thugs ("mounties") beat him up, injuring him badly, then arrested him and accused him of "resisting arrest" and attacking the thugs.
The thugs also beat up his wife, who was with him.
The ACLU is suing the bully for ordering the violent attack on peaceful protesters so he could walk to a church and use it for a photo op.
Some US government law-twisting agency seized shipments of protective masks that had printed protest slogans. The owners were given no explanation or justification and are not even sure who took them.
This is total lawlessness.
Seeking to destroy as many ecosystems as possible during his time in office, the saboteur in chief has eliminated the protection of a marine reserve near the New England coast.
Australia has its own Black Lives Matter movement, about indigenous people killed by thugs.
Interesting musings from Caitlin Johnstone.
*If you are more interested in the fact that Lindsey Graham is a hypocritical closeted gay Republican than you are in the fact that Lindsey Graham is a murderous war pig who advances mass military slaughter at every opportunity, your priorities are disordered.*
*There’s a pervasive belief in [thug] culture … that it is okay to physically assault a stranger who has made you feel emotionally upset. An attack on the officer’s ego is treated as an attack on the officer.*
And others. I agree with some, including those two.
*What if restaurants continued to feed local communities after lockdown lifts?*
Tokyo is gradually reopening, having put in place a system to stop transmission of Covid-19. Japan did not use snooping apps, but made a success of contact tracing by human investigators. It did not force anyone to do anything, but people complied with the sensible measures announced.
By contrast, the US is reopening, in a careless way, without any system to stop transmission, while transmission is increasing.
This reminds me of cargo cults. In the 1940s and 50s, some charismatic leaders in New Guinea and nearby islands had their followers construct imitation airports. They hoped these would fool the spirits that sent "cargo" to European colonists and soldiers into sending some to them too. It did not work. The practice ended many decades ago.
Now it's the turn of the US to follow a path that is an imitation of a rational policy, missing only the rationality.
Guardian reporters from various cities describe what they have seen in protests — including wild vandalism as a response to wild attacks by thugs.
When protesters get so angry that they attack whatever comes to hand, they become the mirror image of rioting thugs.
I saw a video of a protest which cops (not thugs, those) joined in. I was glad to see their solidarity, but distressed for all of them that so many were close together and did not wear masks to protect each other.
*New Yorkers Confront de Blasio Over Defense of NYPD Violence as Calls Mount for Mayor's Resignation.*
Governor Cuomo is also denying the thugs' violence. You can't see it if you shut your eyes.
(satire) *Los Angeles Police chief Michel Moore vowed Friday to take concrete steps to better cover up violence.*
(satire) *The Oakland Athletics stadium was immediately converted into condos Friday after the team missed a rent payment.*
*Anger mounts over selective curfew rules: 'A license to decide who to arrest'.*
These laws appoint thug departments as despots. When a despot happens to be benevolent, you can get good government for as long as it lasts. But will the next despot be benevolent too? Probably not.
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China will join countries to pressure China on its cruel actions.
Activists in Glasgow have unofficially renamed various streets that were named after rich slave traders of the past.
West Virginia has made protests against oil and gas facilities a felony, including pipelines.
Some French thugs have a Facebook group for racism.
Why do some people launch themselves into hate?
*Senior clinicians fear UK has no plan for second wave (of Covid-19).*
Bogus Johnson's idea of a "plan", when talking to the public, is "Don't worry about it, we will do something and everything will be fine."
National Guard soldiers, with armed military assault rifles, are raising tensions in US cities. Their mission is to protect black and brown coffee and the stores that serve it.
I expect they are armed with military automatic weapons, which are ideal for mass shootings but not so much for anything less indiscriminate.
*A Short History of U.S. [thugs] Infiltrating Protests.*
Sometimes all they do is snoop. Sometimes their reports are lies. Often they encourage violence, or start the violence themselves.
(satire) *Republican leaders reportedly claimed Thursday that New Yorkers would greet the United States military as liberators.*
New York State's sales tax on stock transactions gets handed back to Wall Street every year. Ralph Nader suggests that the state keep it this year. to help pay the expenses of dealing with Covid-19.
*How Endless War Contributes to Police Brutality.*
*[thugs] are explicitly trained to conceive of themselves as warriors in battle, always on high alert and prepared to kill.* And who is the enemy they are about to fight?
The federal government is directly involved in this; a change of one law could put a stop to it.
Calling on the ACLU to expel thug unions, which oppose its stated support for criminal justice reform.
Alternatively, the ACLU could make a rule that its member unions are not allowed to make demands about when and how they will be investigated, charged, or prosecuted for crimes. If they persist in doing that, they will be expelled — not arbitrarily, but as a consequence of not following a rule that is obviously valid.
Bolsonaro has ceased publishing statistics on the spread of Covid-19 in Brazil.
Daily quantities are not very useful as an indication of trends. But they are the basis for three-day running averages, which give a more meaningful picture. Denied the former, Brazilians can't calculate the latter.
UK economists are mostly not in favor of squeezing the poor to "pay for" the programs to help with Covid-19.
However, the idea is ridiculous. Just stop the handouts to the rich, and take back those that have already been given.
*How does it feel to be black in newly 'woke' America? Strange - and dizzying.*
The bullshitter stands for "law and order" — law as in "martial law", and order as in a cemetery.
US citizens: call on Joe Biden to support Medicare For All.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban use of tear gases in the US.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to endorse the resolution to end thug brutality.
A resolution won't directly change rules our laws, but it can have influence on thugs, and on state legislators.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call for limiting thug departments' weapons and arms.
I gave this message:
In addition to what others are asking for, I urge you to greatly reduce the number of SWAT teams in the United States and limit by law the situations where they can be used. A city that has a SWAT team needs to keep it trained by sending it on missions that don't call for one, and each mission risks killing people.
There were massive peaceful protests across the US on Saturday.
This followed a week of protests in which thugs demonstrated their cruel nature by rioting — and even white Americans saw what racism concretely means to blacks.
That doesn't mean it will be easy to change this. Meanwhile, the bully and his supporters are egging each other on to impose yet another repressive military regime — this time in the united states.
People who have survived other dictatorships warn us where this could lead.
The fist is now exposed for all to see.
If he destroys the postal service, he may have trouble converting it into a mailed fist ;-{.
One of the people quoted in that article erroneously assumed that the bully was democratically elected. Actually Republicans stole the election by voter suppression.
Zoom will offer end-to-end encryption only to paid customers.
Even for them, it won't be trustworthy. A nonfree program is never trustworthy, and in particular you cannot trust it to protect your privacy. (It could send the unencrypted version to Zoom when asked, bypassing the encryption.)
And you cannot trust nonfree encryption code to do a good job.
Tens of thousands of Britons with dementia are dying from lack of contact with their families.
Tens of thousands are in danger because they can't get needed heart operations.
Virginia will remove a statue of Confederate General Lee from the state capitol, Richmond.
Insiders report that Attorney General Barr personally ordered thugs to attack a peaceful crowd of civilians to get the bully his photo op on the steps of a church.
The ACLU is suing the bully for the damage done by that assault.
Diesel fuel has spilled in a river in the Russian Arctic; it could take decades to recover from the effects. Arctic ecosystems are especially slow to heal.
It is possible that global heating effects caused the spill.
A poll reports that most Americans now acknowledge the racist tendencies of thugs in general, and support the anger at the killing of George Floyd.
Most Americans think that the actions of protesters are at least "partially justified". That is a rather ambiguous term.
*'Should Be Bigger News': Analysis Finds Nearly One Third of Owed Unemployment Benefits Have Not Been Paid.*
(satire) *Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that he would hold a virtual roundtable with American hate groups around the country to better understand how they work.*
*Solidarity Includes Wearing a Mask at Protests.*
The bully has authorized the Drug Enforcement Agency to surveil all protesters (or suspected protesters) and look for something to charge them with.
Six Atlanta thugs face charges for attacking a couple sitting in a car, pulling them out and tasing them.
It is very important to punish thugs that commit lesser crimes, not only those who kill. The violence comes from the same sources regardless of how far it goes.
Decades of research shows that when thugs approach a protest prepared for violence — wearing armor, for instance — it provokes violence.
The challenge is to make thugs stop being part of the problem.
Naturally, the US government has increased spending on provocation gear.
However, lately the protests have become peaceful and cities have begun deescalating.
10 ways Democratic elected officials can protect protesters, hold back the violence of thugs, and thwart the bully — right now.
Two central bankers say: *The world must seize this opportunity to meet the climate challenge.*
*Jane Goodall Warns Humanity Will Be 'Finished' After Covid-19 Without Ending 'Absolute Disrespect for Animals and the Environment'.*
Beef raised on destroyed Amazon forest reserves is being sold to the UK (and, I suppose, the US and other countries too).
The Lancet has retracted a paper which stated that hydroxychloroquine was dangerous for people sick with Covid-19. Now it seems we do not know whether it is dangerous or not.
It appears that the paper was based on false data.
Peer reviewers usually try to check the methods and assumptions, which they can read, but they have no easy way to check the underlying data when those are not published. However, personal medical data must not be published.
Meanwhile, a large experimental study has found that hydroxychloroquine provides no benefit to people ill with Covid-19.
The Minneapolis thug union has fought every initiative to teach thugs to reduce their violence.
This suggests that cutting funds for the thug department is a good idea.
The worst things that US thug unions do, getting special rules to make it hard to prosecute thugs for their crimes,
Toronto thugs manifest behavior comparable to US thugs.
At least Canada does not have to deal with a governing party that is explicitly racist and violent.
Erdoğan has arrested three opposition MPs and made the usual criminal charges for political enemies.
US thugs attacked or arrested journalists 148 times in just three days.
Stampeding Buffalo thugs pushed an elderly protester to the ground so hard that it wounded his head. One of the thugs tried to help him, but was directed by another thug to go attack another protester instead.
Then they lied about what they had done.
This calls for firing all the thugs that lied, plus the one who said not to help the fallen protester, but the one that tried to help him deserves some forgiveness on account of doing that.
What encourages cops to be violent, to be thugs that is, is above all unaccountability, and that depends on getting away with testilying. Therefore, we must place special priority on punishing cops' lies about their violence.
In fact, the city fired both of the thugs that attacked the protester.
In response, 57 other Buffalo thugs, the rest of the "emergency response team", resigned from that team to "support" the fired thugs.
The city must defend the safety of its residents, so it must not yield to the thugs' demand. It can do without an emergency response team for the time being, and cut the thug department's budget.
When news media present sunny, warm, too warm weather as a pleasure, it is a subtle form of climate denialism.
Minneapolis public schools have terminated the stationing of city thugs inside schools.
This will protect students from the risk of violence by thugs and also the risk of being directed by thugs into a life going in and out of jails. (This is called the "school to prison pipeline".)
(satire) *… NYPD chief Terence Monahan publicly defended his squad’s controversial use of non-lethal rubber tires Wednesday as a means of de-escalating ongoing protests against police brutality.*
The New York Times has said it made a mistake publishing an opinion piece by Senator Cotton, which was a right-wing extremist call for state violence.
It is important for newspapers to publish opinions that they don't agree with. Indeed, that is how progressive views occasionally get into the Op-Ed pages. This naturally has to include right-wing views, too.
But it should not extend to demonization and calls for violence.
Senator Kaine proposes a bill to prohibit using the military against protesters.
*Proposals to Ease Covid’s Blow on the Hardest Hit All But Ignored by Corporate Media.*
A study suggests that the fossil fuel industry will lose 2/3 of its expected future profit due to reduced use due to the effects of Covid-19.
The direct effects of this will be a financial disaster, but it could avert the physical disaster coming from global heating. We can deal with a financial disaster much more easily that the effects of climate mayhem.
It follows that everyone investing in fossil fuels is a chump.
The European Central Bank pissed away 7 billion euros on this. The bank should consult a eurologist and stop.
US citizens: call on Louisville to take several tangible steps of justice and prevention in response to the thugs' killing of Breonna Taylor.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop giving military equipment to US thug departments. This does not go far enough. We should require most thug departments to get rid of their heavy weapons, and allow only a limited number of SWAT teams.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Biden to ditch plutocratist adviser Larry Summers.
US citizens: call on your state's governor to take the state's National Guard off the streets.
George Monbiot: *Britain's claims to being a functioning democracy are only skin deep.*
*Jane Goodall: humanity is finished if it fails to adapt after Covid-19.*
This change will require much less sacrifice from each person if we let the human population peacefully decline.
Someone I don't know sent this to me, describing surveillance in China today.
I live in Hangzhou, and here are some of my experiences. It still remain mandatory for people to show the app's readout to get into subway, trains and supermarket, and etc which could be the most of the public areas. For instance, there is at least one security guard in each entrance of that area, almost all of residential areas have only one entrance by now. And except the health code (jian kang ma) you have to have in order to get elsewhere, you aslo have to identify yourself to get another ID card to get in the residential area, and have to show the ID card every time before you get in. In their practice, residential A area's residents won't be allowed to go to residential B area, vice versa. If you don't have these identifiers, the so-called security guard would love to harass you even they know you just got out the area. It's ridiculous to check that out again. If you forgot your phone or card, they would take down your personal information, and they don't have to take a picture of you since the cameras just in front of you!
*Student protesters and journalists in 1989 recall the joy and hope before the crackdown* in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
*New York [thugs] take seconds to restore reputation for brutality.* Thugs attacked protesters for no reason on many occasions. They even besieged protesters on a bridge. Even worse, Mayor de Blasé legitimized their violent attacks.
When repressing protests or preparing to, they cover their badge numbers so they can get away with crimes.
*The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats.*
*Atmospheric CO2 levels rise sharply despite Covid-19 lockdowns.*
Mattis, the first Secretary of Defense appointed by the bully, condemned him for his church steps photo-op, for which he used the military counter to the Constitution, and for trying to divide Americans.
Some of the bully's evangelical supporters were repelled by the way he used the Bible as a prop for hatred.
California and 20 other states have experienced a rise in Covid-19 cases in the past few days.
A state senator from New York City proposes to transfer funds from the New York Thug Dept to other agencies, which would be tasked to handle humanely some of the situations that the thugs now handle.
I don't think this is a panacea. Racism shows up in other agencies, too. Also, some of the situations will, due to the circumstances, come first to the attention of thugs. To get good outcomes would require those thugs to know how to handle them well.
But there are certainly opportunities to make things better by giving problems to other agencies. For example, thugs in schools tend to solve problems by arresting students and getting them started on the school-to-prison pipeline.
Back when there were not normally thugs in schools, the same kinds of problems occurred but most of them did not result in criminal charges.
*Minneapolis public school board to vote on terminating its contract with police.*
In France, wearing a face mask is mandatory in public, but wearing a niqab face mask is punishable with a fine.
I am concerned about face masks, not because of their religious use, but because they are a way to resist massive surveillance.
*ACLU Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Minneapolis Police for Attacking Journalists at Protests.*
The symptoms of exposure to tear gas promote the spread of coronavirus.
Everyone: call on Biden to ditch plutocratist advisor Larry Summers.
The Environmental Poisoning Agency's new rule mostly eliminates states' power to stop projects that put water supply at risk.
Thus, if the EPA's bogus criteria approve the project, there is meant to be no way to stop it.
*New York [thugs] Are Attacking Protesters — They Know They Won’t Face Consequences.*
*UK government urged to protect access to cash for most vulnerable.*
Where privacy is concerned, we are all vulnerable and we all should be paying cash to protect our privacy.
*Coronavirus will haunt US economy for a decade and wipe out $8tn, says CBO.*
20,000 people protested in Paris against racism and violent thugs.
The Tories want to pull Britain out of the EU with no trade agreement. The ones who won wanted this all along, but didn't dare admit it because Britons wouldn't have voted for them last winter. Now they can force that path and blame Covid-19.
Black Lives Matter protests are likely to spread Covid-19 substantially. I was alarmed by the way the protesters in videos were taking this risk.
Do protest, but keep distance, wear masks, and sanitize your hands!
I was struck by the statistics in the article comparing the danger of being killed by thugs (if you're a black male) and the danger of being killed by measles.
*Whether it’s police violence, poor medical care, or simply trying to breathe, we (blacks) suffer from an underlying condition: racism.*
The temporary fall in air pollution is now being reversed as China and Europe reopen their economies.
*Spain (actually, Podemos) rekindles a radical idea: a Europe-wide minimum income.*
Women living near active gas and oil wells tend to have babies with lower birth weight (which bodes ill for the babies' future health).
Wells that were shut down do not show the same effect, so this is not a matter of correlation between poverty and having oil drilling around.
Thugs in Atlanta killed the son of a Ghanaian diplomat, and said he shot at them first. His family say that is absurd.
You can't put total faith in such statements from a victim's family, but they have more credibility than statements from thugs.
*China accuses UK of gross interference over Hong Kong citizenship offer.*
Apparently China's rulers think of Chinese people as "human capital stock", just like some US officials.
Some old Hong Kongers say, "Britain, please take my children instead of me!"
Brazil and Mexico are rapidly "reopening" while Covid-19 is nowhere near under control.
(satire) *…sweatshop worker Li Chen was devastated to hear Monday that the jacket she worked so hard on was looted. "It breaks my heart that I slaved away for 14 cents an hour in an extremely hot and poorly ventilated factory just to have my hard work stolen from Zara."*
Speaking seriously, I don't think that sweatshops paying so little are found nowadays in China. Wages in China have risen quite a bit in the last two decades. Last I heard, clothing sweatshops are now sited in poorer countries, such as Bangladesh.
The Internet Archive acquires and scans paper books, then "lends" each copy digitally with DRM. It argues that this complies with US copyright law. The few consolidates publishing companies have sued the Archive, claiming that this is is "piracy".
The main question in the lawsuit is whether the Archive's practice is covered by fair use. For the Archive's sake, I hope it is, but my main disagreement with the publishers is at the moral level. I say that everyone should be free to non commercially copy and share any published work. Regardless of what laws say, what they are doing is wrong.
Ironically, those "borrowed" books are off-limits to me because reading them requires nonfree software. I won't run that software, naturally.
Unless paper copies are available, the only copies of most of those books that are distributed nowadays without oppressing the readers are the unauthorized copies. In any case, insist on having a local copy that is not encrypted or copy-protected, so that you can share copies if you decide to. Accept nothing less.
Please join me in refusing to use or legitimize the term "piracy"; it is propaganda for repressive copyright. I respond to the term with the retort that "piracy is attacking ships."
There are protests around the world against the murder of George Floyd and other associated acts of repression in the US.
Thugs in Washington DC trapped a group of protesters on the street and tried to arrest them all. Residents welcomed the protesters into their homes to protect them.
Thugs fired tear gas into a house, and at one point blocked a delivery of food for the protesters.
Non selectively arresting everyone in a large group implies that, for most of them, the thugs had nothing specific to accuse them of. It was repression, pure and simple.
The Manchester (England) thug department sabotaged the prosecution of its thugs for killing an innocent man (supposedly planning armed and dangerous, but he wasn't) by refusing to turn over evidence in its possession.
It is absurd to allow thug departments to sabotage justice.
*How the Credibility Gap [of Nixon] Became a Chasm [under the bullshitter].
The bully is training US troops to get comfortable with attacking American protesters.
US soldiers are supposed to refuse to obey an illegal order, and military veterans are calling on soldiers to refuse orders to attack civilians.
That it is a daunting step, since the military can claim the order was legal and put soldiers on trial for disobeying it. Then a court will decide, typically a military court which is biased against the accused.
I urge US soldiers to discuss, in advance, at what point they will deem an order illegal and refuse to obey it.
Covid-19 caused Pakistan to cancel polio vaccination, and the disease is now spreading around the country.
It could spread to other countries, too. I suppose some other countries have interrupted polio vaccination for the same reason.
The fake polio vaccination team that was actually searching for Osama bin Laden may have made the difference between eradicating polio and suffering from it forever.
A Kurd in Istanbul was murdered in a possibly racist attack. This has focused attention on Turkish prejudice against Kurds.
The civil war of 2015 was started intentionally by Erdoğan after he did not win as many seats in Parliament as he thought he deserved.
He figured that war would get him a better result, and it did.
Reportedly Minnesota is using contact-tracing to investigate the social graph of the protesters.
Contact-tracing is a preventive medical activity, like vaccination. According to that report, Minnesota is using it as a front for a criminal investigation. This is a very dangerous tactic.
Remember what happened after the US disguised a manhunt as a polio vaccination campaign? The Taliban and allied Islamist fanatics became suspicious of polio vaccination, and blocked the vaccination efforts for years. Polio is still not eradicated in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Would we have eradicated it forever if not for this US action?
This backfire was no surprise to medical experts; they rebuked the US.
Disguising a criminal investigation as action to stop an epidemic threatens the same sort of backfire.
Can anyone find confirmation of the report?
A right-wing group is suing to try to force various parts of the US to aggressively purge voters. This is a practice that Republicans do voluntarily to try to suppress the Democratic vote.
Colombia is evicting poor people while they are subject to nationwide lockdown and have no money and no work.
China concealed important information on Covid-19 from WHO through the whole month of January.
Some rich antisocialists are hoping that Covid-19 will complete the process of business-driven globalization, rendering states almost powerless to restrain the power of the rich money-barons.
US citizens: call on Congress to legislate release of incarcerated people who are medically vulnerable to Covid-19, absent strong reasons not to include them.
*[A prisoner in] a Federal Jail Said Their Coronavirus Symptoms Were Ignored. The Government Is Fighting to Keep the Records Secret.*
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word
The narcissist wanted to use a church near the White House as a prop for propaganda, so he sent thugs to violently attack the Christian clergy who were set up on the church steps, offering peaceful support to protesters, so he could use that space.
Rioting uniformed thugs attacked an Australian TV crew covering a protest outside the White House. The Australian government will complain.
Israeli soldiers killed harmless, autistic Palestinian Iyad Halak. Then they pointed their guns at a witness who had cried out not to shoot him.
Now a "Palestinian lives matter" movement has started in response.
*Minneapolis police chief: all four [uniformed thugs] "complicit" in George Floyd's death.*
*Obama shares advice on how to make George Floyd protests 'a turning point'.*
*Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn.*
*WHO warns overuse of antibiotics for Covid-19 will cause more deaths.*
An Minneapolis medical examiner ruled that George Floyd died of a cardiac arrest caused by violence committed by the thugs. He found no other medical conditions that would have made Floyd more vulnerable than anyone else.
This is mostly the same as the report of the private autopsy.
Louisville thugs were fired on while enforcing a curfew against protesters. They shot "back" and killed a bystander.
The thugs didn't turn on their body cameras. The mayor fired the chief of the thug department for this. Making sure thugs carry out the requirement for using their body cameras is the thug chief's responsibility. The chief did not do the job well. But maybe perse has not been in the job very long; if so, perse should get one more chance.
Another important responsibility of the thug chief is to make sure that the thugs are trained not to fire when they are not sure of the target, regardless of the supposed reason. Because that reason, whatever it is, is not a reason for killing bystanders.
Can anyone determine how many people were standing in the area that the thugs were firing towards?
New Zealand has been overly strict about keeping foreigners out, even foreigners who live and work in New Zealand. So people are angry that it made an exception for a movie crew composed of foreigners who do not live or work in New Zealand.
After Zealand's success in driving down Covid-19, it has good reason to limit who it lets in. However, as long as it keeps imposing a quarantine on those who do enter, it could safely readmit everyone that lives there.
Testing everyone on a cruise ship found that 128 were infected with Covid-19 and only 24 had any symptoms.
It is possible that even more people were infected, because the test for virus has some false negative results.
The saboteur-in-chief and the movement he serves for may be aiming for a disastrous collapse of civilization and the world. In many different areas of policy they have systematically pushed to eliminate society's efforts to prevent disaster, and its ability to cope with disaster.
*With Militarization of Cops on Full Display, Senator Plans Amendment to End Transfer of Military Equipment to Local Police.*
The US government and many states are covering up or distorting Covid-19 statistics to cover up how bad things are.
Several states have hidden death or infection statistics for factories or nursing homes.
The history of using "citizen's arrest" to control runaway slaves, and later blacks in general.
US judges are considering a rule to stop judges from being members of private organizations that connect them with campaigns for changes in laws. Right-wingers oppose the rule.
Old Americans are taking their support away from the numskull. They are worried that his incredibly bad handling of Covid-19 will kill them.
Meanwhile, the numskull's cronies are supporting a minority of doctors that profess strange medical theories and want states to encourage people to circulate again and transmit Covid-19.
Exactly what so many old voters fear.
In trying to make sense of this, it occurs to me that he is hopping to suppress the votes of old Americans. If they are afraid to go to the polls, or if they are dead by November, they can't vote for anyone other than the numskull.
Whistleblower Reality Winner in prison is in great danger if she catches Covid-19. Prisoners like her, that pose no danger to the public, are supposed to be sent to house arrest at home, but in practice that is reserved for cronies of powerful politicians.
*Across America, police are responding to peaceful protests with violence.*
The article compares the "police" to "armed thugs," and suggests sending social workers or firefighters to handle most kinds of emergencies to which thugs would now be sent.
As protesters rioted and damaged property, thugs profited by rioting and damaging people almost indiscriminately.
That is my terse summary of a very thoughtful article by Rebecca Solnit.
*Across America, police are responding to peaceful protests with violence.*
The author says they are trying to prove the protesters right.
Facebook staff are condemning Facebook for not discouraging access to the bully's latest death threat.
*WikiLeaks founder ‘too ill’ to attend extradition hearing in London via videolink.*
He must be very badly ill. What does he have? Who is concealing this?
*Hong Kong police have formally banned this week’s vigil for the Tiananmen Square massacre, citing Covid-19 measures.*
That is a bad excuse. You can protest and keep distant from the other protesters.
Wherever you look in the US economy, you find looting. Usually poor people are the victims and the greedy rich are the culprits, and cops do nothing to stop it.
Cornel West: *The fundamental question [about the US] at this moment is: can this failed social experiment be reformed?*
Greg Palast covers the protests, including one in LA in which a thug threatened to kill him, but perhaps didn't really mean it.
Reporters Sans Frontières: there is a wave of attacks against journalists covering protests.
Linda Tirado was blinded in one eye. She believes that a thug fired a rubber-coated steel bullet and hit her eye. Firing these bullets at people's heads risks various kinds of serious injury, even death. Are Minneapolis thugs trained to take care to avoid doing that?
Some of the reporters were attacked by protesters, but it appears that mainly they were attacked by insecurity forces.
*Riot or Resistance? How Media Frames Unrest in Minneapolis Will Shape Public’s View of Protest.*
The increased violence will tend to encourage focus on the "riot" aspect, which is likely to distract from the justice aspect.
The bullshitter's standard campaign practice, replacing every vicious or disastrous thing he does with a distraction issue, is still working.
It is not too late for Biden to step aside for a candidate with firm support: Bernie Sanders.
*'What a Rigged Economy Looks Like,' Says Sanders, as Stock Market Enjoys Best Month in 33 Years Despite 20%+ Unemployment.*
Britain's contact-tracing app, and its policies, are absurd. As a result, the app won't do much to quash Covid-19, and people don't want to install it.
If Britain fixed its policies, and made its app respect privacy, people would eagerly use it. Even I would use it, if I could run it on a device that had no microphone and that didn't report anything about me except the data needed for contact tracing.
The UK government is being sued for plans to collect and retain too much data.
Quashing Covid-19 justifies an increase in tracking, but it has to collect and centralize the least data possible.
Bolsonaro is trying to take control of the Federal Police, which is now investigating one of Bolsonaro's right-wing rivals. It could be that the investigation is justified.
Meanwhile, Brazil's Supreme Court is investigating right-wing attackers.
*Brazil’s left and right unite to launch pro-democracy manifesto.*
In much-oppressed Flint, Michigan, the cops joined the protest against the murder of George Floyd. The whole town rallied and no one was injured or arrested.
It looks like Flint cops are police officers, rather than thugs.
People protesting the murder of George Floyd are gratuitously endangering themselves and others by not maintaining safe physical distance and going without masks.
It is hard to stay safe from the thugs, but you can at least keep fairly safe from Covid-19.
Some Minneapolis bus drivers have refused to transport thugs or the protesters they have arrested.
The bullshitter hardly tries to govern the US or do the job of president. He is not interested in making the US successful, neither in the real economy nor against Covid-19.
One could say he is not really president, more like a cracker who stole the codes to give orders as president.
French pun: préparer du flan.
Everyone: demand that all the officers who killed George Floyd be charged with murder.
US citizens: call on the DAs that protected Ahmaud Arbery's killers to resign.
US citizens: call on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Maritime Administration not to approve the Sea Port Oil Terminal in Texas.
The companies that make China's new Covid-19-inspired surveillance apps want people to keep using them after the disease is gone.
I wonder whether it remains mandatory for Chinese to show the app's readout to get into subway trains, restaurants, and so on.
This article argues that the bully's executive order targeting social-media, supposedly a threat to Twitter, is really a message to Zuckerberg: "Keep on letting me use your platform to spread hatred and lies." Zuckerberg seems to be willing.
*[Progressive Congressional reps] Introduce Resolution to Condemn Police Brutality and Demand Nationwide Reforms.*
*George Floyd protesters condemn 'opportunistic' looting and violence.*
State thugs cracked down violently on protesters in Minneapolis on Saturday. Residents of areas around the protests disapprove of the protesters for looting, and consider the thugs a threat because their violence is careless and anyone can be attacked.
*Journalists report and record being shot at, teargassed, arrested and intimidated.*
Thugs and National Guard troops attacked journalists as well as protesters in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
An estimated 54 million Americans will need food aid this year.
If we are not careful, Covid "immunity passports" could become a threat of repression, and might not help control Covid-19.
New York's plutocratist Governor Cuomo sneakily gave nursing home executives total immunity for patients killed by Covid-19. This was apparently in exchange for campaign donations.
Statistics suggest that the executives have responded by trying less hard to protect patients' lives.
The House Democrats' "HEROES Act" includes billions of dollars in handouts for military contractors.
They are not heroes!
Hertz turned itself into a financial company after a leveraged buyout, and put itself in such a corner that it went bankrupt. Other companies that are still just renting cars are not in such trouble.
Ironically named Jim Justice, governor of West Virginia, is a rich deadbeat. His businesses cheat on a wide range of debts, including medical bills of ex-employees that they had agreed they would pay. And they hide assets when they lose a lawsuit. The deadbeat's debts amount to at least 128 million dollars.
Minnesota state thugs arrested a black CNN reporter Omar Jimenez while reporting. At the same time, thugs treated another CNN reporter politely; he was white.
Thanks to the video of Jimenez's arrest, we know for certain that his actions did not justify the arrest, and that the excuse that the thugs made was nonsense.
I should correct one minor detail: Trayvon Martin's killer was hispanic and would not normally be considered "white". It is easy to leap to the conclusion that the killer was white, from knowing he killed a black. I once made the same mistake.
Racists spread the idea that a black person's life is a series of suspicious events. After they take that life, they remind us to presume that perse must have done something wrong, something we didn't see, to justify the killing.
*Can We Achieve Nuclear Adulthood?*
Facebook has a rule against incitement to violence, but it decided to ignore the rule when the bully does it.
Western Australia's laws allow mines to destroy precious archaeological sites.
While Bogus Johnson boasts about the UK's tip-top new contact tracing organization, the people newly hired to do the work are twiddling their thumbs waiting to get a chance to try the nonfree software that they have to install on their own computers. One of them wrote this article, after quitting.
It seems that Johnson deals with the mounting pile of consequences of his failures by making up a new lie each week.
Microsoft has replaced human news editors with AIs. I have a hunch that right-wing trolls will trick them into publishing fake news.
A new breed of gun nuts: they point loaded guns at their nuts and post selfies to prove how macho and foolhardy they are.
Could their spouses and ex-spouses cite these photos in a custody dispute? "Don't let that lunatic have any influence over my children!" I wish I knew a divorce lawyer to discuss this idea with.
Accelerating global heating + Covid-19 + a violent provocation + homes with no air conditioning could lead to bigger and bigger riots.
In 30 years it will be much hotter than today — hot enough to kill people directly in some places. Instead of riots, that will provoke wars and failed states. Civilization could collapse and kill billions of people. Please don't make more children to be caught up in this!
*Beijing has fatally undermined the image of a self-governing and stable Hong Kong.*
Is this happening because the bullshitter debilitated US influence which could have restrained it?
*Americans know who the real looters are. It's the billionaires who plundered America for $434 billion during the pandemic while the essential workers keeping our country afloat make barely over minimum wage.*
Robbing and damaging stores is a bad thing, and it tends to have bad consequences such as increases in repression, as well as harming people who have done no wrong. But this is small compared to the looting that dooH niboR and his scary men do, supported by plutocratist politicians.
*"…countless activists, grassroots leaders and preachers were screaming non-violently long before now: 'Change, America! Change, Minneapolis!' Rather than listen, many of those in power saw even their non-violent protest as an unwelcome development."*
Efforts to train the Minneapolis thugs to regard people as human and value their lives have not succeeded. Now activists demand to cut funding for the thug department.
*If violence isn't the way to end racism in America, then what is?*
Since a thug shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, changes have been small, but not zero. The article reports that when thug departments adopt stricter rules on use of force, it helps, and body cameras help ensure compliance with those rules.
In the US, plutocracy intersects with systemic racism. Whatever makes for more inequality hits disprivileged groups extra. But inequality hurts most whites, too. If they had a lick of sense, whites in the no-longer-middle-class would ally with nonwhites against the plutocrats, and vote for progressive candidate in whatever party.
Now that Twitter slightly interferes with the spreading of the bullshitter's bullshit, he is freaking out, because this can cut off his system for stirring up his cult followers.
It appears that, even in the short term, increased air pollution facilitates infection by Covid-19. Reduced air pollution may protect people.
The thug who physically killed George Floyd has been arrested and charged with 3rd degree murder. That charge means that he isn't accused of intending to kill, but accused of causing death by means of illegal violence.
However, Floyd's death wasn't just due to a knee on the neck: the thugs took various steps to keep all aid away from him. This could justify first degree murder charges for all of them.
Protests over the killing of Breonna Taylor have convinced the city of Louisville to cease no-knock raids, which are a natural recipe for killing innocent people.
The Federal Reserve could offer every American a bank account and relieve problems that poor people generally suffer.
This would be a good thing provided it doesn't do like most banks and require depositors to use nonfree software to use the account. Unless it has checks, the only way to make payments from the account would be via online banking — and if that requires nonfree software, I would urge you to reject it, as I do.
Explaining compassionate policing and how it gets better results than thuggery.
*Authorities Are Cracking Down Hard on Black Protesters While Treating White Supremacist Reopeners With Kid Gloves.*
One additional reason is that many of the thugs are ring-wing racists, so they are eager to repress blacks for mere property crime, while they tend to cater to armed right-wing militias.
Varoufakis warns that medical monitoring devices, combined with surveillance capitalism could make the manipulations of a plutocratist bullshitter so effective that few voters could resist them.
Senator Klobuchar, as a prosecutor in Minneapolis, protected thugs that killed blacks. Aside from that, she is a plutocratist. What a shame it would be if Biden chose her as running mate.
The running mate that would win him substantial support is Bernie Sanders. So Biden came up with an arbitrary reason to exclude Sanders: his gender.
Patriotic Millionaires: *Using government resources for political purposes should be illegal, and the fact that it isn't already is ridiculous.*
(satire) *Expressing concerns about contracting Covid-19 from the interaction, NYPD officer Bruce MacLeod confirmed Thursday that he hoped a local black teen was only coughing because he had just been choking him.*
Alas, complaining to the Federal Election Commission is basically useless. It is paralyzed by partisan deadlock — there is no common standard of integrity that the Republican and Democratic party share. But even if it did act, its rulings are ineffective because they cannot undo the harm done in an election already over. Rich people can make a new organization for each election, and if it gets fined, there is no one who can pay the fine.
What we need, therefore, is laws that can force compliance immediately.
Several US local "news" TV stations broadcast Amazon's propaganda as if it were news, not even acknowledging that they received it from Amazon.
Tens of millions of Americans are threatened with eviction soon if they do not get government help.
Pelosi joined with House Republicans to pull a strange maneuver so that the House of Representatives would have no chance to vote on specific issues of surveillance in the PAT RIOT Act extension.
At the same time they added a clause to give Attorney General Barr some additional authority.
Representatives will still have the chance to vote no to the whole thing, and that is what they should do. Please phone them and insist on this.
I think there ought to be a law that when a company tells workers that their jobs will be outsourced, and that before they are let go they must train their own replacements, the workers don't have to do that.
The law would say that they can treat the order to train their replacements as being laid off, so that they can stop working, and start collecting unemployment insurance, on the day that the training process is supposed to begin.
The law could award them a paid vacation too, why not? That detail won't be crucial — the effect of this law is that companies won't do that sort of thing at all.
The process by which China is imposing repression on Hong Kong has a few remaining opportunities for protesters to try to stop it.
Some Hong Kongers that loved the territory's comparative freedom have despaired and wish only to emigrate — or make China suffer punishment.
Lam chow is the idea that, if you can no longer win, damaging the conquering enemy at its moment of victory is one last goal worth trying for. Weakening the enemy may save its next victim.
That concept is not limited to armed combat or violence. I think Hong Kongers, as refugee witnesses, can do tremendous harm to China's diplomacy without using arms.
Their vision of America is idealized but not entirely wrong. The US has often oppressed other countries and is full of injustices, but it still stands for the ideals of freedom and democracy, despite its frequent failure to live by those ideals. Even with a mad death cult grabbing for power in the US, Liberty's torch still illuminates the world, for now.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect Social Security from Republican sabotage.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word!
Ethiopia's security forces accused of torture, evictions and killings.
Climate crisis making world’s forests shorter and younger, study finds.
When thugs are merely fired for violence and brutality, they can easily get hired again as thugs for another town.
Politicians (mainly right-wing) accuse "social media" companies of political censorship and demand that they stop, while demanding the same companies delete any violent postings instantly. The two demands are contradictory. Please do not refer to people's postings as "content".
US nurses still have to make do with greatly insufficient protective gear to avoid catching Covid-19 from patients.
Why can't a rich country manage to get these made? The roots go back to the outsourcing which eliminated US industrial capacity and made it a basket case. However more recently, the numskull messed things up time after time.
*A former Federal Reserve board of governors member… called on her former colleagues to stop using Covid-19 relief funds to bail out the "dying" fossil fuel industry.*
Republicans have launched an ad campaign calling on Republicans to vote for Biden.
I will be glad if they do, but I wish it were not such a small stretch for them.
360 million years ago, an episode of global heating wiped out Earth's ozone layer, and the ultraviolet-B light caused lots of mutations. This caused a mass extinction of animals.
We are headed for a comparable amount of global heating if we don't take prompt action.
(satire) *Protesters Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First.*
The is suing Clearview AI for violating an Illinois state privacy law with its face-matching lookup system.
If the ACLU wins, Clearview could continue its activities in other states. We will need a federal law to put an end to face tracking all across the US.
*Research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality.*
Why did Covid-19 spread much more in Lombardy than in other parts of Italy? Partial privatization of hospitals, and letting short-term business interests influence public health policy, are suspected.
*US south-west in grip of historic 'megadrought', research finds.* As the fires increase, the water runs out.
There are natural fluctuations but global heating is steadily increasing the baseline. This will get worse and worse unless we curb global heating. Eventually many of today's farms and many of today's people will no longer be able to exist in that region. By and by, there will be nowhere else for them either. If you have children now, that's the future you condemn them to. Please spare them that future by not having children.
San Francisco's precautions against Covid-19 forced homeless people out of shelters and closed the agencies they depended on. For some, that was fatal.
*'Here's a bed sheet, make a parachute!' Republicans say, pushing us out of a plane.*
Giant Asian hornets are invading North America. They are not much danger to humans, but can devastate insect species, including bees.
The BBC is chartered to be "impartial". It interprets that much as the US mainstream media do: whatever the government says, treat it as (at least) plausible.
The conman has a supposed plan to reduce what type-1 diabetics pay for insulin, but it is designed not to have much effect. The US government could fix the problem, and it should.
The G20 countries are subsidizing fossil fuel development with at least 77 billion dollars a year. The amount is not even decreasing.
Since 2015, and even more since 2017, US states are passing many laws to repress protests.
The general cause is that authoritarians, who in many cases got their offices by rigging elections, are rolling back people's rights. With elections rigged, protest is the only remaining way to hold them back. Naturally, the authoritarians are trying to put an end to that.
The US is funding a disinformation site in Armenia.
*The world wasn't ready for a Green New Deal in 2009. Today, it may be.*
However, the planet-roaster governments of the US, Canada and Australia will do their best to block it.
The UK is not quite as planet-roasting as it was last year. The Tories have more or less ceased their obstruction of land-based solar and wind power.
Journalism faces repression around the world. In some violent countries, the threat is assassination.
In Europe and the US, the threat usually comes in the form of lawsuits from those whose activities are exposed, as for instance Chevron in Ecuador. However, the antiamerican's threat to regulate user forums is is part of the global problem.
*Studies add to alarm over deforestation in Brazil under Bolsonaro.*
*Protecting and creating jobs must be a priority in any coronavirus recovery.*
Manure from Minnesota's farm animals is poisoning water supplies. Likewise the fertilizer runoff from growing corn to feed them.
A village in India, in Nagaland near the border with Burma, has operated since 1998 as a community conservation area, managed to protect wildlife. Despite loss of tourism, they can survive.
700 other such community conservation areas have been set up in Nagaland. Dealing with climate disaster, and population growth if that continues, will be a big challenge for them in this century.
Croatian thugs robbed and beat refugees trying to enter from Bosnia.
The bully's campaign tried to suppress sale of a critical cartoon by making an absurd trademark threat against the store that sold it.
Of course, I condemn the bully's attempt at censorship and I am glad that Redbubble eventually stood up to bullying. However, several general bad tendencies are visible here.
To protect my freedom, I won't run that code. That is why I use LibreJS.
As a result, I can't find the cartoon, and if I could, I would not be able to see it.
This would not be worth mentioning if that site were the only one that had this problem. But there are many, and some are a lot more important than a store.
The use of that term is always a mistake because it tends to confuse trademarks with copyrights, trade secrets, patents, and other unrelated monopolies.
If the people running Redbubble use that over generalization in their own thinking about these different kinds of issues, no wonder they make foolish decisions.
The purpose of trademark law is to help customers make sure of what they are buying. That is a useful purpose, and I am in favor of trademark law overall, but it is not a fundamental overriding right like freedom of speech. There are, however, businesses that would like us to grant trademarks more importance they merit. Other businesses want us to grant copyright more importance than it merits, especially when they are trying to impose DRM on us. Other businesses want us to grant patent law more importance than it merits, especially when they want to gouge for medicines despite the resulting deaths.
To oppose those harmful acts, I refuse to accept the propaganda term "intellectual property" that legitimizes them. I never use it, and when I see it in use, I rejecting it too.
You can help, by rejecting it too.
The bullshitter is planning to excrete an executive order to give the FCC power to regulate internet discussion forums by excluding some companies from section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Whether the president has the power to order that is dubious. If Twitter challenges its validity, it would not be finally decided before the election. In the mean time Twitter could carry out assiduous and scrupulously honest fact-checking of his bullshit.
Fight for the Future: "It would be unconscionable for the Democratic House to pass any PATRIOT Act re authorization without critical privacy reforms."
The US will cease giving Hong Kong trading privileges which it enjoys based on its independence from China.
This seems like a perfectly apt response. While it is unpleasant to praise anything done by the corrupt officials of the US government, I can't refuse to praise this one.
Diverting the entire national medical capacity to Covid-19 is causing 2000 cases of cancer to go undiagnosed each week. That will amount to around 100,000 per year if it continues.
If this continues, most of them will eventually die of cancer.
The situation must be the same in the US, except that many Americans can't afford treatment for cancer under our crushingly expensive medical system.
The UK gave just about all homeless people places to live, so they would not catch and spread Covid-19. But will it continue to support this?
Labour has ejected Corbyn's supporters from the party leadership.
I don't know much about Keir Starmer or the positions he stands for. But I don't think they are close to those of Corbyn and his supporters. It appears that a campaign of distortions alleging antisemitism has effectively killed the battle against plutocracy in the UK.
Millions surely still want to defeat plutocracy, but without a leader, they have no way to make their movement visible and attract more supporters.
The human pandemic is sapping the efforts to stop the African Swine Fever pandemic, which is sweeping around the world.
Wild boars, the same species, do not die from African Swine Fever. Would it be possible to cross-breed them to make farm able pigs that are safe from it?
Systems to track the progress of ballots through the mail can also inform voters if their ballots are rejected, and give them a chance to correct the rejection.
This is a crucial job, but it sounds like that is done digitally, which means it may depend on nonfree software. These systems should not lock the voter into running specific software either to ask for notifications or to "cure" a rejection.
If you are a Colorado voter and you would like to help test this, would you please write to me now?
Greetings, American human capital stock. The White House is planning when to hook you up to the production line again.
The NSA started tracking of all phone calls in the US in order to map the social network graph for everyone in the US.
That is the ideal starting point for political repression, any time that officials feel that rules do not matter.
Thugs arrested two protesters against India's discriminatory citizenship act, but a court released them because the charges were not warranted by a peaceful protest. Then thugs arrested them again and charged them with rioting and murder.
(I wonder whose death is being called murder.)
This article says that that is the beginning of a repeatedly traveled road to empower violent mobs to dominate society by force and tear up the constitution of India.
*YouTube investigates automatic deletion of comments criticizing China Communist party.*
*The USDA is bailing out and deregulating meat companies while also reporting data that shows those very companies are guilty of spreading coronavirus among workers for no good reason.*
USDA figures also show that there is no danger of a US shortage of meat, even if one accepts Americans over consumption of meat as normal.
*Israeli Troops Shoot Palestinian Family Harvesting Wheat, Wounding Two.*
In the 1920s, the goal of expelling Arabs was one branch of Zionism. Another branch aimed for coexistence of Jews and Arabs.
Discrimination in housing is openly practiced in Israel. Places where a Palestinian can rent an apartment are quite limited.
In Germany, equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism is institutionalized, and people who compare the occupation of Palestine with Apartheid are punished. However, the attempt to do this to Achille Mbembe, esteemed scholar, has provoked hundreds of academics to defend him.
The extractors' sage grouse are coming home to roost, as a court invalidated the corrupter's cancellation of the agreement to protect sage grouse habitat. This had the effect of cancelling lots of oil leases in sage grouse habitat.
Shahid Buttar: why it is necessary to replace Rep. Pelosi.
He is running against her in November. The Republicans were eliminated in the primary, leaving the plutocratist Democrat Pelosi, and progressive Buttar. I endorse Buttar.
A prosecutor who refused to prosecute the white murderers of Ahmaud Arbery has a history of straining to find grounds to prosecute black women.
*Trump, Putin and Bolsonaro have been complacent. Now the pandemic has made them all vulnerable.*
*Why leaders who want to be seen as strongmen are afraid to take Covid-19 safety precautions.*
Hacking a Casio calculator with a hard-to-notice second display screen, and internet connectivity, to make it an ideal device for cheating on exams.
I don't approve of cheating on real exams, but the hack is impressive. Besides, if you can design something like this, you can ace your exams honestly.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject blanket immunity for businesses about workers that catch Covid-19.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
Amazon biases its searches to favor vendors that use Amazon for their shipping.
If this isn't illegal, it ought to be. We should not allow a store as big as Amazon to have anything to do with order fulfillment, for its own sales or anyone else's.
Publicity has created massive demand for remdesivir, on which Gilead plans to gouge, but a trio of nonpatented drugs gives somewhat better results.
Andrew Cuomo gave nursing homes executives immunity for harm to their patients, and received a big donation in the 2018 governor's race.
A Minneapolis thug killed George Floyd, who is black, by putting his knee on Floyd's neck when Floyd was lying face down, and helpless. He kept his knee there for five minutes, while Floyd said "I cannot breathe".
We can expect the thug to tell a fantastical story, but I can't imagine a story what could possibly excuse this.
A racist bully in Central Park called 911 and made a false accusation against a black man for reminding her to put a leash on her dog. Fortunately, this time nothing bad happened to the man.
Nothing bad happened this time, but bearing false witness is a grave and dangerous act.
Many of Venezuela's hospitals don't even have running water, so they can't do anything to slow the spread of Covid-19. So why are the government's published totals so low? Maduro might well order officials to lie, but I don't see why lying about this would do his side any good.
What worries me more is the report of repression. It could be true or it could be disinformation; I don't have a basis to rule out either one.
In a debate, primary challenger Jamaal Bowman attacked corporatist and militarist Rep. Elliot Engel for upholding plutocracy and supporting wars.
Canadian minister says that the fear of Covid-19 makes for a "great time" to build a planet-roaster pipeline.
Maybe so, but any time is a horrible time to have that pipeline operating on our planet.
Australia by mistake allowed crew to debark from a cargo ship without testing them for Covid-19, although they said they had fever. Now it is about to make another mistake, keeping everyone else on the ship and making them sail it away "as soon as possible".
Surely they know about the flying dutchmen ships whose crews have been prisoners on their ships, for months? Is Australia aiming to impose that fate on this crew?
Those who want off the ship should be allowed off, and quarantined separately long enough to establish who is not sick. Then, if given assurance that their next destination will let them dock, they could take the ship away.
Germany has given Lufthansa a bailout — not as a handout, nor as a loan, but in exchange for stock in the company.
Hangzhou plans to make its Covid-19 monitoring app permanent, and even Chinese resent the surveillance.
*(Plutocratist) Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount an opposition to Trump. They are actively helping Republicans.*
*Pressure for Europe to choose sides between US and China is building, says Josep Borrell, head of the EU's foreign affairs department.*
The smoke from Australia's enormous fires killed 445 people. Meanwhile 4000 more were hospitalized for respiratory problems.
Some of those 4000 may die prematurely due to lingering damage caused by the smoke.
Covid-19 is still slowly increasing in Massachusetts, with R > 1. A model suggests that 13% of the population has Covid-19 now or has recovered from it.
Reopening business and social contact will speed the spread, leaving Massachusetts with less time to set up an adequate system of testing and tracing to stop it.
*Murderer in Chief (Part Two): undermining rules on pollution will kill at least 25,000 Americans per year. That is counting just a few kinds of pollution, so there could be substantially more deaths.
Volkswagen ordered to pay compensation to those who purchased vehicles with the "defeat device" that cheated on emissions tests.
Florida Republicans tried to negate a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to ex cons, by attaching a requirement that each one pay all debts related to the conviction before being allowed to vote. A federal court has ruled that this added requirement is unconstitutional.
This victory is not final. I suppose that the right-wing Supreme Court will make the final decision.
*Some of the wealthiest hospital groups in the United States have received huge infusions of federal rescue funds even as they sat on billions of dollars in cash reserves and poorer hospitals and clinics struggle to maintain bare-minimum levels of service.*
That's plutocracy for you.
* Five major U.S. corporations that have laid off thousands of workers in recent weeks have simultaneously dished out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash dividends to wealthy shareholders,*
Thousands of Hong Kongers protested China's plan to arrest people in Hong Kong and take them to China, where they could be disappeared.
Dubya made himself America's assassin-in-chief, for foreigners. Now the bully has made himself America's assassin-in-chief, for Americans.
Bolsonaro is getting punished for letting Covid-19 spread in Brazil almost unrestrained. His mentor, the bullshitter, has imposed a travel ban on people who have recently been in Brazil.
*[Changes due to global heating] in deep oceans could be seven times faster by middle of century, report says.*
Britons are enraged at Bogus Johnson for lying to excuse an aide, Cummings, who drove for hours to meet his parents, breaching anti-contagion guidelines that have been presented in very rigid terms.
For the most part, separation practices are wise practices because they reduce transmission of Covid-19. In Massachusetts, they are mostly not mandatory, but I don't care — I practice them nearly all the time anyway.
However, there is no reason to practice them with a stupid robot's rigidity regardless of how small a risk would be avoided.
I go to a supermarket once or twice a week, because that is the only way I can get food while not being identified by the store. I define "safe" in terms of my freedom and my privacy as well as my health; keeping safe calls for estimating the various risks.
I also need to take the subway to my bank occasionally to deposit checks.
Once in a while I get take-out from a restaurant or get ice cream. I don't need to do that, but there is no reason to make a fuss about it, because the added risk of this is small compared with the risk of the rest.
I wear a mask when I go out, not because some places say it is required, but because I want to avoid the chance of possibly infecting anyone. Rule or no rule, it is the right thing to do.
The British separation rules are, in overall, treated too rigidly, but they are good rules for the most part. They should be a little less rigid for everyone, but not specially for a few politically important people.
Nothing can excuse Johnson's history of lies.
Columbia Sportswear Sought to Crush a Warehouse Union Drive as the Pandemic Approached.
Right-wing "reopen" protesters in Kentucky hung the governor in effigy, and even Republican politicians condemned it.
At last we see a limit to how much political hatred mainstream Republicans will tolerate.
California has sued Uber and Lyft for classifying workers as "independent contractors" despite the new law that requires treating them as employees.
Bravo, California — but even if the companies yield and obey the new law, I will reject these companies for the bad way they treat their customers: requiring them to identify themselves and run nonfree software.
Last August, the Business Roundtable — an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations — announced their companies would "[invest] in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities. Since then, they have become even nastier.
*My working week: 'If I take a patient to hospital, it could save [per]. But it might kill [per].'*
Spain is now considering a wealth tax.
The point where a wealth tax is needed as well as a progressive income tax is where someone's wealth generates a lot of income that can be hidden from income tax.
Australia's enormous fires, a few months ago, are in line with the forecast made 30 years ago by the national scientific body, CSIRO.
Australia has quietly helped corporate executives to cover up bad news and problems from shareholders.
Millions of people in Pakistan face starvation because of swarms of locusts. The government failed to spray pesticides when the infestation was small.
In 2017 the European Union asked Big Pharma to participate in a plan for research to speed development of vaccines for possible future epidemics. The companies were not interested.
Oregon voters: sign the ballot petition for an initiative which would decriminalize forbidden drugs.
Send mail to signatures@yesonip44.org for more information, to see the full text of the initiative, and the materials so that you can then sign if you wish.
Everyone: support the Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto.
US citizens: call on Congress to make the bully release aid for Yemen.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to end the monopolies on life-saving drugs — to pass the COVID-19 Emergency Manufacturing Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on US state governors to investigate how Amazon warehouses encourage spread of Covid-19.
US citizens: call on Congress to enact 5-year ban on arms sales to Salafi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on state election officials to stand up to the bully's threats of illegal shutoffs of federal funds.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass HR 6579, which would repeal a large tax cut for the rich.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call spread the word!
In Virginia you can eat at a restaurant and talk with mannequins.
Hold on there! Everyone else isn't dead yet.
Everyone: call on Rio Tinto to leave the Minerals Council of Australia, a planet-roaster lobbying group.
There is no Covid-19 vaccine yet, but European countries are discussing whether to require people to get vaccinated, and anti-vaxxers are already campaigning against it.
In the absence of a vaccine that has been tested, and thus in the absence of any information about how effective it would be and what side-effects it would have, there is no way to say anything rational about the question. This dispute reflects conflicting prejudices, nothing more.
If the vaccine is a DNA vaccine, and if it effectively modifies peoples genomes in a heritable way, that will raise an important issue of safety. We must make that decision carefully, not hastily. But if a non-DNA vaccine is developed. this issue won't arise.
Some kinds of Covid-19 virus tests give up to 30% false negatives. This means that almost 1/3 of the people actually infected will be erroneously judged not to be infected.
US citizens: call on Congress (and the conman) to end the monopolies in life-saving drugs, and pass the COVID-19 Emergency Manufacturing Act now.
California's pollution-credit trading system is backfiring badly now that demand for electricity has crashed.
A steadily increasing tax would avoid some of these problems. It would not the shortfall of revenue if pollution surprisingly decreases, but we should consider that windfall of safety.
Dishonest Republican state legislators could force the presidential election into the House of Representatives, where under special voting rules the Republicans would certainly win.
Can we do anything to prevent this hijacking?
The corrupter has overtly threatened Michigan and Nevada with corrupt abuse of power.
The Paycheck Security Act would support small businesses by supporting their employees' wages and benefits.
As we remember the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico ten years ago, causing damage that still persists, let's also remember that this was BP's second oil well explosion. The first, in Azerbaijan, was mostly covered up.
The URL https://www.woroni.com.au/news/analysis-the-issues-surrounding-anus-proposed-online-invigilation/ appears to be about anus exams, carried out using a nonfree malware prackage called Procto-rio.
Unfortunately it is not a joke. The page is about nonfree malware called Proctorio that ANU demands students install and run to take final exams.
That the question of the ethics of making students install software in their own computers has been mentioned indicates progress in making people aware of the danger of nonfree programs.
If I were a student at ANU, I might have been forced to drop out when the school told students to install Zoom. However, first I would have asked my teachers to make recordings from the Zoom calls and post them where I could download them. Or else post the pertinent visual materials where I could get them before the class, and I could phone the Zoom server and record the audio myself. Either way, I could continue the classes without running the nonfree program myself.
The Covid-19 epidemic is exposing the way many important market systems are unstable and liable to crash.
If we can overcome the disaster capitalists that profit from such crashes, we could redesign them to serve or real needs.
The president of Guatemala says that the US is deporting people there who have Covid-19, and this has overwhelmed Guatemala's medical system.
Some of them are not even Guatemalan. The US is deporting Hondurans and Salvadoreans to Guatemala.
The president of Guatemala is right-wing, but even so he could protect his country by refusing to permit deportation to Guatemala as long as the pandemic continues.
If Guatemala makes an alliance with Cuba, it could get real medical help.
There are over 2000 dams in the US that are in poor condition and their failure would kill people.
This is the result of decades of skimping on maintenance to pay for increased military spending and handouts to the rich.
The US total fertility rate is dropping.
This is a good thing, because having more than a few children is a luxury that our species cannot afford — not on this planet the way it is now.
The expense of having and raising children in the US is partially the result of that situation, and partly imposed by the cruelty of plutocracy. I campaign to end that cruelty, but fewer births is at least a silver lining to that cloud.
If we could get the whole world's fertility rate down well under 1.7, we would be headed towards a sustainable population.
49 members of Congress (some senators, some representatives) made suspicious stock trades in February and March. — suspicious in that it looks like they were acting on private information they received in Congress.
They may even have bought stocks that they could boost through their decisions.
Frankline Ndifor, preacher, drew lots of worshipers by claiming he could make them immune to Covid-19, but he couldn't make himself immune. His "flock" now expect him to be resurrected soon.
That will not happen, but some of them will refuse to believe that no matter how long they wait. Eventually they will found the Ndiforian Church, and say he is someone they ca-Ndifor.
If you're not a sheep, you don't need a pastor.
The flood in Michigan, caused by the collapse of an old dam, came close to a nuclear power plant. If it had reached the plant, it could have caused a disaster.
We should shut down nuclear power plants, and replace them with renewable power plus batteries.
Making a sucker out of the US: the conman tells fossil fuel companies, "Pay as little or as much as you like" for extracting fuels from US public lands.
The US needs to impose a steadily increasing tax on use of fossil fuel, no matter where it came from or how it was obtained, and make the increase fast enough to reduce usage to near zero in 10 years. This can be part of a planned shift away from fossil fuels.
*As Warnings Mount of So-Called 'Second Wave' of Covid-19, [the saboteur-in-chief] Says He Won't 'Close the Country' Again.*
Of course he won't. After working so hard to keep the US unprepared, and for "reopening" which will start the second wave, he would hardly waste the opportunity to convert that into actual deaths.
Besides, ALEC wants this, and he could hardly go against ALEC.
(satire) *Xi Jinping Warns Of Second Coronavirus Wave Likely To Disappear Thousands Of Hong Kong Residents.*
Releasing prisoners convicted (or merely accused) of nonviolent crimes not only protects them from Covid-19. It helps protect the whole community.
The article mentions the figure of "5,000%", which always tends to mislead.
Percentages are a clear way of stating the difference between two figures only when the percentage difference is under 100%. For an increase which more than doubles the figure, using percent to represent it is a method of exaggeration. Instead of saying "5,000% more", say "50 times as much." That is a big increase indeed, but has nothing to do with 5,000.
Many governments have increased the use of location tracking by portable phones, in the name of Covid-19, even though that location data is not precise enough to be of any use for contact tracing.
However, human rights organizations are fighting back.
As for me, I don't want to carry a personal tracking device. And they can be used also as listening devices. I have never had one and I never will.
My not having one also assures I will never use the other systems that piggyback on a mobile phone to track or identify people. No contact-less payments. No use-a-text-message-to-log-in.
Please join the resistance against pressure to use systems that track you. Just start saying no, even to some of them, and mention this in your mail signatures, your profiles, etc.
US cities must commandeer hotels to house homeless people.
Senator Warren and Rep. Andy Levin propose federal funding to increase Covid-19 testing and contact tracing as the base for freeing the US of the disease.
This would be a great step towards the task of world-wide eradication.
Biden formally opposes Israel's plan to annex part of Palestine, but won't do anything to pressure Israel not to do it.
The Senate plan to cut Social Security, proposed by Mitt Romney, has support even from some nominal Democrats in the senate.
This shows that even though Romney has criticized the conman, he is nonetheless part of dooH niboR's cruel band.
*Foreign-Owned Entertainment Company Lands Federal COVID-19 Loan.*
Indigenous people in the US will be at a disadvantage in postal voting.
Most measurements of microplastics in the ocean detect only milliplastics, since they use a strainer with holes .5mm across. A survey with .1mm holes found that the smaller particles are more numerous.
The .1mm-.5mm particles add up to much less mas of plastic than the larger ones. However, if toxins leak out in proportion to surface area, they could leak quantities disproportionate to their masses. Also, they could be eaten by smaller animals that could not ingest a .5mm particle, and enter the food chain lower down.
* Climate risks and opportunities need to be incorporated into the financial system as well as public policymaking and infrastructure.*
*We now have the proof: greening the economy doesn't come at the price of prosperity. The investment to rebuild economic activity can be directed towards a green economy and still rebuild economic activity.
The obstacle, as usual, is the control that planet roasters have over several important countries, including especially the US. Doing anything good will require overcoming their political power.
President Hernández of Honduras is suspected of being a major drug trafficker. His former chief of the national police faces US drug trafficking charges.
Hernández got into power in the dubious election held after the US-supported coup. His brother was convicted already of drug trafficking.
Prohibition of recreational drugs is futile and stupid, but that doesn't make trafficking good. For addictive drugs, the state should provide them to addicts in a safe way, so as to pull the plug on the black market.
San Francisco continues its war on homeless, especially its uniformed thugs, but some people are being allowed for the time being to live in tents on the street.
A vaccine for Covid-19, even if it works, may not be effective enough to eradicate the disease.
Biden says that he will consider being more progressive than he was advocating previously.
For this to win my vote, he must endorse specific progressive policies, not merely say he is thinking about doing so.
Republicans won't allow this.
Germany has adopted new safety laws for meat-processing plants.
We should ban use of subcontracted workers in all areas of work.
A study of almost 100,000 patients given hydroxychloroquine as a putative treatment for Covid-19 found that the drug increases the death rate.
The bullshitter may be safe taking hydroxychloroquine, for the time being, if he does not have Covid-19.
The UK will make people arriving internationally pass 14 days of quarantine.
It might make sense to quarantine travelers from high-sickness countries such as the US and Brazil. However, it is pointless and irrational to do this to people coming from other EU countries. They don't have a higher infection rate than the UK itself.
Everyone: phone Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s office at +1-212270-1111 and call for Chase to stop lending to planet roasters. 350.org suggests saying these words
Hi, my name is _______. I'm calling Jamie Dimon's office today to urge him to stop giving loans to the fossil fuel industry. I want him to do this for the sake of people around the world and the future of our planet. As a consumer, I will refuse to bank with any company that is so out of touch that they're still funding fossil fuels.if you can't think of something better to say. No insults or name-calling, please — use a polite tone to state your criticism. Fossil fuel infrastructure is expensive. If banks won't lend for that, it can't be built.
US citizens: call on stronger workplace health and safety protections for US frontline food workers.
UK Tories are as bad as always, on most issues. Now they propose a new business-supremacy treaty that will encourage environmental degradation.
By denying Parliament the power to vote on these imposed changes to the UK's laws, the British state h s made itself nondemocratic and therefore illegitimate.
China has announced plans to impose direct rule and direct repression on Hong Kong.
At least China's dishonesty will be exposed completely.
*Black Americans are in an abusive relationship with the Democratic party.*
A new scheme to bypass conflict of interest rules: the head of the US Covid-19 vaccine program was appointed with 10 million in stock in GlaxoSmithKline, one of the companies whose activity the program is involved with. (He got the stock as an employee.)
The cheater appointed him as a contractor rather than an employee and claims that this makes conflict of interest rules irrelevant — but that doesn't prevent conflicts of interest.
Climate defense activist RL Miller has been elected to the Democratic National Committee and plans to use her position to push the party towards real climate defense.
I wonder how members of the DNC are elected. I have never seen any campaign about who will be a member.
The American Hospital Association funds lobbying against single-payer universal medical care (Medicare for All), through a hypocritically named lobbying group, the "Partnership for America's Health Care Future", for which a more accurate name would be the "Partnership for Unaffordable Health Care and Future Patient Bankruptcies."
Doctors have organized to demand that the AHA stop supporting that lobbying.
While most Americans are in financial difficulties, US billionaires have gained 434 more billions since mid-March.
The head saboteur of the EPA claims all his acts of deregulation of toxins are changes for the better.
The article includes a long list of them.
Microplastics accumulate in sea sediment. In some areas, layers just under the surface can contain 2 million crumbs of plastic per square meter. Animals that crawl through the sediment to feed eat the microplastics, and the toxins climb up the food chain.
The fish humans eat may become dangerously toxic, or perhaps they already are.
The pandemic is likely to boost the pace of automation, which could eliminate a substantial fraction of all today's jobs in a couple of years.
I don't understand how it could possibly work to buy clothing without trying it on. When I buy pants, I know which size I need — but not all the pants of that size fit me. Would I have to buy six pairs of pants, then return five of them or six of them? Would I have to buy six of them and give away those that don't fit me?
US citizens: call on Congress to pick up where the ex-Inspector General's investigation of Pompeo left off.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
*Scotland bans Covid-19 support to firms based in tax havens.*
If your government fails to take this obvious step, that shows it is controlled by tax-dodging rich parasites.
Science advisors of the Obama administration say the US will face a second wave of Covid-19 around September, and must stockpile medical equipment for it.
It is lunacy to have wasted the first stay-at-home period without building up the capacity to follow it with test, trace and isolate. The bullshitter appears to have made this choice this intentionally.
Despite Sweden's high Covid-19 death rate, a survey in Stockholm found that it has gone only 10% of the way to herd immunity (7% have antibodies).
Reaching herd immunity without a vaccine entails lots of deaths.
Rich people hide their pay as capital gains to pay less taxes. They mostly do not give much to charity, and they have not lost much in the stock market's decline.
The big obstacle to contact-tracing in the UK is that the contacts of infected medical workers and nursing home workers are mostly other medical workers and nursing home workers — and if they all self-isolate for a week or two as a precaution, the system will fail immediately.
The first step in fixing this is obvious — give them all sufficient protective equipment — but the UK hasn't got its act together to do that.
China is moving to impose a repressive "national security" law on Hong Kong.
*Hong Kong’s security laws: what are they and why are they so controversial?*
*FDA appears to soften stance on hydroxychloroquine* after the numskull announced he was taking it.
This suggests that he is attacking the independence of its regulation of drugs.
As a separate matter, the FDA has been undermining inspection of production medicines since Obama's day. Obama could do some good things, but only when business wasn't interested.
Georgia Governor Kemp cancelled a special election for the state supreme court. The Republican-dominated state supreme court ruled that he was entitled to appoint a Republican judge instead of holding an election.
Kemp was previously the state official in charge of elections, which gave him the opportunity to rig the election for governor so he would "win."
Economists warn that if the US government refuses to bail out state governments for the costs of dealing with Covid-19, it will push the US into a much larger depression.
Either the conman or Republican senators (I don't recall which) have talked about doing this.
The corrupter removed another inspector general, this one for the Department of Transportation.
That IG was investigating Ellen Chao, the head of that department, for favoritism in favor of the business interests of her husband, Senator McConnell.
The Pentagon in 2019 quietly dropped measures designed to cut down on wasteful spending on business.
Republicans plan to let extended unemployment insurance end in July, when the depression will still be getting worse.
That will, I expect, increase the depression, but not for billionaires, who will receive handouts.
Big corporations are planning use ISDS clauses (I Sue Democratic States) to sue many countries for taking Covid-19 emergency measures that cut into their profits.
Governments may be able to argue that the losses were due to Covid-19 and its consequences, rather than to the government actions themselves. But that is not reliable.
We must abolish the business-supremacy treaties.
*Insolvent Wall Street banks have been quietly bailed out again. Banks made risk-free by the government should be public utilities.*
*AFL-CIO Sues OSHA for Emergency Temporary Standard to Protect Workers.*
The Secretary of Labor, a Republican, has refused to try to protect workers from infection.
Former Apple worker Thomas le Bonniec reports that Apple Siri recorded and saved people's speech at random and is not being investigated for this.
Hurricanes near Australia (peculiarly called "tropical cyclones" though they are the same phenomenon) show a trend over the past 40 years that the number of the most powerful ones is increasing — in line with what climate models forecast.
The US is forecast to get a lot of hurricanes this year, and it will be hard to give people shelter without their catching Covid-19 from each other.
The US needs to be making lots of masks to give them, and goggles. Republicans in their contempt for the non-rich will choose not to do it.
Tory politicians value strawberries more than the inmates of nursing homes.
Algae are spreading across melting snow in Antarctica where there were never algae before.
US citizens: call on Judge Baraitser not to extradite Julian Assange.
US citizens: call on your Senator not to reopen the Pentagon's revolving door.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call please spread the word!
*Andrew Cuomo is no hero. He's to blame for New York's coronavirus catastrophe. His record was terrible before coronavirus, but his abysmal handling of the crisis should get him thrown out of office.*
Many Americans have somehow got the idea that he is progressive. More Information Further information
The US government is trying to bully the WHO into bowing to Christian prudery by removing references to sexual and reproductive health.
Every time the bully succeeds in intimidating someone, he presents that as a triumph, and his fanatical supporters feel stronger. The WHO should show strength by sticking to what it considers right.
The numskull's churlish threats are boosting China's global power.
China applies its power in a way that is less stupid than the US, but no less evil.
A UK right-wing extremist was convicted of the crime of refusing to hand over his phone password for an arbitrary, no-grounds-required, no-legal-advice-allowed search when entering the UK.
This is the same law that was used to make Glenn Greenwald's mate hand over the some of the Snowden leaks. They just have to call you a "terrorist" — never mind whether there is any truth in that.
Jane Roe, plaintiff in the Roe v Wade case, famously recanted her support for abortion rights. Just before dying she confessed that her recantation was a sham — she lied in exchange for half a million dollars from Operation Rescue.
The UK plans once again to impose lifelong punishments on people accused of terrorism, without troubling to give them a trial first.
This would be on top of the deviously evil UK laws that make it a crime to arouse suspicion.
The Palestinian Authority has cancelled all cooperation with Israel, anticipating annexation of Palestine's farm land.
Reportedly Pompeo broke the Pentagon's rules in order to rush approval of an arms sale to Crown Prince Bone Saw.
New Zealand's prime minister proposes a four-day work week so as to get more people employed quickly.
Florida fired scientist Rebekah Jones who had developed a system for online fast access to statistics about Covid-19 in the state. She said she was fired for refusing to censor the data.
(satire) *Amazon Institutes New ‘Hero Tax’ Charging Essential Workers Additional $2 Per Hour For Honor Of Bravely Performing Job*
29 progressive Democrats call for reducing the US military budget this year.
I hope they present a target for this reduction, because a minuscule reduction of ten dollars or ten million dollars won't make much difference against the recent increase of a hundred billion dollars.
*What evangelicals could learn from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam.*
The UK is opposing the campaign to make Covid-19 vaccines available to everyone in the world — and without that, billions of people will be unable to afford it.
Kelp farming absorbs CO2, so it can locally slow the inexorable advance of ocean acidification.
To really end ocean acidification, we must drastically cut our CO2 emissions.
The US sends Hondurans and Salvadoreans seeking asylum to Guatemala saying they should try to find safety there.
They could replace the Guatemalans who are fleeing the violence of their country for the US.
How Hong Kong protected nursing home inmates from Covid-19 with a perfect success rate.
The temporary decline in CO2 emissions, due to staying home and not traveling, is not enough to affect global heating in the long run.
We still desperately need a Green New Deal.
A black man and his mother was accused of stealing a TV set after he bought it. Then he tried to return it and was accused again of stealing it. This time, the thugs beat him and his mother, gravely injuring them both.
The thugs said they mutilated him for "failing to comply". That is a handy opportunity to elevate their subjective impression to the status of fact — handy for racists.
The greediest of US businesses are pushing a bill to allow broader and more absurd patents, even in medicine.
Patents do little good for society, and in some fields a lot of harm. They are especially harmful in agriculture, medicine and computing. All in all it would be better to eliminate patents entirely.
Thousands of prisoners in California have Covid-19, and some are getting no medical care.
The saboteur in charge of the Bureau of Land Management is not only ordering it to do the opposite of its job. He is trying to make it fall apart.
A plan to put an end to Covid-19 in the US, and reopen much of the economy, with lots of testing and tracing.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject blanket immunity for businesses about workers that catch Covid-19.
In the UK, everyone will be an organ donor by default. People will be able to declare that they are unwilling to donate.
In parts of Australia, forest fires are now so frequent (due to global heating) that they will stop new trees from growing and eliminate the forest entirely.
The shallowness of machine learning was exposed when it couldn't make sense of changed patterns of purchasing when most people stopped travelling and started working at home.
This is an inherent consequence of the modern approach to AI, which abandons all effort to understand anything.
Israel tracks all car travel using license plate cameras.
The UK does the same thing, and has used it to sabotage protests. Democracy in Israel is in danger from the top, and law enforcement is totally biased, so every surveillance system is likely to be used for repression of Palestinians, as well as its supposed intended purpose.
The saboteur in chief is speeding up sale of public land so that businesses can despoil more and sooner.
France ordered web sites to delete anything the state labels as "terrorist" with just one hour's notice. This gives no time to discuss whether the material really is "terrorist".
This adds up to arbitrary censorship power, as well as an excuse to shut down any web site that can't afford staff to watch for such requests 24 hours a day.
The FBI accidentally leaked the name of the Salafi Arabian official it suspected of helping to organize the 11 Sep 2001 attacks on the US.
Dubya wanted to blame it on Iraq to have an excuse for the war he had sought even before.
Food giveaways are helpful in the short term, but in the long term we need to expand food stamps.
The International Life Sciences Institute presents itself as working for the general good, but records show funnels money from companies such as Coca Cola to promote use of ingredients that can damage health.
I suppose those companies have dozens of front groups and can use them in parallel.
This article contends that Bloomberg and Bill Gates are collaborating with other billionaires to set up "smart" cities which will use the Internet of Stings for social control.
I don't see proof that this is true, but it is a danger worth thinking about it. If they are not attempting this now, someone else could. To resist it, we should oppose all systems that track people in daily life.
Don't be tracked — Pay cash!
The Financial Times excoriates the saboteur-in-chief for killing tens of thousands of Americans by treating the truth with contempt.
This is the voice of a 1970s Republican, who wants to increase business profits but not by mass slaughter.
It is interesting to compare China's Covid-19 cover-up with America's Covid-19 cover-up. China's cover-up was done by low-level officials who were afraid of being punished because the problem appeared in their department. America's cover-up was done by the highest officials, people who rarely tell the truth about anything.
*Private Hospitals, Now Demanding Bailouts, Lobbied to Defeat Cost-Saving Health Reform as Coronavirus Crisis Grew.*
The acting king of Salafi Arabia plans to buy a popular English soccer team. Crown Prince Bone Saw aims to distract people from remembering how his agents murdered dissident Jamal Khashoggi inside the Salafi Arabian consulate in Istanbul then chopped up the body to dispose of it, as well as his intervention in Yemen that has killed thousands of people who never even criticized him.
Hong Kong's governing council had all pro-democracy members physically carried out, then voted in a new leader.
Meanwhile, accused organizers of last year's protests are on trial.
China is like the walls of a room that slowly but steadily shrink down to zero volume.
Bogus Johnson's bad decisions multiplied the deaths from Covid-19 in the UK. This was after right-wing budget cuts and privatization had weakened the country's ability to protect itself.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media help cover it up.
Slightly in Johnson's defense, I have to say that even for an honest person of good will may hesitate before the enormous step of closing nearly all businesses and activities. But Johnson did so for longer because he opposed the idea on ideological grounds.
*Coronavirus offers chance to create fairer UK food supply chain, say experts.*
The Tories, by contrast, found a way to boost business power by giving 9 large companies total control over food distribution.
Just as global heating denialists called themselves "skeptics", denialists of medical knowledge call themselves "skeptics".
True skeptics probe the evidence and basis for conclusions, but they do not deny rational thinking, and they don't start their thinking from the conclusion they want to prove.
Global heating has made a repeat of the 1930s "dust bowl" heat more than twice as likely. It is now expected to occur around once in 40 years.
Pompeo has been using his office to boost his political career. Now that he has ousted the inspector general believed to have been investigating him, Congress wants to know what the investigation was about.
A manifesto to democratize, decommidify and remediate work.
Facebook may face an antitrust investigation for the many companies it has bought, since their surveillance has a wide reach.
Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit.
You can make yourself mostly invisible to internet surveillance by (1) not giving your name to web sites, (2) blocking nonfree Javascript code that sites send to you, (3) blocking third-party trackers in web sites, and (4) connecting to sites across Tor so they can't tell your location.
An activist's lawsuit claims that the Android "advertising ID" is personal identifying information under the GDPR.
Victory would require Google to get free and informed consent for identifying users that way.
When Google claims that it "cannot identify a user from per advertising ID", I suspect that what that really means is that Google cannot directly identify a user from per advertising ID alone. I suspect that correlating databases collected about that user and indexed by the advertising ID with other databases about per, it is possible to associate per advertising ID with per name with a high degree of confidence.
Food delivery gig workers have no opportunity to go to the toilet: the restaurants where they pick up food won't let them in.
These companies also snoop on their customers, so in addition to boycotting them, it makes sense to simply reject them.
*Trump Administration Wants Bosses to Snitch on People Scared to Go to Work.*
The conman's son has posted false accusations to implant an spurious association between Biden and the word "pedophile".
He calls these accusations "jokes", and admits they are groundless. I think he expects that to make no difference, because the conman's supporters will believe it eagerly and repeat it fervently.
The overall goal is to make truth irrelevant against a lie.
*The fossil fuel industry is using tax breaks in the CARES Act, meant to help businesses keep workers employed, to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes — and then delivering that money to executives.*
The Lancet called on Americans to replace the bullshitter with a president that will take rational steps to eradicate Covid-19.
Essential questions the bullshitter's "warp speed" vaccine program must answer to show whether it is a good idea, or merely warped and on speed.
Don't assume that we have decades before disastrous ecosystem collapses. Scientists have discovered ways that small changes can trigger tipping points.
Will this really happen? Don't bet your children's lives that it won't!
The Philippines is arresting, even shooting people who are homeless for "violating quarantine" while demolishing shanty towns to make their inhabitants homeless. It is arresting people for protesting for food, and others for handing out food to the hungry. People who merely criticize Do-dirty are arrested too.
The Muslim fanatics in Mindanao do not deserve support: they take hostages to demand unjust Islamic law. But Do-dirty takes a lot more hostages — millions of them.
Naturally, the US offers him a "sale" of arms, which may really be a gift from the American people to the murderous government.
Arbery's killers told easily refutable lies in their first report of what happened when they killed hum.
It is crucial to prosecute them for these lies, as well as for murder, because we need to teach thugs that what they call "testilying" is going to be punished.
Two DAs in succession intervened to protect them. It is crucial to punish them, too. If what they did is not a crime, it is a least grounds to fire them.
*Billionaires Are the Biggest Threat to Public Schools.*
A whistleblower complaint, filed a year ago, shows evidence that banks are allowing overvalued mortgages on commercial building property.
Banks' loan staff are supposed to detect and stop cheating. They can't be perfect, but I am sure they know their jobs. If there is a wave of cheating, the banks must be letting it happen.
I can't guess why a bank would do that, but I am sure that the intended fall guy will not be the bank.
US businesses say they are worried about opening because workers or customers who come down with Covid-19 might sue them.
The businesses have a valid point that the uncertainty does no one any good. But they demand more than they deserve — to protect them entirely from liability, so that they can do what they like and not worry about the consequences.
We should make good, clear rules about what businesses must do to protect their workers from Covid-19, then enforce those rules strictly. That will spare business the uncertainty but not the accountability.
DeVos is diverting some of the CARES act funds to support private schools.
The USDA has deregulated genetically modified crops made by gene editing.
This is very risky. Gene editing is more powerful than the sort of gene-insertion practiced in the 1990s.
Plutocratist Democrat Clayburn, who voted for the latest giant giveaway to businesses, said the government couldn't afford to protect people's jobs.
The purely economic value of the lives saved by shutting down business Australia, not counting the noneconomic value of human beings, is estimated at more than ten times the economic cost of the artificial shutdown.
The estimate distinguishes the cost of the artificial shutdown from the cost of decrease in activity that happens naturally as a consequence of illness from Covid-19 or fear of catching it.
*Afghan rivals’ power-sharing deal would promote official accused of rape and torture.*
To have any chance of peace, we have to help the actual rulers of Afghanistan make peace, even if they are torturers and rapists. The alternative to working with them would be for the US to impose new rulers on Afghanistan. That didn't work well before — it usually doesn't.
If we wanted to help Salafi Arabia make peace with Iran, or with the Houthis in Yemen, we'd have to help its actual ruler to do it — murderer though he is. Otherwise the peace agreement would not hold.
The strange history of the electoral college and how the US has elected presidents.
I was taught, many years ago, that the electoral college was planned so as to give large states extra per-capita power, to compensate for the extra per-capita power that small states get by having as many senators as a large state. But perhaps that was a rationalization based on the fact that the electoral college had that effect in the mid-20th century.
I support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The USPS says its package delivery fees for companies such as Amazon are chosen to maximize its revenue, but the numskull insists on a big increase.
If the USPS is right, the immediate effect would be a loss to Amazon, but in the longer term Amazon would switch to its own delivery vans. Instead, all other stores would be disadvantaged.
Here's a better idea. Instead of charging Amazon and similar companies more for deliveries, let's put a substantial tax on all shipments of products from stores to retail customers. That would benefit all local stores. Alternatively, put a substantial tax on all retail sales in which the store can identify the purchaser. That would encourage non-surveillance retail.
Another idea: make all companies pre-fund the retirement of their workers, as the Postal Service does now. Supposing that companies will pay the retirement funds from the income from their operations decades from now invites them to cheat their workers.
An anonymous insider is reported as saying that Kushner advised the corrupter not to talk much about Covid-19 testing, or production of ventilators, lest that cause stock prices to decline.
The bullshitter set a target of vaccine for hundreds of millions of people by January, whether the vaccine is ready or not.
January is not long after the election. Perhaps he intends this plan to be believed just long enough to get people to vote for him. If in January there is no vaccine, he just won't mention it any more.
Elon Musk reopened the Tesla factory and compelled workers to return to it, daring the county to arrest him.
In effect, he is saying, "I'm a billionaire so I can break laws."
The state of California should pass a law that workers can get unemployment compensation if they stay home from an illegally-open business.
Plutocratist Democrats joined Republicans to pass the "HEROES" Act, which offers an insufficient amount of urgently needed aid for poor Americans as an excuse for another big handout to the rich.
In effect, plutocratists are using poor Americans as pawns, keeping them right on the edge of destitution, and saving them at the last minute so that their next big handout to the rich can't be blocked.
Rep. Jayapal voted against this law.
The "Justice Department" claims that it can't prove Michael Flynn gave false testimony — the fact that he said so twice is not enough proof to convict a friend of the corrupter.
It is interesting that, a year ago, the corrupter said that it was. Today he says it wasn't. A year ago, his campaign of contempt for truth was less advanced than it is now.
Apple and Google have developed a supposedly anonymous contact-tracking method which will be part of iOS and Android. That, in itself, is not wrong in principle. However, the implementation will be a nonfree program, and it will depend on running a nonfree operating system, in a device whose hardware reports people's movements and can listen to their conversations all the time.
This article describes flaws of this particular system.
UK thugs broke up a small nonviolent protest in support of Julian Assange.
The protesters were keeping physical distance, which was wise on their part, but even if they had not it would not excuse crushing a protest. Hong Kong protesters risk their lives, after all.
London thugs searched a very calm and collected black man for no reason except that he was sitting in a parked car while black. His account shows the arbitrariness of their behavior.
Apparently they do this all day when they have nothing else to do.
Most US states don't have enough contact tracers to cope with reopening businesses.
Contact tracing needs to be done with a unified national system because people move around the US a lot.
100,000 cruise ship workers are stuck in cruise ships around the world, unable to go home. One recently committed suicide.
The cruise lines can't do anything to get them home unless governments cooperate.
Compostable and recyclable plastic made from plants may be ready in a few years.
Using cardboard for the outer layer of these bottles could avoid the recycling problems of today's plastics.
If the plastic is made from edible parts of crops, that production could still be unsustainable.
A survey reports are men are more likely to go without a face mask than women.
My personal experience in Boston confirms this. When I go out, I usually encounter a few men without face masks. I try to keep far away from them, so they don't transmit coronavirus to me, but on a sidewalk that is sometimes difficult to do.
Even in the subway, where masks are mandatory, I've seen a few men without masks. No women.
*…an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly, there have always been requirements of human sacrifice — a certain portion of the population was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing [59]homo communis, focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If these people can’t [maintain physical] distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If there isn’t enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.*
The term "human sacrifice" is somewhat of an exaggeration. What is referred to is sacrifices made by humans, which can occasionally be fatal to some of them. But that doesn't invalidate the point of the article.
I think we should encourage working for the benefit of people in general. More people, not fewer, should do this. But the rich should not subject us to gratuitous danger as part of the bargain.
Whistleblower Rick Bright revealed how the Department of Harm and Human Suffering planned to arrange for patients to use chloroquine to treat Covid-19, without getting it medically tested first.
These plans came straight from the office of the head of that department, who must have been eager to please the conman regardless of the harm it would do.
That is nothing new — consider the famous border wall, both pointless and destructive. But the wall was one of the centerpieces of his PR.
What shocks me now is that this happens for a point that was just a temporary side issue of his PR. Even a temporary side issue mobilizes his sycophants to act to push it.
In part of Australia, a remnant forest serves as a shelter for endangered species, but maybe it will be cut down soon.
The NHS in England proposes to require each patient to quarantine for 14 days before non-emergency surgery.
I think only a fraction of patients (mainly, the wealthy ones) will have a way to do this; most patients would be excluded.
The news about NHS telemedicine's software is also disheartening. The article mentions that it sometimes fails to work, but I expect it has a worse failing all the time: making users run nonfree software.
I wonder, when I need a medical consultation, how I will be able to get one once my doctor's clinic pushes me to run Zoom — which I will never do.
5G communication technology from the same contemptuous ISP megacorporations is not a step forward. Let's replace them, instead, with municipal broadband.
To realize the full potential for improvement, municipal broadband should not insist on identifying every user, nor record what internet hosts a user connects to, except under the order of a specific search warrant.
I support municipal broadband because it could provide a good system for connecting to the internet. But if we want an internet that is good to connect to, that's a separate issue. To achieve that, we must eliminate the pervasive injustices of most internet usage: luring or pressuring people into using the nonfree software and online dis-services.
Sanders continues to press for any Covid-19 vaccine to be free.
The US does not have enough trained contact tracers to cope with the consequences of reopening business.
Here, I suspect, is where the experience with SARS 20 years ago aided the Asian countries that it hit. They made sure they had a contact-tracing system ready to activate when the next new disease came. Business-dominated countries, where the cult of the invisible hand is the established church, decided to spare the expense.
*I have been asked more than once, "How did the Doomsday Clock miss the coronavirus?" The truth is that it didn’t.* It identified political denigration of science as the underlying threat.
*As an epidemiologist, I know how well contact tracing could work for coronavirus.*
Faux News and other right-wing disinformation channels are now denying the counted number of Covid-19 deaths, claiming that the figures are too high.
We know that the official counts are too low, because some deaths caused by Covid-19 were not tied to that disease at the time.
US citizens: call on Senator Burr to resign for insider trading.
US citizens: call Pelosi's office at 1-202-930-8115 and call on her to reject the attempt to extend some of the surveillance provisions of the PAT RIOT Act. They were unjust before and they will be unjust if enacted again.
US citizens: call on manufacturers of ventilators to cooperate with repairing them.
US citizens: call on McDonalds to provide employee with paid sick leave and family leave.
I am disappointed that the article used the pseudo-word "Latinx", but that won't stop me from signing the petition.
Everyone: call for firing the thugs that killed Breonna Taylor, and dropping charges against Kenneth Walker.
When thugs on a raid, don't announce that they are thugs, it should be entirely lawful to treat them as burglars or assassins.
The tentative peace negotiations between the US and the Taliban seem to have broken down.
Aside from that, a group of totally vicious terrorists invaded a maternity ward and shot the pregnant women. It is not clear who they were, or why they did this. The Taliban condemned the atrocity. In general, the Taliban attacks only its enemies.
A pregnant woman's life is no more and no less important than any other person's. But it is clear that those women were not combatants. That eliminates the only legitimate reason for anyone to attack them.
Wisconsin's supreme court ruled that the governor has no authority to unilaterally order closure of bars, restaurants, or other business on a continuing basis. This requires support of the legislature.
As far as I can tell, the term "stay-at-home order" is a misnomer. Ordering everyone to stay inside per house would be outrageous. Closing most businesses seems legitimate in places where the danger is legitimate.
A UK union warns that the government's Covid-19 tracking app includes access to private messages about union issues.
42 million people in West Africa will soon have trouble finding food.
This will surely get worse; as the number who need food aid increases, the chance they will receive it will go down. We need to provide help in reducing births, as well as food for those alive now.
*Humans are not resources.* Calling for giving workers more power over how businesses run.
(satire) *Florida Governor Deploys National Guard To Force Residents Back Into Malls, Movie Theaters.*
A US appeals court has authorized a lawsuit against the conman for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
The lawsuit can go to trial unless the Supreme Court invents an excuse to stop it.
The ACLU has come to recognize the danger of programs and dis-services that spy on their users.
Alas, it has not yet learned the need to reject the forms of technology which give companies this sort of power over their users: nonfree software, and the use of services that know something their users, such as their names or other personal identifying data.
The bully wants to automatically reject all requests for asylum from people arriving on the border, effectively permanently.
Global luminaries call for future vaccines for Covid-19 to be offered gratis to everyone in the world.
Meanwhile, the billionaires' today appointed a Big Pharma vaccine executive to his Covid-19 vaccine hurry-up committee.
He may indeed push for ways to speed up the availability of a vaccine by cutting some of the corners. Perhaps some of these ideas will be well-advised, given the urgency. But he will also have the bright idea of letting pharma companies gouge people, with the effect of postponing eradication of Covid-19.
Grubhub is gouging restaurants, even as it makes dossiers about customers. Don't use Grubhub.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't using Grubhub require running nonfree software and identifying yourself?
Get your meal deliveries from local restaurants that will write your address on paper and throw it away after — and pay them in anonymous cash.
UK thugs threaten to attack planned protests against lockdown.
A people denied the right to protest cannot be considered "safe". We must defend that right, even when we disagree with the stance of the protest. If the individuals protesting are taking a personal risk, that is not a valid excuse to ban the protest.
(satire) *Updated Patriot (sic) Act Finally Legalizes 80% Of Current FBI Operations.*
Racism against nonwhites is deeply ingrained in the US, thus effectively it is an unwritten exclusion clause in the social contract.
The only kind of account that Windows 10 Home allows a new user to create nowadays is one that is linked to Microsoft's servers. Snooping on users is now an inherent functionality of Windows 10.
The article describes an undocumented way to avoid linking with a server account, but the existence of that is no excuse.
The UK immigration office displays zero tolerance for its own mistakes: "Application rejected because we lost your passport."
The most elementary sense of justice says that you must not hold your own mistakes against someone that is at your mercy. The people who work in that office have been taught to disregard the most elementary sense of justice; the culture of that office is "say no at any excuse".
I suggest moving those bureaucrats to the department that provides environmental approvals for construction and agriculture, and rebooting the immigration office with entirely new staff.
Progressives still need to get out the vote for Sanders in state Democratic primaries.
As the saboteur in chief acts to expand the harm that Covid-19 does to Americans, part of his method is stopping the CDC from reaching Americans with rational advice.
*No insurance, no savings, no support: what happens when LA's least privileged get Covid-19.*
Biden and Sanders have agreed to six task forces to decide on Democratic Party policy positions, and outspoken progressives are co-chairs of three of them.
The article doesn't lay out the structure and domains of all these panels. It could be a real opportunity to shift the party left, but that is not assured.
One of them is about climate defense; they have appointed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as one of its leaders.
The director of the World Trade Organization has resigned, feeling thwarted in his efforts to make the WTO give businesses ever more power over democracy.
Making business-supremacy treaties more powerful is part of the plutocratist agenda. "Reduce trade barriers to support economic growth" means "give business more power."
Michigan students won a suit against the state for failing to provide them with books and teachers and usable school buildings, so they could learn to read.
*Beneath the mixed messages, the Tories are putting wealth ahead of well-being.*
UK Tory ministers got a warning two years ago that people living in nursing homes would be in special danger in any epidemic.
The ministers do not seem to have taken action to protect them.
The Supreme Court found a strained excuses in 2000 to hand supposed victory in Florida to Dubya. It could do the same sort of thing this year.
It was only later that Greg Palast showed how the Republicans had stolen the election before election day, by systematically preventing elegible black voters from voting.
*'Disaster Capitalism at Its Worst': Report Details Big Oil's Efforts to Cash In on Coronavirus.*
Afghanistan veteran Erik Edstrom refutes the claim that he was "serving his country" by fighting in that war.
Soldiers and veterans don't need priority boarding, 10% discounts at gimmicky chain restaurants, or a few crinkled bills stuffed into a charity's coffee can. What they need is a nation that can find the courage and conviction to stop misusing their service.
We must shun the ritual utterances that pretend that what US soldiers do nowadays is service to their country.
A report details how animal farming in the US became more concentrated from 2012 to 2017.
The price of hamburger meat nearly doubled during the period. On the one hand, this shows that increased concentration is not more efficient. On the other, if it leads people to eat less beef, that is a change for the better.
The article does not mention the tendency of corporate farms to breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria which could someday kill millions of humans.
Making prisoners work for purposes outside the prison keeps wages down for free workers. An especially clear example is happening now in New Orleans: using prisoners as scabs. The regular workers went on strike demanding protective equipment and paid sick leave, as well as more pay.
Using prison labor for anything except running the prison tends generally to drive down wages. So the question is what we want: to reduce prison expenses, or have a prosperous society.
The saboteur in chief is working hard to sabotage the US Postal Service, and has pushed out the members of its governing board that want to keep it running.
What could he gain from this? He could make it impossible to vote by mail. Any other ideas?
His reelection strategy (people suspect) is based on forcing people back to work even though many workers and customers will get sick.
To make sure they have to accept it, he wants to protect the employers totally from liability if they do get sick.
I suspect that he actually wants a lot of people to get sick, too. Why else strive persistently to keep masks in short supply? He can't help knowing that many cases will follow, and if he did not want that, he wouldn't be making it happen.
[The corrupter] fired the State Department’s inspector general. The immediate occasion may be that he started investigating Secretary of State Pompeo, but the corrupter treats anyone who interferes with corruption as an obstacle. Now that he is getting away with firing inspectors general, he takes this as an opportunity to displays his contempt for honest government. He will keep doing it until they cease to do their jobs, and it ceases to shock. The he will do something even more disgusting.
Paul Manafort was moved from prison to house arrest to protect him from Covid-19.
Since he does not pose a threat of violence, I think moving him was the right thing to do. What is wrong is that so many other prisoners in similar situations are still held in prison where they are likely to catch and spread Covid-19.
When we criticize favoritism, we should advocate being equally harsh to everyone.
*As Coronavirus Spreads Behind Bars, Prisons Release Very Few People.*
(satire) *Disgusting Bigotry: The Media Is Only Blaming This Bat For Coronavirus Because He’s A Gamer.*
300 elected officials including Bernie Sanders called on the World Bank and the IMF to cancel the debts of poor countries.
Naomi Klein: *How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic.*
Now that people have to do activities on-line, they are working with governments to pressure people into using unjust forms of computing.
Covid-19 hotspots are breaking out in US states controlled by Republicans, resulting from their policy of allowing businesses to open.
Hungary has arrested several people for criticizing the regime on the internet.
The UK's peculiar form of federation seems tailor-made for provoking separatism.
The UK is something like a federation of four states: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The last three have their own state governments which decide some significant policies. England, with a bigger population than the other three put together, does not have its own parliament, but it dominates the UK parliament.
Perhaps it could eliminate the nationalist tendency by dividing Scotland into two states, and dividing England into 20 states. The states could have roughly comparable populations, and they would not drive nationalism in Scotland or England.
To extend this to Northern Ireland might be difficult as it would require more, smaller states.
The response to Covid-19 is causing a big decrease in sexual encounters. Some countries are taking advantage of this to knock down the spread of HIV.
The poverty of the underclass is the preexisting medical condition that makes a country more vulnerable to death from Covid-19.
The UAE may be a "true friend" of the Tories that rule Britain, but it is no friend of justice or human rights.
The friendship seems to be limited to the UAE's purchase of British arms.
US citizens: call on KEPCO not to invest in a coal-fired power plant in Vietnam.
Here's the personal message I sent.
I understand that KEPCO is considering investing in the Vung Ang 2 coal-fired generator.Viet Nam is far away from South Korea, but the disaster of global heating will affect just about everywhere on earth. Your country will not be spared. As a secondary point, coal is likely to be banned in a decade or two, so your investment will not pay.
So that the people who are young today can have a normal life span, I implore KEPCO to reject this plan, and all coal-related projects, and to invest in civilization's future by promoting renewable energy.
Yours sincerely,
*World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year — half of it by US.*
This parallels the situation with military spending overall: the US spends as much as the total of the next 7 biggest spenders.
*Why Are Working People Forced to Sacrifice for the Common Good But Not the Titans of Capitalism?*
Elon Musk is illegally reopening the Tesla factory, and plans to make legal threats against workers that won't take the risk.
Will officials have the guts to padlock the doors of the building?
The judge in Michael Flynn's case not yet agreed to dismiss the charges against him.
There are many links between Guaidó and the recent failed coup, and this has discredited him.
How much blood does the murderer-in-chief have on his hands? Models suggest at least 40,000 people among those who have already died, which will ultimately mount up to over 200,000 people.
Iceland reports that its contact-tracing app made little difference; human contact tracers were responsible for licking coronavirus.
The so-called "HEROES Act" is named for workers, but it includes lots of gush-up to big business.
It even permits use of aid to corporations for fossil fuel development.
I expect the plutocratist Democrats will present this as a "compromise" with Republicans, but they will treat it as a starting point to demand more harmful "compromise". Therefore, pre-compromise with them is a recipe getting screwed.
To deal with them, you must start from strong demands, drive a hard bargain, always be ready to walk away without a deal, and try to identify in advance how they will cheat.
Remember how the conman cheated the contractor that painted his building?
South Dakota has created a special kind of trust that is ideal for hiding wealth from anyone — including tax authorities, creditors, and spouses. Any kind of cheater can take advantage of them.
*Oregon's mega-dairies produce mega-pollution. Weak rules have allowed industrial mega-dairies to push family farmers off the land, pollute Oregon's environment, and threaten animal welfare, and the data shows it is only getting worse.*
*US Covid-19 Vaccine Data Should Be Shared With the Whole World — Not Locked Up.*
An academic study of nutrition reports that 1/9 of the world's children suffer from hunger. Of young children, under 5 years old, 1/4 are stunted from lack of food.
The worse figures for younger children make me wonder about the cause. Do parents feed younger children less? Is the situation getting worse as years pass?
George Monbiot: Education must aim to teach everyone the crucial basic understanding of physical world and the natural world, at the levels that make the environment for our lives.
Sea spray contains microplastics. It is possible that large quantities blow from the sea onto the land, and the plastic ends up in the soil.
Georgia's attorney general wants an investigation of the district attorneys that failed to charge the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.
I had a feeling they were still trying to avoid charging him when they talked about asking a grand jury.
Medical insurance companies want the US to pay their exorbitant premiums, rather than extend Medicare. Plutocratist Democrats were quick to oblige them.
I predict that Biden will be in favor of it.
Trillions of insects migrate long distances across Europe every spring. Some carry pollen from plants in the Middle East to plants in England or Western Europe.
*Brazil's innovative domestic violence centre.*
The cracking company NSO says that its software is used by governments against terrorists and "criminals". Citizen Lab demonstrates how many governments use it against whoever criticizes them.
Labeling dissidents as "terrorists" is standard practice — and many governments define dissent as a crime.
*The race for a vaccine: how the bully's 'America First' approach slows the global search.*
The TSA is hoarding medical-quality face masks which it does not even need to use. Meanwhile, medical personnel can't get enough of them.
The EU has ruled that consent for tracking (including cookies) has to be given with an unambiguous voluntary assent — "scrolling implies consent" does not qualify.
This is clearly the right decision about interpreting the GDPR, but it doesn't addresses the weak points of the GDPR. Basically, it is too easy for practical pressure to convince people to "voluntarily" accept collection of data that should not be collected at all.
When non-Chinese use WeChat, it doesn't censor them (yet). But it studies their communications with AI to learn about how to censor Chinese more thoroughly.
Advocating a job guarantee for every person who is fit to work and wants to work.
*Big Tech After the Coronavirus: All Power, No Accountability?*
One way to keep the GAFAM from having power over you is not to allow them to find out who you are. Don't have accounts on their sites. If you use them anonymously, block their Javascript (which probably fingerprints browsers to track people, and contact them through Tor.
But we can't defeat them by protecting ourselves individually. We need to organize to defeat them and take away their power.
*In Tibet, it’s a crime to even talk about the value of mother-tongue education.*
Vicious as the US is sometimes today, China is worse. It is treating Tibetans now the way the US treated indigenous people before I was born.
*The End of US Empire: Covid-19 Exposes Once-Great Superpower as Epic Failure.*
Massachusetts voters: sign the ballot petition for to put the Ranked Choice Voting initiative on the ballot for November.
To do this, print a copy of the ballot petition, fill in the name of your city or town in one of the slots for it, write your signature in one of the signature lines with your address to the right of it, then mail it to
Ranked Choice VotingThe ballot petition can be found in https://stallman.org/mass-ranked-choice.pdf.
C/O Jim Henderson
38 Brandymeade Circle
Stow, MA 01175
Your letter needs to arrive there by June 12 in order for them to deliver the petition paper on time.
Only registered Massachusetts voters can sign. Multiple people can sign the same petition paper provided they are registered in the same Massachusetts city or town.
Please forward or repost this announcement in any appropriate place where Massachusetts voters might see it.
Republicans want to give Americans immediate support — taken out of their future Social Security payments.
For corporations, by contrast, they have offered support at the treasury's expense.
Republican Senator Alexander poured out money to corporations and rich people, but now he says that "there's not enough money" to give anything to the poor. Why didn't he tell the rich people and corporations that?
Their actions make sense, if you assume that non-rich human beings are expendable, while immortal corporations have intrinsic value.
Individuals and families living in boats, sailing to or in other countries, are being forced to undertake long ocean voyages which they and their boats can't do safely, often lacking food and supplies.
I am surprised by this knee-jerk rigid cruelty on the part of so many countries. I'd expect it from the conman.
Reasons not to buy from Ticketmaster.
In March 1993, the FSF received the following letter, which I think is worth sharing, along with the response that I sent.
New french pun.
A few weeks ago, a Texas official called for sacrificing old people and people with medical conditions for the sake of profit. I think Texas Republicans they have quietly decided to >do exactly that.
There is evidence that nonwhites are much more likely to be killed by Covid-19. I expect those officials are racist and regard the partially-selective killing of those minorities as a secondary benefit.
The bully's push to imprison unauthorized immigrants just because he can is responsible for causing many of them to catch Covid-19, and some fraction of them to die.
The US government is responsible for protecting the health of prisoners, even prisoners who have been convicted of a crime (which most imprisoned unauthorized immigrants have not been). But, as repeated incidents have shown, prison thugs systematically disregard prisoners' reports of being sick or injured.
The US government plans to buy the bonds issues by large corporations, and a lot of this benefit will go to planet roasters.
*[The slaughterer] is making America an obstacle in the global fight against Covid-19.
The Labour Party, now without Corbyn as leader, has proposed inadequate measures to help tenants who have lost their income.
Wuhan found some new cases of Covid-19 after around a month of having none. Now the city plans to test everyone for the virus — again.
*Cargo ship sailors press-ganged into keeping the world's trade afloat.*
They can't get off the ship, even for emergency medical treatment, and they are forced to keep working though exhausted, which makes them accident-prone.
The saboteur-in-chief has destroyed environmental protections across the board. It would take a lot of work to reverse those changes one by one through administrative procedures.
We can't assume a Democratic president will even try. I don't expect Biden would try.
But if we had a government of progressives, they could pass a law to reverse all rule changes made by the saboteurs, and restore all undermined rule making processes to the point at which they were sabotaged.
*Soaring drug prices could bar access to future coronavirus treatments.*
Most countries won't be as bad as the US.
Hong Kong's repression will extend to modifying education to teach submission and cover up history.
*Indian chemical factory behind deadly gas leak was operating illegally*, without environmental permits.
New Jersey prison thugs moved a prisoner suffering apparently from Covid-19 from the infirmary to a shower that they locked her into.
After a little while she passed out, then died.
Pence and the numskull oppose the precautions people take against Covid-19, and people they work with are getting sick.
Is this misguided courage, or is it idiocy?
Greg Palast reports on corruption by Mnuchin, corruption by the Koch brothers, and corruption by the conman, as well as others.
*Some Medieval Towns Handled Plagues Better Than Trump's Unequal, Rundown America.*
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them not to reauthorize PAT RIOT Act surveillance. The more surveillance power we eliminate, the better.
A mask company in the US offered to make millions of high-grade masks for the government on Jan 23. The Department of Harm and Human Suffering, as it is now, did not accept the offer.
Exporting hydrogen, or steel made by smelting iron with hydrogen, could give Australia an export that doesn't release greenhouse gases.
How deregulation and plutocratist policies created today's vulnerable US food system.
The New Deal included measures to protect family farms from the market effects of a bumper harvest. It doesn't surprise me that a Republican, Nixon, started getting rid of them.
Yacoub Rabi's wife was murdered by Israeli terrorists. He will join other Palestinians, and Israelis, in a memorial ceremony for her and others who have been killed by terrorists in Israel and Palestine.
If Israel "annexes" Palestinian territory where farms are, it will make that an excuse to steal many Palestinians' land.
The reaction to "annexation" could be a disaster for Israel, just as the "annexation" itself would be a disaster for Palestine.
Finland reports that its experiment with a universal basic income (for 500 people chosen at random) was a success: it made their lives better and reduced the frequency of various kinds of problems. It did not lead people to choose not to work.
This could be a good way to help people survive the depression now starting and shorten it.
With almost 1/5 of American children not getting enough food, the US needs this urgently. I suppose plutocrats relish the idea of stunting poor people's children through malnutrition, because the effects will reduce their capacity, when adults, to oppose plutocracy, and provide an excuse to dehumanize them.
Rural states in the US are eliminating the practices meant to slow the spread of Covid-19, and this is leading to an increase in cases.
Rural areas in the US have hardly any hospitals left, and the people there can't afford them anyway. Those states tend to be controlled by Republicans, who refuse to help sick poor people (they were supposed to avoid being poor). Thus, people there who develop a severe case are likely to die.
*It is time to create a European republic.*
The UK is considering imposing a 14-day quarantine on people who enter the country. Businesses object.
Is such a quarantine useful?
Imposing quarantine on people entering your country makes rational sense for reducing the spread of Covid-19 in two situations, as far as I can see.
Outside of these two situations, quarantining people for entering the country is a pointless nuisance that serves only to help politicians scapegoat foreigners. Maybe that is why Bogus Johnson wants to do it.
Erdoğan has canceled last year's local election defeats by kicking out opposition party elected officials and appointing unelected replacements.
After crushing opposition with repression, there is no one he can rationally blame now. But he will blame Gülen, rational or not.
How the plutocratist idea of the state set up the US and UK to tie themselves in knots when Covid-19 came along.
Senator Warren and Rep. Khanna have proposed an Essential Workers Bill of Rights.
*The highest rates of Covid-19 casualties are in countries run by know-nothing populists.*
The writer cites the US and the UK, but Brazil and India also belong on the list.
Why weren't Ahmaud Arbery's killers arrested and prosecuted promptly? They lied about what happened, and officials treated those lies as a reason to leave them alone.
Why did the video change this? This article argues that the video made Americans recognize Arbery's humanity.
That may be true, but it did something else as well. It made the falsehood of the lies so obvious that even officials who tried to endorse them couldn't defend them.
Some of us know that thugs lie, that a strained claim made by a thug is not to be trusted. We respond, "Oh, don't give me that rubbish!" But people with right-wing values bend over backwards to believe thugs. (That is what enables thugs to get away with "testilying", as they call it.)
Dehumanizing blacks can be part of why they do so.
US citizens: support the constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not inherently entitled to human rights. https://www.movetoamend.org/motion.
*Let's stop romanticizing nature. So much of our life depends on defying it.*
The former mayor of Philadelphia wants the city to join him in apologizing for dropping bombs on the Move cooperative in 1985.
That bombing killed 11 people. No one was prosecuted for it.
Pakistan has hired some unemployed laborers to plant trees.
This is a sort of miniature Green New Deal. The agency which is handling this has been planting trees for years, and has specific plans for the trees; this suggests that perhaps the operation has been well planned and the trees might actually grow.
However, I wonder why it is necessary to plant trees in an area which is already forested. Shouldn't the existing trees be able to reproduce without human help? If they can't, what's stopping them?
*GOP policies aren't "mistaken." They're a conscious waste of lives for deceitful purposes.*
With 70% of Americans supporting Medicare for All, Biden's opposition to it measures how firmly attached he is to the profits of the medical industry.
The Lord of the Flies is fiction, but a real group of 6 boys got shipwrecked on a deserted island. They cooperated and took good care of each other for over a year, until someone rescued them.
Some US states are reopening businesses but not prepared to handle the consequences. Nebraska is already seeing an increase in new cases.
Extreme distancing practices could in principle eliminate transmission, if people follow the practices very carefully until there are no new cases, and a few weeks longer. But that takes a lot longer than we have practiced them in the US, and we are nowhere near having no new cases.
What purpose can it serve to strict rules and drop them after two months? It can buy time to prepare to use another approach. For instance, to test lots of people and do contact tracing, which need not be automated. South Korea and Taiwan did it just by talking with people.
However, the US has failed to use the time by preparing for that. Or rather, the mass murderer decided not to prepare. The US is not ready to let normal activity reopen.
I hope some states are ready. I hope Massachusetts will be ready soon.
*[Right-wing] extremists are using the pandemic to promote themselves as supporters of the community and spread fake information.*
The world has already begun experiencing short, local bouts of fatal weather.
Fatal weather will kill any unprotected human after a certain time.
These bouts did not last long enough to kill. But the frequency of them has doubled since 1979, and eventually they will last long enough to kill.
The Australian government has ceased studying threats that could cause extinction of native species.
That government's general policy is to help business wipe out species, especially by causing global heating, so it probably would rather people not notice.
Australia's government also wants to reform the system to provide investment for "clean energy" so that it can invest in fossil fuels.
Biden's campaign focuses on showing empathy.
For me, empathy is as empathy does. Does he empathize with Americans enough to push for Medicare for all? Does he empathize with American children's future enough to push for the Green New Deal? If he does, he should show us now; then I might vote for him.
After nurses at NYC's Lincoln Hospital spoke to a camera about the policies and practices they blamed for the death of their former head nurse, who died in that hospital. The hospital is investigating one of them for "releasing patient data" about the deceased — thus threatening her with possible criminal charges.
A bill to "protect privacy" when businesses use digital technology to track workers, visitors and even customers.
Economically concentrated factory farming mistreats the factory workers as well as the farmers, and leads to unreliable food supply. This article calls on the governor of Wisconsin to change it.
The article contains a minor error: it says "loosing", which means "letting loose", when it meant "losing". This doesn't affect the article's point; I mention it only to help others avoid it.
*Coronavirus could 'smoulder' in Africa for several years, WHO warns.*
This is if possible vaccines or cures are put off limits by the globally centralized medicine production system with its patents, facilitated by the WTO.
Goudreau, the leader of the private commando raid to capture Maduro, received a promise from one of Guaidó's lieutenants of a big payoff if he succeeded, and working funds in advance.
The latter eventually broke off the deal because of doubts about Goudreau's competence, but that doesn't alter the fact that Guaidó sought to stage a commando raid to capture Maduro and helped to set it up.
Goudreau and the conman both say the US had no direct involvement. We don't have direct evidence that there was any, but we also don't know there wasn't.
However, indirect involvement there certainly was. Goudreau kept on with the plan hoping to get a 15-million-dollar bounty from the US government for capturing Maduro. Even without any other support from the US, that bounty makes the US co-responsible for the attack.
Hundreds of thousands of families in Britain face eviction in June. The Tories propose not to protect them.
Similar problems are developing in many US states, whose temporary protection orders may or may not be extended.
Chile's right-wing President Piñera has appointed a minister who defends Pinochet's murderous dictatorship.
Scientists now predict over one meter of global sea level rise by 2100.
I expect more because of various not-yet-discovered positive feedbacks. Note also on the US Atlantic Coast other factors are adding to the amount of rise in sea level.
Attorney General Barr has dropped the case against Michael Flynn even after Flynn pled guilty.
Barr prosecute and releases as the corrupter-in-chief orders.
Bangladeshi journalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol was arrested for posting on the internet, then held incommunicado for two months by Bangladeshi thugs.
They did not kill him, but prison could do so.
The Department of Harassment and Suffering may do something good for a change. It plans to warn states against internet voting.
The Pentagon is learning from the bullshitter, claiming that its bombing raids all around the world killed zero civilians
The bullshitter has showed that there is no need to stick to plausible lies if you are willing to spit directly on the truth.
*Republicans Are Using the Coronavirus Crisis to Win Long-Desired Bank Deregulation, Raising Potential for Bank Failures.*
Speculating about how Covid-19 will affect transportation.
I expect we will eliminate Covid-19 one way or another within a year. There is no need to expect that fear will deter use of mass transit forever.
Whistleblower Richard Bright reports on how his boss ridiculed and rejected his proposed plans to prepare enough masks for the US to cope with Covid-19.
His whistleblower complaint received initial approval, which is supposed to mean that he gets to stay in his old job.
I expect that the corrupter will fire the people in charge of the whistleblower office until they change their views. He aims to make every official slavishly follow his orders, no matter how corrupt those orders may be.
The CDC developed detailed advice about how to relax stay-home guidance step by step. The saboteur in chief decided to keep it secret.
The UK government censored parts of a comparable report made by the Sage committee.
The men who killed Ahmaud Arbery have been charged with murder.
I see the prosecutor did not wait for a grand jury. I had a feeling
that that was intended to create a way
*Armed black citizens escort Michigan lawmaker to capitol after volatile
rightwing protest.*
The protesters come from a tradition of murder and they brandished
guns. One can hardly count on American racists to hold short of
actual murder.
The lunatic vetoed the don't-attack-Iran resolution again.
Why does Congress continue to pass these resolutions in the way that
lets the president veto them? It seems like an intentional choice to
posture rather than actually prevent war.
Everyone: support the Covid-19 global solidarity manifesto.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach Attorney General Barr.
US citizens: call on Congress to give Covid-19 relief to everyone living in the US — immigrants included.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to cosponsor the ReWIND Act,
which would stop handouts to fossil fuel companies.
Of the points listed, I disagree with one: I think it would be wise to
fill up the strategic petroleum reserve while prices are low. Indeed,
the US should maintain reserves of all sorts of supplies of which a
shortage could cause big trouble.
But this is less important than the other points, so I still support
the bill.
US citizens: call on American officials at various levels to end water
shutoffs and restore water service to everyone.
The lunatic wants to reduce Covid-19 testing in the US so as to hide
the magnitude of the epidemic.
I suspect he has been working behind the scenes to interfere with
testing. He wants to reopen the economy without the preparation
needed to stamp out Covid-19.
Google has abandoned its project to turn part of Toronto into a
surveillance-pervaded "smart" city.
For "smart", read "spy".
It may be possible to develop a way to benefit people with tracking
that does not identify them. But I would not trust the system not to
track people unless it is developed by people who hate tracking as
much as I do. If Google did it, I would expect Google to give itself
loopholes so that it could identify and follow people in practice.
In the UK, only well-paid people are allowed to bring a foreign spouse
or child to live with them. Many essential workers, including medical
personnel, are not paid enough to bring their spouses.
An article claims that the conman is willing to kill vulnerable Americans
so he can cause an economic boost that might help his reelection.
I suspect it is worse than that: this could be the latest Republican
voter-suppression scheme.
Vulnerable Americans are old, poor, and from marginalized demographic
groups. They are likely to vote Democratic. A Republican with no
scruples whatsoever, a Republican already trying to starve poor
people, would not hesitate to expose them to Covid-19 so some of them
won't vote.
The new head of the US Postal Service has one main qualification:
donating to the corrupter's campaign.
The conman wants to destroy the Postal Service, and now he has another
way to do it.
*With Patents on Coronavirus Medicines, International Drug Companies Will Decide Whether Brazilians Live or Die.*
Not just Brazilians — Americans, too. US government policies encourage and help pharma companies to gouge, and the only check on them is public condemnation.
Since important drugs are developed with public funds, there is no need to give businesses an "incentive" to fund such research. We should eliminate patents on medicines and medical treatments.
We may as well eliminate all patents.
*Millions predicted to develop tuberculosis as result of Covid-19 lockdown.*
*George W Bush paved the way for Trump –- to rehabilitate him is appalling.*
*‘Stop throwing us bare bones’: US union activism surges amid coronavirus.*
A pretend "privacy bill" is designed to reduce existing US privacy protections.
Destroying natural ecosystems pushes the animals that live in them to live in the spreading human habitats instead. Naturally we catch their diseases.
*First Thing: The climate can't take a return to 'business as usual'.*
*UK contact-tracing app could fall foul of privacy law, government told.*
However, the demands mentioned in the article are fundamentally insufficient, because they focus on limiting use of the data once the state collects it. That is too late in the system for privacy to be protected there.
Once data are collected, they will be misused. The only way to protect privacy is to limit what data is collected, and by what entity.
The UK's small presses and bookstores face elimination.
Logging in Australian forests has made them more susceptible to fire.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is questioning whether a state official
has the power to make it a crime to leave your house.
I am very glad that Massachusetts Governor Baker decided to advise
people to stay home — and close most businesses — but not order
people to stay home. I generally follow that advice, since I don't
want to take unnecessary risks. However, occasionally I go somewhere,
and I am not threatened with punishment for doing so.
Most often I go to a supermarket or drugstore, but I also sometimes go
to a restaurant for takeout, or a place that has a printer, or a bank
office. I go to supermarkets physically to buy food so that I can pay
cash and avoid giving any personal information about me.
My idea of "being safe" includes freedom and privacy, as well as
health.
(satire) *In an effort to slow the proliferation of fake news,
tech giant Facebook announced plans Wednesday to crack down on
misinformation by warning users who share links from Facebook.*
*The UK government's failure to respond swiftly and effectively to the
pandemic can and should be considered evil.*
Bogus Johnson, like the bullshitter, has been unwilling to take the disease fully seriously — even despite getting sick himself.
*Anti-Immigrant [Conman] Promotes Burning Fossil Fuels That Will Displace
Millions Toward U.S.*
A large hotel chain got around 70 million dollars in relief money
"for small businesses" by having each hotel apply.
Mouth-foaming right-wing Governor Abbott of Texas privately admitted
that "reopening the economy" would spread Covid-19.
The people who get sick, and the fraction that die, will mainly
consist of poor people, and they don't matter to a Republican except to
stop them from voting.
The bully publicly admits that this will happen, but says it is ok
because "people are dying the other way too."
It is true that poor people are dying from poverty in the US, but
that is something we could easily fix, if only the Republicans
permitted it.
The US military continues to deny most of the civilian casualties caused
by its worldwide bombing campaigns. Even specific instances supported
by eyewitness testimony.
It takes hardly an effort to rubber-stamp them as "not credible".
Governor Cuomo has asked two software billionaires to help him
"reimagine" public school.
One of them got rich from user-subjugating
nonfree software, the other from surveillance capitalism by online
dis-services.
We can imagine what injustices they will push on New York State public
schools. And it isn't even a good education.
In the case of Bill Gates,
we don't need to imagine. His foundation pressured the US to impose
excruciating high-stakes tests, so that the whole school year is
aimed at them.
He offers so much money as grants for research on education that hardly
anyone in the field dares to express doubts about his stance.
*Brazil using coronavirus to cover up assaults on Amazon, warn activists.*
*The largest hospital corporation in America, HCA Healthcare, is using
the coronavirus pandemic to delay and undermine a union election for
1,600 nurses in North Carolina.*
We should prohibit for-profit hospitals. The aim for profit conflicts
with the mission of a hospital.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Justin Walker as US judge.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Faux News to stop spreading COVID-19 disinformation.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate Jared Kushner's hoard of coronavirus protection supplies.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on your Congresscritter to pass the Essential Workers Bill of Rights.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call please spread the word!
US citizens, call on elected officials: After the pandemic, we must rebuild our economy by investing in green and resilient infrastructure.
US citizens: call on the U.S. Patent Office and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) make treatments for COVID-19 immediately free, accessible, and affordable around the world.
*Ohio Government Invites Employers to Secretly Report "Work Refusal" Due to
Coronavirus.*
*New Jersey's Cartoonishly Corrupt Democratic Party Is Finally Getting
Challenged.*
New York City will force homeless people out of the subway at night.
Since shelters are too dangerous, they will have to stay on the street.
US jails, prisons and deportation prisons are becoming hotspots for spreading
Covid-19 to surrounding communities.
The guards and other staff get infected and carry the disease
to the places where they live.
Mathematical modeling suggests jails could cause 100,000 to 200,000
more cases. That doesn't count the prisons.
Bogus Johnson says that no time is the right time to investigate
his inconsistency and incompetence. Especially not now.
What was to blame for the death of political prisoner Shady Habash in
an Egyptian prison?
It could have been that he drank hand-sanitizer by mistake.
It could have been that the thugs did not let a doctor treat him.
It could have been imprisoning him for criticizing the government.
I put the blame on the last two, because those were injustices anyway.
Just after Bolsonaro said the epidemic was decreasing, the death rate shot up.
The UK has released a centralized contact-tracing app and asks people
to trust it.
I don't trust what they say about "privacy" and "security" because I
think they are using twisted definitions of those two terms. I think
that when they say "privacy" they mean "privacy from all parties
except the UK government, and Apple or Google", and when they say
"security" they mean "security against all parties except the UK
government, and Apple or Google".
The UK government tracks all car travel, and has used this against
suspected nonviolent protesters to stop them from reaching a protest.
If its standard of "respecting privacy" permits that,
we must treat whatever it says about "privacy" as worthless.
Lobbyists are asking for a bailout.
*Judge reinstates New York's presidential primary after state cancelled it.*
The primary was going ahead, for other elected offices.
Only the voting for president was cancelled.
An ex-thug and his son shot and killed a black man who was jogging, in Georgia. They made up a story about suspecting him of a burglary, which he clearly had nothing to do with. Now a prosecutor is opening the possibility of prosecuting them.
It is rare for a grand jury not to indict when prosecutors want it to. However, if the prosecutor prefers no indictment, he will find that easy to achieve.
Pet cats that go outdoors don't have a large destructive effect on survival of bird species, overall. But one pet cat can devastate songbirds in its own neighborhood.
Please allow your neighbors the pleasure of birds around their homes — keep your cat indoors.
The bullshitter has intimidated Twitter, Youtube and Facebook to permitting medical disinformation about Covid-19 by saying it himself.
Under the shadow of his special privilege for evil, others get to repeat it.
To further protect his disinformation, the bullshitter has ordered Dr Fauci and the whole Coronavirus task force not to testify to Congress for the whole month.
He could repeat this order every month — why would he hesitate? Every little bit of sabotage helps his goal.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to oppose the attempt to reauthorize part of the PAT RIOT Act.
They should not only oppose the Republican amendments to increase government snooping, they should vote against reauthorization.
There are also proposed amendments offered so that the reauthorization would permit somewhat less snooping. It would be good to vote for those amendments in case the reauthorization passes, then vote against reauthorization.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call please spread the word!
New forms of activism, for protest and for aid, are being invented.
*The Moral and Strategic Calculus of Voting for Joe Biden to Defeat Trump — or Not.*
Conservationists are trying to protect mountain gorillas from catching Covid-19.
Whether they could be infected, we don't know, but it is best not to chance it.
*Conservation in crisis: ecotourism collapse threatens communities and wildlife.*
Long distance tourism helps destroy the global environment and this threatens many species. It also leads to local population growth, which tends to destroy habitats. In the long run what we need to do is restrain the human population so that we can let the threatened habitats spread.
*Poverty kills people: after coronavirus we can no longer ignore it.*
Prisoners in a US immigration jail protested the Lack of coronavirus precautions — so the guards attacked them with pepper spray.
How Brazil's laws make it easy to burn the forest.
The Tennessee Valley Authority plans to outsource engineers to foreign
companies, and has ordered the employees it is about to fire
to train the replacements.
Have some guts — refuse to train them, at least!
President Do-dirty cancelled the broadcast license of the Philippines' main
channel. It had broadcast criticism of him.
Physical distance requirements are wiping out ballot initiatives: they can't
get signatures to get on the ballot.
Massachusetts recently permitted digital signatures for ballot
initiatives.
The US government prioritizes added money for the military
over preventing or curing Covid-19.
This is because the military-industrial complex is calling the shots.
Medea Benjamin: Trump Must Choose Between a Global Ceasefire and
America's Long Lost Wars.
When Deborah Gatewood suspected she had Covid-19, she went to the
emergency room at Beaumont Hospital she went there four times, each
time being told "go home and rest". Then she died.
Why did she go to that hospital each time? Perhaps she assumed that,
as an employee of that hospital, she would get careful treatment.
Was she given substandard treatment? We can't tell for certain from the
information available. There was a shortage of testing capacity,
especially in March. Perhaps there were so many patients that others
who appeared to be sicker used up the testing capacity. Or perhaps not.
Was she the victim of racism? We can't prove that from the
information available, but I wouldn't be surprised. One of the ways
racism frequently manifests itself is as bias in making a judgment
call.
The US and UK are starting to negotiate a new business-supremacy treaty.
With plutocratist liars heading both governments, they will surely aim
to help businesses trample humans and to promote privatization. The
bully will try to create obstacles to Medicare for All and to weaken
all safety standards.
After writing that, I found out that is already part of the plan.
(satire) *[the bullshitter] publicly blamed China Monday for acting too late in coordinating the
U.S. Covid-19 response. "China knew our nation was facing a deadly
threat as early as January, and yet they did nothing to develop a plan
we could use to slow the spread of the virus."*
*Almost a fifth of UK homes with children go hungry in lockdown.*
New York thugs, enforcing physical distance requirements, treated
whites kindly and treated blacks with violence.
The mayor, to his credit, did not excuse the violence.
The US government is trying to ruin state governments while letting banks
do as they please.
States need to set up public banks ASAP, so they can save themselves through
those banks.
Tim Bray, a vice president at Amazon Web Services, quit because he could not
stand how Amazon treated its warehouse employees.
Australia has proposed a bill that would prohibit many of the abuses
that could make its contact-tracing app a direct threat.
This is a big step in the right direction. I think more is needed.
Also, even very firm prohibition on abuse of the data will not
convince me to install a nonfree program, or to carry a portable
phone.
India has published a tracking app, and seems to be planning to require
many people to carry it. It may even impose house arrest on anyone that
does not carry it.
The chief prosecutor of St Louis found evidence that Lamar Johnson was
not merely innocent of murder; he was framed by officials when a
previous prosecutor tried him. She calls for him to have a new trial,
but the state attorney general says that admitting the possibility of error
would undermine faith in the "justice" system.
If the system demonstrates it values truth and justice, it might
inspire some faith.
A former US soldier says that he led a raid against Venezuela on Sunday
whose aim was a coup d'état, and that the raid is still going on.
I suspect the US government organized the raid — that this was a clandestine
act of shooting war.
Now that people are accustomed to working over the internet, you can expect
companies to exploit them through it until forced to stop.
In 1970, construction workers in NYC attacked antiwar protesters, and
Nixon egged them on,
anticipating the conman today.
Meanwhile, right-wing extremists frequently killed black protesters
marching for equal rights.
*"It's being built on our blood": the true cost of Saudi Arabia’s $5bn
megacity.*
As Arabia becomes ever more arid, and importation of food ever more
costly and environment-damaging, people will eventually recognize it
was a dumb idea to build a new city there of all places — even aside
from the repression involved.
Redesigning public toilets to eliminate the danger of leaving germs on surfaces.
The article advocates installing "sensor taps" to turn the faucet on and off. This is a fine idea, if the details are done right. However, I find most sensor-controlled faucets hard to use. I can't determine exactly where the sensor is looking, so I have trouble turning the water on and off. The sinks don't bother to show where the sensor points: they expect it to be obvious, and it isn't.
Washing hands is not the only thing people do with sinks. For instance, I used to brush my teeth in a certain sink. When it was refitted with a sensor-controlled faucet, that became almost impossible.
Using apps for contact tracing has inherent flaws, and may not even be a workable solution.
Why we can't count on an antibody test to prove someone is not infected with Covid-19 (unless it is a very, very good antibody test).
The SEC helped Amazon bury a shareholder resolution calling for it to provide masks and other protective equipment to its workers.
With the numskull in charge, SEC now stands for Sucker-Exploiting Corporations.
An antisocialist tries to blame individual Americans for borrowing money beyond what they could pay back.
It is true that most Americans are acting unwisely, but remember that they are acting under the influence of a system that pressures and lures people to do that. For decades, banks have systematically sent credit cards to college students without being asked. Resisting the temptation to use the card calls for strength that they may never have developed.
So who is responsible for their unwise choice? Partly, they are, individually. But the banks have the bigger share of responsibility. The banks' responsibility is morally more grave, because they understand the situation and they choose to lead students into being exploited.
Meanwhile, it is not a few Americans that find themselves borrowing money for immediate survival. A just system would never do that to anyone.
The writer identifies perself as a "libertarian", but I think that is a misleading label and I won't use it myself.
Letting "efficient" monopolies control our food supply has produced a system so inflexible that farms are destroying crops while stores have no food to sell.
That's not to mention the harm that it does every year, paying farmers too little and helping to force mergers of farms.
We should not forget that a large part of the present crisis is because farms grow a lot of plants specifically to feed to animals.
Refuting important fallacies and errors in Michael Moore's film that attacks renewable energy.
The conman has dismissed another department's inspector general.
He has discovered that this is an effective way to get away with corruption.
Movie studios are starting to eliminate the practice of showing films exclusively in cinemas for a period of time. The danger is that, in the future, streaming dis-services may be the only authorized way to watch movies.
Why does this matter? Because movie theaters are the only authorized way to watch a film that doesn't oppress those who watch.
DVDs have DRM that we know how to break, but DVDs are no longer easily available. Bluray disks have DRM that we cannot break and therefore should never be used.
Netflix has DRM, and creates a dossier about each customer, as well as imposing an antisocial contract where you promise to be a jerk (by not sharing copies).
The only way nowadays that you can see a film, that doesn't oppress you, is to get an unauthorized copy.
*Corporate Looting as "Rescue Plan," Robber Barons as "Saviors."*
*It’s quite telling who counts as "the economy" and what measures are considered "necessary" or "adequate."*
Coal-based electric generation in Australia uses as much water as 5 million people. Water is scarce in Australia, so it can't afford this.
Ironically, burning that coal is making water more scare, in Australia and other generally arid areas.
How Salafi Arabia funded religious propaganda that converted Indonesian Muslims into an intolerant majority.
*The president and his allies are hiding the facts and pretending ‘freedom’ conquers all. As a result, more Americans will die.*
The entire state of Maine depends on tourism, and everyone in it is likely to be ruined.
Officially allowing people to visit the hotels and beaches would make no difference, since they wouldn't take the risk.
With the UK importing less oil, and arms sales to Salafi Arabia blocked, the UK has an opportunity to start cutting ties to that vicious regime.
A considerable fraction of the UK parliament have called for economic sanctions against Israel if it annexes Palestinian territory, saying it should be treated like Russia after its annexation of the Crimea.
To get society running as Covid-19 damps down, consider a universal basic income.
The UK says other countries are trying to "steal" research data pertaining to treating Covid-19. What in the world does that mean?
The article actually says "steal research", but research is an activity; there is no way to "steal" such a thing. The thing that can be stolen is data. But why would there be an occasion to do that, in research about Covid-19? Is the UK keeping the results of its research secret? That would be unconscionable!
Publish your data, UK, and then you won't have to worry about anyone's "stealing" it.
*Egyptian filmmaker who mocked president dies in Cairo jail.*
Egyptians have been arrested for playing songs that criticize al-Sisi, even in other countries.
Amnesty International: *Egyptian government using pandemic to tighten control of media and quash dissent.*
*Slashing US Meat Consumption by Half Could Cut Diet-Related Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 35%.*
The US should protect whistleblowers who reveal that businesses are failing to provide workers with protective gear so they don't get sick.
Many civil society groups call for WTO negotiations to stop negotiating new business-supremacy treaties.
What we really need is much more than that. The basic idea of business-supremacy treaties is to give businesses power over governments. That is inherently wrong.
The US should break up the four large meat-packing companies to protect the nation's food supply.
Plutocratist government has allowed many industries to become too concentrated. My tax proposal would pressure the large companies to split themselves up without the need for a lawsuit against each one.
Whereas the US has let 30 million workers become unemployed, European countries have subsidized workers' payrolls.
Mubarak Bala, president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was
seized (kidnapped?) and taken to a state in Nigeria ruled by
Islamist extremists who have imposed Islamic law.
He was arrested there, and is likely to be killed there — either
executed for "blasphemy" or simply murdered.
Islamic law is unjust and vicious, trampling many human rights.
We in the US are not in danger of having Islamic law imposed on us.
The threat here comes from unjust and vicious Christian law. A
Christian extremist cult has taken over the Republican Party and
is attacking our human rights
even as you read this. It threatens our lives, too.
The UK has a backlog of almost 4000 people who it deported, or threatened to deport, because they can't prove that their parents had a right to bring them to the UK as citizens before 1973.
This is referred to as the "Windrush scandal" in reference to the
Jamaicans who were invited to move to the UK to work, starting in 1948
on the HMT Windrush.
The UK government's attitude from the beginning has been, "We will
deport you unless you prove we can't." This despite having deleted
the database
that many of them would have needed to cite in order to prove that.
After mistreating people so much, the UK has an obligation to take a
forgiving attitude: if a person's case seems valid to the extent it
can be checked, say yes.
Right-wing protesters brought rifles to the Michigan state house
to intimidate opposition.
They were egged on by the numskull, and funded by
right-wing billionaires.
Keep in mind that the Michigan legislature is not democratically elected.
Republicans there practice gerrymandering and voter suppression so as to
"win" elections in despite of the voters.
The Department of Labor becomes the Department of Belabor, and
proposes to defend meat-packing businesses if they are sued because
employees caught Covid-19 at work.
The issue raises many subtle points. For instance, it is absurd to
demand the impossible, or the unknown. The most any business (or
person) can be expected to do is to make a sincere effort to protect
workers, based on what is known. If that is the best the employer can
do, to sue because it didn't do the impossible is unfair.
On the other hand, businesses are likely to try to twist the standards
to pass off cheaper, inadequate protection as enough. Republican
officials, seeking opportunities to help dooH niboR, may be eager to
validate such a sham.
If "the best we can do" is clearly insufficient, what then? Perhaps
the business should stay closed. Or perhaps those who are likely to
be at particular risk if they catch Covid-19 should stay home.
However, they can't just stay home if that implies penury. So I'd say
the government has these responsibilities.
PISSI is trying to exploit Covid-19 to attack and destabilize.
Much like right-wing extremists
and Hinduismists.
It seems to be a tendency of violent extremists to dehumanize people,
even many of their supporters. And not all their killings are done
with arms.
The judge presiding over Julian Assange's extradition hearing very reluctantly agreed to postpone it, because under current conditions there was no way he could meet with his lawyers to make his case.
California has reduced bail to 0 on many crimes, so that defendants don't
have to be in jail and get sick.
In November, Californians will vote on whether to permanently
eliminate the bail system.
There is suddenly no market for the corn that the US grows to
feed to cattle or produce ethanol.
Growing food plants to make fuel is a tremendous waste and is done only because
of foolish government subsidies.
We needs to eliminate those subsidies, as I've said for many years.
We should go back to the systems we used for decades after the New Deal,
which were designed to keep small farms going
Meanwhile, Americans need to eat less meat, for their own health
and the Earth's health.
There is less demand for the cattle, too — partly because meat plants
are closing because many of their staff are sick.
If the mountain of corn cannot be used, that waste will be small
compared to the waste of growing too much corn each year.
*All military operations across Libya have stopped [for Ramadan] in response to
international appeals.*
Australia's contact-tracing app sends quite a bit of personal data to
a centralized Amazon server. It lets users enter a pseudonym but demands
their real phone numbers, so in effect the centralized server will
know the identity of each user.
The description of the anonymous IDs that phones will exchange
is not clear to me. I can't tell whether this really protects users'
privacy or not. I would appreciate a pointer to a report by someone
who has studied the real details.
No matter how absurd a thing an important official might say, US media are obliged to pretend there is some possibility it is valid.
Poll Shows Tens of Millions of Americans Would Avoid Covid-19 Treatment Over Cost Fears.
I would too, if I had no insurance, or employer-provided junk insurance. If you let Covid-19 go untreated, there is a chance you will die from it; but if you get medical treatment that puts you in penury, your life will be ruined.
We should aim to eliminate coronavirus world-wide, not just in wealthy countries.
It Looks like the rich people that support Biden want him to choose a non-progressive woman as his running mate.
I don't expect him to disobey them. They are the master and he has never questioned that.
*UN Labor Agency Warns 1.6 Billion Workers at Risk of Having Their 'Livelihoods Destroyed' by Pandemic.*
Clearview AI, whose business consists of using lots of cameras to track a large fraction of US residents on the street, wants to use Covid-19 to legitimize this.
I think that what Clearview AI does now ought to be a crime. We should poss a law to make it a felony, so that the management of that company or any other company will go to prison if they do it.
Specifically, operation of a system capable of systematic face recognition in places where the public is allowed to go (including the parts of stores that are open to the public) should be prohibited, outside of very narrow limits on where it can operate and how.
*Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp: Stupid or Pseudostupid?*
1/4 of Italians are threatened with extreme poverty due to the Covid-19 shutdown. In the poorest areas, the mafia is giving them food and recruiting their support.
Modeling suggests that reduced vehicle traffic in Europe has avoided over 10,000 deaths in the past month, as well as a lot of sickness.
That is nowhere near as many deaths as were caused by Covid-19 in the same period.
UK prison thugs have a practice of punching prisoners for no reason except to intimidate them.
The groping accusation against Biden, contrasted with the rape and
groping accusations against the bully, lead to ironic responses from
Democrats and Republicans.
Each of the two men has done other things that are harmful on a mass
scale, far bigger than crimes against a few individuals. And will
probably do more of them if elected. But the Democratic Party, at
least, maybe still has a chance to nominate someone other than Biden.
Alas, I fear it would choose Bloomberg, who is basically still a
Republican.
Uber and Deliveroo are designed to operate like fast-growing weeds,
choking whatever sector they operate in, exploiting their workers, and
getting their payoffs from the last wave of investors before they go
pop.
For the sake of economic stability alone, I think it would be wise to
have regulations to hamper this sort of disruption scheme.
However, there's another nasty aspect to these businesses that the
article does not mention: surveillance. I don't need to decide
whether to boycott Uber (or Deliveroo), because before I reach that
point, I balk at handing over my name and address and at paying with
something other than cash.
Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal: *The pandemic has made the US
healthcare crisis far more dire. We must fix the system.*
PISSI is rebuilding its forces in Iraq, and is launching guerrilla attacks.
The numskull is directly responsible for this. If he had kept supporting
the Syrian Kurds of Rojava, they could have rooted out PISSI.
I think the numskull didn't want a full victory over PISSI. The
fight, for him, was an opportunity to tell a superhero story for
political ends. In superhero comics, a villain that dies is no use
any more. So they keep allowing villains to make comebacks. In the
same way, the numskull saved PISSI at the last minute so it could make
a comeback and give him a chance to tell more stories.
*At this perilous moment, the US and Iran need a military hotline more
than ever.*
The bully doesn't seek good relations with Iran, nor specific rational
concessions. And the same may be true of the Iranian extremists.
Vietnam eradicated Covid-19 by lots of testing, careful contact-tracing, and
strict quarantine.
As to the controversy about travel bans: if a country has few cases
and is working hard to block transmission, a ban on entering the
country makes sense because that pathway could bring in more cuss
than local transmission.
However, for a country in with many cases, and the majority come from
local transmission, to ban on entering the country is gratuitous
suffering.
Canada has banned some kinds of semiautomatic rifles
after an American-style massacre in which the killer used one.
*Coronavirus Has Mexico's Workers Pinned Between U.S. Business
Interests and Their President's Obsessive Austerity.*
*Medical Expert: Federal Jail Intentionally Destroying Medical Records and
Hiding Extent of Coronavirus Behind Bars.*
The International Energy Agency, normally a friend to fossil fuels,
predicts that use of fossil fuels for making electricity will soon
end permanently.
Hooray! But we still need to reduce emissions from transport (lots more
mass transit) and agriculture (eat less meat).
ICANN's board blocked the sale of the .org top level domain to a
company. If the sale had proceeded, the company would have been able
to gouge the domain owners without limit for renewal of their domains.
Many of these domain names might have disappeared, including this one.
The comments raise the good question: what allowed such a proposal
to come this close to being accepted, and how should ICANN change to
prevent it?
*We must recognize that there was an
affordable housing crisis before the pandemic and there will be one
after.*
Xiaomi phones report many actions the user takes — starting an app,
looking at a folder, visiting a web site, listening to a song. They
send identifying information too.
You are probably aware that lots of other nonfree programs and
disservices snoop on users. For instance, Spotify and other streaming
dis-services make a dossier about each user, and they make users
identify themselves to pay. Out, out, damned Spotify!
It is peculiar that Forbes exonerates the same wrongs when the
culprits are not Chinese — but we shouldn't make that mistake.
*Vice President Pence’s office threatened to retaliate against a
reporter who revealed that Pence’s office had told journalists they
would need masks for Pence’s visit to the Mayo Clinic…*
The Republican rule is, "You have no right to show the world what
we really do."
ALEC is organizing pressure for states to compel low-wage workers to
return to work.
Republicans are also organizing to make sure that, if they get sick, they
will get no treatment and their families will get no income.
Around the US, cities are removing the protections against corruption
and privatization of public schools.
US banks are asking for permission to harass debtors on the phone.
With an FCC now on the side against human beings, they might get
permission.
A data leak released data describing millions of car trips taken by Britons and recorded by government spy cameras.
This leak added a secondary danger (other parties know where you travel) to the primary danger (the state knows where you travel).
People in China who published copies of things Chinese people posted about Covid-19 earlier this year have been arrested.
I'm sure US Republicans would like to arrest scientists who preserved information about global heating research a couple of years ago.
*Study: 3.7 Million Frontline Health Workers Have Medical Problems That Raise Their Risk of Dying From COVID-19.*
Sanders proposes to cover all uninsured Americans with Medicare for the length of the the epidemic.
The bully's blockage of funds for the WHO will cause an 80% cut in support to hospitals there.
The suffering in Yemen is mainly due to the civil war, which the US prolongs by supporting the bombardment by Salafi Arabia.
AOC says, the fact that some US workers are paid less than unemployment benefits shows the need to increase workers' pay.
If the US increased the minimum wage to match (taking account of inflation) its previous level, it would surely exceed their unemployment benefits.
*Over 100 Economists Call on Congress to Take Bold Action to Stop Mass Layoffs.*
The head of the Arizona Republican Party called on anti-lockdown protesters to deceive the public by dressing up as medical workers.
For the Republican Party, truth is target 1.
*Supreme Court Affirms That No One Owns the Law.* And this includes annotations made by officials about how to interpret the law.
Studying DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) as a matter of forcing bad user interfaces, by looking at how users have complained about it.
The article's basic stance is to oppose DRM. Yet it is full of pro-DRM propaganda tropes, such as "Digital Rights Management" and the claim that it "protects copyrighted works", and that defeating it is "circumvention". Why repeat the propaganda for what you are trying to oppose?
I suppose the author used those terms bowing to the widespread perception that they are the "correct" terminology, and that other terminology would be seen as "incorrect". What a deep and broad advantage that gives to the perpetrators of DRM! To take away the power of this supposed rule of correct speech, we must refuse to follow it.
The paywalled paper that the author published studied the public's responses to the triennial invitation to argue for exceptions to part of the DMCA. These exceptions, when granted, are temporary (they last only three years) and incomplete (they legalize certain copying but don't legalize the device needed to do it), so this invitation is not a real opportunity to push for substantive change. It is simply a distraction.
Don't be distracted! Join the FSF in condemning DRM, and calling for repeal of the part of the DMCA that prohibits devices to break DRM. Why not phone your congresscritter's office now?
To fully eliminate the injustice of DRM, let's make DRM a felony.
US internet access companies have eliminated the data caps that they
claimed were necessary to keep their networks from crashing due to
heavy load. However, no such problem has occurred.
Perhaps that was just a fabricated excuse to charge more.
Some ventilator manufacturers have been pressured into publishing
their repair manuals.
We should not have to depend on companies to make concessions. To
reduce plastic waste, we need laws to require that manufacturers
design products to be repairable (and recyclable) — and to cooperate
in all ways with that repair and recycling.
The Mayo Clinic set an example of cowardice when it bowed down
to Pence and did not enforce its own safety rules.
The RSS, a violent organization for repression of non-Hindus,
is now being allowed to run checkpoints on the streets of India.
This puts them in an excellent position to launch more pogroms against
Muslims and other religious minorities. Naturally, Modi would be in
favor.
The Misquito tribe accuses Nicaragua's government of supporting colonists
who seize areas of their lands, and kill them.
The colonists practice illegal logging and mining, as well as deforestation
to run cattle.
It sounds much like the US in the 1800s.
*German prosecutors charge Neo-Nazi with murder of politician.*
The Tories have decided that inquests into the deaths of doctors
should not consider whether lack of protective equipment was a factor
in causing the deaths.
That reason appears plausible, but is based on an error. Indeed, an
inquest is not the place to judge a government policy as wise or
unwise, but investigating whether that policy played a role in causing
a particular death is part of the purpose of an inquest.
Facebook is suing a surveillance company that has cracked the WhatsApp
to spy on people including journalists and government officials.
It is laudable that Facebook works to stop others from snooping on its useds,
but that won't convince me to let Facebook snoop on me.
George Monbiot: we need a survival package, not a "stimulus package".
Governments must take control and manage polluting businesses to
reduce how much business they do.
*UN chief: don't use taxpayer money to save polluting industries.*
Plastic debris in the ocean interferes with hermit crabs' thinking about
choosing the better shell clothe itself in.
Presumably this is because of chemicals it releases into the water.
A giant fracking project in Argentina is close to cancellation.
Argentina has promised large subsidies for drilling there, which means
that most of the profit would go to the companies
and little to Argentina
or Argentines.
Some countries are making big efforts to help the homeless; others are
punishing them for being homeless. Meanwhile, businesses are
exploiting Covid-19 to make more people homeless.
Fundamentally, the large number of people with no home, or a cramped
home, is due to the combination of inequality (and its consequent
poverty), urbanization, and population growth. Urbanization is itself
the result of economic causes related to inequality.
An incinerator that is burning firefighting foam that contains PFAs is
not burning 100% of those chemicals. Some have been find in soil and
water in the vicinity of the incinerator.
This is a matter of concern even for small quantities, since they don't
naturally decay at all.
The US commission on international religious freedom asked to list India
as one of the "countries of particular concern"
due to Modi's repression
of Muslims.
The overload of the NHS, and other secondary effects, could cause around 18,000
additional deaths from cancer in the UK over the next 12 months.
These are people who have cancer anyway, but the situation will impede their
treatment.
The new US government program of handouts for the biggest companies
has no conditions of honesty or decency. Nothing would stop them from
handing the money straight to the CEO, except that the other
stockholders might demand a cut.
Only 5% of people imprisoned for crimes described as terrorist
commit another such crime afterward.
This suggests to me that it is safe to release most of them so they
don't catch and spread Covid-19 in prison. But also that a special
kind of sentence might be invented that would serve in place of prison
and achieve the same results.
In reaction to Covid-19, hospitals and individuals are taking a lot more
antibiotics.
This will build resistance, and few new antibiotics are being
developed. Our neoliberal governments have left the decisions in the
hands of business, which mostly considers antibiotics not profitable.
The Mayo Clinic allowed Pence to visit and even meet with a patient
without as mask.
His argument, that he is tested "regularly" for the coronavirus and
therefore knows he can't transmit virus to anyone else, is not absurd.
However, we don't know how frequently "regularly" is. If it is once a
week, he might become infected and start transmitting virus between
tests.
In any case, there was no reason for the hospital to make an exception
for him. I expect the hospital management were afraid of reprisals
if they did not.
An app for parole monitoring is so buggy that it is very hard for
people to keep the requirements. They live in fear of being
imprisoned again because something did not work. It needlessly drains
the battery, and when the battery runs dry at the wrong time, the user
can be imprisoned for that. In addition, it can listen through the
phone at any time.
I'd choose an ankle bracelet if I had the choice. However, those
don't work in the smooth way you might imagine. Parolees using ankle
monitors have to pay for them, also,
thought they
don't also have to pay hundreds of dollars at the start to buy one.
And ankle bracelets too are unreliable, and run out of charge too often,
which puts the user in danger of being imprisoned or missing work.
Every portable phone, whether smart of not, can be converted into a
full-time listening device. Let's learn to think of every portable
phone as a form of virtual prison.
How China, with foreign cooperation, quashed an outbreak of plague in 1911.
Then doctors from around the world met to study which methods were effective.
Around 20 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance, but a study suggests roughly 50% more are unemployed but have been blocked or discouraged from doing this.
*Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-N.Y.) announced a new joint proposal on Tuesday to halt mergers and acquisitions during the coronavirus pandemic.*
I agree, but why allow them again afterwards?
Republicans want to give businesses complete immunity for imposing working conditions that favor transmission of Covid-19.
This goes with a plan to keep meat-packing plants open without giving the workers protective gear.
It would be unreasonable, perhaps even harmful, to demand too much. If not enough protective gear is available made, when medical personnel have trouble getting them, we must not blame an employer for not getting some — or insist it outbid the hospitals for them. Some companies might get gear by bribing the conman, and medical personnel might get sick as a result.
However, it would be a mistake to jump to the opposite extreme. For instance, if unsophisticated masks will prevent most transmission in the work place, companies must get them and provide them. There is no sense in giving businesses license to be totally careless with employees' health.
US unions attack the business bailouts for supporting businesses as those businesses shaft workers.
The New York State Democratic Party cancelled its presidential primary on the grounds that all the candidates except Biden have withdrawn. The election will be held anyway, since it includes other offices as well.
The Sanders campaign objected to this move, since it could reduce the turnout of progressives for other candidates.
I hope progressives understand the importance of replacing right-wing Democrats, and vote as if their lives depend on it — since they will.
Democrats are coming to understand the danger of Republican voter suppression. However, anything that artificially discourages progressive voters from voting will have a similar effect.
Large parts of the US economy cannot recover as long as people are worried about catching Covid-19. Even if US states allow them to reopen, not many people will make use of them.
The article mentions a restaurant reservation service called OpenTable. I've read it gouges restaurants, so that overall they are worse off due to its existence, but no restaurant can afford to reject it while its competitors don't.
That is a reason to boycott OpenTable, but the strongest reason not to do business with it is that it identifies customers and feeds the surveillance industry. Once I stepped into an interesting-looking restaurant and learned that the only way to dine there was to reserve via OpenTable. Which implied that I would never dine there.
When I make a restaurant reservation, I do not identify myself in a way that a database could track. Usually I give a false name — which will not alter how much I pay for the meal. And I pay only in cash.
The Saboteur of Agriculture wants to allow chicken processors to speed up their inspections. Basically, to cut corners and spread more pathogens.
Similar things have already been done with pork processing.
*Vilnius gives public space to bars and cafes to allow physical distancing during lockdown.*
Companies that make plastic are asking the US government for a billion dollars.
The right thing to do is extract concessions to the environment in exchange for saving a part of the industry with a smaller amount of plastic going forward.
Michael Moore has fallen for and repeated planet roaster disinformation. It is sad.
Criticize the conman for the wrongs he does, but not for avoiding the war in Vietnam. The war was evil, and the draft was evil.
Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx plan to strike on May 1.
The social change of keeping distant from other people can affect how much we trust each other, or empathize with each other, and it could be hard to reverse.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call on Massachusetts lawmakers to protect voting rights, by mail or in person, for this year's election.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect farm workers from Covid-19.
America's food depends on that, as well as the farm workers themselves.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call please spread the word!
Immigrants crowded up in US immigration jails are trying to tell us about their vulnerability to Covid-19. The deportation thugs sometimes punish them to shut them up.
NIH official Rick Bright says he believes he was taken out of his official role because he defended making government decisions based on science. In particular, he rejected the unsubstantiated use of chloroquine to treat Covid-19.
The saboteur in chief is against science because he can't bribe it.
*COVID-19 is so dangerous to food security because the global supply chain was insecure to begin with.*
*COVID-19 Sweeping Through Ranks of US Immigrant Farmworkers and Meatpackers.*
Texas has backed down on its scheme to ban abortion by calling it a "nonessential" procedure.
I hope the women who were blocked from getting abortions can get it done now, but some of them might have been pushed past the 3-month limit, up to which they don't need to offer justification.
The US Department of Agriculture dawdled for a month before buying surplus produce. Farmers were ruined along with vegetables while the agency disregarded its mission.
A small company that does data collection for the conman's campaign got a suspiciously large small business loan, suspiciously fast.
New Zealand has nearly eliminated Covid-19 and will start gradually reopening many kinds of businesses.
The lesson here is that a lockdown can be effective, if it is complete enough to stop nearly all transmission and thus eliminate the need for the lockdown.
New York City will exclude cars from many streets.
I am eager to see which streets I am familiar with will be included.
The bullshitter has gone beyond fake news to publishing a deepfake
video about Biden.
I fear that many people will treat whatever is depicted there as fact
even if they see a notice that it isn't.
(satire) *[The bully] publicly accused New York health officials Monday of
inflating the state’s Covid-19 mortality rate by including African
Americans in their calculations of the total dead.*
*Without 'Transformative Change' to Global Economic Systems, Humans Risk
Causing More Deadly Pandemics.*
One thing we need to change is the operation of factory farms for meat.
Agribusiness demands reducing the controls against disease, which
means moving in the wrong direction. Thus, the US under the saboteur
is cutting back on meat inspection,
which is crazy, since it will promote the spread of antibiotic resistance.
You don't need to have any preexisting conditions to die from
resistant bacteria.
*'Halt This Madness': US Drove Last Year's Over $1.9 Trillion in Global
Military Spending.*
Poland says that people can trust its centralized quarantine tracker
because the data will be saved for "only" six years and only the Polish
government will have access to it.
That doesn't make it very trustworthy.
On the one hand, 14 days of location tracking data, which on each
occasion reports that you are in the same place (at home), is nothing
to worry about in itself. If I were in quarantine for a few weeks,
infected with coronavirus, I would not object to being tracked for
that period.
I would not let them do it with a portable phone, though, because
that device can also listen and transmit at any time, and it can be
tracked by others aside from the quarantine authority. I would not
install a nonfree program on my computer to do it, either.
I would invite the government to lend me a portable phone with a
broken microphone for the duration of my quarantine. Then I would
uncover its camera when agents call me through it. I would not care
what software they have installed on their phone while I borrow it, as
long as it could not do anything except the job it is officially
supposed to do. If they wanted to hear my voice as well, they could
call my landline at the same time.
On the other hand, the general defeatist attitude in the quotation at
the end, "They know all about us, so why resist their systems to know
all about us," is a very important mistake. All we need, to force
systems to be redesigned so that "they" won't "know all about us", is
to throw off the defeatism and start demanding they do so.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose bailouts for weapons
companies and military contractors. That includes mercenaries — the US army
should stop hiring mercenaries.
*Hamas arrests Gaza peace activists for … chat with Israelis.*
*Meteorologists say 2020 on course to be hottest year since records began.*
Global heating is continuing steadily.
*Nonvoters Are Not Privileged. They Are Disproportionately Lower-Income,
Non-White and Dissatisfied With The Two Parties.*
*Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top
scientists.*
Even if you are willing to be tracked by online sales, you can help the
world by boycotting Amazon in particular.
Even if the people deciding a country's response to Covid-19 are smart and of good will, they are vulnerable to groupthink.
This presents an interesting comparison for today's Republicans: those
of the 1970s.
The UK said it would releases some prisoners so they would be less
exposed to coronavirus. And it did release some — 33 of them.
The Acting King of Salafi Arabia announced that it will no longer
sentence minors to death.
Whether unofficial dismemberment will be limited to adults is not clear.
Covid-19 could wipe out many endangered languages that are spoken only
by a few old people, most often poor.
Employer-paid medical coverage causes a many kinds of bureaucratic disasters because each company has its own list of allowed doctors and hospitals.
The copyright industry is trying to use Covid-19 as an excuse to impose robotic copyright filters in the US, similar to the devastating directive that was passed by the EU a year ago.
It is unfortunate that the article uses the confused term "intellectual property" as if it referred to something meaningful. It is a bogus overgeneralization which is lumps together various unrelated laws.
This issue is about one specific law: copyright. "Copyright" refers to a meaningful topic. "Intellectual property" does not.
I think it is also unfortunate that the article speaks of "monetizing".
The "reopen" campaign is an astroturf campaign; its web sites were registered by well-funded right-wing groups.
*Texas Attorney General's Office Says It Can Toss People In Jail For Suggesting Coronavirus Fears Are A Legit Reason To Vote From Home.*
Evidence including DNA sequences and sequences of events makes it pretty clear that the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain evolved in animals and did not escape from a virology lab.
Everyone: call on the European Investment Bank to close your fossil finance loopholes and fund a just COVID-19 recovery.
Amnesty International…demanded
online retail giant Amazon start prioritizing the health and safety of
its workers around the planet.
This one injustice is a small part of the injustice Amazon does.
Let's refuse to give it any money.
Millions of Americans who have lost their jobs have been unable to
file claims for unemployment pay.
Insect populations overall have declined by 25% in the past 30 years.
The saboteur in chief set up a panel to recommend ways to promote
nuclear power. Its recommendations would throw loads of money into
radioactive waste.
A Reagan-like Republican is running in the Democratic primary against
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
They can't imagine her voters would actually prefer such a candidate.
Are they some sort of trickery?
Various countries are increasing the level of surveillance to react to
Covid-19, but that may be only the occasion for long-prepared plans.
Covid-19 has disrupted measles vaccination. Children could die from
that.
Hungary's oppressive ID requirements — one must show government ID
even to buy a bus pass or pick up a parcel — are being used to
repress trans people.
Bogus Johnson sent his chief political heavy to participate in
supposedly independent scientific advisory meetings.
The crisis caused by Covid-19 may pulverize the right-wing assumption
that the state must not help people. But it can also encourage state
actions to hurt people.
We Are Ruled By Wizards —
bending reality is as simple as bending people's perception of reality.
Under Cover of Pandemic, Trump's NLRB Moves to Make Unionizing 'Nearly
Impossible for Workers'.
[The saboteur in chief] has been hesitant to invoke the Defense
Production Act for medical gear. But he's already used it hundreds of
thousands of times for weapons and bombs.
"Tea Party" Republicans undermined the US stockpile of N95 masks.
They pretend that no one could have guessed that the US would need
hundreds of millions of masks, but they didn't need to guess, only to
listen.
Their ideological opposition to making use of government to serve all of
society throws us into helpless dependence on the plutocrats that they serve.
We need to reclaim control of the state, so that it can do the many jobs
that only a state can do.
Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In.
I highly recommend Ted Chiang's book, Stories of Your Life and Others.
If you buy a copy, please pay cash only — don't let a business track
what you read. And especially don't get the commercial ebooks that
impose DRM and require you to promise to act like a jerk.
I bought a printed copy and paid cash.
Some companies that operate bug bounty programs for tech businesses
have been perverted into schemes to pay bug reporters to keep silent
— permanently.
The low price of oil has already made oil companies shut down many US
oil wells permanently, and a lot more will be shut down soon.
Bizarrely, the article does not mention that this will help
civilization survive. Why not? Why do the Guardian's editors
want business journalist that doesn't look beyond the effects
on the profit prospects of certain businesses.
*Coronavirus Hasn’t Stopped Jared Kushner’s Real Estate Empire from Hounding Tenants with Debt Collection, Eviction Lawsuits.*
*How To Tell Real News From Useless Narrative Fluff.*
Just as many people have begun foolishly giving companies lots of
their personal data, by buying things over the internet or paying in
non-anonymous ways, these companies have started giving lots of
customer personal data to the US government.
I say it is not enough just to survive Covid-19. We need to survive
with some privacy left. My policy is to refuse to let companies know
that I am the one buying.
*Leading US biologist Thomas Lovejoy says to stop future outbreaks we
need more respect for natural world.*
The argument that some vulnerable people depend on a wet market is not
strong enough sustain the conclusion that the market should stay open.
There are less dangerous ways to help those people.
The UK is prosecuting supporters of independence for Scotland, and
others who have reported on the trial of Alex Salmond, for publishing
information that could have helped people identify one of the
witnesses that testified for the prosecution. One of them is Craig
Murray.
I think there is more from him here.
Murray says that mainstream newspapers published more or less the same
information but were not prosecuted. He concludes that this is a
politically biased prosecution. He will not get a jury trial,
so he could be railroaded as Assange is being.
Alex Salmond was the leader of the Scottish National Party, which
advocated independence for Scotland (and still does). He was accused
of raping or groping women (I don't know the details), but the jury
rejected the charges.
I have no position on the issue of Scotland, but politically biased
prosecution is evil.
Sérgio Moro, Brazil's justice minister, has resigned.
Previously, as a judge, he participated in a corrupt scheme to jail Lula.
A business collects broken plastic fishing nets in Chile and recycles
them to make clothing.
A large fraction of the plastic floating in the oceans comes from
broken fishing nets,
so this could be quite useful if it scales up.
Unfortunately the oil glut may kill the market for the recycled plastic.
If you want to vote in November, check now that you are registered.
And you may have to do more than that.
However, it is an exaggeration to say we have 6.5 months to "save the planet",
because whatever happens in November, the president elected then won't try
to do it.
The US military and climate disaster feed each other.
Is there still "enough for everyone"? If that is true today, it won't be true ten years from now. If and when there are too many of us, the only humane and ethical remedy is to reduce births.
Racist bigotry is more prevalent in China than in the US.
In the US, many of us campaign against it.
*Small Business Rescue Money Flowing to Major Trump Donors, Disclosures Show.*
California opens some beaches, with restrictions to keep transmission of Covid-19 to a very low level.
This is a rational change, from zero-tolerance rigidity to a flexible approach.
Republicans are thinking of using the US Postal Service crisis as an opportunity to break its unions.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to demand that the head of the Pentagon answer questions about authorizing use of landmines.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call spread the word!
When Sérgio Moro resigned he revealed some illegal actions by Bolsonaro that could justify impeaching him. However, the military are now in control, and impeaching Bolsonaro would replace him with an ex-general who admires the military dictatorship. Not much better, but perhaps little worse.
I expect the US will work for military rule in Brazil.
Amazon has been caught cheating against companies that sell through Amazon, by using data about their sales to compete with them.
Due to a paywall, I cannot access the article that reported on this, and even if I saw a copy I would not post a reference to it. But I am confident that it would not have reported this without convincing evidence.
Edward Snowden warns Israel about the danger of using massive surveillance data to act against Covid-19.
Palestinians report that Israeli colonists attacked Palestinian farmers while Israeli soldiers encouraged them. A Palestinian tried to record this but one of the colonists stole per camera.
The human rights group B'tselem reports that these attacks have increased in April, now running more than one per day. They attack buildings, olive trees, cars, and persons, often destroying or damaging them. They have not killed people this month, but they have grievously wounded helpless people. They often carry guns, so they could easily kill many at any time.
Often Israel soldiers are present and attack the Palestinians out of sheer hatred.
*If Coronavirus Overwhelms Gaza, Israel Alone is to Blame.*
Israel will keep Gazans locked up in the prison which is Gaza, and shoot them if they try to flee.
US citizens: call on Congress to give Americans $2,000/month until employment returns to pre-COVID-19 levels.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word!
Another flaw in the the extremely flawed CARES Act: the small business loans are supposed to be forgiven later if used to keep staff on the payroll, but the loan contracts don't guarantee this forgiveness.
This will give banks an opportunity to cheat or harass those businesses later.
*[The conman] reportedly owes tens of millions to the Bank of China.* That bank is owned by the Chinese state.
If that is true, it means that China more or less owns the conman, unless he has amassed so much money through his corruption that he can pay back the loan now.
So, Mr Trump, have you repaid that loan yet?
*The Dutch government has announced measures including huge cuts to coal use, garden greening and limits on livestock herds as part of its plan to lower emissions to comply with a supreme court ruling.*
UN Secretary General Guterres warns that Covid-19 endangers human rights, threatening freedom (attacked by authoritarian governments) as well as other human needs.
Stiglitz warns that Republican policies are driving the US towards another great depression.
*South Carolina’s Republicans gutted public healthcare. Then the pandemic hit.*
*Warren Demands Investigation Into Trump's Coronavirus Response, Saying He Put 'Political Expediency' Before Public Health.*
The decrease in coal burning and mining in the US is the result of years of pressure from the public.
Congress should stop piling more and more money onto the bloated US military budget.
Computerized voting machines, in addition to making the election vulnerable to rigging, can potentially transmit Covid-19 from one voter to the next.
Rep. Shalala sold stocks and did not mention this on the required disclosure forms. She pleads ignorance of the disclosure laws. Natural that
(satire) *Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) assured Democratic House representatives Wednesday they don’t need to try being productive during the stressful pandemic.*
Washington State passed a law limiting government use of face recognition. The ACLU says the limits are not enough to avoid the danger.
It appears that the law does not apply to businesses, indeed to anyone other than government agencies. That makes the law inadequate, since it does nothing to limit the businesses, such as Safran that accumulate face recognition dossiers about everyone and sell access to these dossiers.
*COVID-19 ‘Liberate’ Groups Are the Same Ones Pushing Climate Denial.*
There is no activity more essential than protesting when necessary. But the thugs of Raleigh, North Carolina, say it is forbidden because it is "non-essential".
However, we should recognize that one of the ways Covid-19 threatens to do permanent harm is by allowing governments (including the US) and companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Zoom and others) to increase their levels of surveillance and control over people.
Ironically, even as government threatens us with repression, it is also a necessary platform for serving many vital needs, and the only tool we could use to keep the companies and plutocrats in check, and stop global heating before it destroys technological civilization.
This means we must first take control of our government, then use it to defeat the plutocratists. It's a devil of a situation, but it's that or serfdom.
We must not allow discrimination between protests based on what cause they advocate. If we permitted that, the plutocrats would ban protests against them.
"Every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010–2016" was developed using public research funds, according to the National Academy of Sciences. The NIH used to have a rule that drugs developed with public research funds had to be sold for a reasonable price, The plutocratist president, Bill Clinton, eliminated that rule.
Congress could restore that rule now with a law, if we replace the plutocratists in it.
Big Pharma says it needs monopolies to get the money to pay for the
large studies of the effects of drugs. Those studies are crucial but
we must not allow pharma companies to play any role in them — because when they pay for studies, they corrupt the studies.
If we are wise, we will pay for those studies with public funds, too.
After all, it's our money either way, whether we pay it via the government or through the pharma companies.
Mafias are distributing food to Italians who have no money and can't
buy anything. It appears that the government's efforts to give people food
are not reaching everyone.
Rather than sending thugs to question people on the street who are
suspiciously bringing people food, the government should improve its
own efforts to do the job.
Members of the UK Parliament will be compelled to use Zoom in order to vote.
This is the ultimate surrender of a government to malicious technology.
The US faces a national shortage of purified CO2, and this could
impact water treatment.
Boston is planning for a meter of sea-level rise by 2070.
Since we keep finding that Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than
expected, I am not sure that is enough.
Building "resiliency" is a useful medium-term measure, that could help
Boston survive while we curb global heating — if we do. But without
that, it is futile; all such efforts will be overwhelmed by the sea.
Farms are letting fresh fruits and vegetables rot, while millions of
Americans can't get food.
This is what results from devout worship of the Invisible Hand,
whose cult demands human sacrifice.
Common Cause's list of urgent recommendations for Congress to support
democracy.
I agree with them aside from one: funding to extend broadband
internet.
In order for "digital inclusion" to be an advance, it has to respect
freedom. The internet today, used as people normally use it, devours
freedom. When society as a whole depends on such use of the internet,
it becomes a trap that keeps people under the thumb of surveillance
capitalism and state repression. Making that sort of internet faster
is a mistaken goal.
Republicans have proposed funds to support farmers — but watch out: they
will give all the money to big agribusiness unless the system is designed
very carefully.
Indeed, even if they don't directly give all the money to giant
agribusiness corporations, those will grab most of it because of their
domination of the market. Smaller farms typically sell to giant
monopsonies, which effectively set the price farms receive for their
production. These prices keep farmers right on the edge of going
under.
To support actual farm prices would require different systems.
The US had such systems in the past, but plutocratists won't be
in favor of bringing them back.
*Unless a vaccine is made available to every country Covid-19 will turn
into a global threat without end.*
We hope to develop a vaccine, or a treatment, but the way to get rid
of Covid-19 that we already know can work is that of testing,
tracing and isolation. If that is our only way to do it, that too
must be implemented globally.
Testing, tracing and isolation does not require tracking everyone's
movements with a digital device.
China does that because repression is its goal.
A discussion of China and WeChat — how China has gained surveillance
of nearly all activity simply by making people pay for many vital
things via WeChat or Alipay.
Covid-19 is temporary, but if it acts as an excuse to impose
surveillance, the surveillance is likely to be forever. The time to
resist is now.
One way to resist is to join me in always paying cash when you
purchase goods, publications (textual or not), and ground transport.
If a store declines to take my cash, I say politely that cash is the
only way I can pay. If the store refuses to make an accommodation, I
say "Too bad," and leave.
It is useful to tell your local and state politicians that you want
laws to require retail businesses to accept cash. New York City
passed one last year.
Above all, don't be defeatist: don't give in to the attempted
self-fulfilling prophesy that Covid-19 will terrify us into paying
only through surveilled systems.
*Nobel laureates condemn 'judicial harassment' of environmental lawyer.*
This refers to Steven Donziger, being persecuted by Chevron for being the
lawyer for the Ecuadorian farmers who sued Chevron.
Microsoft is planning to invest heavily in machines to extract CO2 directly from the air and convert it into other substances. It aims in 10 years to extract more than it emits.
Investing in research on those machines, and on the less radical carbon capture and storage, is a good thing to do. It has a chance of making a big difference.
But research is always a risk. We must not assume this will work out.
Amazon has donated to a fund to keep UK bookstores operating, but the donation is minuscule compared with the harm that Amazon's unfair practices have caused them.
We should not leave it up to rich people to decide how much to give back out of all that they have taken.
A court is considering the Tory plan for voter suppression in the UK by demanding photo IDs.
Arkansas's ban on surgical abortions has been upheld by the federal appeals court.
In some states, these bans have been overturned. In others, upheld. I suppose the Supreme Court will study the case, and its right-wing majority will seize the opportunity to interfere with abortion rights by hook or by crook.
*Top vaccine expert says he was fired for resisting Trump on hydroxychloroquine.*
Amazon is considering adding face recognition and license plate recognition to Ring surveillance cameras.
Setting up a system capable of systematic recognition of faces — or license plates — should be illegal, outside of very narrow circumstances.
An additional dam on the Nile will create a competition over which country gets the water.
This indicates that the population of the region is hitting a resource limit. Whether or not that competition leads to an actual war, people will die as a result.
Showing that you can't overcome resource shortages with dams alone. You need birth control too.
*New research finds 147 million will be hit by floods by the end of the decade.*
The UK is considering ordering people over 70 to stay home for months.
I would not obey a rule like that. Since I do not wish to get sick, I go out only occasionally and take care when I do. But I will not live by an absurd zero-tolerance rule that demands I avoid even small risks, regardless of what that does to my freedom and privacy.
For instance, I buy groceries in the supermarket and I pay cash. I will not order them delivered or pay for them in a way that would identify me.
Covid-19 is spreading through Singapore's 300,000 migrant workers, who are housed together up to 20 to a room. Now all of them are quarantined in those rooms all day.
Even before Covid-19, they were exploited and cheated.
Democrats are about to accept another "stimulus" which helps small businesses and hospitals, but none of the poor.
The Trump Hotel in Washington DC leased a building from the US government so as to profit if the bullshitter became president. Now it is having trouble paying its rent, so it is asking for rent relief.
There is a glut of oil, and oil companies are paying others to take massive quantities of oil and store it until someone wants it. Many fossil fuel companies are facing bankruptcy, and many investors are facing losses.
We need those investors to lose money, and learn the lesson not to invest in fossil fuels. As always, the saboteur in chief doesn't want rich people and big companies to suffer the negative consequences of their actions, so he has announced a big "bailout" for them.
Bailouts for fossil fuel companies are not merely wasteful, not merely dooH niboR. If they spare investors from learning the lesson that their investments are damaging, the bailouts are damaging.
*A political system that is structurally incapable of acting for the
common good, even when millions of lives are at stake, is not just
failing to solve our problems. It is the problem.*
The US government's evident corruption and incompetence in dealing with Covid-19 demonstrates that this is the situation. Now we need to fix it so the government can protect us from the even bigger dangers such as global heating and world-wide wars.
The House of Representatives is considering remote voting.
I see no particular problem in the interim plan to use proxies for votes. However, remote voting creates a security problem that is impossible to correct if it uses nonfree software or services operated by companies. It has to be with free software and the server must belong to the House of Representatives.
Milan plans to shift many streets to pedestrians and bicycles.
I hope it will also increase bus service and build new subway lines. Not everyone can ride a bike, and walking to distant places will take too long.
US officials say China organized a disinformation campaign in March saying that the bullshitter was going to use soldiers to clamp down on movement in the US.
The bullshitter makes the US more vulnerable to disinformation from whatever source. Perhaps he should ask someone to tell him the children's story, "The President That Cried 'Fake!'". Eventually the president said "fake" about news that really was fake, and nobody believed him.
The corruptor placed the US's biggest private medical insurance company in charge of distributing aid to hospitals.
This gives the company an opportunity to pressure hospitals to modify their relationships with that company in ways that will benefit the company in the future, and perhaps even today.
Why did the corruptor choose that company? My guess is that it is paying him off.
Lobbying turned a supposed "loan program for small businesses" into a loan program for larger businesses — some of which just want to go bankrupt.
In effect, Congress is assuming that the officials that administer the program are making strong efforts to keep it honest — but with the conman in charge, you can be sure that will not happen.
US citizens: call on Congress and Mnuchin to stop big banks from taking Americans' crisis relief checks.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588. If you call please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to protect US contributions to the WHO.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word!
The Western US, from Oregon to New Mexico, has been suffering a deep drought since 2000. Researchers have established that, in the past 1200 years, only one past drought equaled this one.
If this was the worst a drought could be before 1950, global heating now makes worse droughts possible.
A thug in the UK was caught on video, threatening to fabricate an accusation against a man who was passing by.
The chief of the department had the decency to condemn the thug's actions unreservedly. That condemnation goes beyond an apology. But this is not enough by itself. It is necessary to punish that thug firmly, so that the others know they won't be winked at if they do this again.
*'Absurdity and Cruelty' of US Healthcare System, Says Sanders, 'Should Now Be Apparent to All'.*
Cooperating with North Korea's need for help in coping with Covid-19 could offer the US an opportunity for useful diplomacy.
Human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been released from formal prison, but remains a prisoner in some undisclosed location while he is trained to say what his guards wish.
Australia is funding several hail-mary programs to keep the Great
Barrier Reef alive another decade or two in the face of global
heating.
Succeeding in this, would help the planet-roaster government resist
doing anything to limit global heating itself. Even making the attempt
will help that.
The article does not mention ocean acidification, which is the other
big effect of increased CO2 in the air.
In a few decades perhaps,
that will kill all corals, and many molluscs, crustacians, and
starfish. The excess CO2 may interfere with the thought processes of
fish, which could wipe out some species.
Australia principal river system, the Murray-Darling system, gets only
half as much water nowadays as in the 20th century, due to global
heating — so it will get worse.
Australians believed the water was there but they were taking out too
much.
* Polluting industries around the world are using the coronavirus
pandemic to gain billions of dollars in bailouts and to weaken and
delay environmental protections.*
The extra pollution could do more harm than Covid-19 does.
Privatized medicine has mostly abandoned rural America, and laws
assure a nationwide shortage of doctors, few of whom choose to go
there. This causes helplessness in facing any sort of epidemic.
With copious testing, contact tracing, and isolation of those
infected, it is possible to eliminate Covid-19 from an area, or pretty
close. Taiwan and South Korea have done it.
Just waiting won't make ending stay-at-home safe, so how does the US
plan to achieve that? If we are waiting for some major change in the
situation, what change is it, and how do we plan to make it happen?
An internal investigation in the Labour Party, which was leaked,
concluded that some of its staff, who opposed Corbyn, weaponized
accusations of antisemitism so as to ensure the party would not win an
election under Corbyn. The mainstream media
did
its best to support that campaign.
Part of the campaign was to demand a zero-tolerance approach to
eliminating antisemitism from the party. A zero-tolerance approach to
enforcing any rule tends to create dissention and hostility, because
it means that very small differences in conduct lead to enormously
different treatment.
Apple and Google, which do enormous amounts of tracking of users,
have become the unlikely guardians of people's privacy by limiting
how apps can get data about bluetooth contacts.
In addition to blocking various abusive forms of surveillance, they
also prevent any sort of contact-tracing app that accumulates a list
of phones that have passed nearby, even if it were up to the user
to decide to send it in.
If such an automated recording of nearby-passing phones is an effective
method of contact tracing — which some experts doubt —
then preventing it from being used seems to be a bad thing.
In addition, governments can do this in other ways, as China does. I
think China's app operates by reporting the phones GPS location to the
state. If everyone is forced to install that app, the state can
figure out which phones passed nearby.
Even voluntary schemes for tracking people's movements
can become effectively mandatory if employers, landlords, and services
punish people who don't do it.
I have to point out that the UK began tracking all car travel over 10
years ago, and has already abused the system to sabotage protests.
Of course, now it is sabotaging all protests, and not that there
is less to protest now than there was.
Biden is not seriously trying to win the support of progressive voters.
I think he takes us for granted.
Biden was making the US a worse place many years before the conman
got into politics,
and he will continue doing so if elected, just not
as fast as the conman does.
Slow sidewalk-travelling robots can now deliver food orders
to customers willing to be surveilled.
I see only two things wrong with this system. For customers, there is
no way to buy anonymously, so I would not use it. For workers, it
means a lot of unemployed people. The Tories would have them living on
the street faster than you can say "Tories".
More information about why the US postal service is about to collapse.
It is a plan that Republicans have been operating for over a decade.
Many important reforms have been implemented in some parts of the US
in the past month.
An internal investigation within the Labour Party quotes staff's
emails to show that some of the supporters of B'liar and his crew
acted to sabotage the party so that Corbyn and his progressive side
could not win power.
In other words, Labour's plutocratists were more loyal to plutocracy
than to their party or its constituents.
*Ukraine: wildfires draw dangerously close to Chernobyl site.*
Ukraine is alleged to be covering up the danger.
Corporations have used disease as an excuse to exclude shareholders
from their annual meetings.
This eliminates one of the few methods that were available to the non-rich
to put political pressure on corporations.
A Hong Kong protest leader warns that Beijing is likely to push once
again for total control of Hong Kong, and that Hong Kongers will
resist.
*Big Banks Sued for Putting Large Corporations Ahead of Main Street Small Business Owners for Covid-19 Rescue Loans.*
*Freedom of information request filed after Pentagon stopped publishing
figures for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.*
The large number of people in prison in the US could cause 100,000
extra deaths from Covid-19.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for ending military
draft registration — HR 5492.
Also oppose HR 6415 which would make conscription cover women as
well as men.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The bully wants to shield employers from legal responsibility for workers' catching Covid-19 at work.
Why would US workers want to sue their employers about this?
I see two rational motives.
I don't expect Republicans to support that.
*The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT)
consortium … removed [all] mention of the decentralized
protocol proposal Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity
Tracing (DP3T) from its website.* The people developing that
protocol found out when they saw their work had been deleted.
This stinks of an intentional effort to increase surveillance. Europeans, fight this now!
If you don't put as much effort into protecting your freedom as into protecting your immediate health, your effort to "stay safe" is unbalanced!
*Governments must act now to stop 265 million starving, warns World Food Program boss.*
*Inequality and the Coronavirus,* and gusher-up economics.
Yanis Varoufakis: the reason the EU should agree to issue EU-level bonds is that it is in the interest of the whole EU.
*80% of the [recent US] stimulus tax break will go to 43,000 people.*
*Loss of [birth control and abortion] services caused by lockdowns
could result in millions of unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions.*
Contrast the behavior of rich people, such as Richard Branson, who
think the government owes them loans after shirking taxes, with
the responsibilities they say poor people have.
*"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," billionaires are fond of telling us. All while making us pay for their boots.*
*Denmark: no bailouts for companies headquartered in tax havens* or that have squandered their reserves on stock buybacks.
The UK welfare system has been compelled by circumstances to abandon
some of its cruel practices because of the staff requirements. More
importantly, the Tories no longer dare pretend that citizens prepared
to work reasonably hard will never need government assistance.
They might go back to that pretense once Covid-19 is out of the way.
Labour voters can help the party overcome the internal sabotage that
succeeded in stopping Corbyn from winning the 2017 election.
Peru: riot police block highway as people attempt to flee [to their
home towns] amid lockdown.
Some of those people have Covid-19 and would bring it to their home
towns if they go. However, the overwhelming majority do not have
Covid-19, and would die if they stay in Lima. Covid-19 is going to
reach those places sooner or later, but it could take time,
A better-organized and wealthier state would test them all, then
quarantine those who are infected and let the rest go home. But Peru
is not capable of that.
This shows us the sort of disasters that massive inequality can cause.
Meanwhile, the plutocrats labor every day to make more inequality.
Prison officials are monitoring prisoners' phone calls to see if they
say anything about coronavirus.
The fact that they are using some sort of neural network to identify
that topic seems like a side issue to me. It would be just as bad
if humans were listening for such discussion.
Doubt is essential for science — but for politicians, it's a sign of
weakness.
The UK plans to require witnesses testify in a hearing through
nonfree software.
Sea-level rise, and its various consequences, will destroy South Florida
in this century. Even before it is inundated, it will be wiped out.
Scientists say it appears to be too late to prevent the Arctic Ocean
from losing all its ice in the summer, starting around 2050.
This will accelerate global heating no matter what else we do.
Two studies suggest that air pollution makes people more vulnerable
to getting badly sick from Covid-19.
Inside Rikers: An Account of the Virus-Stricken Jail From a Man Who Managed
to Get Out.
Pelosi appointed Rep. Shalala to the oversight committee, rather than
Rep. Porter.
Porter is known for grilling CEOs hard. Shalala is known for owning
shares in quite a few corporations that might ask for a bailout.
Greg Palast: Absentee ballots in the US place many obstacles in the
voter's way, and the votes of people from marginalized groups are more
likely to be blocked.
Thus, switching to voting by mail will not automatically assure that
all registered voters get to vote.
Farms should make some adjustments on living arrangements so that
citizens can help in the picking — not structure it only for migrant
workers.
The US government confiscates protective equipment being shipped
between states.
The corrupter uses the equipment to reward states, even businesses,
that serve him personally.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject a bailout for big oil.
Proposed contact-tracing apps would do a lousy job, because what they
try to do is very different from real, effective contact tracing.
Don't assume that a system, once actually in use, will respect any
sort of privacy for anyone.
I hope the US does set up effective contact tracing, and if I am ever
called because of a rational suspicion that I am infected and asked
about my contacts, I will do my best to cooperate. If I am told I am
likely to be infected, I will stay inside to protect others. But I
will not use something that would let the state track my movements
even if I do not become infected. I will not carry a
portable phone.
To throw freedom and privacy overboard to avoid a small incremental
risk to health is folly. We need to maintain our freedom and privacy
along with our health.
The US deportation thugs hold 34,000 prisoners. Most of them it could
legally release right now. It is considering releasing only 600.
Spain has allowed workers to go to work for many non-essential
businesses, calculating that the infection rate will continue to go down.
*In this moment of crisis, macho leaders are a weakness not a strength.*
Leaders appear strong (and win support) by visibly making someone else
back down. Business is so powerful nowadays that it is generally
easier to make the non-rich back down and serve the rich. So that is
what they do.
The Occupational Suffering and Hardship Agency told employers not to
bother reporting when their employees catch Covid-19.
This information is very important for measuring the spread of the disease
and detecting when working conditions are encouraging its spread.
*Don't be fooled: Britain's coronavirus bailout will make the rich richer
still.*
There is no need to wait — it is already happening, in the UK
as in the US.
Public Citizen proposes how Congress should restore oversight to the
2-trillion bailout for big companies selected by the conman and
Mnuchin.
When the article talks of "squandering" this money, it understates the
danger. Having negated all existing oversight, Mnuchin and the conman
will have no obstacles to stop them from exercising favoritism in
whatever way they wish, in effect using this money as bribes. They
could pressure large companies to spend more on Republican campaigns.
Given how far the conman has already gone in corruption, such as
handing out ventilators and masks to states that support him, I expect he will do this.
It was terribly foolish for
Democrats in the House of Representatives to agree to this loan
program — foolish to imagine those corrupt officials would not
exploit every opportunity for corruption.
When talking about the Special IG, please do not refer to per as "they". It causes grammatical confusion.
The OPCW has labeled Assad as responsible from dropping sarin gas on
Khan Sheikhun in Syria.
There are claims that this attack did not happen at all.
After contemptuously defying Congressional oversight committees,
the conman is now contemptuously defying executive branch inspectors general.
This confirms that his goal is arbitrary rule with unlimited corruption.
The numskull is making US allies distrust the US and despise him.
*Inequality doesn't just make pandemics worse — it could cause them.*
*More than 60 poorer countries are spending more paying creditors than on health – study.*
Paraguay won't tax the rich to help the poor, so poor people are trying
to help each other.
Paraguay's leftist president was removed a few years ago by a
more-or-less coup and replaced by the right wing.
The US plans to test an amazing Cuban medical discovery, a vaccine
which prevents one kind of lung cancer from growing any further.
The UK is giving patient medical records data in bulk to Palantir and
other companies, for "research" purposes.
I would not trust those companies to keep the spirit of their
commitments, or even the letter of them.
Coal mining companies in the US are asking Congress to "rescue" them
by eliminating the taxes that pay for cleaning up abandoned mines and
the lungs of abandoned miners.
If coal mines are not to be cleaned up, it is better to shut
them down immediately, so they stop contributing to global heating
disaster.
The Miami Herald decided to sue the State of Florida demanding release of information about which nursing homes have had Covid-19 fatalities. Thegovernor intimidated the newspaper's law firm into refusing to do this work.
*The GOP Has Become a Death Cult.*
I would say, rather, that the Republican Party has merged with a
variant of Christianity that is death cult.
Starting from their mad premises, their reasoning is rational. If
there were a heaven where you would be eternally happy, why hesitate
to die in a way that would get you in? Indeed, Christians had to
decide that suicide was a sin, or their believers would have eagerly
begun the trip to heaven.
This simply demonstrates that madness requires nothing more than the
adoption of mad premises.
Beware the temptation to go to the opposite extreme. There is no
reason to take risks to continue the dooH niboR economy, but there are
parts of the economy we must take risks to continue. We need to grow
food -- and make sure everybody gets enough. And we must be ready,
now as in the past, to take risks to defend our freedoms.
Their campaign is based on valid principles, but it does not get to
the root of the matter and the solution it advocates is inadequate.
It supposes that schools could somehow insist, and verify, that
nonfree programs do only what they are supposed to do, and that
dis-services don't manipulate students or allow their data into the
hands of anyone that would misuse it.
The one solution that will really fix the problem is to switch
completely to free software, keep all the school's data about students
on the school's own computers, and not even collect data that could
be used to hurt the students.
Perhaps that is seen as too radical even to advocate, the way some
Democrats in Congress see Medicare for All as too radical no matter
how much we need it.
China is pushing again to impose total control over Hong Kong.
Protests will be necessary again soon.
A former US convict talks about how much he appreciated having a tablet
in his cell.
It makes me terribly sad to see this praise for a tablet full of
nonfree software. Surely he is running several nonfree apps designed
to mistreat the user.
I won't deny the benefit he reports. A computer can be very useful,
even while mistreating its user in ways most people don't recognize.
However, the mistreatment is entirely avoidable. A tablet with free
software could have done the same jobs.
Billionaires' investment clubs ("private equity") are taking advantage
of the crisis to move in on corporations that are experiencing losses.
The damage from the Big Spill reached all the way to the coast Mexico,
and big decreases in seafood catch afflict the coast ten years after.
Mexican President Peña made a settlement that effectively let
Billionaire Polluters off the hook. Whether or not a bribe can be
identified, I call this corruption. The US has seen similar corrupt settlements recently.
Norway is moving very fast to electric vehicles.
If the electricity comes from hydropower, this really does eliminate the
greenhouse emissions.
There is just one bad aspect: most electric car charging systems require
payment by credit card. It is very hard to travel without being tracked
by this. That is an injustice.
Electric cars don't have to be tracking devices. There is no
fundamental obstacle to doing this right. But countries are turning
them into tracking devices.
*Employees Say Smithfield [pork] Plant in Wisconsin Concealed Covid-19
Infections, Pressured Them to Work Elbow-to-Elbow Without Protection.*
The UK is delivering food to people who dare not go out, but following
its usual practice, the UK has set strict criteria for who qualifies to receive these deliveries.
It would be unthinkable to risk handing out food to someone who
might not deserve it.
US citizens: call on the FDA to lift the prohibition on telemedicine for
abortion medicines.
Rating employees with a single number tends to make for more inequality
in their bonuses than rating employees through a discussion.
Several EU countries propose to combine the Green New Deal with a plan for
restoring the economy after Covid-19.
I am not an expert who can usefully study the details, but the idea seems
very good to me.
The effort to impose computational idea patents in Europe
was thwarted by the UK's departure from the EU.
The monopolist forces will try again, and we will get another chance
to fight to stop them.
Republican officials are cheating on implementation of the extension
of unemployment insurance.
You can't expect Republicans to honestly carry out a deal.
"Cheat the poor" is their motto.
Don't be impressed when billionaires donate small fractions of their
income as "philanthropy". They do it for self-serving reasons:
to discourage us from cutting back their political power.
The time to resist repression and surveillance after the end of
Covid-19 is now.
Don't tell people "Stay safe!" Tell them, "Stay healthy and free!"
Some people in the UK feel their lives have been ruined because
assisted conception services have been shut down.
While I can appreciate the disappointment of those who wish to have
children, I say we must not cater to it, because far worse things than
being childless are coming. Having children nowadays (with or without
medical assistance) places a large burden on the future. It reduces
civilization's chances of survival, even as it adds more one person to
suffer in civilization's coming crisis.
Rather than spending public money to help people make a child, we
should tell them to consider adopting a child — to satisfy their
yearning in a way that helps future humanity rather than burdening it.
Modern-day slums, created by right-wing economic policies, are
spreading Covid-19.
The "cramped" living conditions of the poor, in the US and the UK and
some other countries, get their impetus from the general economic
situation that draws large numbers to a few successful cities — but
this turns into real hardship because of favor-the-wealthy government
policies that don't build enough housing in those cities, combined with the right-wing squeeze-the-poor policies
that squeeze some poor people onto the street.
The US Postal Service is likely to collapse in a few months
unless it gets direct government support, according to its head.
I wonder why the conman believes it would be profitable to make it
collapse.
The Houthis in Yemen have sentenced journalists to death.
China is censoring research publications about Covid-19.
Apparently China's face is more important than people's lungs.
Singapore has banned use of Zoom for schools, over a side issue.
Singapore is paying no more attention than the US to the inherent injustice
of that program.
The EU agreed to rescue Italy, Spain and other countries, temporarily,
only to crush them in a couple of years as it crushed Greece before.
The concessions that the richer countries agreed, eliminating the
conditions that crushed Greece immediately, will postpone the crushing
of Italy and Spain, but not for very long.
The right-wing propaganda idea that governments can't do a good job is
totally wrong in South Korea. Citizens insist on that governments do their
jobs well, and governments do.
US citizens: call on Congress to
end
the spread of Covid-19 in US prisons and jails, including immigration
jails, including providing safe conditions and medical care.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone:
call
on Liberty Mutual insurance to stop insuring tar sands.
If you sign, please spread the word!
BlackRock's plan for buying corporate bonds is aimed in a direction
that
will
tend to help fossil fuel companies most.
The bully has
sent
a war fleet to the seas off Venezuela and is making threats of
war.
I can't put Maduro and the bully on a linear scale to judge which is
worse, but it is clear that if the bully succeeds in realizing his
ambitions of absolute power he would be far worse.
*Moving towards a Medicare for All healthcare system will not just
stem the financial losses that hospitals are now experiencing, but
will ensure that we are
prioritizing
care and equity in our healthcare system.*
Political repression in Kashmir includes
threatening
doctors who report that they don't have sufficient equipment.
Internet blockage stops them from accessing information for medical
purposes.
The article mentions a web site for reporting on Covid-19's spread in
Kashmir, which has chosen "open source". I have a hunch that they are
not apolitical, as the term "open source" encourages people to be, but
that they don't know how the free software movement is different from
open source.
USAA, a bank and insurance company for members and veterans of the US
military, has
reversed
course on seizing government aid payments for debt.
However, the US government has still done nothing to prevent this
practice.
Mnuchin and the bully value the rich and powerful, while dehumanising
everyone else. The idea of agreeing to aid human beings, then
diverting the aid to banks and rich creditors, must have them laughing
at the suffering they cause.
Petroleum-based fields of industry, including plastic, are lobbying
for what will be an unending system of bailouts, as well as
changes
in the laws meant to protect us from the harm their operations do.
After they have got a series of handouts, they will use the "sunk
costs" fallacy to argue that "You can't stop now".
We have to aim for a large but orderly reduction in these fields,
not for keeping them going as before.
Gaza has run out of coronavirus tests. It can't get more
because
of the siege imposed by Israel.
Since Covid-19 reached the West Bank, attacks by Israeli fanatics
against Palestinians have
almost
doubled.
Their slow but steady taking of Palestinians' lands is
speeding
up.
Some right-wing Israeli fanatics fought against imposed quarantine,
left their quarantine site, then found three Arabs having a picnic.
They threw stones at the Arabs, then
burned
their cars.
The fanatics will be prosecuted for trashing the bus that was taking
them to quarantine. Burning Palestinians' cars is perhaps not
considered worth prosecuting.
The US renamed its War Department as the "Department of Defense," but
in substance it is still the Department of War. Looking at the real
threats that the US faces,
what
would a real Department of Defense do?
*The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Exposing the
Plague
of Neoliberalism.*
Neoliberalism is the economistic ideology that goes with plutocracy.
It denies that there is a place in society for any relationships
except the market. Neoliberalism inflicts suffering globally, all the
time, and hollows out society's resilience so that medical and
political harm can easily spread. And when it intersects with acute
plagues, such as Covid-19, the combination produce special, acute
harm.
But there is a worse alternative:
China's
authoritarian capitalism. China's system is not dysfunctional; it
doesn't tie the state in knots. When that state wants to
put
a million people in prison, it lies even more shamelessly than the
bullshitter does, and entirely silences dissenting voices.
Shell's
new
greenwashing plan.
Setting 2050 as the target date and using the term "net-zero carbon"
are
enough
to indicate that this is not serious.
India's journalists that criticize the ruling party are in danger of
prosecution,
or
even murder.
The US and Russia are opposing the UN's global cease-fire initiative. War takes priority over all.
The bully's methods have much in common with the way Mussolini made
himself dictator of Italy.
Ilhan Omar has proposed a bill for the government to pay people's rent
and mortgages for a while.
I suggests paying corporations only a part of the usual rent.
The ACLU position's on contact tracing by phones identifies some valid issues.
However, it misses other valid issues. Whatever privacy protections
this one app offers are at best one watertight wall on one side of a
leaking ship. The phones themselves allow location tracking in many
ways. And you can't trust any nonfree program to do only what its
developer says it does.
Danger: vending machines for meat and vegetables seem like a great idea
until you find out that they track who buys.
Now more than ever we must defend the right to pay cash — but
insisting on paying cash. Covid-19 will not last forever,
but rights lost tend to be lost forever.
Decades of systematic right-wing attack on scientific experts and
government action have spread a bias to reject them. Neither of them
is immune to corruption, but the right-wing alternative is corrupt at
the root. How can we get back to a way of thinking that has room
for something other than corruption?
US using coronavirus pandemic to unlawfully expel asylum seekers, says UN.
VICE has published documents showing Michigan Governor Snyder actively participated in the conspiracy to poison Flint's water supply.
However, it looks like Snyder will escape prosecution, protected by
his Republican cronies.
In the US some poor people are ground up between the gears of
a response to Covid-19 that doesn't think of them. In Mexico and Guatemala,
that is happening to masses of people.
Children in Spain are not allowed to go outside the house — never at all.
Many find it unbearable.
Hungarian journalists fear coronavirus law may be used to jail them.
More reasons for the US to cancel student loan debt.
The US is slowly building up the capacity for protective gear,
testing, and contact tracing, but is nowhere near the level necessary
to eliminate Covid-19 here. The numskull wants to reopen business
anyway, and never mind getting ready.
A Koch-funded protest group is being organized to protest to demand that.
I am glad to see that some Americans are ready to protest despite the
danger, which they do reduce by applying the usual measures. Too bad
they are not doing it for a sensible cause, such as reducing
surveillance by business and government, or pushing for more
production of the things that are necessary to reopen business safely.
Biden is proud of his role in repressive intervention in Latin America.
10 years after the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the damage has not
disappeared.
We know how to prevent a repeat of that disaster, but the oil
companies would rather take the risk; they figure that the public will
suffer most of the costs of the next disaster, just as it suffered
most of the costs of the last one.
The biggest disaster ever, for a free and ethical internet,
is the current pressure on everyone to rush to do things on line.
When people talk about "being online", that as become an abbreviation
for "carelessly running any nonfree app someone tells you to use."
However, if you don't want to be subjugated and kicked around online
you must take the opposite approach: rejecting software unless we can
determine it is free/libre, and that it doesn't send any data beyond
what we want it to send.
You can support internet freedom simply by saying no to organizations'
online portals, saying, that code does harm to the users. I hope you
will redo this code, but in the mean time I can do this activity only
by phone or email."
I've been doing that, with airlines and medical clinics, for some time
now.
US citizens: call on Congress to end surprise medical bills in the
next COVID-19 package.
If you call, please spread the word!
The IMF cancelled 6 months' worth of debt payments for the poorest
countries, but that is just the beginning of what they need.
Oceania reports that the US oil industry has done little to improve
safety of offshore drilling since the Big Spill 10 years ago.
The conman's supporters are eager for the end of the world and they
expect him to make it happen. They regard anyone who disagrees with them
as an enemy to be spit on with contempt.
The latest Covid-19 "stimulus" law includes another big tax cut for the rich.
The intended benefits for the non-rich are being eliminated by
Republican cheating,
Here's an article that defends the importance of digital privacy,
but starts by giving up on many fronts. It lauds online dis-services
and their nonfree client software, and won't go further than to
plead to avoid even more change in the same bad direction.
I'm not interested in whatever secondary benefits those dis-services
might offer. I don't want to be distracted from making sure I don't
have contact with them.
Morozov: The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus will supercharge the
surveillance state.
"Progressive solutionism", like "punitive solutionism", to use
Morozov's terminology, both presuppose tracking people and having a
system "manage" them. I'd say they are two ends of a spectrum
Once the system is operating, it can easily be adjusted along that
spectrum.
Whatever forms of repression and centralized power we accept today
will continue to hurt people for a lot longer than Covid-19 does.
Whole Foods workers plan to strike, demanding masks and training to
protect them and customers.
It is surely not a coincidence that Whole Foods belongs to Bezos.
Why buy from him?
Should passengers return to cruise ships after the pandemic? No.
The article explains how cruise ships harm their passengers, their
staff, and the environment.
How the left starts to organize when protests and political campaigning
are banned or perceived as dangerous.
Amazon fires two employees who condemned treatment of warehouse workers.
The basic way to limit Amazon's power to do wrong to various sectors
of society is to refuse to do business with it.
The residents of Brazil's shantytowns face the danger of hunger due to
lockdown.
(satire) Trump Urges Loosening CDC Restrictions To Let Coronavirus
Get To Work.
Over a year ago, Foxconn said it would build a big factory in
Wisconsin in exchange for a subsidy. The factory plan keeps changing,
and shrinking, but so far nothing seems to be happening.
Amazingly, Foxconn may actually be denied the subsidy for not carrying out
the plan.
A suffering US restaurant chain owner applied for a loan whose purpose
is to allow him to rehire laid-off workers, then complains that it is
"inflexible" because it requires him to rehire the laid-off workers.
Billionaires' income is mainly generated by their wealth, so no matter
how the tax amounts are determined, we can understand the effect on
their wealth by measuring them as a fraction of that wealth. For US
billionaires today, that fraction is 1/5 of what it was in the 1980s.
How the tax amounts are determined does make a difference. If it is
calculated on wealth, it can exceed the billionaire's income,
resulting in a welcome decrease in the billionaire's wealth.
The 2008 fiscal crisis damaged US-led globalization.
Covid-19 has damaged China-dominated globalization.
Can we stop globalization from bouncing back?
Globalization is the triumph of efficiency over resilience, and profit
over people. If we learn the lesson, we will strengthen resilience,
and that means pruning the globalization.
"DNA vaccines" could amount to genetic engineering, since the genes
they carry get incorporated into the genome of the animal (which may
be a human) that gets vaccinated.
A DNA vaccine is not necessarily bad or unjust, but it has the
potential to be so. So they need to be studied carefully, not rushed
into use. It is therefore a matter of concern that some of the
vaccines being developed against Covid-19 are DNA vaccines.
The US system of imprisonment is a trap in which millions of people
are caught, and society as a whole as well. It doesn't achieve its
stated purposes.
Covid-19 is interfering with the scheduled refueling and repair of
nuclear power plants. They may have to shut down.
Or they could keep operating with increased risk of a nuclear accident.
Operators have imperfect information about what is going on inside of
a nuclear reactor. Under the influence of hot, corrosive fluids, pieces
of metal can break and move. This makes it even harder to understand what
is going wrong and what to do about it.
Canada (like the US) moved mountains to produce equipment for World War II.
Why accept a shortage of ventilators, or any product, necessary to put an
end to Covid-19?
With our governments in thrall to billionaires, one is compelled to
suspect that the billionaires have a plan to profit by not making enough.
Big US banks want to buy assets of US oil companies.
This could make it harder to crank those oil companies down to zero,
because they won't need to go looking for funding.
However, it could also reinvigorate the boycott of JPMorgan Chase,
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup — a boycott which started
ten years ago to punish them for causing the recession.
Online misinformation about 5G wireless has inspired many acts of
vandalism against base systems in the UK.
I've read that the safety of the frequencies used by 5G wireless has
not been established. It should have been thoroughly tested before
the decision to adopt those frequencies, but the uncertainty does not
constitute evidence for the claim that it is dangerous.
The known dangers of 5G wireless are the same as the dangers of 4G and
3G: every portable phone helps the phone network track the users'
movements (except the Librem phone when its radio is switched off),
and every portable phone can be remotely converted into a listening
device (except the Librem phone).
Airlines are disregarding the EU law which says they must offer
customers a refund when they cancel a flight.
Perhaps it is a good idea to offer them a compromise, but that
compromise must be accepted by the public, not imposed by the
airlines. The broader voucher program proposed in the article could
be a good solution, but giving putting these customers at the head of
the companies' creditor lists could also be part of the solution.
That way, the customers might not get all they are owed, but at least
the stockholders will be the first ones to lose.
*Wisconsin proves it: Republicans will sacrifice voters' health to keep power.*
Covid-19 outbreaks are sparking riots in many US prisons.
Tracking coronavirus may be a good idea, but doing this by tracking
every individual creates a threat of repression.
A clever system to detect who an infected person has come close to,
without reporting where any person has been, is described here.
Schools are trying to make students take exams via vicious snooping
software.
The article says how nasty the program's behavior, and the company's
behavior, are.
But even before we get to the nastiness of the surveillance, and the
painfulness of the hoops (such as to stare at the screen and never
look away), even installing the program violates your freedom.
It is surely not free software,
so just by running on your computer it denies your freedom,
and (I expect) it requires an equally unjust operating system
in order to install it.
(I tried to check those things, but the company's web site would
not let me connect.)
I see two ways to avoid this in justice.
Your stand will have more power if you join together with other
students as a group to refuse.
The bully has told border thugs to deport asylum seekers summarily,
without an asylum hearing.
The WHO has been given so little power to coordinate response to epidemics
that it can only plead with national governments.
A bookstore owner writes about how her bookstore has continued to
operate…as a surveillance system.
She presents this as a story of triumph over adversity, disregarding
the implications of imposing surveillance on all purchases. For me,
this outcome is perverse and alarming. Paying for a book with a
credit card tracks people and what they read. So does shipping it to
the customer.
I won't give a store any information that could identify me, and
especially not a bookstore. So until there is a store that lets me
enter, browse, pay cash, and take the book away, I won't buy a book
from a bookstore. If bookstores "survive" by converting themselves
into collectors of data, all of which is available to the FBI without
a warrant under the law Biden helped write,
they will become part of the problem.
Can we count on them to let people pay cash again some day?
US citizens:
call
on Congress to rescue the US Postal Service.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
call on
Congress to provide support to local journalism, which is now
endangered everywhere in the US.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Will the US government tell us
which
big corporations get a handout?
Noise pollution from roads
drives
away bats.
Many bat species are endangered; this may be part of the cause.
*Will coronavirus shock the global economy into
long-term
thinking?*
Imagine if instead of renaming the Department of War to "Defense", the
US set up
a
department really for defense.
A judge ruled that one of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline's
environmental review was
not
properly done. Construction across water has been put
on
hold.
No wonder the saboteur in chief
wants
to get rid of environmental reviews for large projects (the ones
with the potential to do really big harm).
Australia is
offering
to end lockdown if 40% of the people carry a contact-tracing app.
Under ordinary circumstances I would refuse to carry any such thing;
no need to bother investigating the details.
Nowadays, due to the epidemic, I feel an obligation to cooperate with
contact tracing. But that does not mean I would accept anything
whatsoever under the rubric of contact tracing, regardless of what
else it really does.
And that goes double in Australia, due to its law that authorizes the
state to order the developers of any product or service to secretly
sabotage it.
Plutocratist Democrats' new idea for giving some nonrich Americans
medical insurance is to
subsidize
their premiums for the insurance they had before they were laid
off.
The criticism in the article exaggerates, which is a shame since it is
mostly valid. This would give laid-off former full-time workers
something: it would pay part of the cost of continuing the
coverage that they most of them received from their employers. Which
is usually a lousy plan with high deductible and high copay.
Compared with a national medical system, it is a little better than
nothing.
Meanwhile, the US government is giving big airlines billions,
plus loans.
An incomplete consideration of the question of whether it is right to
use the park yourself, if everyone else is staying away to avoid a
dangerous crowd.
This discussion ends prematurely with an invalid conclusion: to
deprive everyone and call it "fairness". There is some number of
people who can use the park while staying sufficiently apart from each
other. Since that is not dangerous, society should set up a system of
rationing for slots to use the park.
The system should not commit incidental injustices through a bad
choice of mechanisms. For instance, it should not require using
non-libre software, and if authorities verify that park users have
slots, that should not identify those users who do have slots.
The arguments for individual disobedience are much weaker against this
helpful system than against a wasteful extreme of complete denial.
A reawakening dormant volcano, located between Reykjavik and its airport,
may cause substantial difficulties for both.
*Peter Navarro: what Trump's Covid-19 tsar lacks in expertise, he makes up*
He *wrote books quoting expert who turned out to be fictitious version of
himself.*
The euro zone banks are once again driving the poor EU countries into
unending debt. They will be forever reduced to working for the banks,
like Greece.
Some hedge funds have made billions of dollars betting on a stock
market crash.
Others say they are going bankrupt. Let's hope so!
Plutocratist US politicians are managing the response to Covid-19 to
protect big businesses
and let everyone else suffer for their sake.
How FDR would include the rich in making the sacrifices to fight the
"war" against Covid-19.
Also, right-wing voter-suppression in the 1940s.
Eli Lily has stopped gouging on insulin.
That practice endangered the lives of people with type I diabetes,
often forcing them to skimp on it
and risk their lives
The US could get rid of this problem in general by changing its patent
laws and adopting a national medical system,
also known as Medicare for All.
The company could have done this before, but thought it could get away
with gouging. Perhaps Eli Lily made this change hoping to preserve its
power to gouge by eliminating one of the arguments used to push for
eliminating that power.
(satire) *… police shot an unarmed black civilian who
reportedly matched the description for Covid-19.*
"In the heat of the moment, it was completely impossible to
differentiate between the 6-foot-1inch, 175-pound male and the
0.125-micron pathogen."
(satire) *CDC Releases Instructions For All
Americans To Make Their Own Hospitals.*
As Republicans push hard for another act of dooH niboR, Pelosi and
Schumer are not trying very hard to make it better than that.
In San Francisco, vote for progressive candidate Shahid Buttar for Congress.
Many kinds of animals, even some fish, transmit patterns of activity
(culture) to their offspring.
Global heating effects have forced millions of people in Somaliland
into refugee camps. Women in those camps are in great danger of rape.
The article sometimes says Somaliland and sometimes Somalia. Nowadays
those are two different polities with different political situations.
Somalia is whether the outside-imposed government fights al-Shabaab.
However, these events are in Somaliland which is more or less at peace.
A landlord in Minnesota faces charges for evicting a tenant in spite
of the emergency order against evictions.
Various groups representing not-yet-middle-aged voters have announced
to Biden what programs he would have to adopt to their support in the
presidential election.
I will join my name to them. Biden would have to work hard to
demonstrate sincerity in commitment to these programs, but if he does,
I will support him.
*Coronavirus is not some great leveller: it is exacerbating inequality right
now.*
US citizens:
call
on all governments to end their wars.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The precipitous decline in excessive clothing purchases has led to
cancellation of orders.
Millions
of people will be faced with unemployment.
Last year we had a couple of long-term concerns about world garment
production.
It is impossible in general to determine whether a worker contracted
Covid-19 at work or elsewhere, so I think a company should be
responsible for maintaining working conditions that make transmission
unlikely, according to a clear and adequate standard.
leaving mostly dooH niboR.
The acute problem of unemployment for those workers doesn't alter the long term disaster that the production of last year was leading to.
We need to move towards a real solution, not a stopgap that makes things worse. A real solution saves the workers and their families from an early death, this year and in future years. It ends the wasteful excesses of production.
I think that a real solution requires either a big drop in the birth rate, or some miracle.
*'I didn't buy new clothes for a year and it was the best thing to happen to my wardrobe'.*
The bully says he will
cut
off US support for the WHO.
*[The bully's] decision to cut WHO funding is an
act
of international vandalism.*
*What
does the WHO do, and why has [the bully] stopped supporting it?*
*Commercial creditors
'must
sign up to global debt deal' — or forgo Covid-19 help.*
I agree — except that it seems wrong to give any state "help" to
giant investment companies. Their stockholders often claim that they
deserve their high profits because they are risking high losses, yet
whenever it looks like such a loss is going to occur, they plead "it's
not our fault, so save us from this loss."
By the same logic, every time they get a big gain, it's not their
credit, so they should hand it over to the public treasury.
*Water in estuaries along NSW coast has
warmed
by more than 2C [since 2007].*
This is much faster than the ocean or the air.
US hospitals and clinics are shutting down departments, even closing
entirely,
putting
their staff out of work.
Meanwhile, the hospitals that are still open are overwhelmed with
patients, but they have no extra funds to hire the doctors and nurses
that have lost their jobs. A national medical system could give them
new assignments where they are needed.
The ACLU is suing to stop Baltimore from using airplanes to track the movements
of everyone in the city all the time.
Ecosystem disasters are just a step away. *New study finds ocean
ecosystems likely to collapse [suddenly] in 2020s, and land species in 2040s,
unless global [heating] stemmed.*
The Coral Sea, in the ocean beyond the Great Barrier Reef, is suffering
extreme coral bleaching.
Those reefs are too far offshore to be affected by fertilizer runoff
and tourism. This is due to heat alone.
*Bernie Sanders’ political revolution is not over.*
*"While this campaign is coming to an end," said Sanders, "our movement is not."*
It won't be over until we win.
Doctors in Pakistan protested the lack of protective equipment for them.
Thugs attacked them violently.
Given the world's low state of preparedness, there may be little that
hospitals or governments can do to give medical personnel better
protection quickly.
US doctors and other medical personnel don't have masks to protect themselves
from Covid-19, and hospitals fire them if they talk about this. They are
asking people to join in making masks for them.
*Top doctor sparks anger by telling NHS staff not to waste PPE.*
His point, which in principle seems valid, is that precisely because
they don't have enough of the most effective protective equipment,
they should take care to use what they have in the most effective way
— the way that gets the most net protection.
*Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty.*
*Coronavirus could push half a billion people into poverty, Oxfam warns.*
The world needs a massive program to help the poor and save the
environment so civilization can continue. The enormous government
spending already being carried out in many countries may puncture the
claims that "there is no money for this."
With Sanders out of the race, it is virtually certain that the next
president will be a supporter of plutocracy and authoritarian state power.
We know of course that the conman supports those. It is less well
known that Biden also supports plutocracy
and attacks human rights (he wrote the basis of the PAT RIOT Act).
Big oil companies that have spilled lots of toxic chemicals in the US
have got a big gift from the conman, non-enforcement of the laws against this,
and now want another big gift.
To ensure that Mnuchin and BlackRock can play favorites arbitrarily with
bailout money, the conman has fired the inspector general that would be in
charge of investigating them for corruption.
The US is buying masks from China and turning them over to companies,
which then sell them at exorbitant shortage prices to states.
I wonder how these companies remunerate the conman.
The conman is using Covid-19 to escape corruption investigations, skew
the census, sabotage elections, and other things.
*Top Sanders Aide David Sirota Explains Why Billionaire Class Will
Support "Coronavirus Care for All" But Never "Medicare for All".*
*Monopoly houses, toy soldiers and Lego: the museum of plastic lost at sea.*
The brinksman and his cronies want to cancel the treaty that
permits the US and Russia to operate observation flights over each
others' territory.
I can't believe that the desire to reduce military spending by $40
million dollars is a sincere motive. In general, plutocratists seek
to increase spending on the military-industrial complex. I wonder
what the real motive could be.
Polluted air increases the chance of dying from Covid-19.
It also increases the chance of dying from other causes, and getting sick.
A UK mayor said that Boris Johnson "deserves" to have Covid-19.
I don't think anyone "deserves" to have Covid-19, or any other
disease. I don't think anyone "deserves" to die. We all die, but
death is always an unjust fate.
However, since Johnson courted infection as a callous, dishonest
political stunt, he is morally responsible the consequences, including
getting infected himself, and the thousands of others who will catch
Covid-19 as a result of his "leadership", some of whom will die of it.
And that was only one of his many acts of contempt for truth and
justice.
Perhaps he deserves to be punished for these acts, but not punished
with death. The death penalty is an injustice and should never be
inflicted on anyone. What Johnson deserves is for Britons to tell him
they won't give him another chance to endanger people, then take away
his political power. But this will not happen if they erase their
memories of his wrongs.
When Britons voted for Johnson and other Tories, they brought bad
government and its consequent suffering on themselves (and other
Britons too). But that does not mean they deserve bad government and
its consequent suffering. Nobody deserves that. What they deserve is
to (1) change their minds and (2) undo their bad decision.
US citizens:
call
on the FDA to lift the restrictions on the abortion drug
mifepristone.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone:
call
on TV networks (primarily US networks) to stop showing the
bullshitter's dishonest "briefings" live.
If you sign, please spread the word!
* We must hold the likes of Rishi Sunak and Andrew Cuomo to account, not
fawn over their modest displays of competence.*
The British fashion industry could be wiped out as a side effect of
Covid-19.
The fashion industry is a manipulative waste of people's money and the
world's natural resources, so we are better off without it. However,
those people and other people without jobs must not be reduced to
penury. We need a real welfare system that provides everyone with a
decent life.
Craig Murray: Julian Assange has a long-term pulmonary problem,
so if he catches Covid-19, he has a high chance of dying.
Murray believes the UK wants him to catch it and die.
He may be better off catching Covid-19 and dying than living
to spend his life being tortured by the US. However, the affect
on freedom of the press will be the same disaster either way.
Domestic violence has doubled or tripled in some countries due to
lockdowns. A rough estimate is that this includes over 200 million
women.
Organizing to make sure future US stimulus plans don't further ingrain
dependence on fossil fuels.
Returning to the previous economy should not be considered the goal --
and anyway, the plutocrats already working to make it worse.
Stiglitz: many poor countries are going to default on their debts this
year, unless they are rescued.
To truly rescue them would require forgiving those debts, or lending
them again at very low interest. Stiglitz proposes something along those lines.
However, I expect the plutocrats of the world to see in this crisis an
opportunity for disaster capitalism — to buy all the valuable assets,
including farmland, to convert the governments of those countries into
debt collectors, and to treat the inhabitants, for all time, like
unauthorized immigrants from nowhere.
*As Coronavirus Looms in Federal Prisons,
People Inside Denied Constitutional Right to Speak With Lawyers.*
They test hardly any of the coughing prisoners, then count everyone
not tested as not infected. Anyone who makes, or believes, that
argument must be looking for an excuse to falsify the facts.
But stopping prisoners from consulting their lawyers is far worse,
as it prejudices their cases in many ways that the article explains.
Many governments around the world are grabbing total power in the
name of protecting people from Covid-19.
Republicans are profiting from it, too, using it as an excuse to
prevent protests, almost eliminate opposition campaigning and
fund-raising, and hamper voting.
An emission of CO2 comparable to what humans are expected to emit in
this century, due to the giant volcanism that ended the Triassic
period, caused extinction of half the species of life on Earth.
That emission took 500 years. We humans are doing it even faster,
which means even less time for life to adapt.
"I have studied the psychological effects of pandemics – and even a few
weeks of isolation can cause lasting anxiety."
This makes it especially important to get some people we know to use
free software to talk with us, and soon. Make sure that the place
they retreat to from future anxiety has room for free software.
*Even though a small minority have persisted in gathering in groups, I
still do not accept the need to legislate for a nationwide house arrest
using the police for enforcement.*
The denial of citizenship rights to UK citizens of Caribbean origin was
the result of a bad attitude: if you can't jump through our hoops,
that's your fault.
Many immigrants with US medical qualifications are banned by
visa conditions from travelling to the cities where they are urgently
needed.
Proposing that Sanders should continue his campaign, not with the aim of
winning the nomination (since that is unlikely) but rather with the aim of
influencing policies after the election.
I think the best chance of influencing policies after the election is the chance that Sanders may win. Biden gives us no chance of ending plutocracy,
because he never wanted to do that.
As for the idea that people should "unite" behind Biden, if he wanted my
support he should have stood for progressive policies.
Boris Johnson is now
in
intensive care due to Covid-19.
I won't mock him with the name "Bogus" now that he is very sick dying,
but recall that his last great act of denialism was to deny that
Covid-19 was a big danger. He denied this with actions as well as
words, and he probably would not be sick now if he had not done so.
The narcissist uses his power to make people bow down to him, while
caring
nothing about others, even as he kills them.
He
personally
corrected the text of his speech to say "Chinese virus" instead of
"coronavirus".
The Daily Beast speculates that this was meant to distract
non-supporters from his bad decisions. I think it was meant to
distract his supporters from them also.
The narcissist
was
told in January that Covid-19 might kill over a million Americans.
Everything he has done to interfere was after hearing that danger.
The effects of Covid-19
fall
hardest on the poor and marginalized. In the US, that includes
blacks, because racism tends to marginalize people and make them poor.
The article describes how this exacerbates the effects of Covid-19,
citing blacks as an example. However, racism has some special
consequences that go beyond the problems of being poor.
*I'm a black man in America.
Entering
a shop with a face mask might get me killed.*
Ordinary local thugs
have
not let up on shooting people, and the immigration thugs have not
let up on arresting people for deportation (aside from the fraction
that will die in immigration prison).
(satire) "The free market works best with some healthy competition, so
by
increasing
the number of U.S. states to 68, we can hopefully double the cost
of ventilators," said the conman.
*Why America’s
Anti-Science
and Anti-Intellectual Attitudes Doom It to Coronavirus "Pearl
Harbor".*
Michael Atkinson: "It is hard not to think that the president's loss
of confidence in me
derives
from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an
independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my
commitment to continue to do so."
The USDA's new policy of letting slaughterhouses decide which
carcasses to inspect is
ideal
for smoothing the path for new diseases to jump from pigs to
humans.
They call it NSIS, which perhaps stands for (Almost) No Swine
Inspection System. It demonstrates plutocratists' ideological
opposition to anything that regulates business for the public good.
*School closures have
little
impact on spread of coronavirus — study.*
A toilet connected to an artificial intelligence system could monitor
your health daily and
keep
a host of corporations informed.
The only way people should trust such a system is if all the software
is free and various community organizations maintain versions that
they check for respect for privacy.
One aspect of the system is an advance for privacy: the use of
analprints to recognize people is far superior to the more commonly
fingerprint and face recognition. You don't leave an analprint
behind every time you sit down, and your ass can't be identified from
its analprint as you walk on a sidewalk or a lobby.
*After Coronavirus, Let’s Never Forget:
Republicans
Recklessly Put Our Lives In Danger.*
They have done worse than that, and they are still doing it.
Cancelling the measures to prepare for any future epidemic was certain
to kill people some day. But their relentless efforts to force the
world into global heating disaster are
certain
to kill hundreds of millions (at least).
Only
3/4 of the new electric generating capacity built in 2019 was
renewable.
How foolish it is to build any infrastructure that depends on fossil
fuels! We must put an end to that practice, on the double.
From "free" countries' governments to private hospitals, freedom of
speech is
threatened
in the name of "protecting" us.
*Misinformation Hampered Ebola Response. The Same Thing Could Happen
With Coronavirus.* Indeed, right-wing nuts (including the president)
are
already
promoting this.
His
henchmen, too.
The job of the US Trade Representative is corrupt at the root. It
consists of promoting business-supremacy treaties, twisting arms to
impose them on countries, to help companies dominate people and turn
democracy into a sham. This has been the case for decades, probably
at least 40 years.
If the US Trade Representative told me that 2 + 2 = 4, I would get out
my computer to check.
Proposing a
step-by-step
relaxation of lockdown rules, allowing increasing amounts of
various activities but still preventing transmission of Covid-19.
On the workplace relations that result in
business
gibberish.
*Coptalk
is defined by what at first seem to be paradoxes. On the one hand, it
is saturated with anodyne, technical language — the exhaustive
precision demanded by official reports and internal reviews. On the
other, it is fundamentally evasive. This might seem contradictory, but
in fact reveals a kind of systematic cunning …*
This cunning addresses the problem of how to kill and then frame
someone and make it sound like just another day's work.
Colorado has
published
objective criteria for deciding who is to get treatment for
Covid-19 when there is a shortage of supplies.
I think these criteria are wise, except for the preference given to
those who are pregnant over those who are not. That preference was
standard in the past, and it derived from the idea that making more
humans was an important contribution to society.
Now that population growth is a big danger, that assumption should be
discarded.
Why
taking
hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 could kill you.
It could also use up the limited supplies of hydroxychloroquine,
leaving
people suffering from lupus without their medicine.
All this based on an unfounded speculation.
Sanders's proposed law to
reduce
the medical and economic harm done by Covid-19.
Bangladesh is
providing
food to sex workers, since their business is shut down.
(satire) *Congress Sets Aside $1,200 In Trust For Each American
Until
[perse] Proves [perse's] Responsible Enough To Handle It."
US citizens: thank Bernie Sanders for running for president.
The bully's men decided in September to cancel a program to identify coronaviruses in various animals that had the potential to jump to humans.
It had already identified a close relative of Covid-19. If it continues,
it can identify other viruses that may help deal with future pandemics.
Americans: don't mistake Governor Cuomo for a progressive just because
he handles one highly visible issue well. He is still the same
plutocratist he has always been, a so-called "centrist" Democrat that
stands for the interests of business.
The bully's men have added artificial obstacles to the recently passed
law offering paid sick leave, which will have the effect of excluding
many workers who were supposed to have this benefit.
The conman cheated contractors he hired to work on his buildings. Why wouldn't he cheat workers too?
*How US Can Keep Death Toll Far Below the 100,000 Projection.*
By building, rapidly, a public health system that can test lots of people
and find most of the recent contacts of those found to be infected.
The problems with the US medical system result from being shaped for a
bad goal: business profit rather than patients' health. These
businesses use their influence to make medicine more expensive.
The way to fix this is to take them out of the circuit, with Medicare
for All. The other proposed "solutions" are designed to leave a big
role for the business that gouge patients. Unless their proponents
have made a big mistake, you can be sure their proposals will gouge.
The US government and states should support businesses by helping them
keep paying the wages of idled workers.
I am concerned that urging people to think about "safety" will have the
effect of encouraging people to cede their freedom to reduce physical risk.
So I suggest we explicitly distance ourselves from that way of thinking.
What keeping "safe" means to me
A Labour leader calls for a wealth tax to help pay the UK state expenses
caused by the epidemic.
Orbán used Covid-19 as an excuse to obtain dictatorial powers, which he
aims to use for general right-wing repression.
*US facing hunger crisis as demand for food banks soars.*
We need the government to operate food banks: to buy food to
distribute in them, and send national guard to run them. And make enough
face masks for them.
Remember when the government of China concealed the danger of the (not
yet really understood) Covid-19? Now the US government is doing it,
removing the captain of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt
claiming that he did not try hard enough to conceal the spread of the
virus on that ship.
How to improve America's safety net so it catches workers knocked off their
feet by recessions under today's conditions.
Obama's former press secretary, Jay Carney, is now an executive for
Amazon. After warehouse employees went on strike, demanding
protective equipment to avoid spreading Covid-19, Carney said Amazon
fired the organizer because he "violated social distancing rules."
Just the day before the strike, Amazon ordered him to stay home in
"quarantine" for 14 days.
Was the strike announced in advance? I expect it was. If so, I think
this quarantine was arranged by Amazon's as an excuse to keep its
leader away on the day of the strike.
Amazon's PR staff intended to use that to distract attention from
the bad conditions it keeps imposes on its workers.
*Senators Requesting Big Oil Bailouts Received Millions in Big Oil Donations.*
Current US laws permit this, when done in an indirect way, but it is
corruption just the same.
US citizens: call on Congress to
staff
the new Congressional Oversight Commission with aggressive
watchdogs to prevent corruption in coronavirus relief spending.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on American officials at various levels to end water
shutoffs and
restore
water service to everyone.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to
stop
the continuing practice of taking immigrant children away from their
parents and subjecting them to cruel conditions including denial
of medical treatment.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Instacart to give workers supplies for
self-protection, and paid sick leave.
Even if the company treated its workers well, I would refuse to use
it for the protection of my privacy, because it can't be
used anonymously. And I expect it requires clients to
run nonfree JavaScript code, which for my freedom's sake I refuse to do.
US citizens: call on HHS secretary Alex Azar to declare abortion an
essential medical procedure.
*Decline in Fossil Fuel Emissions Due to Coronavirus Lockdowns No Substitute
for Climate Action, Advocates Say.*
Covid-19 will be licked in a year or two, and greenhouse gas emissions
will rise again (the plutocrats intend to make sure they do), so the
bigger (but slower) danger of climate disaster will still be waiting
for us.
*When the Invisible Hand Gives You the Finger* — (1) failing to
provide medical supplies and equipment, then (2) saying that you
should go back to work just to keep the profits flowing.
The cult of the invisible hand seems to be as absurd as any other religion.
*The Coronavirus Paradox: Biden's Delegate Lead Increases as the Need for
Bernie's Politics Adds Up.*
Republicans reluctantly agreed to a law to send checks soon to
non-rich Americans. Then they cheated on the deal, by making an
arbitrary rule that poor people who live on government pensions or
aid, and don't file tax returns, would not get checks. Unless they
find out about this and file a return solely for this rule, they will
get shafted.
Yielding to a wave of criticism, Republicans dropped the new
requirement only for those who receive Social Security pensions.
They must hope that this will divide the opposition, so they could get
away with shafting the other affected people: military veterans, and
those whose income is small enough to qualify for the existing income
assistance.
Why deny this aid to the poorest? Those politicians' overriding goal
is to transfer money to the rich, so they take advantage of any
opportunity,
I do not submit my tax returns on line because it requires nonfree
software. I use xournal to write my data on the PDF form, and print
that. As I have no printer, I will visit a copying store to do the
printing.
I do this because keeping safe means protecting our freedom as well as
our health.
Concentration camps have existed for a century; the US and China both
operate concentration camps today.
US concentration camps do not kill prisoners directly, but often deport them
to a high probability of death.
Working from home, nowadays, often means that the employer monitors
everything that you do, via the nonfree software they make you use.
The government should not be allowed to collect data on masses of
individuals' movements without a warrant.
Australia is not satisfied with the forest destroyed by the
unprecedentedly large fires — it is giving logging companies an
exemption from environmental laws to help destroy what remains.
*[The numskull] Refuses to Reopen Affordable Care Act Enrollment to Help
[Newly] Uninsured [Americans].*
Greta Thunberg rebuked the US government for ceasing enforcement of
environmental protection regulations.
Environmental damage allowed now by the EPA will make people more
vulnerable to Covid-19 now, and continue harming people and nature
for years after Covid-19 has ceased to preoccupy us.
In education, don't think of "soft skills" as secondary.
*Soft Skills Are Essential Skills and Our Kids Need Them Now More Than Ever.*
The ACLU won a US court ruling that disobeying a server's terms of
service (or disservice) does not violate the CFAA.
This will be a milestone victory, if it endures, but we cannot take it
as final yet. I expect the big digital quasi-monopolies will arrange
to try to reverse this decision.
Too bad we could not bring Aaron Swartz back to life if the decision
stands.
Robert Bork's evisceration of US antitrust law allowed a gouging company
to dismantle the US government's contract for making copious
inexpensive ventilators.
More information about those events (though it doesn't trace the
connections to antitrust law and Medtronic).
But it does mention that the US government pushed to reduce the number
of hospital beds because it expected that the business-based US
medical system would seek excuses to keep all hospital beds full.
A National Health Service can maintain extra beds as a reserve, given
political will to provide good medical care.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to fully fund a vote-by-mail system for November.
To sign this without running nonfree Javascript code, use the
Salsalabs workaround.
If you sign, please spread the word!
Everyone:
call
on New Mexico's Department of Cultural Affairs and Museum of Art
to undo its censorship of art that shows the effects of fracking.
If you sign, please spread the word!
*The Democratic Party
Must
Harness the Legitimate Rage of Americans. Otherwise, the [extreme
right-wing] Will Use It With Horrifying Results.*
The US sent a hospital ship to help New York City, then
covered
it with rules that have made it almost useless.
This fits the conman's pattern. He signed a law to give Americans
payments to tide them over, then
made
rules to exclude millions. He signed a law to give some American
workers paid sick leave, then
made
it easy for a company to exclude its workers from paid sick leave.
I wonder if the conman had anything to do with the rules
preventing the use of the hospital ship.
I wonder if he studied government under Kafka.
The bully's men have added artificial obstacles to the recently passed
law offering paid sick leave, which will have the effect of
excluding
many workers who were supposed to have this benefit.
The conman
cheated
contractors he hired to work on his buildings. Why wouldn't he
cheat workers too?
Republicans reluctantly agreed to a law to send checks soon to
non-rich Americans. Then they cheated on the deal, by making an
arbitrary rule that
poor
people who live on government pensions or aid, and don't file tax
returns, would not get checks. Unless they find out about this
and file a return solely for this rule, they will get shafted.
Yielding to a wave of criticism, Republicans dropped the new
requirement only for those who receive Social Security
pensions. They must hope that this will divide the opposition, so
they could get away with shafting the other affected people: military
veterans, and those whose income is small enough to qualify for the
existing income assistance.
Why deny this aid to the poorest? Those politicians' overriding goal
is to transfer money to the rich, so they take advantage of any
opportunity,
I do not submit my tax returns on line because it requires nonfree
software. I use xournal to write my data on the PDF form, and print
that. As I have no printer, I will visit a copying store to do the
printing.
I do this because keeping safe means protecting our freedom as well as
our health.
Paul Mason forecasts that the effects of the epidemic shock
will
compel capitalism to incorporate many socialist features —
such as nationalization of some large business sectors, perhaps a
guaranteed monthly income.
Ellen
Brown's comments on the US bailout of business debt.
The US Strategic National Stockpile's web site said its purpose
included providing medical supplies to states and local governments.
Kushner mistakenly said this was not true, so the government
removed
those words from the web site.
The mainstream media don't dare to say "Orwellian", but that's what it is.
This is how the Soviet Union approached its own history.
(satire) *… Jared Kushner admonished resource-stricken states
this week that they
should
have shown some foresight and planned ahead before joining the
Union.*
(satire) *… the governors of several Southern states confirmed
Thursday they have exempted religious services from their
shelter-in-place orders, arguing that
Covid-19
is a good Christian virus that wouldn’t dare to spread during
church.*
A nonfree program is ipso facto untrustworthy: its developer controls
what it does. It is always the case that the developer may have
already used that control in ways that hurt the users.
In the case of Zoom, this is not a mere possibility. The developer
has done a
lousy
job.
This is in addition to denying freedom to the users by making the
program nonfree.
The fastest way to develop treatments or vaccines for Covid-19 would
be through
international
cooperation. However, mainstream politicians and mainstream media
ignore this and stick to the plutocratist line.
It is unfortunate that the author of that generally admirable article
fell into the confusion that the term
"intellectual
property" always tends to spread.
Amazon warehouse workers in Chicago have gone on strike
demanding
the company take steps to protect them from the spread of Covid-19 in
the warehouse.
Amazon is demonstrating the cruelty to workers which is its usual
attitude. That is one of the
many reasons I urge everyone to refuse to
buy from (or through) Amazon. I never do that.
Ralph Nader: supporters of the president should
look
at all these things he is doing to increase dangers for Americans.
Owen Jones: The Labour Party's new leader, Keir Starmer,
continues
Corbyn's policies, and progressives should defend him against the
followers of Tony B'liar.
Millions of Indians are stuck on the street with
no
money and few friends, and forbidden to travel to the places they call
home. Modi is willing to let them starve to death.
The conman is firing the inspector general of US intelligence agencies
as
punishment
for noticing the conman's crimes.
This is part of his general campaign to intimidate anyone in the
government who would criticize him.
US citizens: phone the White House at 202-456-1414, and demand
allowing veterans, and people receiving Supplemental Security Income
(disabled, or working but poor), to get their $1200 CARES act benefit
checks without having to file a gratuitous tax return.
US citizens: call on state officials to allow everyone to vote by mail.
US citizens: call on the narcissist to Use the National Defense Production Act
to force production of protective equipment.
(The Japanese word for "bank" is "ginkō".)
In 2016, under Obama, the US government made advance plans for how to deal
with an epidemic. In 2020 the numskull's officials ignored them.
The numskull's virus denialism is causing thousands of American deaths.
Russia plans to require everyone in Moscow to get government approval
for each trip out of the house. Added to this obvious injustice is
another injustice whose gravity most people won't recognize: the
system requires a nonfree app running on a Stalin's Dream device.
Edward Snowden: *high-tech surveillance measures
governments use to fight the outbreak of COVID-19 … could
have a long-lasting impact.*
US bombing in Somalia continues killing civilians and the US government
continues saying everyone killed was an enemy.
*Violence and humiliation used to police coronavirus curfews around
globe, often affecting the poorest and more vulnerable.*
In China in 2020, if you don't carry a portable phone with a special
malicious app, you are almost under house arrest.
Lockdown alone will not put an end to Covid-19. Mass testing can.
*Oceans can be restored to former glory within 30 years, say scientists.*
That would require great efforts to end the damage that humans
continue doing to the ocean, and that includes CO2 emissions.
90 million years ago, a part of Antarctica that was under 600 miles
from the South Pole was covered by rainforest. Scientists suspect that
a high level of CO2 was responsible.
US citizens: call on your state officials to make vote-by-mail available in all elections.
US citizens: call for investigation of the senators that profited
from inside information about Covid-19 by selling their own shares.
US citizens: call on private medical insurance companies to cover all
Covid-19 treatment in full).
*Poll Shows Nearly 60% in US Believe
Political System Designed Solely to Serve Rich and Powerful.*
So why did they vote for Biden rather than Sanders? There is nothing
to recommend Biden except his support for those bad goals.
Biden continues to state his opposition to Medicare for All.
*Financial help for airlines 'should come with strict climate conditions'.*
Likewise for all business pertaining to transportation using fossil
fuels.
Refugees in Italy have set up a cooperative farm which delivers
vegetables to nearby Italian families.
(satire) *"We allocated hundreds of million dollars in state funding
… to begin construction on thousands of estates, country
houses … to ensure that each and every wealthy New Yorker
can ride out the pandemic in safety and comfort," said New York
governor Andrew Cuomo.*
Las Vegas is giving homeless people "shelter" in boxes painted on a
parking lot while thousands of hotel rooms are empty.
New York City has enough vacant hotel rooms for all its homeless people,
but instead of housing them there, it sends thugs to roust them.
The shelters are now dangerous places to stay.
(satire) *[The numskull] kicked off
his plan to tackle the medical supply shortage Tuesday by awarding
ExxonMobil an exclusive contract to drill for ventilators in the
arctic.*
Most American families will have trouble paying their rent or mortgages
this month or next. They need help.
The bullshitter occasionally tells the truth. He admitted on TV that
Republicans can't nationally win a free and fair election.
Alberta's planet-roaster government has invested a billion dollars
in in the Keystone XL pipeline so that Trance Canada can begin
construction while Covid-19 has everyone in a trance.
This despite the fact that it can't start construction now because it
doesn't have approval of various kinds.
Running hospitals, and medicine in general, with the attitude of
business rather than medicine is directly responsible for the
shortages of hospital beds and ventilators in the US. In New York
City, mergers and closures in the name of efficiency have eliminated
over 1/4 of the hospital beds since 2000.
The FBI has announced it will stop accepting FOIA requests by internet.
Supposedly this is necessary because of Covid-19, but there is no rational
connection between the two.
This seems to be an instance of the right-wing extremists' general
attack on truth and rationality. They can cite any irrelevant fact as
a reason for any decision, and thumb their noses at anyone who points
out the irrationality.
US political leaders, and investors, have a very limited horizon for
imagining that bad events could really occur, or how bad they may get.
The saboteur in chief has ordered nearly eliminating Obama's 2012
requirement for increased fuel efficiency of new cars, which was
scheduled to take effect in 2021.
I expect this will kill millions of people by accelerating climate disaster,
but that will take a couple of decades to become visible, and today's
high officials won't be in office by then. Their successors will try to evade
the blame by lying about the facts.
*Myanmar (Burma) editor could face life in jail for interviewing rebel.*
Amazon fired the worker who organized Amazon warehouse workers to
go on strike demanding equipment to avoid transmitting Covid-19,
as well as decent pay.
The madman is making states bid against each other for scarce
mechanical ventilators.
There must be many makers in the US who can provide improvised ventilators.
International concentration of the industry that makes making medical
equipment, supplies and drugs is a false economy — it optimizes
profit for normal circumstances and prevents ramping up production
when there is an epidemic. Instead it leads to competition between
countries for something they all need.
I think that countries should agree that each will maintain production
facilities that can be ramped up when needed, for a wide variety of
medical needs.
One danger of relying on private hospitals, as the US heavily does, is
that they may shut down just when they are most needed.
Private equity funds are buying up small companies in certain US
medical fields, consolidating them, and making them gouge people.
Florida's governor wants to stop the cruise ships Zaandam and
Rotterdam from docking, saying that since they are "foreigners" they should all get sick and die.
That's right-wing extremists for you — they never miss an opportunity
to demonize the scapegoats-du-jour and inflict cruelty on them.
The lockdown response to Covid-19 may lead to a big undercount in the
US census, perhaps favoring the Republican efforts to exclude
unauthorized immigrants.
The madman is planning to escalate the fighting with an Iran-aligned
militia in Iraq.
This could result in direct war between the US and Iran.
*We Don't Need Return to Normalcy — We Need President Bernie Sanders.*
Thugs in Europe are acting like callous robots in dealing with
homeless people.
*Bailouts … must help people, not (mainly) corporations.*
Exiled Pakistani journalist Sajid Hussain, operating from asylum in Sweden,
seems to have been disappeared weeks ago. Thugs of Pakistan's government are suspected.
*Climate-killing products should come with smoking-style warnings.*
An unprecedented heat wave in Antarctica shows the world is proceeding on track to global disaster.
The US government is lending Boeing 17 billion dollars at a special low interest rate that amounts to a gift of hundreds of millions. Does this make sense?
US citizens: call on Congress to end the spread of COVID-19
in migrant detention centers, jails, and prisons.
US citizens: call on Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza and allow full
access to medical supplies.
US citizens: call on officials to let people out of jail and stop
jailing people when it is not vitally necessary.
US citizens: call on federal and state officials to make prisoners'
phone calls gratis.
Orbán is now dictator of Hungary in all but name. There is no more
legislature and no more elections until he decides to bring them back.
He can imprison anyone for "spreading misinformation", whether it is
true or false.
*'The Strike Wave Is in Full Swing': Amazon, Whole Foods Workers Walk Off Job
to Protest Unjust and Unsafe Labor Practices.*
Bravo to these workers.
Maybe it is necessary to set up a public subsidy for local news in the US.
I would hope that this requires sites permit anonymous access via Tor.
(satire) *Amazon Announces Unlimited Time Off, Increased Health
Benefits For All Warehouse Robots.*
In the UK, *Coronavirus has mercilessly exposed the damage years of
austerity and shrinking of the state have wreaked.*
Monsanto expected its herbicide dicamba to ruin other farmers' plants.
The Muslim victims of the Delhi pogrom are being kicked out of the
camps they moved to. They can't find homes and can't get food.
Putting BlackRock in charge of buying up companies' debts creates a
giant corruption opportunity.
Perhaps that's the intention.
*Why Coronavirus Is Humanity’s Wake-Up Call.* Since our economy is so
lousy that it isn't worth a sacrifice to preserve it, we need to
change it.
Employers are hurrying to replace many of the workers now staying
home, with robots — if we let them.
I refuse absolutely to use robot sales registers in stores. Once I
went to a supermarket in the evening and found no way to pay except a
robot, so I put my purchases down and left. But I do more than that.
I generally shout to the people near the robot sales registers,
"If you use these machines you are putting other Americans out of work.
Join me and insist on going to the human sales agents. We don't have
to let them replace humans with robots!"
How about joining me an doing likewise? It build awareness of the
need for social solidarity.
Covid-19 creates a crisis: a need to choose between paths, including
the path of global solidarity and the path of kicking others when they
are down.
*Fighting COVID-19 Starts With Universal Access to Water and
Sanitation.* All countries including the US must cease water shut-offs,
and turn the water back on in every home.
Since Bolosonaro won't protect Brazilians from Covid-19, a local gang
has started doing its bit.
Trying to "restart the economy" as the bullshitter wishes would
not achieve its goal. Workers would get sick and businesses would
shut down again.
What is needed, rather, is to protect workers and small businesses
from the effects of the temporary shutdown. Most big businesses have
plenty of reserves; they don't need help.
The bullshitter's lawyers are trying to gag an ad by Biden's campaign
which shows the bullshitter's statements downplaying the severity of
the Covid-19 situation.
Venezuela was very quick to block the spread of Covid-19. Many
Venezuelans in the US want to go home, if only the US would allow
Venezuela to pick them up.
My friend in Venezuela, who does not blindly support Maduro,
confirmed this is accurate.
Salafi Arabia is using the security flaws in SS7 to track people around
the world.
SS7 is the protocol for communication between phone companies.
It has been known for many years that the lack of security in SS7 allows
anyone (if willing to commit a crime) to spoof being another phone system
and get data about the activity and movements of any phone line.
*Without adequate healthcare and unable to deliver basic needs, India now faces twin catastrophes of coronavirus and starvation.*
Spain and Ireland have temporarily nationalized all private hospitals.
They should make this permanent, and the US should do likewise.
*Bernie Sanders in the Age of Coronavirus: We Need Him Now More Than Ever.*
The US is exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19 because of decisions
and policies that make it insecure — due partly to accepting a narrow
military definition of what it means to be "secure".
At least one teenager has died, apparently from
Covid-19, because an "urgent care" clinic refused to treat him.
He was one of the 8% of Americans who have no medical insurance.
The US is underreporting deaths from Covid-19 by attributing them to
other causes.
*'We Need Medicare for All': Massive Coronavirus Job Losses Expose Obvious
Failure of Employer-Based Insurance.*
The "stimulus" slush fund authorizes bailouts for non-US companies.
This could include cruise ship companies which avoid US taxes and
environmental laws.
*American Small Businesses Are on Edge of Extinction Event and Congress Is Not
Doing Enough.*
Italy seems to be doing a great job of helping society, as well as
individuals rich and poor, survive.
KUOW public radio will no longer transmit the bullshitter's daily
propaganda speeches about Covid-19. The station says they are likely
to spread misinformation.
Bravo!
Whenever the bullshitter starts speaking in any program you are
watching or listening to, I suggest you switch it off and do something
else.
If his utterances contain, by chance, any valid information, you will
find it elsewhere — you can't trust it if it comes from him.
Whatever he says about what he will do, he will probably change
anyway.
Arguing with his words is ineffective for convincing his supporters.
So don't waste your attention on them — switch off.
Telling a broadcaster that you switch off when he comes on might do
some good.
People who enter Taiwan are subject to a strict quarantine, tracked by
their Stalin's Dream devices (portable phones). If the device ever
does not respond (such as, out of power), enforcers go after you
immediately.
The strict quarantine may be necessary, but the specific method of
enforcement is intolerable. I wonder what they would say to a person
who has no Stalin's Dream device and refuses to have one.
The tracking of my movements would not matter if I were forbidden to
leave the apartment. It would only show I did not leave. But it is
also a listening device, and I would protect myself from that one way
or another.
What worries me most is how I would get food. I buy things only
anonymously. I do not give my name or address and I pay only cash.
Under those quarantine rules, I might not be able to buy any food.
14 days without eating would not kill me, but it would be extremely
unpleasant — enough to convince me to do as Paul Huang did, and stay
away.
For me personally, that is all theoretical. Travel for speaking is
not feasible if entering a country requires a 14-day quarantine,
regardless of the details of how it is enforced. But the issues of
freedom posed by the enforcement affect everyone, not just me.
*'Amazon Putting Lives of Workers at Risk': Omar and Sanders Press Bezos on
Alarming Lack of Coronavirus Protections.*
The lockdown to stop the spread of one infection will presently cause
the spread of other infections, because much of world condom production
is shut down.
Condoms are used to prevent disease; they should be considered
essential products and their factories should not be closed. Surely
they can take steps to protect employees from catching anything at
work.
*Tackle climate crisis and poverty with zeal of Covid-19 fight,
scientists urge.*
The UK plans to lend over a billion dollars to countries so they can
buy British weapons.
A retired Venezuelan general says he bought weapons to plan a coup
using money provided to him by Guaidó, encouraged by the US. He
announced this in public after the US government indicted him, along
with Maduro, for alleged drug trafficking.
Factory farms (of chickens or pigs) encourage evolution of especially
virulent strains of flu. They also encourage small farms to move to
areas close to wildlife. They may thus have contributed to the
evolution of Covid-19.
Today I received a postcard saying, on the front, "President Trump's
Coronavirus Guidelines for America." I laughed. Surely nobody but
his fanatical supporters would trust advice because it carries his name.
It is also a mistake to reject advice because it carries his name.
Someone checked, and the advice on that postcard is basically the same
advice you'd get from WHO. It has no resemblance to the bullshitter's
own views.
The thing to do with advice published under the bullshitter's name is
not even look at it. That way you won't be in danger of being
influenced by it in any manner. There are plenty of better places to get
advice from.
A friend suggested that putting his name on advice is electioneering.
New Zealand has found a giant aquifer of fresh water under the ocean.
To ensure it remains available for emergencies, it had better regulate
the use of that water to avoid permitting extra growth that would require
drawing water from it all the time.
Kaiser Permanente denied a patient hydroxychloroquine which she needed
to treat lupus, saying it was reserving the drug for future sufferers
of Covid-19. There is no scientific evidence that hydroxychloroquine
is good for treating Covid-19, only speculations boosted by the
bullshitter.
Adding insult to injury, the company thanked her for the "sacrifice"
it was forcing on her.
I have no information on whether it is true that she can safely go
without it for a month. I hope it is true.
Netanyahu shut down Israel's parliament and imposed massive
surveillance by decree. Israelis protested and were arrested in the
name of the Covid-19 emergency.
As one protester said, officials that trample human rights and
democracy is more dangerous than Covid-19. And that applies even more
strongly to greedy nihilists such as the bully.
If Israel wants to use phone location data to check who might have
passed Covid-19 to whom, it should set up a firm institutional
structure to ensure that data obtained for this purpose
cannot be used for any other purposes.
Members of the House of Representatives have asked the State
Department for detailed information on how Israel uses weapons
procured from the US, including whether they are used for actions,
such as demolishing Palestinians' homes, which violate the conditions
US law places on those weapons sales.
Bolsonaro denies the reality of Covid-19 as a dangerous disease, and
has opposed all measures to stop it from spreading in Brazil, even in
his own life.
State governors who formerly supported him are now defying his orders
in order to establish social distancing.
One measure he did take, supposedly for protection against Covid-19,
was to reduce enforcement of forest protection laws.
That is because he supports destroying
the forest.
(satire) *Trump Announces Plan To Retrain Nation’s 3 Million
Unemployed Americans As Human Ventilators.*
India tells people to stay indoors and starve, and one state says
people will be shot dead if they don't. Meanwhile, foreign visitors
are being evicted because hotels are closing or they use up their
funds. Will they be shot dead for this?
Australia is offering help to the Australians who face eviction or starvation.
Maybe some other countries do, too.
Does the government offer some other way out to starving Indians, one
not described in the article?
Any company that wants a bailout should in exchange eliminate its
tax-avoidance schemes.
The shutdown of much clothing production is an opportunity to reshape
the industry to stop being grossly wasteful.
The numskull declared high-level planning meetings for dealing with
Covid-19 government secrets. Thus, officials from spy agencies could
participate and medical officials from the Department of Health and
Human Services were excluded.
US citizens: call on the US government to stop fighting wars and
ocus on the real dangers: global health, migration, inequality, and
climate disaster.
US citizens: demand an end to taking funds from important government activities
to pay for the damaging border wall.
The wall does no good, but it does do harm.
US citizens: call on Texas to let abortion clinics stay open and
continue functioning.
The Netherlands will pay compensation for some of the abuses of its
colonial rule over Indonesia.
The UK government decided to give housing to all homeless people in Britain,
to protect them from Covid-19.
This could have been done at any time; all that was lacking was the
will. Better late than never.
It could be done at any time in the US, too.
Using Covid-19 as an excuse, Republican saboteurs have given US
companies almost unlimited permission to pollute air and water.
There may be some cases in which this is justified and necessary, but
many companies will jump for the opportunity to dump toxins. They
will kill people; they can even cause Covid-19 to kill more people.
And there is no limit on it, and no requirement to look for the least
dangerous alternative.
Loujain al-Hathloul, who was tortured in jail for agitating for the
right to drive a car in Salafi Arabia, will soon be put on trial.
The acting king offered to release her if she would swear she had not
been tortured.
Robert Reich: *The real divide [in the US today] is between democracy
and oligarchy.*
I think the term "plutocracy" is slightly clearer than "oligarchy",
but under either name, we must put an end to it.
The "national security" apparatus sucks down lots of money, year after
year, with little opposition.
It does not make Americans secure; on the contrary, it puts our
freedom in danger and persecutes the heroes that try to tell us about it.
*'Looting of America by Big Corporations': Progressives Appalled as Senate
Unanimously Passes Largest Bailout Bill in US History.*
"COVID-19 emergency spending bill: $250 billion for direct payments to
Americans, $250 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $4 trillion
to bail out corporations. Seems like the balance is off a bit."
US airlines got a big bailout, with no commitments about reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.
350.org says this is
is protecting both your
health and your freedom.
Q: Is it true that in Japan money grows on trees?
A: Yes, on the ginko trees.
