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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
British offshore wind-farms pay large sums to rich aristocrats for the "right" to operate.
There may be injustice in these details, and maybe some of these details should be changed. Perhaps some of the laws that require payment to the rich for permission to set up a wind farm.
But none of that calls into question the need to make the wind farm!
Canadians love their national medical system, but privatizers never give up trying to eliminate it.
*Lula Applauded for Naming Amazon Defenders as Brazilian Ministers.*
Hikvision video systems can classify people by many dimensions of personal characteristics, and purports to identify patterns of actions that suggest forbidden dissent.
*The crime victims’ advocate [who is] fighting mass incarceration.*
*Al Sharpton has warned Democratic leaders that they must step up the party’s appeal to African American voters or risk …Republican leaders making greater inroads with the Black electorate.*
I've read that the danger is even greater among Hispanics.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
*Sanders Calls on Buttigieg to Hold Southwest CEO Accountable for "Greed and Incompetence."*
The Taliban have forbidden women to work for NGOs. Decades of war have left many families with only women to earn money; now that they cannot work, they are desperate. Are they desperate enough to kill Taliban -- any Taliban they can get?
The west tried sending armies to defeat the Taliban, but the Taliban defeated them. The western-sponsored Afghan government was corrupt, and its army did not have the will to win that the Taliban had. There is no sense in trying that approach again. What could defeat the Taliban?
If Afghan women, in total desperation and with total determination, start killing whatever Taliban they can get their hands on, they can put an end to religious tyranny.
Nursing home care for disabled or demented old people in the UK is utterly lousy, because the nursing homes cannot hire enough staff to do the job right.
The necessary first step to fix this is to tax the rich more, and use some of that money to give nursing home staff a raise and increase the number of staff. But are there more workers available to hire? Where did the former staff go? Were they foreigners who cannot now work in the UK? The government could fix that by allowing more foreigners to immigrate and work. Are they disabled by long Covid? Fixing that would be harder.k
West Virginia Journalist Fired in Alleged Retaliation Over Reporting on Abuse in State [psychiatric] Facilities.*
*Danish Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into Working as a Propagandist.*
Human rights advocates are alarmed about Israel's new government, the most right-wing it has ever had, which is endorsing fascist, racist and colonialist policies towards Palestine.
Netanyahu has promised to legalize thefts of Palestinians' land carried out by private groups of Israelis, and to annex the whole West Bank. I expect that the next goal after that will be to expel all Palestinians, a few at a time so that it can deny the intention to expel them all.
iMonsters can be tracked for 24 hours after being switched "off." The author of the article considers this harmless in and of itself, but I disagree: simply recording your movements is harm.
A Minneapolis thug faces major charges for beating up Jaleel Stallings and seriously injuring him, while Stallings was lying prone on the ground. It also has financial relationships with major companies that would like to influence that policy.
Apple said it will implement end-to-end encryption for many purposes, including storing backups on Apple servers.
One can't really trust the security of this encryption, because it will be done by nonfree software running in a nonfree operating system. There would be nothing to stop Apple from making that software send Apple every encryption key the user uses.
A 28-year-old man, running for Congress, had to sleep on friends' couches at the end of the campaign. He won the election, and was rejected for an apartment in Washington because of his campaign debts.
(satire) D.C. Landlord Clarifies He Rejected Gen Z Congressman Because He’s Black.
The FDA disregarded its rules to approve the super-expensive and questionable Alzheimer's preventative, Aduhelm.
US citizens: call on USDA to plant prairie habitat for bees.
Robert Reich: *How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began*, in the 1970s.
*Big Pharma and [Republican] Allies Aim to Sabotage Medicare Drug Price Reforms.*
The House of Representatives decided not to give the Senate or the DoJ the evidence it has obtained in a year of investigating Big Oil.
How global heating causes occasional bursts of very cold air in the northern hemisphere.
The melting of so much Arctic sea ice has made the Arctic considerably warmer than it used to be, and that makes it easier for an air mass of Arctic air to head south and freeze people.
A company distributes software to crack the security on surveillance cameras and alter the recordings stored in them.
This is an additional reason why security cameras must not be connected to a network. To uphold security, they must be secure, and that means air-gapped.
The original reasons why security cameras must not be connected to a network is to avoid furthering massive surveillance of people in general, with the terrible threat of China-style repression.
Finally, the US is making substantial investments in decarbonizing electricity and ground transportation.
Other major sources of greenhouse gas emissions include agriculture, concrete. air transportation and plastic. The US needs to work on reducing emissions from all of them.
The question of whether to allow exposed total liar George Santos to take a seat in the House of Representatives will compel each other Republican member to take a public stand on whether there is any limit to what lies they will accept for grabbing power.
When programmers try to save time by using AI assistants to write code, they tend to overlook bugs.
(satire) *Self-Loving Tesla Forgives Itself For Running Over Child.*
France has required packaging and utensils provided with food to eat in a restaurant be reusable, and used many times.
Right wing politics is based on cruelty, and the behavior of its leaders and movement is sociopathic.
Mastodon's founder, Eugen Rochko, has rejected offers to convert Mastodon into a business and give him lots of money. He says that accepting such investment would make Mastodon as bad as Twitter.
Bravo!
*'The System' Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future.* Especially for young people. This creates a special opportunity for political organizing.
The article proposes the AARP as an example to follow. Sad to say, the AARP attracts old people by offering them opportunities to save money, but it doesn't represent their interests.
Restrictions on abortion in US states led to measurably higher rates of suicide among women of reproductive age.
This is especially significant since it largely compares the same states before and after introducing restrictions.
The other result, that states which restrict abortion also show a worse state of health for women and infants, does not necessary demonstrate consequences of restricting abortion. They may be the more general consequences of being ruled by right-wing government.
*Flush With Record Profits, Exxon Sues to Block EU Windfall Tax.*
48,000 student academic workers at the University of California have accepted a new contract with big wage increases.
Recently released secret documents add to the evidence that the CIA was involved in something with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of President Kennedy. However, it's not clear what they were doing. The CIA has 4,000 still-unreleased documents relating to Kennedy.
Describing the dynamic where companies make discussion sites that build real communities, then spoil them hoping to make the users purchase more.
There is an interesting aside about LiveJournal (which I never used), claiming it was used a lot by Russian dissidents, and eventually sold to a company that worked for Putin.
US corporations amass enormous quasi-monopolies by buying many small businesses one by one. The US government never investigates.
Details of the Global Minimum Tax system for corporations that the EU and US are plannimg to adopt.
My proposal for a progressive tax on a corporation's gross income, with the tax rate to depend on the global corporation's total gross income, is simpler and I expect it to have better results.
In addition to the standard moral reasons to treat prisoners of war with respect, Ukraine has a special practical interest in doing so. Every conscript in the Putin forces must wonder, "Should I look for a chance to surrender?" Ukraine should act so that the answer will be an unhesitating "Yes!"
Describing the requirements of the EU's Digital Services Act.
Every time I encounter the term "content", referring to publications, postings or messages, it makes me angry.
However, most of the substantial requirements look reasonable to me.
What I worry about is that some of the requirements may have the effect of requiring users to prove their identity. For instance, rules about "protecting children" could have the effect of imposing censorship on adults unless they prove their age by showing official identity documents.
Senator Warnock's victory in the Georgia runoff had to overcome very strong voter-suppression efforts.
California's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon could force it to change its operations, world-wide.
Even if we stop Amazon from doing wrong to its warehouse workers and its competitors, that won't end the injustice of snooping on its customers and making them run nonfree software. Please join me in refusing to accept such treatment.
The president can and should take steps to reduce rents for many Americans.
*How Private Equity Gave Rise to Extreme Inequality.*
Staff at the University of Leiden took down a painting of former administrators of the university because (1) they were depicted smoking and (2) they were all male.
The university president said that some people "do not feel represented" by the painting. So what? It doesn't represent me, either. It doesn't represent present-day people at all, and it wasn't meant to.
It's right to call for changing the past sexism which is visible in the painting. Evidently the university has already started doing so, since its current president is a woman.
It is sometimes necessary to break with past errors; to erase references to the past because of past errors is outrageous. The people of today have no right to demand that the art of the past be replaced to represent them.
BP tries to present itself falsely as a green oil company while planning to spend a lot more in fossil fuels than in renewable energy.
Summer camps in Crimea turned into prison camps for some Ukrainian children.
Australia is taking a stern attitude towards soldiers that try to cover up or disguise war crimes.
*UK aid to Afghanistan entrenched corruption and injustice, report finds.*
A powerful elite received most of the benefits.
The governor of New York said that the current blizzard is a "war with mother nature." I think that well describes the things humans have done to produce the global heating that made a storm this powerful happen.
She also called it "the blizzard of the century," which is an over-optimistic prediction about the storms of the next 77 years.
There is a campaign to make the word "Indian", referring to indigenous groups of the Americas, taboo.
The article claims that any use whatsoever of that term is "offensive", regardless of the intended meaning. I am skeptical of this, so I challenge those who think so to provide grounds for the claim.
The use of "Indian" to refer to people from the Americas started with an error, when Columbus believed he had reached India or what is now Indonesia. It also invites confusion, since there are more people in the US that were born in India than members of indigenous tribes. For clarity I usually write "indigenous" to identify the latter.
But those things do not add up to an offense or justify imposing yet another language taboo. There is no need to eradicate "Indian" from place names around the US.
Another conjecture about Musk's goal in dealing with Twitter: that he aims to make it explicitly serve as a tool for right-wing extremism.
The doctors that worked on US sleeping car trains created a special branch of medicine, known as Pullmanary medicine.
US citizens: Kavanaugh's ugly holiday party proves we need a SCOTUS code of ethics; call on Congress to enact one.
US citizens: tell Democrats such as Biden that the kind of "bipartisanship" that is desirable is to fight for progressive policies that most Americans support, even many Republicans — not making deals with right-wing extremists.
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed documents from big oil companies and studied the tactics they use for climate disinformation. The committee was going to publish the documents, but seems to have been pressured out of it. Soon Republicans will take over that committee and kill the investigation completely.
The Putin forces shelled the market at the center of Kherson.
This leads me to think that they can't be terribly short of artillery shells.
(satire) *U.S. Treasury Introduces New Wild Bills That Can Be Used For Any Dollar Amount.*
*[Some of] the monsters of American capitalism: Trump, Bankman-Fried's, and Musk.*
The Tories hide behind "pay review bodies" instituted to set pay for NHS workers. These bodies do what the government wants, but the government can pretend it has nothing to do with the issue.
How Haiti's history of colonization and slavery drove it to today's ruin.
The "elections" of presidents Martelly and Moise were quietly imposed by the US government.
(satire) *New Sponsored Google Maps Feature Directs Every Driver To Denny's.*
This is a joke, but it illustrates a serious danger about Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS).
*The 17 findings in the January 6 committee’s final report.*
Peru's congress sneakily plans to eliminate the protected lands for "uncontacted" indigenous groups.
Over half a million current members of the US military have drunk PFAS-tainted water, preceded by millions of others in the past.
Chile will open an embassy to Palestine in occupied territory.
We can't help the very poor more than a little unless we tax the very rich much more.
*This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism — and It's Hideous.*
*The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.*
*Positive signals from Iran over nuclear deal put west in a tricky position.* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/20/positive-signals-from-iran-over-nuclear-deal-put-west-in-a-tricky-position
I suggest dropping sanctions against Iran, then inviting it to decide whether to continue arming Russia (and face sanctions for that) or stop arming Russia (and continue without sanctions).
*Israel's New Far-Right Government to Lift Ban on Parliamentary Candidates Inciting Racism.*
The US government is investigating a Texas school district's book ban as a civil rights issue.
Republicans in the Senate are fighting tooth and nail to keep poor Americans in hunger.
At least this deal replaces a temporary aid program with a permanent aid program. In the long term, that is a step forward. However, the permanent aid program is limited to families with children.
*Markey Asks Biden to Draft Plan for Ending Public Funding of Overseas Fossil Fuel Projects.*
Two-thirds of Antarctica’s native species are threatened by global heating.
The species most threatened is the emperor penguin, beloved by everyone.
*Make Big Oil Pay to Clean Up Their Mess on Public Lands.*
Medea Benjamin describes 10 good developments during 2022.
I disagree with her about one of them. The use of dollars as the standard international exchange currency gives the US a considerable economic advantage. 15 years ago, with US power more or less dominating the world and starting wars, I figured that ending that advantage would be a change for the better.
Today, however, US power is reduced while China's economic and military power is growing. China's government is repressive and aggressive, and it denies facts like any fascist. The US is the nucleus of resistance to China's aggression. If the US avoids falling into fascism, we will appreciate US power to resist China's dominion.
New York Governor Hochul nominated an anti-union conservative judge to the state's highest judgeship.
(satire) *FIFA Officials Open For 2030 World Cup Bribes.*
(satire) *Hundreds Of Swimmers Die Every Year Getting Tangled Up In Plastic Lane Dividers.*
*Court Finds EPA Approval of Bee-Killing Sulfoxaflor [a neonicotinoid] Unlawful.*
US citizens: call on Senator Mary Peters to push to appoint people to the USPS board of governors who will replace DeJoy with a good postmaster.
US citizens: call on Senator Schumer to give Sellout Sinema no special favors.
Counsel for Democrats for how to gain in the 2024 elections.
A lot of this seems valid to me, but I see one pitfall to avoid. The next Republican presidential candidate could easily be DeMentis. To focus on the corrupter too strongly could be weak in opposing DeMentis.
I am not sure what is the best way to prevent that, but I have an idea: to focus condemnation on Republican demonization/distraction. All Republican candidates try to demonize weak "enemies" to take our minds off the powerful enemies: billionaires (both individuals and businesses).
* Congress should pass laws to ensure both transparency (about income) and proper auditing of the most powerful in politics.* The same law could help protect the privacy of everyone else from Republican threats.
*Transcripts reveal Cassidy Hutchinson was pressured to protect [the bullshitter].* For instance, not to try to remember the answers to questions she was asked while testifying.
Polar bears are vanishing from the region where they were formerly most numerous.
7 states have amended their constitutions to prohibit treating convicts as slaves, but practical changes in the practice of forcing convicts to work for a pittance are just starting.
American workers should keep in mind that forcing prisoners to work for a low wage undercuts the wages of free workers.
I think it makes sense to distinguish prison chores (for instance, cooking food for for the prisoners to eat, and cleaning their clothing) from work on products or services for use outside the prison. It is legitimate to require prisoners to do the chores they need done, but that cannot legitimately take more than a few hours a week.
Many American teenagers have so little experience of independent activity that they perceive basic adult activities as risky.
It is plausible that this is a frequent result of treating adolescents like children, and children like infants.
Long Covid is sometimes fatal. Just how often that occurs is an open question.
The Department of Justice has joined the lawsuit against Georgia election vigilantes.
The US is throwing a monkey wrench into the WTO's system for business-friendly resolution of trade disputes, by blocking nomination of judges to hear appeals. If you are in favor of business-friendly resolution of trade disputes, as the author of the article is, you will conclude that the US is doing something wrong.
I've condemned the WTO since the beginning, first because of its patent rules, and later because its system for "resolution of trade disputes" is used to stop countries from protecting themselves against harmful products that happen to be imported from other countries. The US tried to protect itself against flavored cigarettes, and to protect marine mammals from tuna caught in ways that killed them, and each time the WTO reached a judgment that compelled the US to give up on it.
I am sure the WTO has harmed other countries in similar ways, all based on the idea that every kind of business opportunity must be permitted.
Australia proposes to require people to prove their identity to sign up for a dating app, and undergo criminal background checks.
This is likely to mean that the app companies get a lot more data about each user, which they can then abuse.
If Australia passes a law to require these checks, it should also pass a law strictly limiting what other personal data the company can collect. It should not be allowed to know any user's location, ever, and it must delete all copies of a user's data when the user says to do so. Messages between users should be encrypted such that the company cannot decrypt them.
Even with this law, I would refuse to use those apps because they are nonfree software.
The Putin forces have stolen the collections of several archaeological museums in the captured areas of Ukraine. They have also destroyed archaeological sites by building fortifications on them.
*The [UK's] Rwanda deportation scheme might be legal, but it remains deeply shameful.*
The need to work for income as well as study, leaving students with no time to do their homework, is a major factor leading university students to cheat.
India's Hindu-nationalist government is also a Hindi-nationalist government, trying to impose Hindi on the 3/4 of Indians that don't speak Hindi.
Many defend English as India's de-facto "lingua anglica", because it is neutral — it does not prefer any one part of India over the others.
The evidence in the Jan 6 committee's report shows the Department of Justice that there is a basis to prosecute the corrupter.
I think its most important effect will be to show the public that prosecuting him is legitimate.
Dean Baker: *Industrial Policy Is Not a Remedy for Income Inequality.*
Fixing vulnerabilities in the function of the electoral college is not enough: we need to replace it with popular vote.
The electoral college was designed when the United States was founded. People thought of themselves as citizens of the various states, and thought of the union as literally a federation of states. In terms of those concepts, the electoral college made sense as a way for states to choose the chief executive of their federation. But we no longer think of the US that way.
Please urge your state to sign up to the National Popular Vote.
In the US, right-wing state governments reduce working people's life expectancy. But the mainstream media don't dare admit that one of the two political sides is better than the other.
Legal steps needed to block avenues for future presidential coup attempts in the US.
To have unrigged elections, we need also to prohibit gerrymandering and voter suppression. To have fair elections for president, we need to do away with the electoral college.
US citizens: call on the Senate to replace Senator Manchin as energy chairman.
Proposing a system for acquiring property on celestial bodies and objects which avoids the bad outcome that the early space travelers claim everything.
My view of property rights is very different from an antisocialist's. People are not inherently entitled to own any kind of property, but a system of property rights can be beneficial on the margin for people in general. In normal circumstances, where no one is in penury, it is useful for individuals to own clothing, books, furniture, bicycles, food, and so on, and maybe even houses. I mean "useful" in the sense that in those circumstances the system of property rights benefits everyone. This presumes that overall economic system protects people from poverty, so that every individual gets to own a reasonable amount of those things.
However, property rights must not be absolute. If the system does push someone into poverty, "property rights" can't justify keeping that person in penury. If you need food to survive, you are entitled to "steal" some, with a few special exceptions such as taking the food some other penurious person was about to eat, or taking a farmer's seed corn.
That said, the temporary property rental system proposed in the article linked to could be a useful method to add to a system of non-absolute property.
*Freedom of Press is Dealt Deadly Blows by Modi's Proto-Fascist Regime in India.*
*Global heating to drive stronger La Niña and El Niño events by 2030, researchers say.*
These events already cause havoc — droughts and fires in some places and times, floods in others. Global heating is likely to make them worse.
Next year's climate conference will be hosted (and run) by the UAE.
The UAE is a repressive regime that recognizes human rights only when that pleases the emirs, so protest will be crushed and most activists kept out, as happened this year in Egypt.
In addition, the UAE is a big oil exporter, which means that next year's event will be even more corrupted by global heating denialists than this year's.
The UAE spends lots of money to manipulate the US government and policies.
If any powerful countries really want to make progress in defending the climate, they should denounce the UN climate conferences as corrupt betrayals, refuse to attend, and organize a new kind of event. But maybe they are corrupted enough to be content with this corruption.
Big US banks are lobbying against a proposed rule that would stop them from managing retirement funds any more if they are caught committing crimes in doing that.
*"The [Putin forces] mined everything": why making Kherson safe could take years.*
Please distinguish between the Putin forces and Russia. Ukraine will need to live with Russia, and Ukrainians will need to live with their Russian relatives, for centuries, assuming those countries survive coming global disaster. Hate Putin, not Russia!
Fiji has ousted coup-leader Bainimarama through a democratic election. But it is not yet clear he won't stage another coup.
16 cities in Puerto Rico are suing fossil fuel companies and their PR tools for conspiring to deny the dangers of burning oil — in particular, increasingly devastating hurricanes.
Campaigning against plans to restart a US nuclear reactor that has been permanently shut down for being dangerous to operate.
Convicting the wrecker on the charges recommended by the Jan 6 committee may be difficult.
But it is crucial to try.
However, putting the wrecker in prison won't be enough. Other fascists are jockeying to be his successor as the leader of American fascism.
Australians propose a "right to protest" law to override state laws that impose severe punishments on nonviolent protests.
I've read that Australia does not have anything like the US Bill of Rights in its constitution. It needs one.
Musk's response to a disappointing result in a poll on Twitter: voter suppression.
(satire) *Man Who Could Have Been Holding Gun In Diverging Timeline Shot Dead By Police.*
Deepening the satire of this item is the fact that it describes the way racist stereotyping actually works. When thugs see a black man, they imagine what they believe a black man might have been doing and may shoot for those imaginings.
The Senate considered a harmful trade: to extend tax credits for poor families with children in exchange for tax cuts for corporations (mostly for the rich).
The article does not make it clear which of those two changes were temporary and which were permanent. But I expect that the increase in tax credits for children was temporary.
This sort of deal is bad and we should defeat it. Continuing to reduce taxes for the rich will paralyze the government, leaving it unable to afford tax credits for the poor, or anything else. We need to increase taxes on the rich.
The real "great replacement": a broad range of Republican attitudes lead whites to die younger (especially those without a college education).
Some of these attitudes lead people to take foolish risks, from which some die. But in areas where Republican attitudes dominate, they also lead to laws that put people in increasing danger. The Republican Party has become the Republican DEATH CULT.
Biden privately sees the non-nuclear deal with Iran as impossible to resurrect. However, he is still open to diplomacy on the matter.
*Experts Welcome New Biden Policy to Facilitate Humanitarian Aid in Sanctioned Nations.*
It is clearly established that US trade sanctions harm poor people in those countries, by interfering with imports of food and medicine. This was the case in Iraq in the 1990s and until the Bush forces conquered that country. People have been clamoring for changes to avoid that result ever since then.
*Sixty years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the US has learned its lessons — but Putin has not.*
The challenge is to give Putin an exit that isn't either a victory for him or a disaster for everyone. I can't offer an answer, but the start of an answer is to stop pushing to oust or prosecute Putin. Desirable and just they would be, but not wise.
*Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.*
A lie denies specific truths. Bullshit attacks the very idea of truth.
Retirement tax changes: *This bill does not make it easier for workers to save for retirement, it just makes it easier for high-income earners to shelter more of their earnings from taxes.*
*Elon Musk claims the FBI paid Twitter to "censor info from the public." Here's what the Twitter Files actually show.*
The Keystone tar sands oil pipeline has had several big leaks, more than one would expect. Its safety record is deteriorating, and it may have been built with low-quality materials.
It's a good thing that the Keystone XL pipeline was not built.
Given the extra corrosivity of tar sands oil, and the extra pollution caused by extracting and burning it, we should probably shut down the existing Keystone pipeline and stop the extraction of tar sands oil.
Why the Democratic Party keeps doing badly against Republicans that despise the non-rich.
‘First Night Against the Wars’ is coming up. Let's have our next stand-out for Julian starting at 2pm on Dec 31 in *Copley Sq*. at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth, in front of the Public Library. We are expecting more activists this year as we join forces with Boston’s new coalition ‘Solidarity Action Network’. The coalition group will be gathering from noon to 5, bringing all our issues together, crushing inequality, climate collapse, endless war, nuclear Armageddon and, of course, free speech! It grew out of the Earth Day Strike a few months back.
US citizens: call on the DOJ to act on the criminal referrals for the wrecker.
Everyone: call on Amazon to Stop the sale of neonicotinoid pesticides.
Even if we sentence the wrecker to prison, the fascists he unleashed will remain dangerous.
Elon Musk compared with Henry Ford — brilliant entrepreneurs that turned to spreading hatred and almost destroyed their companies.
*Seven reasons to be cheerful about the Amazon in 2023 — and three to be terrified.*
Micah Lee reports that Musk is still blocking his Twitter account and those of some other journalists that have criticized Musk.
However, instead of marking the accounts "suspended", so the public can see how Twitter is treating them, they are blocked from logging in.
The US seized funds from Afghanistan's central bank, and in September set up a channel to donate those funds for food for Afghans. But it's not doing anything.
There are hints that Musk is preparing Twitter for bankruptcy.
I speculated that his aim might be to eliminate it.
Sherif Osman is an Egyptian dissident who moved to the US long ago. On a visit to Dubai, he was arrested and may now be handed over to Egypt to be a political prisoner.
*The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) failed to pursue mandatory audits of [the corrupter] on a timely basis during his presidency.*
Alameda county passed a law prohibiting landlords from doing criminal background checks on would-be tenants.
It looks like the UK government is going to join in a campaign of repression against people who share Netflix passwords.
The name "Intellectual Property Office" indicates a basic leaning towards dividing people and imposing repression. This is a typical example. If you allow that term to shape your thinking, you will be evil too. Likewise for calling sharing "piracy."
Netflix does so many unjust things to its customers that I urge everyone to reject it entirely. In particular, it requires customers to run nonfree software designed specifically to restrict them.
Using it and sharing a subscription deals the company a small blow, which it deserves, but does not protect customers from most of the injustice.
*Anti-Vaxxers' disregard for basic human safety also makes them lousy drivers.*
The outgoing governor of Oregon has commuted all of Oregon's death sentences. Slowly the US advances toward abolishing the death penalty.
Progress, though slow, in understanding long Covid.
Google is adding client-side encryption, but due to the basic architecture it's not entirely trustworthy.
Google encryption may be effective against snoopers that have no special relationship with Google. However, Google remains ultimately in control of the encryption software and the operating system it runs on, so you can't trust it fully. Google will have the power to give you an "upgrade" that shows Google the plaintext of every encrypted message.
The right-wing allies of Bolsonaro won a majority in Brazil's congress. Human rights, conservation and democracy in Brazil are still in danger from them.
Iran's secret police are cracking protesters' Telegram accounts to get information to arrest people.
One weakness of the global biodiversity pact is that it allows countries to give permission to destroy natural ecosystems based on "offsets" as an excuse. This means a promise to construct a new wild area to replace the one that was destroyed. Such replacement is easy to say and hard to do.
The Jan 6 committee voted to recommend prosecution of the wrecker for four crimes, including supporting an insurrection.
The wrecker's lawyers tried to bribe witnesses to mislead federal investigators.
Republican George Santos, who was recently elected to Congress, seems to have filled up his biography with falsehoods.
Turkey may block Sweden from joining NATO because Sweden's supreme court has rejected the extradition of a Turkish journalist wanted by Erdoğan for political persecution.
*Dutch PM apologizes for Netherlands’ role in slave trade.* Activists in former Dutch colonies imperiously rejected the apology because its words and its ceremony were not done to their satisfaction.
Twitter intentionally hid the origin of Pentagon political propaganda aimed at the Middle East.
* Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have ordered an indefinite ban on university education for the country’s women,*
*3M sets 2025 deadline to stop making [PFAS].*
After the wrecker's veiled but undeniable launch of an attack against the US government, prosecuting him is a necessary part of loyalty.
The CFPB has ordered Wells Fargo Bank to pay almost 4 billion dollars for fraud committed against 16 million customers.
The CFPB called Wells Fargo a "repeat offender" and said that this is just the beginning of its actions against the bank.
UN Secretary-General Guterres announced a "no-nonsense" climate defense conference for September 2023 for which *the price of entry is non-negotiable -— credible, serious, and new climate action and nature-based solutions that will move the needle forward and respond to the urgency of the climate crisis must be presented.*
A last-minute deal in a must-pass spending bill gave Maine fishermen 6 more years before they have to protect North Atlantic Right Whales.
Given the rate at which the population of those whales is decreasing, that could wipe them out.
Senator Warren rebuked the Pentagon for "vastly" underreporting civilian casualties in its required annual report.
In various countries, people are suing governments for failing to protect them from the harm global heating will do to them.
Radio City Music Hall decided in advance to exclude certain people from its shows, and sent bouncers to get one from a show, and identified her through facial recognition.
The reason they did not want her to watch the show is that she is a lawyer that works for a law firm that is handling someone's a legal dispute with the operators of Radio City Music Hall.
In addition to being a bizarre overreaction, it demonstrates why we need to ban the practice of identifying people by their faces, outside of very limited circumstances.
However, the crucial step in the chain of surveillance is not the step of matching the face in a picture against a database. Rather, it is systematically collecting images of people (whether video or still) that could be used to identify people. That is what we need to prohibit. We must prohibit surveillance cameras and allow only security cameras.
Right-wing extremist candidates combine racism and disinformation with promises to help the poor (but excluding poor blacks and poor immigrants).
Even if we stop thug departments from putting weapons on robots, some robots will endanger human rights in other ways. This article suggests some rules to limit use of robots by thug departments.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
Why is it that so many US prosecutors so often violate the rights of the accused by making trials unfair? Perhaps it's because the Supreme Court has barred them from being sued for such illegalities.
Biden has a plan for how to eradicate homelessness in the US.
Everyone: tell the Starbucks board you will not cross the picket line.
US citizens: call for passage of the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would defend younger voters from tactics used to impede them from voting.
US citizens: call on Biden to give endangered species protection to manatees.
US citizens: call on Biden to drop Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange.
Modeling suggests 1/10 of all living species will be extinct by the end of this century, if global heating continues as projected.
Crown Prince Bone Saw is trying to "sportswash" Salafi Arabia's cruel and repressive reputation.
Tobacco companies used sportswashing, and maybe still do in some places. In the US, that was eventually prohibited.
*Crypto was supposed to solve financial corruption. But FTX shows it’s just got worse.*
I am not sure this is an inherent part of using cryptocurrencies. It may be due to a twisted way of using them: people buy and sell them through companies called "exchanges" rather than trading them directly. Those exchanges seem to tend particularly to corruption.
However, even if all users did everything directly in the currency's blockchain, it would seem to be just perfect for bribing politicians untraceably.
*Global corporations "cheating public out of billions in tax," say campaigners.*
This is why we designed GNU Taler to reliably identify the payee. It gives anonymity to the payer only.
Former enslaved migrant workers in Thailand are suing the UK supermarket Tesco for selling the clothing that they were forced to make.
Amy Goodman: *The US Justice Department Must Drop Charges Against Julian Assange.*
Cinderella as a joke on Louis XIV's fancy for glass.
US right-wingers have danced with fascism and Nazism since the 1930s and have only occasionally been afraid to show it.
Peru's suppression forces have killed 20 protesters, generally by shooting them. This caused protests to spread. People demand that Congress resign for new elections, but Congress refuses.
Musk has banned Twitter users from posting information about where to find them on other sites.
Of course, you shouldn't be used by Facebook or Instagram at all, anyway.
Twitter's policy may be illegal in the US. I wonder, though, whether FTC enforcement power can prevail against a billionaire who is willing to lose millions of dollars as a result of his choice of policies. If he chooses to defy the FTC, can they do more than fine Twitter a few million?
(satire) *Johnson & Johnson Raises Price Of Band-Aids To $100,000 Apiece.*
*[The wrecker] Is Not Our Biggest Problem: It's the Open Fascism He Has Unleashed.* Many fascists are flexible enough to follow another authoritarian leader, such as DeMentis, instead of the wrecker.
The article discusses a conjecture that fascism wakes up in the US every 80 years as the people who defeated fascism before die and cease to lead the country to reject fascism.
How light pollution pushes animals and plants to extinction.
*Cop15 deal includes target to protect 30% of nature on Earth by 2030.*
The basic question is, will countries give this more than lip service? For instance, most of the UK's "protected marine areas" are hardly protected at all.
The article claims that China imposed the deal despite objections from many countries. Given that the survival of civilization and the natural world are at stake, I feel little sympathy for anyone that refuses to help save endangered species. But these objections may make the treaty a dead letter.
The biodiversity movement seems to have adopted as a matter of faith that indigenous humans will always protect biodiversity and ecosystems. In many cases they will, because they depend on those ecosystems for their living. In those cases, damage to those ecosystems will harm them so they will oppose such damage.
But this is not invariably guaranteed. Human beings have been polluting their environments for short-term benefit for millennia. Humans often bend and redraw their moral rules to excuse their own benefit. Humans can resist this tendency, but nobody is automatically above it due to descent alone.
The part of this agreement that is absolutely perverse: the plan to establish a parallel patent system in the name of preventing "biopiracy." The patent system we already have is harmful and unjust; this plan creates a second parallel system of restrictions on the use of knowledge, adds a second harm, a second injustice, to the first.
The goal, clearly, is to give some income to poor countries. That goal is fine, but do it in some other way!
*Tokyo will require new homes built from 2025 to have solar panels.*
California adopted a "blueprint" for achieving a "net zero emissions", but the plan is bogus since it calls for carbon capture and storage, which has never been made to work properly.
A blueprint means a precise set of measurements for something to be made. A rough sketch is not a blueprint.
The UN-brokered truce in Yemen could lead to an end to the war.
Joseph Stiglitz: *The Road to Fascism*
* Growing hardship is all but assured in 2023, and it will provide even more fertile ground for dangerous demagogues.*
The story of the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972 makes me think of Putin's shelling and missile attacks on Ukraine.
Everyone: call for a treaty to regulate production of plastics.
US citizens: call on Congress to put an end to private prisons.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: tell Federal Insurance Office that renters and homeowners need data on how global heating impacts their insurance.
Increased heat may explain around 8000 shootings each year in the US.
The thugs who killed Ronald Greene have been charged with crimes including homicide.
I can't tell whether one of these charges does justice to the lies the thugs told about how Greene died.
We are all waiting to see if high officials of the thug department will face charges for trying to protect the killers themselves from charges.
The reason Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested seems to have been an illegal funds transfer between two parts of FTX whose funds were supposed to be kept separate.
*Ellsberg, Donziger Among Those Demanding Freedom for Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale.*
Biden endorsed Manchin's dirty deal to undermine environmental regulations on energy projects. Even worse, he endorsed the values that deal is based on: that hypothetical reductions in the price of fossil fuel is more important than protecting or planet from global heating or pollution.
Colombia has implemented a progressive wealth tax and other tax increases for the rich. The specific details of the wealth tax respond to problems encountered by previous wealth taxes in Europe, to ensure it touches only the rich.
Leftist film director Ken Loach accused the BBC of helping to write Corbyn out of history, including trying to make Corbyn out as anti-semitic.
He also stated that 200,000 members or more have left the Labour Party in response to Starmer's right-wing shift.
Workers at 100 Starbucks stores will strike for three days.
Biden said, during the campaign, that he wanted to eliminate the death penalty. However, the US just voted against a UN resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.
An interesting example of collective governance of an organization.
Tunisia's authoritarian president has reorganized how the legislature functions and held an election under totally new rules. There were not many candidates and not many voters.
*[Famous] Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti arrested after criticism of death penalty [given to protesters].*
Pointing at technological advances that are supposed to eliminate global heating in a few years is a standard denialist tactic. They have often cited fusion power for this, but also carbon capture and storage and "carbon offsets" (which tend to be bogus).
We don't have time to wait for these things.
Insulate Britain protests met with ire from motorists, but everyone now sees that they were right.
Australia will build more large grid storage batteries so as to keep unneeded renewable electricity for when it is needed.
The corrupter is marketing NFT "trading cards". The money people pay for them goes to a secret business, and I suspect it won't appear in the corrupter's future tax returns.
QAnonenties are starting to transfer their worship from the wrecker to Musk.
They are mostly authoritarian followers and it isn't crucial to them which authoritarian leader they can follow.
AT&T, Amazon, Comcast and Intel donated to the campaigns of Republican election denialists, well before this year's election.
Article talking about how the world is tailored toward men.
For the most part, of the issues listed, I agree that we should change practices so that they serve women as well as men. I disagree in regard to office temperature, though, for the simple reason that you can wear more clothing without limit, but there are limits to how much clothing you can remove in an office with other workers. If at that point some people are still too hot, the only solution that can satisfy everyone is to make the office cool enough for them, and for those who find that too cold to wear another layer.
There were times that my office in the Stata Center was so hot that I needed to be nude to be comfortable. I kept the door locked so that visitors would knock and I could ask them to wait a minute. I did not usually explain that this was so I could put my shirt and pants on.
The presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico condemned the ouster of Peru's President Castillo as a "legislative coup", saying it was backed by the US.
This is not an absurd idea; the US backed such a coup in Bolivia a few years ago, and in Honduras a few years before that.
Information in the article suggests that the poor voted him into office and still support him. They are now protesting vigorously, and the "forces of law and order" are shooting and gassing them from helicopters. It sounds like the thugs support the right wing and treat the people as the enemy.
This does not necessarily imply that the coup story is the whole truth; there are valid reasons to argue that it is Castillo who tried to overthrow constitutional order, as President Boric of Chile said.
It seems clear that there was a process of reciprocal escalation. In such a situation, it is easy to perceive the escalations by the side you oppose as injustice, and the escalations by the side you support as legitimate self-defense.
To judge the right and wrong of such a process requires a lot of facts about the actions and the background. All I can do is try to judge which of the other presidents to trust.
(satire) *Elementary School Lesson On Water Cycle Explains How Water Becomes Property Of Nestlé.*
*Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk.* Musk defines "free speech" the way autocrats do.
*Workers, Not "Stockbrokers and CEOs," Will Pay Price for Fed Rate Hikes: Warren.*
*Plastic ‘nurdles’ stop sea urchins developing properly, study finds.*
It would be nice to imagine that this provides a way to protect kelp forests, but enough plastic to do that would surely harm other species too.
Australia has revoked a rule, made by the previous planet-roaster government, that permitted the burning of wood waste from native trees to count as "renewable".
In practice, native forests are not renewable under present conditions.
The world-wide campaign to prevent nondisclosure agreements from being used by employers to cover up any abuses, from harassment to rape, is making substantial progress, but not in the UK.
You can't expect the Tories to eagerly pursue this goal, because they represent the rich who commit the abuses and want them covered up.
My first experience with a nondisclosure agreement was when I asked someone at CMU for a copy of the Xerox laser printer software source code. He said he had actually promised in advance to refuse to share that code with me and other colleagues at MIT. Shame on him! He had made a commitment to be a jerk and deny his cooperation to his colleagues.
From this I learned that signing a nondisclosure agreement for generally useful technical information, such as software, was betraying the whole world — so I vowed I would never agree to one, and I never knowingly done so.
That led me, a year or two later, to the conclusion that nonfree software was an injustice, regardless of whether the nonfreedom was brought about by a nondisclosure agreement.
"Crisis pregnancy centers" look like abortion clinics, but their mission is to confuse females so that they don't get abortions. They get away with lies because they are almost exempt from regulation.
The right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court have protected them from regulations intended to protect women from being deceived.
*Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly told to work while infected as Covid surges.*
In the US, this is achieved by denying workers paid sick leave. They can't afford to do the right thing and avoid infecting follow workers, even customers.
The infection is spreading very fast. I presume it is one of the recent Omicron variants. At least that will reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries.
Ukraine's plans to reconquer Crimea military may be impossible or unwise.
The places that Russian troops were stationed since 2014 include, as a fact, parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but Putin always denied that this was the case. He should not be invited to acknowledge it belatedly now and reap any benefit.
To negotiate the fate of Crimea is more sensible. An honest election would have been a legitimate approach in 2014, but Putin drove out or exiled those who supported Ukraine, then (according to this article) lost anyway lied about the result.
Putin's elections in Russia are blatantly dishonest.
The population of Crimea today is different from the population in 2014. If an election is to be held now about which country Crimea should belong to, which people should vote in it? To give the decision to the current population would mean that Putin (or anyone else) can conquer territory and legitimize that with an unfair election. To give the decision to the 2014 population might be asking for further violence.
Global heating is killing millions of fir trees in Oregon.
China's relaxation of restrictions on capturing wildlife for food *could weaken animal protection and pose a hazard to public health, say experts.
The term "post-pandemic" is wishful thinking, not reality.
There is a suspicion of fraud in the vote-counting of Fiji's election.
Fiji has a history of real trouble in its elections. I wonder whether it will be possible to assure the honesty of this election.
*CFPB Applauded for Proposing "Public Rap Sheet" for Corporate Criminals.*
Drivers in London forcibly moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests. If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions for new tactics for climate protesters.
Ukraine's plans to reconquer Crimea militarily may be impossible or unwise.
The places that Russian troops were stationed since 2014 include, as a fact, parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but Putin always denied that this was the case. He should not be invited to acknowledge it belatedly now and reap any benefit.
To negotiate the fate of Crimea is more sensible. An honest election would have been a legitimate approach in 2014, but Putin drove out or exiled those who supported Ukraine, then (according to this article) lost anyway and lied about the result.
Putin's elections in Russia are blatantly dishonest.
The population of Crimea today is different from the population in 2014. If an election is to be held now about which country Crimea should belong to, which people should vote in it? To give the decision to the current population would mean that Putin (or anyone else) can conquer territory and legitimize that with an unfair election. To give the decision to the 2014 population might be asking for further violence.
The incredibly complex history of reprocessing and disposing of nuclear waste in the UK.
In theory, the process is clearly simple. In practice, it keeps getting more complex.
*Flying insect numbers plunge 64% since 2004, UK survey finds.*
Some years ago, a similar decline was observed in Germany.
This portends ecological disaster.
US citizens: call on the House Ways and Means Committee to share the wrecker's tax returns with the Senate Finance Committee ASAP. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Democrats including Biden to seek the kind of "bipartisanship" that means progressive policies that many Republicans support — not deals with right-wing extremist Republicans. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to investigate corruption and ethical lapses at the Supreme Court. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to hold corporations accountable for price gouging. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *Elon Musk Receives Experimental Neuralink Implant In Attempt To Delete Memory Of Being Booed.*
The EU is setting up a system of "green tariffs" to charge imports based on how much greenhouse gas is emitted in producing them.
Anti-abortion fanatics have proposed to move on from laws criminalizing performing abortions to prosecuting people who have abortions.
* Without a plan in place to minimise infection [by Covid-19], a "moving on" strategy leaves vulnerable people behind.*
Most people want to believe the danger is gone, and governments have decided to let them do so. It's good for business also. How easy it is to dismiss suggestions to protect yourself and others with a mask by saying, "It is no longer obligatory."
It's no longer legally obligatory, but it is morally obligatory.
When someone without a mask sits near me on a train or plane, I ask per to please wear a mask. If perse says, "I don't have a mask," I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its plastic wrapper. The masks sold by BYD are simple to put on, so I offer those.
One of Erdoğan's political rivals has been convicted of insulting Turkey’s supreme election council, calling them "fools."
Many countries make it a crime to insult officials. Indonesia just made itself one of them.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult anyone — even me, even you. Erdoğan shows plenty of contempt for freedom and democracy. He even started a small civil war to reverse an electoral defeat.
Just after Cabot Oil & Gas (part of Coterra Energy) accepted 15 criminal charges for polluting the water of Dimock. Pennsylvania, the state government allowed it to resume fracking there.
Fracking should be illegal. The risk of poisoning groundwater for centuries or more is too high a price to pay for some more fossil fuel to burn — especially since burning it is harmful globally.
The Arctic: Hotter, rainier, wetter, and less ice and birds.
Extreme weather (which is partly caused by global heating) has devastated the Florida orange crop.
We must expect all sorts of crops to be harmed by global heating effects.
Musk urged his Twitter followers to adopt QAnonsense.
Maybe he is trying to compete with the wrecker to seize power in the US.
US citizens: phone your senators and implore them to reject any bill containing Manchin's environmental planning deregulation deal.
You can phone (888) 997-5380. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US corporations gave 8 million dollars to Republican election liars.
Explaining the enormous challenges of going from "ignition" in a laser-fusion target to the production of commercially useful power, and why this is likely to take decades.
We need to quit using fossil fuels fast — we can't wait for fusion to be usable for this job.
*Brazil goldminers carve illegal ‘Road to Chaos’ out of Amazon reserve.*
They use bulldozers and power-diggers, and carry submachine guns.
The US keeps using economic sanctions to punish unjust or aggressive governments, but the sanctions almost never have any positive effect.
Without a big increase in humanitarian aid donations, the UN predicts that 200 million people will die in 2023 for the lack of aid.
200 million is a very large number of deaths in one year. The average number is around 83 million. The human population will decrease in 2023 if this forecast comes true. The 200 million maybe in addition to the 80 million that would have died anyway.
The typical annual increase in human population is around 18 million. It follows that 200 million deaths will mean that the total human population decreases by several years' worth of population growth.
It sees that we have reached the point at which the global disaster we have caused starts to kill so many people that it reduces the human population. This is very bad.
I have begged humans to reduce their birth rate, so that we could reduce the population the painless way and avoid ever reaching this point.
*Eels facing population collapse, conservation groups warn.*
The EU has given in to the usual short-term thinking, prioritizing short-term profits over sustainability. Such a decision is tantamout to saying, "Let's make one last batch of money by wiping out the fish."
DeMentis has started an "investigation" of everything about Covid-19 vaccines.
They may not find any serious problem or wrongdoing, but they will have plenty of opportunities to talk endlessly about hypothetical, conceivable problems, thus blowing smoke that they can claim implies the presence of a fire.
The US government protected people against possible right-wing attempts to ban interracial and same-sex marriages.
This is good, but it is just a part of the harm that right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court threaten to do. Since Democrats refused to eliminate the filibuster and expand the court, Americans are now sitting ducks for at least two years.
The NLRB funding is inadequate, and the result is that workers' rights go undefended.
Varoufakis calls for two major economic changes: to make corporations belong to their workers, and to reduce the dependence on banks for financial transactions.
A thug in Vallejo, California, attacked a documentalist who was standing on his own porch, making a video of the thug's traffic stop.
The documentalist sued and the city paid $300,000 to settle the dispute.
The recording showed the thug making false accusations against Burrell. Such false accusations are a common first step in an attempted frame-up. Any thug caught doing this, even if nothing worse results, should be fired and blacklisted for all jobs that involve special authority over the public.
The Keystone 1 tar sands oil pipeline leaked 600,000 gallons of oil into a creek in Kansas that feeds a river and a reservoir for 800,000 people.
The pilot program to privatize Medicare includes insurance companies that have been fined for inflating charges.
Twitter has more or less blocked access to a bot account that tweets where Musk's private jet goes.
*Covid-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but the fight isn't over.*
Three million is around one percent of the US population.
*Hundreds of Oath Keepers Have Worked for DHS in Recent Years, Report Finds.*
There are probably tens of thousands of workers for the DHS, so this is not necessarily a large fraction. Nonetheless, it is dangerous.
Protecting biodiversity (or any aspect of the environment) requires ending government subsidies to activities which damage biodiversity. Allowing businesses to excuse damage to habitats by means of "offsets" is asking to be lied to.
*Framing men as the "villains" gets women no closer to better romantic relationships.*
That assumption means getting stuck in a shallow form of feminism based on not believing things can get any better.
*Labor proposal to fix Australia’s broken environmental protection system could revolutionise sector.*
*The 50-Year Takeaway From Middle-Class America. We [Americans] should be demanding the same benefits enjoyed by less wealthy but more progressive nations.*
US states provide enormous special tax breaks to companies — almost always big companies that can play one state against another. A campaign seeks to put an end to this, first of all by limiting them and publishing them.
I proposed a federal law to enable any one state to object to any special subsidy propsed by any other (competing) states. This would prevent a company from playing one state against another.
The governor of Bali reassures foreign tourists and visitors that the prohibition against sex outside of marriage won't threaten them in Bali.
There are other places in Indonesia which are also interesting to visit, but maybe they won't be safe.
More importantly for Indonesia, this law also restricts freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
No country should allow a prudish religion any influence in its laws. Laws driven by Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are causing cruelty and repression around the world.
Although no court has proved that Governor Snyder conspired to put the people of Flint at risk of lead poisoning, we have plenty of reason to believe he and his high officials did so. I can't put him in prison, but my conclusion is that he's guilty, partly because the ideology of the Republican Party is to do things like that to the poor, weak, and disprivileged.
*Biden faces growing pressure to drop charges against Julian Assange.* Pressure is coming from Australia and Brazil, as well as American defenders of freedom of the press.
So phone the White House and say, drop the charges against Assange — reporting on leaked dirty secrets must not be a crime. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
New Zealand will gradually ban tobacco by raising the age requirement to buy tobacco by one year per year, Tobacco is death, and I hope you will not smoke it. But banning a widely used drug generally leads to widespread corruption and injustice.
China does not allow fair trials. To bias the trial of opposition publisher Jimmy Lai to be fair, China kicked his British lawyer out of Hong Kong.
The UK plans to hand out 130 more fossil fuel licenses for the North Sea. This puts civilization in danger. So environmentalists are suing.
*Plan to protect 30% of Earth divides and inspires at Cop15.*
Tories have undermined the National Health Service to the point where it can't even tackle the backlog of millions of important but non-urgent operations.
Iran is executing protesters after bogus trials.
Peruvians detest Congress, which removed President Castillo from office, even more than they detest President Castillo.
I wish I had a basic understanding of politics in Peru, or knew someone who could explain it to me, so that I could have a background against which to judge what is happening.
Scientists started a fusion reaction that released about 25% more energy than what was used to start it. This demonstrates in principle that controlled fusion can be used to generate energy. There is a long way to go to develop fusion into a practical energy source. For the next few decades, survival of civilization still depends on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy as fast as possible.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to vote to end US support for Salafi Arabia's war with Yemen. *UN Report Shows 11,000 Children Killed or Maimed in This US-Backed War.* The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the U.S. Senate to investigate corruption and ethical lapses at the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Most managers in the UK say that stress over the cost of living is making workers anxious and interfering with their work.
Those managers are in a special position to tell the company executives, "Give the workers a raise!" Will they do it?
How Big Pharma used threats against governments to defeat the proposed "patent waiver" for Covid-19 vaccines in the World Trade Organization.
The WTO is a business-supremacy treaty; its basic purpose is to give business more power over the world's governments. We need to eliminate most of that power by greatly weakening every business-supremacy treaty.
4400 homeless people live. in the "skid row" of Los Angeles, and they have only 9 toilets to use at night.
The UN standard for refugee camps calls for far more than that.
Rep. Greene declares her support for an armed coup.
When she takes her oath of office again in January, she will say it insincerely. Is there any way to exclude her from Congress over this?
The UK nurses say Tories are making false statements rather than negotiating, while the "Labour" party doubts that Britain can afford a 10% raise for them.
This reflects Starmer's implicit rejection of a change in the general policy of starving and freezing the poor to enrich the rich.
Here's what a true Labour leader would say.
Some pertinent facts.
The US is blocking the full adoption and effective enforcement of many crucial treaties.
To present one extreme example, every member of the UN has ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, except for the US.
The House of Commons will observe a minute of silence in remembrance of the Nazi genocide of Jews (and some others).
The threat of Nazism still exists ad is growing. I suggest that the House of Representatives adopt a similar annual practice, starting this month. It won't be easy for the Republicans that will control the House next year to reject this. They support Nazis but don't want to admit it.
The Tories want to start a new coal mine in England, so they claim that steelmaking companies want that coal.
Turns out, they don't.
Others say it is a boondoggle to artificially create jobs in a certain region. That could be true, but why do it this way? There are many kinds of jobs that could really be needed. Indeed, Many of the region's inhabitants oppose the mine.
I suspect that the Tories' real motive is to help some rich donor get richer.
Ralph Nader: As Republicans push numerous plans that most Americans would oppose, most Democratic candidates fail to go on the offensive against them.
A US Forest Service crew head carried out a prescribed burn to reduce the danger of wildfires. Things went wrong and it started a big wildfire. But is that a reason to arrest him?
Perhaps the Forest Service needs to change some aspects of its practices. I am not an expert on prescribed burns, and I don't want to become one, so I have no opinion on that.
But what is absolutely clear is that arresting the employees who carry them out is absurd trumpery.
The bullshitter falsely claimed that Black Lives Matter protesters were part of a conspiracy called "Antifa", and told the DHS to find proof.
An internal investigation by the DHS published a report that *describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain.*
An investigation by the House of Representatives found that the idea of natural gas as a temporary "bridge fuel" was an intentional deception: Big Oil's real goal was always to make it a permanent choice.
The article points out a number of ways in which extracting transporting and burning gas are dangerous. But Big Oil's propaganda still tries to convince people that gas is safe.
What's at stake in the biodiversity conference? *We are tearing holes in the fabric of life on Earth.*
*US Can End Its Complicity in Horrendous Yemen War Today.*
The US needs mask mandates to stop the spread of flu, RSC and Covid-19.
This one measure is effective against all pathogens that spread through the air.
When someone sits near me in a train or plane and isn't wearing a mask, I ask per to wear one. If perse says perse doeesn't have one, I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its unbroken plastic wrapper.
Often perse responds that it is not obligatory. I'm going to try out this response: "Legally it is not obligatory. Morally it is obligatory."
A campaign to give all US personnel stationed at bases in the UK training in driving on the left side of the road.
People have shot at electric power stations in Oregon and Washington.
The attackers have not been identified, but the obvious suspects are right-wing extremists. That region (outside its big cities) is known for the presence of people who hate the very idea of government and can consider any sort of sabotage justified if it damages government.
Afghan refugees being smuggled into Greece were caught and charged with doing the smuggling. One such conviction has been overturned on appeal.
Warnock won the election for senator from Georgia in the face of powerful and effective Republican voter suppression. The Warnock's general election for senator in 2022 had a million fewer voters than Warnock's general election in 2020. And the subsequent runoff in 2022 had a million fewer voters than the runoff for the 2020 election.
Republican voter suppression is intended to hit Democrats harder than Republicans. Why it did not succeed this time in defeating Warnock, I don't know, and I wonder.
The article explains that Georgia Republicans have already passed further laws to make it harder to fight voter suppression in 2024.
An Italian is trapped in the Italian embassy in the United Arab Emirates because he has been sentenced to a large fine and he has no money.
UK ministers refused to negotiate with the NHS workers who are preparing to strike soon.
This confirms, in my view, their intention to destroy the NHS.
Se me dijo que mis chistes son polisemias. Dije, "No, polisemia es tener polizontes en la sangre."
US citizens: call on Biden to extend paid sick leave to railway workers.
Everyone: call on Wall Street banks to keep their pledge to stand against racial injustice by forcing their lobbyists to drop their lawsuit against the CFPB.
*Court Orders U.S. to Examine California Shipping Lanes' Role in Endangered Whale Deaths.*
Ayatollah Khamenei is badly ill and may be dying. If he dies, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is likely to take power.
The writer speculates that the IRGC might give Iranians personal freedoms, to reduce resistance to their rule, but not democracy, and expects power rivalries to continue unchanged.
I would rejoice to see Iranians have somewhat more freedom. I hope that the US and Iran can make peace some day.
An extremely corrupt Kansas City thug faces charges of collaborating with a drug gang to force 73 women into slavery and prostitution. He is also accused of raping people to intimidate them, and a series of frame-ups.
The whole thug department knew about his pattern of crime, and stood behind their fellow thug.
*‘Only 100 meters apart’: Ukrainians and [Putin forces] face off in Donetsk.*
I read that the Putin forces' persistent focus on taking Bakhmut is that it is the next step toward capturing 100% of the Donetsk oblast. If they take Bakhmut, and then take Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, they could boast of holding 100% of one of the regions that Putin claims to have annexed this year.
In military terms, this would be worth nothing, but that's the sort of irrationality that tends to happen under an absolute ruler.
*Press Freedom Champions Renew Call for DOJ to Drop Charges Against Assange.*
*Macron announces free condoms for 18- to 25-year-olds in France.*
This offer is a good start; it should be extended to everyone.
*[Dissident Ilya Yashin] sentenced to eight and a half years over series of posts about [Putin forces] atrocities in Bucha.*
Putin's obedient servants lie on command, too afraid to refuse. The wrecker has led US Republicans to do likewise. Yashin has chosen to go to prison rather than become a tool of falsehood.
Comparing imprisoned antipollution protester Violet Coco with convicted polluters: *less than 6% of people charged with environmental pollution and property damage offenses are sent to prison.*
*Racism poses public health threat to millions worldwide, finds report.*
Lula has sued Bolsonaro for various reasons, one of which is accusing the country's computerized voting system of being vulnerable.
Bolsonaro has done much to undermine democracy and elections in Brazil, and morally deserves punishment. However, the general claim that Brazil's computerized voting system makes Brazil's elections vulnerable is valid. That is because the machines record only totals, and do not keep individual paper ballots that voters marked by hand. Such systems are vulnerable to someone, somehow.
Brazilian experts campaigned against this system when it was adopted, demanding a system that enabled the results to be audited, but they lost the battle.
There is no evidence that anything wrong happened in the voting machines in this election, but Brazil should change to an audit-able voting system for the sake of the future.
Joseph Stiglitz: *Raising interest rates to tame inflation will only cause more pain.*
Biden has taken significant steps towards releasing all the prisoners remaining in Guantanamo. That would enable the US to put an end to its national shame.
Senator Sinema has officially left the Democratic Party, which suggests that she will run as an independent in 2024.
As the article said, we already knew she belongs to the Plutocratic Party. What matters is, will this make it easier or harder to elect a better senator in her place? I fear this will make it harder — because it won't be possible to eliminate her in the Democratic Party. I don't know whether her presence in the general election as an independent candidate would help or hurt.
Congress is trying to impose a link tax through an increasingly frequent sneaky method — last minute inclusion in "must pass" omnibus bills.
(satire) *Elon Musk Worried He Won't Have Enough Twitter Employees Left To Fire On Christmas Eve.*
US zoning laws obstruct the conversion of surplus office space into badly needed residential space.
Republicans have added to the NDAA a clause to repeal the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for the military.
This is more harmful than it appears. The vaccination requirement has convinced some right-wing fanatics to leave the US military, and we need to keep it going.
It also helps keep the troops healthy.
Accusing the US rail unions of being weak-spirited and divided.
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The Republican county supervisors in Cochise county had refused to certify that county's election. Then they got a court order which required them to certify the vote, so they did.
They presented no grounds for refusing to certify the results, but we can see that it was mad hatred: they hate the election so much that they wanted to fight it regardless of what effects that would have.
Ironically, if they had got away with not certifying that county's vote, the result would have been to elect one more Democrat to the House of Representatives. That would have been a major setback to Republican power nationwide.
I therefore conclude that the refusal was not an instance of Republican "by hook or by crook" cheating, but rather mad rage against free elections.
I previously posted that Cochise county's vote was majority Democratic, because had I read that in another article. That would have made the refusal consistent with by-hook-or-by-crook cheating. But it appears that that other article was mistaken about this.
US citizens: call on the US to end subsidies for fracking in Argentina.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and say to reject anything like the SECURE Act (HR 2954) and the EARN Act (S 4808). These bills would change Social Security to give less to the poor and more to the rich. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The FTC has blocked the merger of Microsoft and Activision, both giants in making video games.
These video games are nonfree software, which means they treat users unjustly. I would not allow any of them on my computers, and I urge you to reject them too.
Notwithstanding that, it is still important to stop them from merging. Allowing them to merge would exacerbate the evil of concentration of industry, and do nothing to reduce the evil o f nonfree software.
The president of Peru was removed from office by Congress. He had attempted to prevent this by dismissing Congress.
I don't have enough contact with Peru to judge which side was basically at fault, but I lean towards trusting Arce's view. He is a leftist elected president in a country that borders on Peru, so he has surely paid plenty of attention.
More about the new president Dina Boluarte, who was previously the vice president.
Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff by under 3%.
It is good that he won, but the closeness of the outcome shows that most Republicans hate our freedoms so much that they will vote for even a lying creep who will help destroy them.
* Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening teachers, schools and education because they need the poorly educated to make up their voting base.*
*Brown University bans caste discrimination throughout campus in a first for the Ivy League.*
I think caste discrimination should be prohibited like race or sex discrimination.
Apple has dropped its plan to scan every user's photos and will use another approach to protect children from would-be abusers.
The new approach seems not to be a threat to other users' privacy.
Plutocratist "mainstream" Democrats continue to control the party's leadership in the House of Representatives.
The Labour Party is turning to mythical trickle-down economics, saying it aims to turn the UK into a "global start-up hub."
Poor Britain. Competing to help the rich dominate society won't help anyone but the rich.
Congress is considering a kind of "link tax" to require discussion platforms to pay for hosting links to news sites. It would harm libraries and smaller news media.
It would also give lots of subsidy to Big Media.
Criticizing Effective Altruism: to program people as donation robots is desocializing, isolating and alienating.
I suspect those things reduce people's lifespan.
*Pegasus spyware was used to [crack] reporters’ phones. I’m suing its [developers].*
Referring to the developers of a program as "creators" is propaganda for ideas we would be wiser not to promote.
The US rescued hostage Brittney Griner by trading an important Russian arms dealer for her.
Griner deserved to be freed for the simple reason that what she did was not wrong. However, I don't understand why Americans clamor for Griner's release more than for the release of everyone imprisoned in the US for possession of marijuana. There are many Americans unjustly imprisoned in the US for doing nothing more than what Griner did. They too deserve to be freed.
It is a shame to let arms merchant Viktor Bout go free, though.
I think we should not pressure the US to try to ransom hostages, because that pressure benefits the regimes that take hostages at the expense of the US. If I were a hostage, I would say, "Don't ransom me if the ransom hurts my country!"
Denying the call to boycott Russian music.
I take a stronger stand: it is misguided and destructive to blame "Russia" for Putin's crime of aggressive war. Putin is the one responsible. Let us not refer to the army that invaded Ukraine as "the Russian army" — call them the Putin forces.
The Tories plan to open a new coal mine in England. Supposedly the reason is to reduce the cost of electricity, but the mine will produce coking coal to be exported to make steel. Meanwhile, the steel industry is looking to replace the use of coking coal to reduce its emissions.
*The "fate of the entire living world" will be determined at the Cop15 UN biodiversity summit, according to leading scientists.* It is considering a partly concrete plan to slow the destruction of the Earth's natural ecosystems.
[Effective altruism] is "profoundly individualistic" and reliant on the status quo. EA's calculations assume that humans won't change. But humans have to change if we are going to [save] life on Earth.*
Superstitious anti-vaxxers have convinced each other that a blood transfusion with "vaccinated blood" is somehow dangerous. One couple tried to prevent their baby from getting a transfusion unless it was with "unvaccinated blood"; since the baby would have died without surgery and a transfusion, the state intervened and took guardianship to authorize the operation.
Qatar promises to vastly expand its fossil fuel exports; the resulting greenhouse gas emissions would imply global disaster.
The specific point that the total emissions from Qatar's exports would eventually add up to more than one year of the whole world's emissions seems like a red herring to me. I would expect that the same is true for the US too, and perhaps several other countries.
But even though this is just a red herring, I think the article's conclusions are plausible anyway.
At least four on the Supreme Court seem to lean towards the bizarre "independent state legislature" theory. The confrontation in Arizona, in which one county refused to certify its vote, is exactly the kind of situation where a state legislature could (under this theory) arbitrarily make up its own presidential election results.
The revised Electoral Count Act could close that mad loophole, if Congress passes it this month.
US citizens: call on the US government to block Amazon's planned merger with One Medical.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to stand up for keeping Ilhan Omar on the foreign affairs committee.i
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Biden administration not to allow oil drilling near Chaco Canyon.
Chaco Canyon is beautiful, as well as having great historic significance.
Global heating is causing sea animals to move to different habitats. The result will be to wipe out most of the seabirds in western Europe.
Climate defense activists defeated Manchin's "dirty deal" to undermine environmental regulations in the US Senate.
He could try again to pass it in another way, so the fight is not conclusively finished.
*DOJ subpoenas officials in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona for communications with [the wrecker] around 2020 election.*
Al Jazeera asserts it has proof that Israeli forces fired directly at reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, and has filed a case with the International Criminal Court about this.
The Biden administration has given Haitians in the US temporary protected status through August, 2024.
(satire) *SWAT Team Busts Down Door Of Denver Woman's Home To Apologize For Previous Raid.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
US citizens: call on Congress to abolish the debt ceiling now.
Lawyers hired by the corrupter searched a rented storage unit and found additional secret government documents.
Great 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg dares the US to prosecute him like Julian Assange. He wants to challenge the constitutionality of such prosecutions.
Ellsberg faced the threat of prosecution at the time, but ultimately officials decided not to prosecute him.
A right-wing conspiracy in Germany plotted to attack Parliament and overthrow the government.
Their ideology was a strange mixture of Nazism, anarchism, and superstition. But they had real weapons and could surely have done real killing.
The Tories plan to deal with strikes by NHS workers by prohibiting strikes.
This approach would be of little use for fixing the broken NHS, but assuming their real goal is to ruin it, this could be quite effective.
San Francisco responded to public revulsion and reversed its recent decision to authorize the thug department to use robots for killing people.
To halt (and then reverse) the general militarization of US thug departments is a much bigger job.
Some Republican senators are condemning the wrecker for showing contempt for the Constitution.
It could be that they are looking for a chance to publicly split from him, having seen that his endorsements of candidates turned out to be disadvantageous for them. They may have decided they will be better off with a new, fresh fascist leader.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prohibit some of the harmful practices of Amazon and some other platforms.
This bill would not do anything to make anonymous purchase possible, or insist that the sites work without sending nonfree software to the user's browser, so I would sill refuse more or less to do use those sites. But their overall injustice would be reduced.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the Open App Markets Act. It would require Apple to allow users to install apps obtained from places other than Apple's store.
It looks like this would make it possible to distribute free software for the iThings which users could build from source. That means iThings would no longer be jails.
Of course, they would still be nasty in many other ways, so I would still urge everyone to reject iThings, along with Android.
Abortion rights activists are considering ballot initiatives to legalize abortion in 10 states.
In 2020, when much of the world was desperate for masks and other Covid-19 protective equipment, the Tories gave contracts to companies owned by their cronies. Many of those companies had no experience or manufacturing capacity.
*Australian government overturns decision to cancel citizenship of man on death row in Iraq.*
It is very good news that Australia has overturned the law used to cancel people's citizenship over alleged crimes. That law was an inspiration for various other countries with right-wing governments that base their popularity on performative cruelty.
Those other countries remain to be convinced to eliminate those unjust policies.
Labour has proposed some good reforms for the structure and rules of the UK government.
Shocking rare crimes against children create an impulse and a pressure to overprotect children by locking them up. For the children's sake, we must resist that pressure.
*Argentina's [vice president and ex-president] Cristina Fernández sentenced to six years in $1bn fraud case.*
*Dutch king commissions research into royal role in colonialism.*
*Trump Organization guilty of tax fraud, New York jury finds.*
The corrupter was not personally charged with the crime, but if prosecutors have evidence that he knew about the scheme, they should charge him too.
The US has delayed yet again the requirement for "REAL ID" drivers licenses for purposes such as getting on an commercial flight.
There is too much identifying and tracking people in the US. Let's keep resisting, and see how many years we can block this.
South Korean President Yoon threatened truck drivers with years in prison if they didn't end their strike. They defied him.
The way to end a strike that causes great inconvenience for society is to make the employers pay proper wages and offer proper working conditions. Whose side are you on, Yoon?
(satire) *Fate Of Christmas Uncertain After Eric Adams Institutionalizes Real Santa.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
The TSA has a "pilot program" to use facial recognition to identify airline passengers. And a second generation coming which will do the matching against a database.
Widespread use of facial recognition enables the sort of tracking that China's pervasive repression is based on. We cannot allow such systems to exist.
For now, you can refuse to participate in the TSA's facial matching. Please refuse! To maintain even a little privacy, we must fight tooth and nail against massive surveillance systems, both new systems like this one and existing systems such as Clearview AI.
Biden wants South Carolina to be the Democratic Party's first primary in 2024 so that no progressive candidate can challenge him for the presidential nomination. He is confident of winning heavily there.
New York City is spending a lot of money to prevent a repeat of some of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but the overall effort is far inadequate.
For the longer term, there is no hope of protecting New York City from future inundation with local measures. The only way is to curb global heating.
Qatar paid British MPs to give Qatar support in Parliament.
I find it hard to understand how this could be lawful, but in my sense of justice this is outright bribery and ought to land the participants in prison.
Drivers in London forcibly moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests. If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions for new tactics for climate protesters. [New note has corrected link to suggestions]
Republican extremists are supporting Putin's lies about Ukraine.
That includes a Faux News announcer. Does an airport near you show Faux News most of the time? You could complain to the airport and say to show something else instead.
*Just Stop Oil's message to Suella Braverman: threaten us all you like — we're not listening.*
*Facebook moderation system favours "business partners", says oversight board.*
US citizens: call on Missouri schools to reverse overzealous book bans.
The chinook salmon are heading rapidly towards extinction, though no one is sure why.
A strange aspect of this article is that it assumes that only by identifying with the sadness of a local indigenous group can we appreciate that the loss of these salmon is a great loss. In effect, it treats their feelings about the possible extinction of chinook salmon as the primary issue.
I can empathize with their sense of loss. I recognize the loss too. But I insist that the objective loss is more important than how people feel about it.
Peoples adapt their cultures to their environments. The ancestors of that group, long enough ago, lived elsewhere and perhaps did not encounter salmon. If the group survives through the coming global disaster, in time it will get used to the absence of chinook salmon. But the damage done by their extinction and the loss of ecosystem they was part of will never go away.
If a species goes extinct and there is no indigenous group to notice, did the extinction really happen?
Stop burning trees to make energy, say 650 scientists before Cop15 biodiversity summit.*
The University of California academic workers are on strike. The management is trying to break their solidarity by offering raises to everyone but the graduate student employees.
Ukraine has reportedly attacked distant Russian airfields used as bases for heavy bombers that bomb Ukraine, and for cruise missiles. Some bombers were damaged.
To attack Russian aircraft and missiles on the ground is a legitimate and natural tactic, but challenging to carry out. Bravo, Ukraine!
The Ukrainian Army seems to have a genius for figuring out clever ways to win the war. Meanwhile, the Putin forces have only a plodding hunger for bigger war crimes.
Leaving the EU was supposed to let the UK "take back control" over its laws and policies, but instead the international banksters have control.
Tories fundamentally believe in letting the rich have power, even if they dislike some of the consequences. Naturally they were never going to fight hard against it. Corbyn would have.
The Intercept interviews two Iranian exiles about the continuing protests, one of whom says we should rather call this a revolution in progress.
Cory Doctorow: in many kinds of products, adding a media-player and its DRM creates an excuse to use the DMCA to forbid users to tinker with any aspect.
Nowadays, any product with DRM is no longer merely defective by design. It is oppressive by design also.
US citizens: call on Biden to commit to the full $100 million for climate finance pledges.
Volunteers are installing public phones in Philadelphia. They are like payphones except gratis.
Every city and town ought to provide these, and you should never have to walk half an hour to reach one.
More on the wrecker's declaration of war on America and everything that is good about it.
Nothing is perfect. There are a number of things in the US Constitution that ought to be changed, Republicans have highlighted some of them in recent decades by stretching them for abuse. The Constitution must protect the environment much more, and the rights and well-being of the disprivileged and disadvantaged. Fairly taxing the rich and curbing the power of business would make that possible. Eliminating the electoral college could make elections more democratic.
The wrecker would not do any of that. He would make himself dictator.
I forecast years ago that leaving the EU could be beneficial if Corbyn were in charge, but would be harmful with Tories in charge. Sad to say, Britain did the latter and has been harmed. Leaving the EU created opportunities to change policies, laws and relationships — opportunities that Britain could use in various ways. Assuming that each party would use those opportunities to achieve its goals, the consequences were clear.
I have updated the page stallman-computing.html.
I have updated the page rms-lifestyle.html.
China has dropped the zero-Covid policy of trying, via tests and quarantines, to stamp out transmission.
It is to be celebrated that powerful protests can make China change rigid, harsh policies. But is this change the wise change to make?
My recommendation was to make the quarantine system less harsh and rigid, so people would not die or get badly sick from being in quarantine for a while.
Two weeks ago, The wrecker publicly associated with a white nationalist and a Nazi, and thus took a clear stand against justice and equal rights.
Since then, he called for abolishing the US Constitution, and thus revealed himself indisputably as an enemy of US democracy and freedom.
Perhaps other Republican leaders, such as Governor Dementis, are less hostile to justice, equal rights, democracy and freedom. But I tend to think they are simply more circumspect.
The UN is considering a resolution to prosecute Putin and other high officials for systematic war crimes by the Putin forces.
They deserve prosecution, but I think it would be a mistake to demand they surrender to prosecution. That would be, in effect, a decision to pursue regime change as a war goal.
That decision would have bad consequences for Ukraine, for the kidnapped Ukrainians, and for the Russian people as well. If Putin yields up all of Ukraine's territory, and returns the kidnapped Ukrainians, he will have had a defeat, not a victory. Those war aims are enough. If Putin is willing to give those, we should offer him peace.
To demand more than that would give him more reason to keep fighting instead of making peace.
*Iranian protesters call for three-day strike as pressure on regime builds.*
I would not be so quick to conclude that the repressive regime will fall soon. Repressive regimes have faced very strong protests and stayed in power.
Five Connecticut prison thugs face charges of reckless endangerment for transporting Richard Cox in a van without a seat belt and thus breaking his neck.
Shouldn't they be charged with gross bodily harm, too?
US citizens: call on Congress to help families, not give tax cuts to corporations.
*"Turn Off the Tap on Plastic," UN Chief Declares Amid Debate Over New Global Treaty.*
I think it is crucial to stop the production of plastic products which are fundamentally difficult to recycle — for instance, different materials joined together.
Elnaz Rekabi participated in an international sports competition without wearing the required head-covering. Her family's home was then demolished.
If the Iranian state did this, then ironically it joins Israel in the practice of punishing an entire family for one person's infraction.
(satire) *Right-Wingers Criticize Kanye For Not Using Platform To Raise Awareness Of Lesser-Known Nazis.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
Macron threatens to invoke business-supremacy treaties to stop the US from carrying out its insufficient but helpful greenhouse gas reduction plans. Environmental activists protest this when Macron was visiting the White House.
Will French activists protest this too? I hope so?
Business-supremacy treaties are fundamentally unjust because they elevate trade over democracy. Businesses had too much power already, and these treaties gave them even more.
Biden joined Congress to impose on railroad workers the contract that the railroads had proposed — with no paid sick days.
*Biden Urged to Sign Executive Order Guaranteeing Rail Workers Paid Sick Leave.*
These same railroads commit safety violations repeatedly, and get fined over and over, but they do not correct the dangers.
(satire) *Biden Signs Legislation To Avert Crisis Of Treating Rail Workers Like Humans.*
(If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.)
*The pilots flying passengers across US state lines for abortions.*
The Hinduismists that rule India are attacking hundreds of old mosques by fabricating claims that the buildings are former Hindu temples which were seized centuries ago and converted into mosques. In most cases there is no real evidence that this ever happened. But such is the fanaticism and contempt for truth on the part of the ruling BJP and its supporters that they disregard evidence. The track record of repression and pogroms suggests they are hoping this gives them an excuse to kill some Muslims.
Historians who know about the history of these sites face threats to shut them up. The threats range from firing them to murdering them.
This note has been corrected by a newer note
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The county supervisors voted to certify the results they had because refusing was illegal.
They presented no grounds to refuse to certify the results, but we can determine what their motives were: The country's voters had voted majority Democratic, and the Republican election officials figured that they could steal some statewide elections by (in effect) discarding all the votes from their own county.
A large fraction of Republicans are traitors at heart, and seek opportunities to steal any election that they lose. If imprisonment is required to thwart their treachery, prison it should be.
Everyone: call on Costco to commit to protecting the boreal forest.
US citizens: call on Congress to work towards a world that is free of nuclear weapons. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Minnesota is considering small reforms in rules for thug departments to better control their predilection to bully people, brutalize people from time to time, and associate with racists, Nazis and insurrectionist organizations. The thugs' unions are pushing back hard.
More information.
NIH has set up a web site for reporting the results of your at-home Covid-19 test, if you wish. It is a good idea, but you should not use the site as currently implemented, because it requires you to run nonfree Javascript code. What a shame.
The San Antonio thug who shot at Erik Cantu 10 times and maimed him faces charges of attempted murder.
The increased willingness to prosecute thugs for violent crimes even if the victim does not die will help control cop crime.
*A woman who sold fake COVID-19 immunization cards gets three years in Federal prison.*
There is no market any more for fake vaccination records, but one more naturopathic "doctor" taken off the streets is likely to make the public safer.
Republicans just barely won control of the House of Representatives, and they did it because of the right-wing partisans that Republicans put on the Supreme Court.
The UK's registrar of corporations was "reformed" to make it cheap, quick and easy to create a corporation. Crooks started many fraudulent corporations and used them to steal and hide millions.
An economist official at Bank of England says that leaving the EU has a large share of responsibility for the increase in food prices in the UK.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Pelosi's successor as leader of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, is a strong and firm plutocratist, who supports a few progressive positions so people won't recognize how plutocratist he is.
Perhaps in your eyes the fact that he is black and Muslim makes his election to that position something to celebrate. In my eyes, he's just another plutocratist congresscritter that we should try to replace with a progressive.
Australia is investigating the use of slave labor in building its renewable power systems.
*[The right-wing Australian government's] "grassroots" nuclear power survey linked to consulting firm [working for US nuclear reactor industry].*
Should we call this a "public-private partnership for profit"?
*World's biggest food [corporations] made £20bn in profits — while warning of price rises to come.*
Curbing global heating will not save our planet's ecosystems. They are threatened more immediately by other human activities including deforestation, overgrazing, overfishing, desertification, and soil degradation.
A relationship does exist: global heating will eventually destroy many ecosystems, if they survive that long. But we have to curb the other environmental threats, too.
Having fewer children will help reduce all those forms of excessive human impact, all at once. And will free up your effort to work on the other problems.
Australia has sentenced a climate protester to over a year in prison for blocking one lane of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The US should pressure Israel to agree to nuclear disarmament. Maybe Iran and Israel would agree to nuclear disarmament together.
*President Lula da Silva wants to establish a new Federal Police unit focused on deterring environmental crimes.*
*Campaigners Demand Deep Cuts to Plastic Production as Global Treaty Negotiations Ramp Up.*
Here is a set of narrow arguments against the "KOSA" bill that is supposed to protect "children's" privacy, but will instead deny the privacy of all internet services.
I agree with the arguments in general, but I need to state these points of disagreement.
The British government has become simply incompetent. They summon people to court by mistake, after reporting judgments against them by mistake, after failing to notify them at all.
Indonesia plans political and sexual repression: it will be a crime to (1) insult the president, the state, or the official ideology or (2) have sex (except for married couples).
Reportedly Islamists are behind this attack on freedom in Indonesia.
Frontier Airlines has eliminated telephone customer support. The only way to communicate with the airline is through its web site.
I once flew on a Frontier flight, and noted that the staff seemed to have a right ear and a left ear, but no front ear. That cast its name in question. Now it should be called "No-ear Airlines."
I tried looking around that web site. For the most part, the information seemed to be present and navigation worked. But I think that most inquiries and actions depend on nonfree Javascript code, which excludes me from doing them.
They invite people to use a chat system to get in contact with an agent. That might be an acceptable solution, except that that chat system is part of the web site and it seems to depend on Javascript too.
One thing I noticed on the site is that the company is pressuring people to use its cr…app rather than its web site. Surveillance by the web site is limited; surveillance by a cr…app is much more complete.
Google promised not to save location data about "sensitive" places such as abortion clinics, which some states threaten to sue or prosecute people for going near. It did not make enough change to eliminate the danger.
I am not surprised, because surveillance-based companies will always tend to collect too much data and hold on to too much data.
However, data tends to get duplicated and get stored in various places. The root of the search problem is (1) collecting location data, (2) collecting personal identifying data, and (3) identifying return visitors (with cookies).
An acceptable web service must not find out any of those facts about you unless you request to send them. And it must do its job even if you choose not to send them.
US citizens: call on drug stores to require people to wear masks.
41 Republicans plus Manchin used a filibuster to kill the proposed railroad workers' contract that gave them sick leave. Then the Senate approved the contract lacking sick leave, the version that Biden had asked for.
*Three UK Universities Ban Fossil Fuel Industry Recruiters From Campus.*
The UK's immigation department sent 20 asylum seekers letters inviting them to come to meetings to discuss their cases. When they arrived, which in some cases was a big expense for them, they were told that the staff did no plans for meetings with them that day.
Either these letters were a prank, or the UK government has become so incompetent and confused that it can't carry out the simplest plan. After seeing how incompetent Tories are, I think the latter is more plausible.
Senator Merkely has proposed a bill to put a heavy tax on single family homes when they are owned by big companies that own hundreds of them.
The history, since 1940, of the series of US tax cuts for the rich that impoverished the country.
Want to really make America great again? Tax the rich!
*The [corrupter's] supporters can no longer avoid testifying before grand juries in Washington DC and Georgia.*
*Big polluters given almost €100bn[-worth] in carbon [emissions] permits [gratis] by EU.* That was over a period of 9 years.
The FBI and DHS focus disproportionately on foreign terrorists as possible threats, and insufficienly on (right-wing) domestic terrorists such as white supreacists and Nazis.
The Tyre Extinguishers have deflated the tires of 900 SUVs around the world as a protest against these dangerous gas guzzlers.
A Just Stop Oil protester was sentenced to 6 months in prison for blocking a highway for a while. The court called this "causing a public nuisance," and I'm sure it did. As these protesters say, it's nothing compared to the unending public nuisance conditions that increased use of fossil fuels will cause.
*Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could finish off Putin and Russia.* The proposal includes modern aircraft and longer-range missiles. Careful strategic thought is required about whether to donate the latter.
Herschel Walker, MAGA maggot candidate for the Senate in Georgia, filed for a tax break on a "primary residence" in Texas where he really lives. This may have been illegal.
Pheromone-assisted insect traps can photograph and identify pests via image recognition. This technique can potentially save greatly on the use of pesticides.
Unfortunately, under today's general practices, it will also be a trap for farmers. It will be run by nonfree software, so it will snoop on the farm and put the farm at a disadvantage. And the farmers won't be able to repair it.
The US system of producing medicines suffers from too much commercial centralization (few producers) without much central planning. Also a tendency to optimize for efficiency rather than reliability.
The result is susceptibility to shortages.
Anti-vax fanatics in New Zealand would rather let their baby die than let it get a transfusion of "vaccinated blood" for surgery.
They and others have convinced each other that there is some danger in this.
George Monbiot: Farming and its subsidies are an increasing danger to nature and the climate.
There is no mystery to why governments subsidizes farming. It is not just that rich people want to profit from them; everyone wants the results. But we need to cut down this unsustainable practice.
Fewer babies will certainly help!
A fracking company accepted criminal liability for poisoning the water of Dimock, Pennsylvania and will pay to replace the wells with new water systems and to deliver clean water for the next 75 years.
Here is a timeline of how the company caused the damage, of enforcement efforts, and how the company resisted them.
This is justice in a narrow sense, but it won't clean up the water of that region. It won't undo the lasting diminiution of water supplies in Pennsylvania. There may not be any feasible way to do that.
There must be many other regions of the US which have already suffered similar damage.
We must not allow it to happen in any more places.
Leaders of the Oath Keepers have been convicted of secitious conspiracy for organizing the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, based on their conversations about same.
This gives the Department of Justice a basis for confidence in bringing that charge against others who were involved, including potentially the corrupter himself.
Antifascist individuals and groups are finding their Twitter accounts suspended. Apparently Musk's idea of freedom of speech has a right-wing bias.
New York City's night-mayor has asked a wide variety of workers to incarcerate homeless people in mental hospitals — including people who are supposed to help the public. This plan is explicitly not limited to people who seem to pose a threat to others.
Many homeless people run away from shelters because the conditions there are so unpleasant they would rather be on the street.
A host of criticisms of this plan.
Once you get committed to a hospital — even if you did it by faking insanity — it is reported to be very hard to prove you are sane.
*Australian PM Anthony Albanese urges US government to end pursuit of Julian Assange.* Assange has been hounded for over a decade using a series of dirty tricks and twisting of the law. But this injustice has a bigger target than Julian Assange. Its main target is the freedom of the press to report on crimes committed by governments.
Democracy depends on whistleblowers, and it depends on journalists to publish what whistleblowers report. The prosecution puts democracy too in danger.
Massive surveillance is part of the threat to democracy. That is why we must limit the collection of databases of personal data, not merely regulate how the data are used.
The Tories have adopted a "voter ID" law, which as always is systematic suppression of voting by voters who are poor, young, or marginalized. In addition, merely through the extra work it requires at underfunded polling places, it will cause chaos.
*Plibersek's "determination" alone won’t save the Great Barrier Reef –- here’s what needs to happen.*
Amnesty Interational: Colombian thugs used torture, rape, and kidnaping to repress the mass protests of 2021. They also used lesser forms of psychological punishment, such as forcing people to strip.
The article embodies a strange set of values. It seems to take for granted that acting based on sexism or racism is a more serious wrong than rape.
I disagree with that. In my view, rape is wrong regardless of the details of the victim.
The UK could pretty much end transmission of HIV and illness from HIV, but it doesn't spend the money to do so.
Victoria (in Australia) has adopted ambitious greenhouse gas goals. Here are suggestions for how to achieve them.
*Israel has stripped a prominent Palestinian-French human rights lawyer of his Jerusalem residency and is expected to deport him to France.*
Israel has had a pattern of repression of lawyers that defend the rights of Palestinians.
Also a pattern of causing suffering by inventing excuses to take away Jerusalem residency permits. For example, being away studying in a university for a few years.
The article refers to "administrative detention", a euphemism for putting people in jail without trial.
A Nigerian student faces criminal charges of "defamation" after beatings in jail were not enough to make him confess.
The details of what the student said are a side issue — treating defamation as a crime always endangers freedom of speech.
The "big four" accounting firms are structurally embedded in systematic corruption. They are "too big to fail", but sooner or later one of them will fail.
The way to end the corruption is clear: prohibit accounting companies from doing anything other than auditing.
If a sudden change is hard to implement, here's a way to force them to make them separate gradually.
Tax the consulting gross sales of accounting firms a stated percentage that rises annually. It could be 3% in the first year, 6% in the second year, and so on. I think that in 5 years they will have moved most of the consulting business to some new sister company.
The details could be adjusted so as to require splitting each current company's non-auditing work into N or more independent new companies.
Other adjustments could make them split the auditing work among a larger number of new auditing companies.
The insufficient competition in the US allows businesses with market power to gouge by piling on "junk fees". Booz Alan has a monopoly over some kinds of access to some US national parks and other public lands, exercised via a "government" web site run by that company, and pulls in much more income from junk fees than the US government agency concerned actually gets.
But it's worse than that. Aside from the matter of price, use of that "government" web site requires running nonfree software. Those parks are off-limits to the free world.
I have visited some US national parks, and I paid cash to enter them. Is that still possible? Can anyone investigate that site (see the article) and report which parks and places can't be entered by paying cash, without using any web site?
Or which parks and places can still be entered by paying cash, without any web site?
Whichever list is shorter would be the more useful.
*Arizona elections official goes into hiding after post-midterm threats* from right-wing Big Lie fanatics.
*Three Georgia sheriff's deputies, all white, charged with battery after beating black inmate.*
The video shows that they prepared to attack him, while he was standing in a cell, doing nothing significant.
Two versions of the video have been published, one in which the attack was intentionally blurred and one which shows what happened. The thug department promoted the former and the latter is hard to find.
*Canada accused of putting its timber trade ahead of global environment.*
Could the US and China collaborate to curb global heating?
It seems to me that neither government has a strong enough commitment to that cause. In the US, it is because Republicans are determined to keep driving straight at the cliff. As for China, it seems to assume that doing this slowly and arriving decades late is sufficient. The two countries need to be set individually on the goal before they can collaborate on it.
US citizens: phone President Biden and urge him to issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose all of their political spending.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on your state legislature to implement fair districting.
The EU has proposed a plan to cut plastic waste from consumer goods.
This is good, but what about the fishing nets?
When billionaires pledge to donate most of their wealth to charity, there is no guarantee that that money will ever reach a charity, The system is complicated and the pledge may be almost meaningless.
Never mind their pledges — let's tax them a lot more.
*UK super-rich [are] less charitable than decade ago, says charity chief.*
Stop depending on them to give voluntarily, and tax them more!
*Biden urged to threaten Israel weapons halt over far-right concerns.*
How will Tories face the NHS strikes that are due to their 12 years of budget cuts?
The House of Representatives narrowly passed a law to give railroad workers the seven days of paid sick leave (is that per year?) that they want. Now the question is whether Republicans will filibuster it and kill it, to ensure a strike.
*ALEC Lawmakers and Corporate Lobbyists Meet in D.C. to Debate Rewriting the Constitution, Punishing Socially Responsible Businesses, and Protecting Misinformation.*
George Takei talks about growing up in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, and later coming out as gay.
Railroads in England cancel a lot of trains. But the ones they cancel before 10pm the night before are omitted from the statistics, so the statistics don't show how bad this really is.
Privatization makes this worse. Instead of government agency, which would obey orders to report more useful figures, these are "private companies" that have "rights" to state their cancellation rate in a way that minimizes it.
The railroad passengers deserve rights, and the railroad workers deserve rights, but there should be no stockholders or executives involved in running trains that "deserve rights" over how the trains run.
90% of US countries have had at least one weather disaster from 2011 through 2022. This figure does not count heatwaves.
There is no information about how much each disaster was due to global heating, but it is a big cause of weather disasters now and going forward. Each American should recognize that "global heating is going to hit the place I live."
That doesn't count the crop failures that are going to affect us all even though the place they occur may be far away.
The article points out also that it would be more economical to do things to prevent disasters than to repair them.
Businesses are pushing for a federal tax cut this year. As if they didn't pay too little tax already!
US citizens: call on Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
By deciding to investigate Israel's killing of Shirin Abu Akleh, the US is putting limits on its willingness to support Israel no matter what Israel does.
Qatar believes it can bully any and all parts of the British government by pulling some of the investments that harm Britain.
The UK NHS is trying to suggest that nurses should not strike because it would cause some operations to be delayed.
That statement is literally true, but the argument it is part of is invalid. The main cause of postponing millions of operations every year is mismanagement and underfunding by the government, and the harmful consequences include the pay that is inadequate for nurses to live on.
*China censors maskless crowd footage in World Cup broadcasts.*
Apparently the contrast with them puts China in a bad light, in the minds of many Chinese. Are they right? I won't assume that. They can see when people die from the rigidity and harshness of the Chinese state. But if China drops the effort to eradicate Covid outbreaks, it could kill millions of Chinese. I think it would be better to correct the rigidity and harshness.
I agree with Sridhar that in what China needs in the long term to get better vaccines and get most people vaccinated.
A court order not to retaliate against union organizers also requires Amazon to read the court's decision to all the employees at the unionized plant in Staten Island.
I hope this requires Amazon to pay the workers for the time they pass listening to this reading.
Comparing the US and British medical systems: both horrible but in different ways.
The British medical system (the NHS) did not just grow with its current problems. It worked much better until the Tories started cutting its budget, through trickle-down politics based on worship of the Invisible Hand. It is clear how to fix them: give the NHS enough money to do its job.
The US medical system's problems did just grow, as the worshipers of the Invisible Hand let gouging private companies get whatever they wished for and blocked efforts to stop them. It is clear how to fix these problems: create a public national medical system and sweep away those greedy bastards. The usual term for this nowadays is "Medicare for all", though I think we should go further and set up a system of VA hospitals for all.
*Netanyahu strikes Israeli coalition deal with far-right [antigay fanatic].*
Hatred of gay or queer people is not a phobia, it is bigotry.
*War in space would have immediate effects [on civilian life.] Attacks on satellites could take out GPS systems, banking systems, power grids …*
A group of UN experts call for putting the Great Barrier Reef on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites that are in danger.
*Monkeypox to be renamed mpox to avoid stigma, says WHO.*
This illustrates our society's tendency to cater excessively to hypersensitivity. There is nothing in the name "monkeypox" which insults anyone, and monkeys can't understand the word "pox".
What next — will they rename "chicken pox" to protect the feelings of chickens, or people accused of timidity? How about renaming "Rock Mountain Spotted Fever" so that the Rocky Mountains don't feel stigmatized?
It is futile to bully people to eliminate locutions because racists or right-wingers could spin them in a nasty way. They can invent more such things at any moment. The bullying would be a never-ending series of self-inflicted blows, at which bigots would laugh and say, "See how easily we make them go nuts!"
Forecast: expect Xi to do in many parts of China what he did to the Uyghurs and to Hong Kong.
The island of Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, is being taken over by intrusive vines that grow too fast to remove. Vines are covering buildings, farms, paths, and forests. People find it hard to keep their farms going.
Massachusetts voters amended the state constitution to increase the tax rate a few percent for incomes over a million dollars a year. So far so good. But the greedy rich have many ways to get rid of laws that make them pay their fair share.
In the UK, many necessary life activities exclude people that don't use snoop-phones full of nonfree software. This article shows how common that is.
The author cannot envision the idea of choosing to reject snoop-phones as a matter of justice if you are capable of using one. But you can. Every one of the restrictive activities that excludes the old people that can't use a snoop-phone are likewise doing wrong to everyone that refuses to use them.
And doing wrong to each person that does contact them with a snoop-phone.
India is exporting Hindu-supremacism and its violence to Britain. And to the US.
Finally some influential newspapers argue for dropping the charges against Julian Assange.
The UK governmen admits that tens of thousands of homes in the UK are not safe for people to live in.
This, together with various other issues including the Grenfell fire shows that the UK has lost its ability to enforce regulations on businesses that are meant to protect public safety and well-being.
It can't even run railroads well, because it has privatized them.
I am not sure what the causes are. I've seen "cronyism" sugested as a cause for some, but I suspect that another cause is catering excessively to the wealthy and business. The companies that run the privatized railroads get more importance than the passengers.
Watch out for a false sense of security. The US is still in danger of being taken over by fascism.
The Republicans, by a margin of one seat in the House of Representatives, seem to have succeeded in ensuring that the federal government can't do anything before the 2024 elections to ensure our elections are not rigged then.
Vaccine disinformation has convinced many to refuse measles vaccination, and that is creating a completely unnecessary threat of measles.
(satire) *Cash-Strapped Subway Threatens To Reveal Identities Of Customers Who Eat Subway [food] If They Don’t Pay [ransom].*
The Tories have heard the voice of Insulate Britain and proposed a plan to insulate the homes of middle-class Britons.
It's a good idea, but middle-class homeowners could afford to pay back this support out of the savings they will have. The government should lend the money for middle-class homes, and give the money for insulating poor people's homes.
Yanis Varoufakis conjectures that Musk wants to turn Twitter into a platform for surveillance capitalism, and that everything he said about freedom of speech was a red herring.
Global heating killed 20,000 people in Europe through heat waves last summer that were possible due to local heating.
Brains learn to predict other people's likely behavior and to save the unconscious effort of figuring about concerns that never arise for them. As a result, powerful people learn to be ruthless and not to concern themselves with the feelings of the obedient people around them.
Putin has banned any public mention of same-sex or same-gender relationships. Like DeMentis, his law prohibits this only under certain conditions, but when his followers interpret the conditions, there is nothing that is safe to say.
"Green Capitalism" sounds promising, but is it really capable of preventing global climate disaster. A book argues that it is not: that measuring the value of each thing in the world in monetary terms just won't do the job.
A committee came up with an estimate of the monetary value of a great whale, One can question whether the monetary value captures the importance of continued existence of whales, but maybe the result would be adequate.
But what about the continued existence of a rare, endangered species of small animals? If people calculate that without adding a term to represent the value of simple existence of a distinct species, they might get a minuscule number.
How many endangered species preserved are worth one living whale? It's hard to make that question meaningful, It's like asking how much money a human life is worth. Insurance needs to find a way to answer that question, but is that the right way to understand the importance of various things? Is that the right way to decide who lives and who dies?
If you buy the book, please do not get it from Amazon.
Private equity companies are buying up medical specialist clinics in the US, and creating local monopolies that systematically gouge, and even defraud.
This problem afflicts many areas of medicine, just as it affects many other areas of life in the US.
For medicine, the full solution is a national medical system. It would save the US money overall, but might require taxing the rich more.
However, the problem of concentration of industry needs a general solution too.
Some US universities have made deals with sports betting companies. The university helps promote gambling to the students, and in return gets a share of what the students spend.
I don't believe in prohibiting gambling, but those who have your well-being in mind will not encourage you to gamble.
* Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to [Facebook+Instagram].* As well as other basic personal information.
The do this through a tracking pixel on their web sites. The info sent comes from what the user enters in the web site; it seems that does not include the detailed financial data that users hand over for the tax return itself. Sending the latter to some other company might, I suspect, be a crime.
Millions of sites use the Facebook&Instagram tracking pixel to send data about their visitors.
Google Analytics collects much of the same data, but not the user's name. However, often it can figure out the user's identity in other ways.
The iMonsters' app store client program collects many kinds of data about the user's actions.
There is a command to disable this collection, but it seems not to have an effect.
Does it matter that Julian Assange has Asperger's syndrome? (I avoid the term "autistic spectrum" because it is a misleading overgeneralization.)
In principle, no. Publishing leaks about the horrible crimes of governments is admirable and no one should be punished for that.
In practice, if it helps prevent Assange's extradition, I will be glad. However, to avoid putting journalism in danger globally, saving Assange from US vengeance based on personal grounds will not be enough. We need to protect journalists and whistleblowers from punishment for serving the public.
*Far-right extremist [Ben-Gvir] to be Israel's national security minister.*
He wants to give immunity to Israeli soldiers that shoot at Palestinians, and execute Palestinians for various sorts of crimes. In this ministry he would be in charge of thugs, and would surely encourage them to commit violence. In Israel I was told that the border police were especially cruel and violent towards Palestinians.
The documentary "Tantura" tells the story of Israel's expulsion of the Palestinians of a town near Haifa, in 1948. The film-maker, Alon Schwarz, faces revulsion for this.
I wish that Uri Avnery were alive to talk about the film and the events. His article, Truth Against Truth, provides some context.
Faux News hammered viewers with frequent reports about crime, until election day.
"Think about crime — don't think about the help Republicans won't let the government give you!"
Walmart drives its workers hard, but especially hard in the "holiday" season. They are compelled to work 55 or even 60 hours a week and can't take time off even for an emergency.
Australia will accept the wives and children of PISSI fighters
*SpaceX Workers Say They Were Illegally Fired for Open Letter Criticizing Elon [Musk].*
Republicans have a broad plan: *to destabilize, weaken, and even destroy the institutions that give a voice to people who don't agree with their vision.*
Suggesting that NATO should make a rule to have dialog with a possible attacker before any NATO state fights back against an apparent attack.
A UK thug department has paid damages for attacking protesters. The thugs made a sudden attack at a peaceful demonstration. The thugs cited Covid lockdown regulations in force at the time, but that can't justify a violent attack!
Paying damages and not admitting wrongdoing is not enough.
Tory budget plans are likely to degrade UK public services even further.
San Francisco thugs propose using robots that can carry deadly weapons, to respond to reports of incidents.
The criterion they propose for using this sounds very similar to the criterion for shooting people. As we know, thugs often shoot people dead in situations where that justification was not a good criterion.
The UK gave every homeless person a place indoors to sleep, for a short time during the pandemic.
I think the UK did not continue this for very long, but that doesn't mean it can't be done again.
It may require taxing the rich more.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, don't starve critical investments in healthcare, children and transit. Pass government funding before the end of the year.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice not to let the wrecker use his new presidential campaign to get off the hook for criminal charges.
US citizens: call on Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to remove all medical debt from credit reports.
US citizens: call on state officials to disqualify the wrecker from running for president or other offices, as the Constitution calls for.
US citizens: call on Biden to advocate repeal of the ‘02 AUMF.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the FTC to require platforms to make their direct messages end-to-end encrypted.
This is a half-measure. Truly secure encrytion has to be done by a free client program that the user installs independently of the platform. Therefore it can't be implemented by a communication platform.
If the encryption is done by the platform — either in its server, or in its nonfree client program, or in code sent to the user's browser (for instance, in Javascript) — then the platform has control over the encryption, and can backdoor it at will.
US citizens: call on Congress to raise the debt ceiling now so Republicans can't use it as a lever for sabotage later.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
Musk has readmitted many right-wing extremists to Twitter, including the bullshitter and people who deny that he lost the 2020 election.
However, it prohibits all users from posting links to the Distributed Denial of Secrets web site, ddosecrets.com, which posts government secrets leaked by whistleblowers.
A furniture company shut down its operations abruptly and fired all its workers instantly, without notice. It also tried to deny them all benefits — even the option to continue their medical insurance at their own expense.
It may be illegal for a company to do that, but that's not enough. It ought to be a crime for the executives and managers involved in the decision.
I wonder why they shut down the company abruptly. Two ideas that occur to me are (1) they decided to move operations to another country and (2) the company was owned by private equity. Neither one makes the action any less wrong.
As for the fact that they did this on one day of the year rather than one of the other 364 days, or what method they used to inform the staff, or the fact that some of them were sleeping, don't let those minor details distract you. If your condemnation of bad treatment of workers can be mollified by choosing such details better, that will help businesses attack workers rights ore effectively. We must demand the substance of treating workers decently, not merely the show.
Bolsonaro's Nazi propaganda and relaxation of gun laws in Brazil have led to massacres by Nazi fanatics.
*"A Death Sentence": Biden Blasted for Approving Oil Export Project.*
Failing to decrease oil extraction now can easily doom most people.
(satire) *Biden Meets With Turkeys Who've Lost Loved Ones To Thanksgiving.*
Ukraine is now sending subsidized food to some African countries.
Protests against strict Covid lockdowns have spread in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
The next climate conference will occur in the UAE, a fossil-fuel kingdom that is attacking Yemen with US support. There is not much hope from an event held there. So Naomi Klein suggests that civil society boycott it and hold a parallel event.
Democrats had successes among rural voters, and if they try harder they can develop real strength there.
Calling on the IMF to eliminate the extra interest that it charges poor countries.
Steven Donziger argues for ways to tackle global heating in international law.
Creating the crime of ecocide is one of his solutions.
In the UK, workers who are sick are not interested in notes excusing time off work — they are so desperately poor that they are compelled to work while sick.
Facebook closed accounts that it found were spreading false information on behalf of the US government.
CIA officials, appointed by the wrecker, discussed assassinating Julian Assange. Instead they took the slow path that has been in use for several years.
The summary of Assange's history, in that article, is misleading on a number of points. This is a better reference.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposes to deregulate new kinds of nuclear power plants.
They have a history of seeking to please and serve the companies that make nuclear power plants, so such a proposal makes me suspicious. We should not build new, "small" nuclear plants because that is too slow, expensive and risky to be of service in preventing global heating disaster.
To go fast, we need to use the solution that is fastest and cheapest to build: renewable power.
Iran is expanding its uranium-refining capacity. This suggests it intends to produce nuclear weapons — though it could be a plan to generate nuclear power instead of burning so much oil.
Sydney thugs violently arrested habitual prank protester Danny Lim and left him seriously injured.
He told them at the outset he needed an ambulance, and when a passerby offered to call one, the thugs threatened to charge him with a crime if he did so.
Thugs should face criminal charges for making threats to falsely accuse people, just as for actually doing so.
I don't quite get the jobe of his sign, nor the point of his protest — but those details don't affect the issue here.
There are big protests in an Apple factory in China, and videos are circulating despite Chinese censorship.
Surveillance jungle: rental e-scooters in Paris are very strictly tracked. And of course the renter has to identify perself to rent one.
"Convenient" disservices like these are what teach people to accept surveillance. If we don't want a society in which one's every move is known, we have to reject surveillance disservices.
*There will come a time for [peace] negotiations — but calls to reach a deal with the Kremlin now are more wrong-headed than ever.*
I think it can't hurt to have negotiators continue to meet, since occasionally they can agree on a significant side issue. But they must not aim to to pressure Ukraine into inviting defeat.
*The massacre at Club Q didn’t happen in a vacuum. There has been a dangerous escalation in hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric.*
Japan is meddling in Australian politics by trying to pressure Queensland not to increase the tax on exported coal.
That tax increase is a tiny step towards the vital goal of reducing coal consumption. It is terribly insufficient, but opposing it endangers all of us.
Biden's delay on ruling on whether Crown Prince Bone Saw could be sued in a US court gave him an opportunity to appoint himself "prime minister" and thus gain the benefit of a shelter in a pertinent treaty.
US citizens: phone your representative and senators and call on them not to pass any tax cuts for business. Handouts should be directed to non-rich Americans!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *New STEM Program Teaches Students Skills To Appease Whims Of Capricious Tech CEO.*
I find this especially on target because the absurdity it attacks is the basis of the buzzword "STEM" itself.
(satire) *British World Cup Attendees Accused Of Smuggling Alcohol Into Stadium Through Bloodstreams.*
(satire) *Landlord Pledges To Address Tenant Infestation.*
An ironically misguided petition asks the US government to require communication platforms to encrypt all private messages.
It would sure be wise for users to encrypt those messages. But that won't be secure if the platform sets up the encryption and the decryption. If you do that with software that the platform provides, the platform could put in a back door to bypass it, making it ineffective for security against snooping by that platform. If you want encryption to provide real security, install the GNU Privacy Guard and use it — to encrypt a message before you send it, and to decrypt a message after you receive it.
Major US railroad workers' unions have rejected a contract offer that didn't offer them enough.
The railroads are profitable and they should share these profits with their workers. I'm disappointed with Biden for proposing a contract that didn't give them enough.
A federal court issued an injunction for Amazon to stop firing workers for protesting unsafe working conditions.
Some players in the football world cup in Qatar planned to wear armbands to support equal rights for queer people. Qatar said it would respond by taking a step to expel them from the game, so they abandoned these plans.
Qatar violates human rights egregiously — this is one example, but the mistreatment of workers who built the facilities is even more blatant.
We should not allow Qatar any sort of position of special power over any international activity. *By consenting to Qatar's illiberal policies for residents and guests alike, FIFA has further besmirched its already tainted reputation.*
The EU would have the power to make FIFA yield to various human rights rules and agree to require all future world cup hosts to accept them.
Starbucks is closing stores, and 40% of those stores have unionized or are organizing.
Starbucks has taken anti-union measures before.
Oregon's governor pardoned everyone convicted in Oregon of possessing a small amount of marijuana.
Unlike Biden's pardons, this included non-US-citizens.
Many states and territories still need to do legalize marijuana and pardon everyone convicted of possessing it.
"Stakeholder capitalism" turns out to do little for the groups it is supposed to benefit — it is at best lip service, sometimes even a fraud.
*Senior officers ordered "unlawful" arrests of journalists at Just Stop Oil protests.*
They didn't explicitly say "arrest journalists", but they gave orders to arrest protesters, and did not mention that journalists were a special case.
I don't think they should be in a position of authority if they disregard freedom of the press. Meanwhile, arresting protesters is bad too.
*SpaceX employees say they were fired for criticizing Elon Musk in open letter.*
Heather Wallace, of suburban Texas, asked her child to walk half a mile to their home. For this she was arrested, then pressured to plead guilty to "endangering a child". Eventually Texas decided it was ok to let the child walk, but the guilty plea has taken away her career and tied her up in mandatory lying.
It is horrible to force someone to apologize for something that was not wrong. A group of bullies tried to do that to me. Fortunately, they did not have the power to imprison me, so I stood up to them and did not apologize except for certain things that I really felt it would be better not to have done.
Using state eminent domain power to seize land and houses for the sake of a private project is an attractive nuisance that inspires corruption.
Carbon-removal programs have always been a long shot. But now that the planet-roasters have blocked the more reliable forms of action, they may be the Earth's last best hope.
The thing is, they won't do much good if the planet-roasters treat them as excuses to increase their emissions.
Democrats in Congress plan to pass a resolution to recognize that the wrecker has violated his oath to defend the US Constitution, and therefore is barred by the Constitution from running for any office in the US.
Comparing the economic situation of Americans in their 30s in 1990 with Americans in their 30s today measures the tremendous harm that right-wing politics has done to Americans generally.
The Senate found that US immigration thugs have sent women prisoners for medical operations without getting their consent, and without properly supervising the operations.
Twelve Senate Democrats voted to end the US Covid emergency law.
This would prevent Biden from suspending repayment of student loans. It could also kick millions of Americans off medicaid. Right-wingers would in general like poor people to die.
The Ukrainian soldiers and border guards on Snake Island, who told the Moskva, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," were captured. The Putin forces gave Ukraine no word about them and Ukraine believed they were dead. In fact, they were imprisoned, and tortured, but not killed.
One, Bohdan Hotskiy, was eventually swapped for a Russian prisoner of war, which is how we know how he was tortured. The rest remain prisoners, as far as I can tell from this article.
About another woman who almost died from getting pregnant while living in Texas.
Republican operative Senator Manchin is making sure the Democrats cannot eliminate the debt ceiling this year, and thus ensuring the Republicans can use it for blackmail next year.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose a forestry bill that would require cutting down lots of mature trees. These trees store lots of carbon from the air, and offer habitats that many species depend on.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on Biden to extend student loan repayments freeze until cancellation is awarded.
US citizens: call on officials of your state to disqualify the wrecker from holding office, on grounds of insurrection.
*With Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House, "Republicans will try to impose economic pain on families so they can blame us and seize power for themselves," [Senator] Warren noted.
Cutting Social Security and Medicare is the start of this, but they plan to do more too.
Mainstream media don't admit that's what Republicans are doing, and I don't think Biden will do it either.
The US is working with other countries in which China has set up secret repression stations to pressure Chinese expats.
The Momentum movement, which was supported by a large fraction of Labour members, has lost many supporters as they see that Labour has been taken over by Starmer and his plutocrats.
The question is, have they still got any chance of winning anything by supporting Labour?
The US has laws to find people who might intend to buy guns and kill people, and stop them from buying guns, but makes little effort to make that system actually work.
I suspect that the system has another problem: people are not that reliably predictable. Identifying some of those people is easy, but setting the net fine enough to identify all of them would identify lots of false positives too.
Examples of how damaging a part of the natural environment can cause enormous harm to humans who didn't know how they depended on it.
Deforesters in the Beni region of the Bolivian lowlands don't just cut down the trees. They go on to flatten and destroy the uninvestigated middens left by ancient inhabitants whose culture is very little known.
The Bolivian government is encouraging deforestation to boost agriculture. This contributes to global disaster, which could lead our civilization to end up in ruins like the ones they are destroying.
The thugs in Western Australia have a notable pattern of letting their dogs attack indigenous Australians, especially minors.
It is clear that the thugs handling these dogs fail to keep the dogs under proper control. Whether this is due to malice or irresponsibility is not clear from this statistical information. They should publish the videos of the dog attack on Jayden Abraham.
The US approved keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant running 10 additional years, from 2025 to 2035.
The article asserts that California is having trouble coming up with renewable generation to replace the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, but also that ten-ish US power reactors have closed since 2013 due to competition from cheaper renewable generation. It is not easy to reconcile those two statements.
If California doesn't expect to have enough renewable generation working by 2025, why doesn't it spend more money on building more rather than on keeping the Diablo Canyon power plant running?
The important decision about whether to build a third runway at Heathrow airport, which would imply a lasting increase in flying out of the UK, is being made as a battle over the business interests of various investors, including foreign governments such as Qatar and China that are absolutely vicious.
The corruption/privatization of the UK government has squeezed the public interest out of the decision.
A new tactic for right-wing global heating denialists — "Have faith in the market to solve the problem!"
What about when we see where "the market" is taking us, and it leads to disastrous heating? "Have faith, 2 or 3 degrees C of heating won't be that bad." But we are barely coping with 1.1 degrees now.
"The market" operates constantly — always under the explicit and implicit rules that society imposes on it. Societies frequently change those rules, either explicitly and intentionally or unconsciously. The question we face now is how to change the rules to reduce the disaster we are creating. "Just let the rules sweep you away" is not even an answer.
(satire) *Qatar World Cup Games To Cut Off Human Sales After 75th Minute.*
Wealthy people in Britain can pay hundreds of pounds for an ordinary appointment with a general practitioner, because the NHS has been starved to the point it takes weeks to be seen.
A Pakistani film about a trans woman, which won a prize at Cannes, is now unbanned in Pakistan, but it is still banned in part of India.
India is very bad in regard to censorship; many important works have been banned.
* After being repeatedly humiliated by Prince Mohammed, Biden continues to appease an autocrat who disdains him.*
The international climate conferences have never agreed on the goal of reducing use of fossil fuels. This year's conference saw a move to come closer to that position, but it failed.
This shows how resolutely some governments insist on maintaining or increasing their use of fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate retired military members working for foreign governments.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly and break it up.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
South Korea's president is attacking freedom of the press, by punishing specific organizations that criticize him.
Since young voters mostly voted for democrats, Republicans propose to raise the minimum age for voting.
Voters around the US approved ballot initiatives to fund aid for affordable housing and taxes on sale of expensive dwellings.
Robots that carry guns and can select targets are already being made. The ones mentioned in this article cannot fire the guns without an order from a human soldier.
If we want robot weapons to appreciate the value of human lives, we had better treat their lives as having value too. If and when they become capable of appreciating the value of lives of others, they may be ready to deserve that.
The scenario of cracking the security on robot weapons should remind us that humans too are vulnerable to this too. Right-wing extremists cracked the mental security of US soldiers and thugs, brainwashing them to attack US democracy in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol. No system
*The big takeaway from Cop27? These climate conferences just aren’t working.*
*There was no commitment to cutting the emissions causing accelerating this crisis, without which this agreement is nothing more … than a "down-payment on disaster."*
The planet roasters have spread their influence both overtly at the events and out of sight through influence on governments. And then there are the business-supremacy treaties.
Considering that the effect of these systems of influence will be to kill hundreds of millions of people, I think it is time to wipe out those systems, and never mind what property and financial interests get "harmed." Indeed, "harming" those interests is necessary — their wealth gives them power to keep disaster going, so the only way to reduce the damage they can do is to is to wreck some of their wealth.
Shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant caused damage to structures that are not critical.
Who fired these shells? They chose targets that would provoke anxiety but were unlikely to cause real danger. In other words, it appears to have been a sort of bluff. This is indication (though not proof) that the Putin forces did the shelling.
We should not take seriously their claim that the shots came from Ukraine; they have no credibility.
T appears that Putin's plan does not include causing any significant damage, but plans occasionally go wrong. It behooves Ukraine and Putin to agree on a plan to demilitarize the power plant itself.
But I don't expect Putin to agree to this.
Animals bred in zoos evolve to be less fit to survive in the wild.
This is a predictable consequence of natural selection. Animals' survival in a breeding program does not depend on the characteristics that are needed for survival in the wild, but maintaining those characteristics has costs. So they will tend to lose those characteristics.
It would be interesting to see what happens after those captivity-adapted animals are released. Do they respond to the selection pressure of wild existence by evolving in the other direction? That seems likely if enough of the original wild population remains. But if there is very little of the original wild population, the superior wild characteristics might have been lost entirely.
*The 1.5C climate goal died at Cop27 — but hope must not.*
Alas, that was our only chance for a world free of blatant changes in weather and climate.
*McDonald’s and Walmart beef suppliers criticised for "reckless" antibiotics use.*
I've been posting about this danger for many years. These producers are choosing the actions in their short-term best interest, and our government hasn't got the power to force them to follow long-term interests.
South Koreans separate food waste from other waste, and hand it in in special bags for municipal composting. This almost completely prevents the social burden of food waste.
*Beware self-made "genius": entrepreneurs promising the earth. Just look at Elon Musk.*
Starmer is proud of having many Tory friends.
I conjecture that this is because he doesn't disagree with them all that deeply.
An international vote adopted more protections on sharks, which are being wiped out by the trade in shark fins for Chinese conspicuous consumption.
Kiribati's president wants the rest of the world to pay the cost of protecting the Kiribati islands from rising seas.
To do this for 10 or 20 years might be feasible. If we curb global heating fast, the problem may then vanish as a result. But if global heating continues unchecked, the idea is hopeless.
Perhaps the president is well aware of this and is actually pushing for the major countries to curb global heating quickly. It is worth a try, for the sake of each and every one of us.
While Covid-19 preoccupied the medical systems of Europe, a million or so people who had contracted cancer did not get tested until late. They may die from this.
Three Russian officers were convicted of murder on grounds of being responsible for deploying the Buk missile launcher that was used to shoot down flight MH17.
I think it is wrong to charge soldiers with murder, in any form, simply for being involved with deploying a weapon, which weapon was later fired at civilians by mistake with fatal intent. That is not murder.
If soldiers had knowingly fired it at a civilian aircraft, that would be murder. But no one tried to prove that such a thing happened.
To respect the laws of war includes steadfastly refusing to stretch or twist them to "get at" people because they are on a side we oppose. We must support applying them evenhandedly.
*Seventy five countries led by the US, UK and France are expected to sign a declaration in Dublin on Friday to refrain from urban bombing.*
Russia, China, Israel, and India said they would not sign. Ukraine also refuses to sign, but maybe it would sign if Russia does.
*If you're outraged by XR and Just Stop Oil, imagine how disruptive climate breakdown will be.*
If you are concerned about the works of art that Just Stop Oil protesters threw liquids at, keep in mind that if civilization ceases to have spare funds to maintain museums, some of them will be exposed to the elements and decaying. The rest will have been taken by billionaires who expect to save a fraction of you, at the cost of becoming their slaves.
Some people are convinced that prosperity requires a growing population — even in the US.
We can't afford a growing population in the US. It uses too much resources already. I'd say that survival, in the long term, requires a gradually shrinking US population. People in the US consume so much resources that a decrease in the US population is crucial for the world as a whole.
A "young population" is a harbinger of disaster.
We can enable ordinary Americans to prosper and cut down the resources we use, if only we could put an end to plutocracy that demands ever more billions for each billionaire.
We have plutocracy because the billionaire plutocrats have purchased laws (and judges) that assure them the power to buy more laws and court decisions.
Playwright Caryl Churchill was given a lifetime achievement award. Then the award committee took the award back because Churchill had expressed support for Palestinians' Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Artists are entitled to have political views, like anyone else, but judgments about their merit as artists should not judge them by their views on political issues.
Climate talks must consider reforming agriculture so as to end its large greenhouse emissions.
Workers at over 110 Starbucks stores went on strike Thursday.
A few activists heckled Biden's speech at Cop29. They were banned from the whole event after that, under the excuse that they "put lives in danger".
We expect Egypt to carry out censorship, but US officials should be better than that.
Kari Lake, a Republican election liar, was defeated for governor of Arizona. Now the question is whether she will try to bluff by claiming she actually won, and, if so, how the state will put a halt to the imposture.
Supposedly leftist President Boric wants Chile to sign the TPP — which would eliminate Chile's right to regulate many areas of business and health.
Fossil fuel companies use these business-supremacy treaties to attack measures for decarbonizing. Boric also wants Chile to sign the Energy Charter Treaty, a business-supremacy treaty designed specifically to interfere with measures to reduce use of fossil fuels. It is effectively a suicide pact.
If you are in Chile, launch a fight against this absurd plan.
Right-wing politicians in Texas have, surprisingly, supported criminal justice reform, and this has allowed Texas to close many of its prisons.
*Secrecy Enabled by Rich Countries Lets Corporations Dodge $90 Billion in Taxes Per Year.*
The Cop27 climate conference achieved very little of its main goals.
but did make progress towards an agreement about having heavy-emissions countries pay to help poor low-emissions countries. The armies of fossil fuel lobbyists seem to have stymied it.
Kemp arranged to rig the Georgia election for governor, just as he did when he was first elected governor.
The Netherlands will ban possession of nitrous oxide because a small fraction of car collisions are attribute to use of it.
The cops say (about a three-year period) there were almost 1,800 road accidents involving nitrous oxide, including 63 fatal collisions, according to a police survey reported by the Dutch public broadcaster ONS.
There were a total of 582 road fatalities in 2021. These figures are not quite comparable, but we can estimate around 20 road fatalities in 2021 that were related to use of nitrous oxide. That is a rather small fraction of 600. I don't think drugs should be banned for such small reasons. I believe they ought to try an education campaign to help people use nitrous oxide safely. Certain basic safety precautions that San Francisco hippies make an effort to teach each other could win the community's support and be more effective than a prohibition.
The Tories have told housing inspectors to put the blame for dangerous situations on the residents, not on the building owner who could actually fix the problem. In some cases, fixing substandard housing requires changes that the tenants would not be allowed to make, even if they knew how, since they don't own the house.
Ticketmaster has a monopoly on selling tickets for many kinds of events. Now Americans may demand to break it up.
Over a century ago, the US government knew how to break up monopolies, and it did so systematically in every area. That is what we need. But my progressive tax on gross income may convince companies to split themselves up.
Musk invited Twitter users, including bots, to "vote" on whether to give the corrupter an account again.
Since it was Musk who decided who could vote, and how often, his unofficial elections are no more meaningful than Republicans' official elections,
Supreme Court justices sternly condemned this year's leak of the as-yet-unpublished Dobbs decision that would overturn Roe v Wade. One of them, Alito, is now proved to have leaked a future decision to a rich right-wing supporter in 2014.
Let's not let secondary matters such as leaks steal the stage from primary matters. The leaking of either of these rulings was a secondary issue compared with the two bad rulings themselves. Alito is a participant in both of these rulings, as well as one of the leaks.
Everyone involved in using water from the Colorado River is being told to reduce the amount used. It won't be easy, but otherwise the Glen Canyon Dam will stop generating electricity.
Twitter contains many years of tweets that are crucial records for historians, and now there is a danger that all or a large part of them will suddenly be lost.
We don't know who carried out a terrorist bombing on the street in Istanbul, but Erdoğan has made this an excuse to bomb the Syrian Kurds.
US citizens: call on the U.S. to support a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Faux News and associated newspapers have turned on the bullshitter, and are now supporting governor DeMentis.
The Tories plan to cut spending to help the poor after years of cuts that cut into the bone. This is not inevitable, it is a choice.
The underlying choice is about who matters and who does not. As usual, for Tories, those who matter are the rich. The mainstream media support that choice by selectively presenting parts of the truth, and the views of banksters.
Attacking famous works of art in ways that won't actually damage them is a sort of a sham attack. It may reassure people that there is no real danger. There is indeed no real danger in these protests, but the danger of global heating disaster is quite real.
Eventually, these protests will lose the power to startle, and stop doing any good.
*How Michigan Democrats took control for the first time in decades.*
*Draft Cop27 agreement fails to call for "phase-down" of all fossil fuels.*
*John Fetterman shows how Democrats can win back working-class Trump voters.*
A bird of ill omen: pallid swifts, which normally winter around the Mediterranean Sea, are wintering up north in Britain.
Scientists are collecting samples of the hundreds of thousands of tons of microbes that wash, annually, off the surface of melted parts of glaciers.
A false accusation on Instagram against the Iranian government claimed that it had sentenced 15,000 protesters to death. In fact, only one protester has been sentenced to death, though some others may also face execution.
To kill even one person for protesting is very shameful, but opponents of the regime must take more care to ensure they continue to deserve to be trusted.
Egypt has not sentenced Alaa Abd el-Fattah to death, but he may die from a hunger strike.
Most people in the UK agree that the UK should pay part of the costs for poor countries of "climate action".
The problem with this poll is that it poses the questions in the wrong order. First of all, how much will "climate action" (a vague term) cost? That depends on another question: what exactly is "climate action"? Are we talking about sea walls and drains, or are we talking about decarbonization?
If we get cracking on reducing global heating and other damage to natural ecosystems, the total price will be less; it may be bearable. In that case, it will make sense to adjudicate who ought to pay what share.
If on the contrary the planet roasters continue to delay actions to reduce the damage, the cost may grow to far more than the whole world can ever pay. That will mean we have hit total disaster, and there is no longer a global system in which any adjudication could actually be carried out, so the question has become purely theoretical.
What about intermediate scenarios? I can imagine that millions of people in wealthier countries would say, "Yes, I agreed we should pay part of the costs of helping poor countries cope with global heating, but there is a limit. We refuse to live in penury!"
To help poor countries is feasible and just only if the rich people in the wealthy countries bear most of this burden. We non-rich must not accept this burden for our countries while leaving until later the question of how much of that burden falls on the rich people. We know that they will try to dump all of it on the non-rich.
*Republicans scrape back control of US House after underwhelming midterms.* This means that one dissenter among them can defeat any legislative plan. The Senate is likely block their bills, too.
The question is, how far will Republicans go in holding the whole country hostage to impose their demands.
NATO has pretty much concluded that the missiles which hit Polish territory were Ukrainian anti-missile missiles, which were fired at a Russian missile and not at the ground where they hit.
* Island countries are more vulnerable to government oppression after natural disasters — according to new research — and there are concerns that the increased frequency of weather-related events due to the climate crisis, could see the further rise of autocracies around the world.*
*Australia told to end new fossil fuel subsidies if it wants Pacific [island nations'] support to host climate summit.*
To subsidize fossil fuels is a terrible thing for any country to do. The Labor government is much less friendly to fossil fuels than the previous right-wing government, and it has reduced the subsidy, but not reduced it to zero.
Smoking both marijuana and tobacco is more likely to cause lung damage than tobacco alone.
Lula spoke at Cop27 and warned that no place on Earth is safe from climate disaster. His program for Brazil is to protect the forest.
Curbing population growth will not help the urgent measures we need in order to curb global heating in this decade. Reducing the birth rate won't make a big difference in just a few years.
However, if we do enough in this decade to win a chance for civilization's future, the task of preventing global disaster will not be finished. That will take decades. During that time, reducing the birth rate will make a difference — especially when it comes to returning large amounts of land to the wild and reducing total consumption of natural resources.
Iranian thugs were recorded shooting at the public in a metro train station in Tehran. Other thugs attacked women inside the train.
To thwart the plan to use face recognition against protesters, I suggest protesters arm themselves with the tools required for destroying the state repression cameras mounted in public places where protests are likely. That would include ladders.
*Xi Jinping's cordial tone at G20 does not herald softer foreign policy.*
He is playing two roles in parallel: good empire-conqueror and bad empire-conqueror.
A volley of Musketry has driven out 3/4 of Twitter's remaining employees.
This reinforces my suspicions that Musk's damage to the company is his aim, not a mistake.
One Tory minister is a bold champion of defending nature and the climate. *Nature restoration, the climate crisis, sewage in our rivers — people care fundamentally about these things.*
Assad released around 7,000 political prisoners, and "only" around 130,000 of them remain in prison.
Tanzania suffers from a "young population,"due to a government that pushed for a bigger population.
A young population is a harbinger of probable megadeaths to come.
*All hail Jeff Bezos the philanthropist! The rest of us will just keep paying our taxes.* I despise Bezos for more than just the reasons that are widely agreed with. Because of the unjust policies of Amazon, I would refuse to deal with it even if it were just 5% of its actual size. And all of its competitors too, if they do similar bad things.
*Germans turning 18 to be offered €200 culture pass "birthday present".*
I think this is a wise policy.
US citizens: call on the FTC to thoroughly investigate supermarket giant Kroger's proposed merger with Albertsons.
A court already ruled against it, but that's not inevitably final.
Everyone: call on the Florida High School Athletic Association remove questions about menstruation from its student health forms.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to fight Republican election lies.
US citizens: call for an investigation of Salafi Arabia's ownership of a significant part of Twitter.
A terrorist bombing took place in Istanbul, targeting civilians. Turkey blamed the Kurdish militant group PKK, and the Syrian Kurds, but the PKK says that it does not approve of attacking civilians and had nothing to do with it.
The Putin forces have admitted that they were forced out of the north Kherson region by Ukraine's interdiction of supplies.
This article gives more information on their widespread looting and sabotage. Some looting had to have been organized by the Putin forces commanders. Some sabotage was carried out on the Nova Kakhova dam, Ukraine cannot try to repair the dam until it has chased the Putin forces out of artillery range. Even then, the Putin forces might fire missiles at it,
Google will pay damages of around $400 billion for tracking locations of users who had said not to track them.
This suggests three questions to me.
Most UK newspapers are right-wing and will attack any personal detail about an important Labour politician in innumerable absurd and vicious ways. Trying to give them nothing they could attack is self-defeating.
Angela Rayner, who I believe is the only former ally of Corbyn in an important position in Labour, just tried the opposite tactic: tell them something about her they are sure to revile (but not actually wrong in any way), and dare them to attack her.
Bravo, Ms Rayner!
Medical care in US prisons tends to be inadequate. If you have a minor treatable problem, the prison staff can deny you treatment so you develop a serious problem. If you have a serious problem, they can treat it insufficiently or badly, so that you die from it.
I suspect that their attitude is that anyone who isn't satisfied with the medical treatment received is a troublemaker and should be punished by suffering from the disease.
Interviews with Republicans reveal their split between the corrupter and DeMentis.
We must all recognize that increasing human population is a major obstacle to saving civilization from environmental danger.
See also
We need the human population to start decreasing, to save civilization. But if we want civilization to survive, we must also prevent human species from dying out entirely. The decrease in sperm counts, recorded since 1970, is global, and has sped up since 2000.
There is some evidence that the decrease is due to prenatal environmental pollution.
*India "committed to clean energy" but continues to boost coal production.*
The FBI is investigating the shooting of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen abu Akleh. Israel condemns the investigation on principle.
The need for this investigation is because Israel's investigation refused to recognize that soldiers must have chosen to kill her for no legitimate reason.
The Energy Charter Treaty, a business-supremacy treaty designed to prevent any and all measures to reduce fossil fuel extraction, incorporates a fundamental conflict of interest which tends to bias its judgments in favor of fossil fuel companies.
However, that is a secondary problem, because the treaty is explicitly designed to promote fossil fuel companies and interfere with measures to regulate them. Even if every judgment were made in a perfectly honest fashion, the tendency would be for them to do harm.
Interestingly, most CEOs don't say they believe they morally deserve to be paid enormous sums. On the contrary, many say the gap should be smaller. But they are accustomed to receiving high pay offers, for practical reasons that the article explains, and they don't insist on being paid less than that.
What should society do about this? We could ask investors, executives and directors to consider making executive salaries smaller. But the same factors that have made executive salaries so high are likely to make that request ineffective.
I suggest we instead increase the tax rate on high incomes, and close the loopholes that they use to avoid taxation entirely. It is the obvious solution that many people don't consider because plutocratists have smeared it.
How about the restoring the Eisenhower income tax?
"Feminist" education that reduces gender stereotyping is good for boys as well as for girls.
The UK is considering imposing a national ID card once again.
Britons, you defeated ID cards 15 years ago. Now you will have to defeat it again.
The question of what data the state will or won't link to the national ID number is a red herring, because many other organizations are likely to index databases by national ID number. It will become the easiest way to keep a data base about individuals. They will do this even if they don't really need to verify anyone's identity.
In Barcelona, I learned 15 years ago, the municipal swimming pools recorded who was a paying member by their national ID numbers. All they really need is to verify that a client paid for a membership, but checking the national ID card was quick and easy — and unjust.
The state too is likely to include a person's national ID number in other data bases of personal data.
Stephen Kinnock is the MP for Aberavon in Wales. If you know people who live there, please talking about the issue with them.
*Australia criticised for resisting Cop27 push to end international fossil fuel subsidies.*
Two apparently Russian missiles hit Poland in the region near the Ukrainian border. NATO will probably not respond directly militarily.
Although anything Putin says is likely to include lies, it is possible that these missiles were not fired intentionally at Poland.
Young people living near an Iraqi oilfield have a very high frequency of cancer, apparently due to pollution from flaring gas from the oil wells.
*Study suggests 24% of 12- to 34-year-olds globally listen at "unsafe level" on devices and visit noisy venues.*
*Trump repeats prison rape threat against journalists, has plans to "brutally imprison significant numbers of reporters," says Rolling Stone.*
*Elon Musk Would Have Done Better With Twitter If He’d Read Noam Chomsky.*
It is amusing to see Musk wildly change Twitter's rules and find that each change backfires worse than the previous one.
I don't care about Twitter the way many people do, because the requirements for having a Twitter account include things I won't do. And even if I did them, I couldn't afford the time it would cost me to actually use Twitter.
*The 1.5C climate target is dead — to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it.*
Every target will be cursed by planet roasters just as this one was, until the world conclusively defeats them and renders them powerless.
* All students at the University of Barcelona will have to take a mandatory course on the climate crisis.*
*'Welcome' But 'Must Be Improved': Groups React as Biden Unveils Plan to Cut Methane [emissions].*
The Putin forces meticulously destroyed all sorts of infrastructure in the areas of Kherson as they retreated.
This destruction was not limited to electricity, phones, and the Nova Kakhova dam. They destroyed even a small town school building, according to another article.
Fanatical Muslims in Pakistan banned the release of a Pakistani film that was submitted as Pakistan's entry for consideration for an award.
There is no chance that Corbyn will be allowed to run again under the Labour Party banner. Starmer is blocking anyone who wants change that goes beyond tweaks. Corbyn says he will run for reelection; perhaps he will have to run as an independent.
Given Starmer's plutocratist policies and dirty tricks for imposing them on the party, it is clear he will not allow Momentum or anyone else who wants more leftist policies to have any influence. If I were British, and if Corbyn had inspired me to join Labour, I would quit and support something else.
Could Corbyn join the Green Party and perhaps run as a Green candidate?
Important hospitals are closing in US inner cities, leaving the people who live there (mainly poor, mainly from disprivileged groups) in danger of dying on the way to a more distant hospital.
*When universities accept money from the fossil fuel industry, they demonstrate a complete lack of regard for their students' futures.*
*Tasmanian salmon farms used more than a tonne of antibiotics in 2022 disease outbreaks.*
This tends to make bacteria evolve resistance, which can kill people. Bacteria can share genes even between species, so resistant bacteria infecting salmon can transmit resistance to other bacteria that infect humans.
Faux News brings up distraction pseudo-issues to swing elections. The mainstream media pick up the same pseudo-issues.
Melting permafrost in the Arctic leaks CO2 and methane, and promotes large wildfires. That can make the difference between survival of civilization and destruction of civilization.
Secondarily, the melting causes buildings to sink into the melting permafrost underneath them.
Countries can continue scientific cooperation even when they are at war, if they decide to. It is important for the US and Russia to agree to do this. The US can make an exception to its sanctions for specific research projects.
Automated car control features supposedly will make the car safer, but they can just as easily backfire.
A court blocked the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.
We should not have allowed Penguin and Random House to merge. And we should not have allowed a giant conglomerate to buy either Simon & Schuster. The bigger a company is, the harder it is to keep it from harming people, intimidating people, or cheating people.
Musk's takeover of Twitter is a leveraged buyout. Musk could have borrowed the money himself, but he chose to foist the debt on Twitter. That will make it difficult for Twitter to I speculated that his aim might be to eliminate it. [pol note]
Sherif Osman is an Egyptian dissident who moved to the US long ago. On a visit to Dubai, he was arrested and may now be handed over to Egypt to be a political prisoner.
*The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) failed to pursue mandatory audits of [the corrupter] on a timely basis during his presidency.*
Alameda county passed a law prohibiting landlords from doing criminal background checks on would-be tenants.
It looks like the UK government is going to join in a campaign of repression against people who share Netflix passwords.
The name "Intellectual Property Office" indicates a basic leaning towards dividing people and imposing repression. This is a typical example. If you allow that term to shape your thinking, you will be evil too. Likewise for calling sharing "piracy."
Netflix does so many unjust things to its customers that I urge everyone to reject it entirely. In particular, it requires customers to run nonfree software designed specifically to restrict them.
Using it and sharing a subscription deals the company a small blow, which it deserves, but does not protect customers from most of the injustice.
*Anti-Vaxxers' disregard for basic human safety also makes them lousy drivers.*
The outgoing governor of Oregon has commuted all of Oregon's death sentences. Slowly the US advances toward abolishing the death penalty.
Progress, though slow, in understanding long Covid.
Google is adding client-side encryption, but due to the basic architecture it's not entirely trustworthy.
Google encryption may be effective against snoopers that have no special relationship with Google. However, Google remains ultimately in control of the encryption software and the operating system it runs on, so you can't trust it fully. Google will have the power to give you an "upgrade" that shows Google the plaintext of every encrypted message.
The right-wing allies of Bolsonaro won a majority in Brazil's congress. Human rights, conservation and democracy in Brazil are still in danger from them.
Iran's secret police are cracking protesters' Telegram accounts to get information to arrest people.
One weakness of the global biodiversity pact is that it allows countries to give permission to destroy natural ecosystems based on "offsets" as an excuse. This means a promise to construct a new wild area to replace the one that was destroyed. Such replacement is easy to say and hard to do.
The Jan 6 committee voted to recommend prosecution of the wrecker for four crimes, including supporting an insurrection.
The wrecker's lawyers tried to bribe witnesses to mislead federal investigators.
Republican George Santos, who was recently elected to Congress, seems to have filled up his biography with falsehoods.
Turkey may block Sweden from joining NATO because Sweden's supreme court has rejected the extradition of a Turkish journalist wanted by Erdoğan for political persecution.
*Dutch PM apologises for Netherlands’ role in slave trade.* Activists in former Dutch colonies imperiously rejected the apology because its words and its ceremony were not done to their satisfaction.
Twitter intentionally hid the origin of Pentagon political propaganda aimed at the Middle East.
* Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have ordered an indefinite ban on university education for the country’s women,*
*3M sets 2025 deadline to stop making [PFAS].*
After the wrecker's veiled but undeniable launch of an attack against the US government, prosecuting him is a necessary part of loyalty.
The CFPB has ordered Wells Fargo Bank to pay almost 4 billion dollars for fraud committed against 16 million customers.
The CFPB called Wells Fargo a "repeat offender" and said that this is just the beginning of its actions against the bank.
UN Secretary-General Guterres announced a "no-nonsense" climate defense conference for September 2023 for which *the price of entry is non-negotiable -— credible, serious, and new climate action and nature-based solutions that will move the needle forward and respond to the urgency of the climate crisis must be presented.*
A last-minute deal in a must-pass spending bill gave Maine fishermen 6 more years before they have to protect North Atlantic Right Whales.
Given the rate at which the population of those whales is decreasing, that could wipe them out.
Senator Warren rebuked the Pentagon for "vastly" underreporting civilian casualties in its required annual report.
In various countries, people are suing governments for failing to protect them from the harm global heating will do to them.
Radio City Music Hall decided in advance to exclude certain people from its shows, and sent bouncers to kick one of them out, after identifying her through facial recognition.
The reason they did not want her to watch the show is that she is a lawyer that works for a law firm that is handling someone's a legal dispute with the operators of Radio City Music Hall.
In addition to being a bizarre overreaction, it demonstrates why we need to ban the practice of identifying people by their faces, outside of very limited circumstances.
However, the crucial step in the chain of surveillance is not the step of matching the face in a picture against a database. Rather, it is systematically collecting images of people (whether video or still) that could be used to identify people. That is what we need to prohibit. We must prohibit surveillance cameras and allow only security cameras.
Right-wing extremist candidates combine racism and disinformation with promises to help the poor (but excluding poor blacks and poor immigrants).
Even if we stop thug departments from putting weapons on robots, some robots will endanger human rights in other ways. This article suggests some rules to limit use of robots by thug departments.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
Why is it that so many US prosecutors so often violate the rights of the accused by making trials unfair? Perhaps it's because the Supreme Court has barred them from being sued for such illegalities.
Biden has a plan for how to eradicate homelessness in the US.
Everyone: tell the Starbucks board you will not cross the picket line.
US citizens: call for passage of the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would defend younger voters from tactics used to impede them from voting.
US citizens: call on Biden to give endangered species protection to manatees.
US citizens: call on Biden to drop Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange.
Modeling suggests 1/10 of all living species will be extinct by the end of this century, if global heating continues as projected.
Crown Prince Bone Saw is trying to "sportswash" Salafi Arabia's cruel and repressive reputation.
Tobacco companies used sportswashing, and maybe still do in some places. In the US, that was eventually prohibited.
*Crypto was supposed to solve financial corruption. But FTX shows it’s just got worse.*
I am not sure this is an inherent part of using cryptocurrencies. It may be due to a twisted way of using them: people buy and sell them through companies called "exchanges" rather than trading them directly. Those exchanges seem to tend particularly to corruption.
However, even if all users did everything directly in the currency's blockchain, it would seem to be just perfect for bribing politicians untraceably.
*Global corporations "cheating public out of billions in tax," say campaigners.*
This is why we designed GNU Taler to reliably identify the payee. It gives anonymity to the payer only.
Former enslaved migrant workers in Thailand are suing the UK supermarket Tesco for selling the clothing that they were forced to make.
Amy Goodman: *The US Justice Department Must Drop Charges Against Julian Assange.*
Cinderella as a joke on Louis XIV's fancy for glass.
US right-wingers have danced with fascism and Nazism since the 1930s and have only occasionally been afraid to show it.
Peru's suppression forces have killed 20 protesters, generally by shooting them. This caused protests to spread. People demand that Congress resign for new elections, but Congress refuses.
Musk has banned Twitter users from posting information about where to find them on other sites.
Of course, you shouldn't be used by Facebook or Instagram at all, anyway.
Twitter's policy may be illegal in the US. I wonder, though, whether FTC enforcement power can prevail against a billionaire who is willing to lose millions of dollars as a result of his choice of policies. If he chooses to defy the FTC, can they do more than fine Twitter a few million?
(satire) *Johnson & Johnson Raises Price Of Band-Aids To $100,000 Apiece.*
*[The wrecker] Is Not Our Biggest Problem: It's the Open Fascism He Has Unleashed.* Many fascists are flexible enough to follow another authoritarian leader, such as DeMentis, instead of the wrecker.
The article discusses a conjecture that fascism wakes up in the US every 80 years as the people who defeated fascism before die and cease to lead the country to reject fascism.
How light pollution pushes animals and plants to extinction.
*Cop15 deal includes target to protect 30% of nature on Earth by 2030.*
The basic question is, will countries give this more than lip service? For instance, most of the UK's "protected marine areas" are hardly protected at all.
The article claims that China imposed the deal despite objections from many countries. Given that the survival of civilization and the natural world are at stake, I feel little sympathy for anyone that refuses to help save. But these objections may make the treaty a dead letter.
The biodiversity movement seems to have adopted as a matter of faith that indigenous humans will always protect biodiversity and ecosystems. In many cases they will, because they depend on those ecosystems for their living. In those cases, damage to those ecosystems will harm them so they will oppose such damage.
But this is not invariably guaranteed. Human beings have been polluting their environments for short-term benefit for millennia. Humans often bend and redraw their moral rules to excuse their own benefit. Humans can resist this tendency, but nobody is automatically above it due to descent alone.
The part of this agreement that is absolutely perverse: the plan to establish a parallel patent system in the name of preventing "biopiracy." The patent system we already have is harmful and unjust; this plan creates a second parallel system of restrictions on the use of knowledge, adds a second harm, a second injustice, to the first.
The goal, clearly, is to give some income to poor countries. That goal is fine, but do it in some other way!
*Tokyo will require new homes built from 2025 to have solar panels.*
California adopted a "blueprint" for achieving a "net zero emissions", but the plan is bogus since it calls for carbon capture and storage, which has never been made to work properly.
A blueprint means a precise set of measurements for something to be made. A rough sketch is not a blueprint.
The UN-brokered truce in Yemen could lead to an end to the war.
Joseph Stiglitz: *The Road to Fascism*
* Growing hardship is all but assured in 2023, and it will provide even more fertile ground for dangerous demagogues.*
The story of the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972 makes me think of Putin's shelling and missile attacks on Ukraine.
Everyone: call for a treaty to regulate production of plastics.
US citizens: call on Congress to put an end to private prisons.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: tell Federal Insurance Office that renters and homeowners need data on how global heating impacts their insurance.
Increased heat may explain around 8000 shootings each year in the US.
The thugs who killed Ronald Greene have been charged with crimes including homicide.
I can't tell whether one of these charges does justice to the lies the thugs told about how Greene died.
We are all waiting to see if high officials of the thug department will face charges for trying to protect the killers themselves from charges.
The reason Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested seems to have been an illegal funds transfer between two parts of FTX whose funds were supposed to be kept separate.
*Ellsberg, Donziger Among Those Demanding Freedom for Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale.*
Biden endorsed Manchin's dirty deal to undermine environmental regulations on energy projects. Even worse, he endorsed the values that deal is based on: that hypothetical reductions in the price of fossil fuel is more important than protecting or planet from global heating or pollution.
Colombia has implemented a progressive wealth tax and other tax increases for the rich. The specific details of the wealth tax respond to problems encountered by previous wealth taxes in Europe, to ensure it touches only the rich.
Leftist film director Ken Loach accused the BBC of helping to write Corbyn out of history, including trying to make Corbyn out as anti-semitic.
He also stated that 200,000 members or more have left the Labour Party in response to Starmer's right-wing shift.
Workers at 100 Starbucks stores will strike for three days.
Biden said, during the campaign, that he wanted to eliminate the death penalty. However, the US just voted against a UN resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.
An interesting example of collective governance of an organization.
Tunisia's authoritarian president has reorganized how the legislature functions and held an election under totally new rules. There were not many candidates and not many voters.
*[Famous] Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti arrested after criticism of death penalty [given to protesters].*
Pointing at technological advances that are supposed to eliminate global heating in a few years is a standard denialist tactic. They have often cited fusion power for this, but also carbon capture and storage and "carbon offsets" (which tend to be bogus).
We don't have time to wait for these things.
Insulate Britain protests met with ire from motorists, but everyone now sees that they were right.
Australia will build more large grid storage batteries so as to keep unneeded renewable electricity for when it is needed.
The corrupter is marketing NFT "trading cards". The money people pay for them goes to a secret business, and I suspect it won't appear in the corrupter's future tax returns.
QAnonenties are starting to transfer their worship from the wrecker to Musk.
They are mostly authoritarian followers and it isn't crucial to them which authoritarian leader they can follow.
AT&T, Amazon, Comcast and Intel donated to the campaigns of Republican election denialists, well before this year's election.
Article talking about how the world is tailored toward men.
For the most of the issues listed, I agree that we should change practices so that they serve women as well as men. I disagree in regard to office temperature, though, for the simple reason that you can wear more clothing without limit, but there are limits to how much you clothing can remove in an office with other workers. If at that point some people are still too hot, the only solution that can satisfy everyone is to make the office cool enough for them, and for those who find that too cold to wear another layer.
There were times that my office in the Stata Center was so hot that I needed to be nude to be comfortable. I kept the door locked so that visitors would knock and I could ask them to wait a minute. I did not usually explain that this was so I could put my shirt and pants on.
The presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico condemned the ouster of Peru's President Castillo as a "legislative coup", saying it was backed by the US.
This is not an absurd idea; the US backed such a coup in Bolivia a few years ago, and in Honduras a few years before that.
Information in the article suggests that the poor voted him into office and still support him. They are now protesting vigorously, and the "forces of law and order" are shooting and gassing them from helicopters. It sounds like the thugs support the right wing and treat the people as the enemy.
This does not necessarily imply that the coup story is the whole truth; there are valid reasons to argue that it is Castillo who tried to overthrow constitutional order, as President Boric of Chile said.
It seems clear that there was a process of reciprocal escalation. In such a situation, it is easy to perceive the escalations by the side you oppose as injustice, and the escalations by the side you support as legitimate self-defense.
To judge the right and wrong of such a process requires a lot of facts about the actions and the background. All I can do is try to judge which of the other presidents to trust.
(satire) *Elementary School Lesson On Water Cycle Explains How Water Becomes Property Of Nestlé.*
*Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk.* Musk defines "free speech" the way autocrats do.
*Workers, Not "Stockbrokers and CEOs," Will Pay Price for Fed Rate Hikes: Warren.*
*Plastic ‘nurdles’ stop sea urchins developing properly, study finds.*
It would be nice to imagine that this provides a way to protect kelp forests, but enough plastic to do that would surely harm other species too.
Australia has revoked a rule, made by the previous planet-roaster government, that permitted the burning of wood waste from native trees to count as "renewable".
In practice, native forests are not renewable under present conditions.
The world-wide campaign to prevent nondisclosure agreements from being used by employers to cover up any abuses, from harassment to rape, is making substantial progress, but not in the UK.
You can't expect the Tories to eagerly pursue this goal, because they represent the rich who commit the abuses and want them covered up.
My first experience with a nondisclosure agreement was when I asked someone at CMU for a copy of the Xerox laser printer software source code. He said he had actually promised in advance to refuse to share that code with me and other colleagues at MIT. Shame on him! He had made a commitment to be a jerk and deny his cooperation to his colleagues.
From this I learned that signing a nondisclosure agreement for generally useful technical information, such as software, was betraying the whole world — so I vowed I would never agree to one, and I never knowingly done so.
That led me, a year or two later, to the conclusion that nonfree software was an injustice, regardless of whether the nonfreedom was brought about by a nondisclosure agreement.
"Crisis pregnancy centers" look like abortion clinics, but their mission is to confuse females so that they don't get abortions. They get away with lies because they are almost exempt from regulation.
The right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court have protected them from regulations intended to protect women from being deceived.
*Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly told to work while infected as Covid surges.*
In the US, this is achieved by denying workers paid sick leave. They can't afford to do the right thing and avoid infecting follow workers, even customers.
The infection is spreading very fast. I presume it is one of the recent Omicron variants. At least that will reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries.
Global heating is killing millions of fir trees in Oregon.
China's relaxation of restrictions on capturing wildlife for food *could weaken animal protection and pose a hazard to public health, say experts(.
The term "post-pandemic" is wishful thinking, not reality.
There is a suspicion of fraud in the vote-counting of Fiji's election.
Fiji has a history of real trouble in its elections. I wonder whether it will be possible to assure the honesty of this election.
*CFPB Applauded for Proposing "Public Rap Sheet" for Corporate Criminals.*
Drivers in London forcibly moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests. If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions for new tactics for climate protesters.
Ukraine's plans to reconquer Crimea militarily may be impossible or unwise.
The places that Russian troops were stationed since 2014 include, as a fact, parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but Putin always denied that this was the case. He should not be invited to acknowledge it belatedly now and reap any benefit.
To negotiate the fate of Crimea is more sensible. An honest election would have been a legitimate approach in 2014, but Putin drove out or exiled those who supported Ukraine, then (according to this article) lost anyway and lied about the result.
Putin's elections in Russia are blatantly dishonest.
The population of Crimea today is different from the population in 2014. If an election is to be held now about which country Crimea should belong to, which people should vote in it? To give the decision to the current population would mean that Putin (or anyone else) can conquer territory and legitimize that with an unfair election. To give the decision to the 2014 population might be asking for further violence.
The incredibly complex history of reprocessing and disposing of nuclear waste in the UK.
In theory, the process is clearly simple. In practice, it keeps getting more complex.
*Flying insect numbers plunge 64% since 2004, UK survey finds.*
Some years ago, a similar decline was observed in Germany.
This portends ecological disaster.
US citizens: call on the House Ways and Means Committee to share the wrecker's tax returns with the Senate Finance Committee ASAP. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Democrats including Biden to seek the kind of "bipartisanship" that means progressive policies that many Republicans support — not deals with right-wing extremist Republicans. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to investigate corruption and ethical lapses at the Supreme Court. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to hold corporations accountable for price gouging. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *Elon Musk Receives Experimental Neuralink Implant In Attempt To Delete Memory Of Being Booed.*
The EU is setting up a system of "green tariffs" to charge imports based on how much greenhouse gas is emitted in producing them.
Anti-abortion fanatics have proposed to move on from laws criminalizing performing abortions to prosecuting people who have abortions.
* Without a plan in place to minimise infection [by Covid-19], a "moving on" strategy leaves vulnerable people behind.*
Most people want to believe the danger is gone, and governments have decided not to let them do it. It's good for business also. How easy it is to dismiss suggestions to protect yourself and others with a mask by saying, "It is no longer obligatory."
It's no longer legally obligatory, but it is morally obligatory.
When someone without a mask sits near me on a train or plane, I ask per to please wear a mask. If perse says, "I don't have a mask," I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its plastic wrapper. The masks sold by BYD are simple to put on, so I offer those.
One of Erdoğan's political rivals has been convicted of insulting Turkey’s supreme election council, calling them "fools."
Many countries make it a crime to insult officials. Indonesia just made itself one of them.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult anyone — even me, even you. Erdoğan shows plenty of contempt for freedom and democracy. He even started a small civil war to reverse an electoral defeat.
Just after Cabot Oil & Gas (part of Coterra Energy) accepted 15 criminal charges for polluting the water of Dimock. Pennsylvania, the state government allowed it to resume fracking there.
Fracking should be illegal. The risk of poisoning groundwater for centuries or more is too high a price to pay for some more fossil fuel to burn — especially since burning it is harmful globally.
The Arctic: Hotter, rainier, wetter, and less ice and birds.
Extreme weather (which is partly caused by global heating) has devastated the Florida orange crop.
We must expect all sorts of crops to be harmed by global heating effects.
Musk urged his Twitter followers to adopt QAnonsense.
Maybe he is trying to compete with the wrecker to seize power in the US.
US citizens: phone your senators and implore them to reject any bill containing Manchin's environmental planning deregulation deal.
You can phone (888) 997-5380. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US corporations gave 8 million dollars to Republican election liars.
Explaining the enormous challenges of going from "ignition" in a laser-fusion target to the production of commercially useful power, and why this is likely to take decades.
We need to quit using fossil fuels fast — we can't wait for fusion to be usable for this job.
*Brazil goldminers carve illegal ‘Road to Chaos’ out of Amazon reserve.*
They use bulldozers and power-diggers, and carry submachine guns.
The US keeps using economic sanctions to punish unjust or aggressive governments, but the sanctions almost never have any positive effect.
Without a big increase in humanitarian aid donations, the UN predicts that 200 million people will die in 2023 for the lack of aid.
200 million is a very large number of deaths in one year. The average number is around 83 million. The human population will decrease in 2023 if this forecast comes true. The 200 million maybe in addition to the 80 million that would have died anyway.
The typical annual increase in human population is around 18 million. It follows that 200 million deaths will mean that the total human population decreases by several years' worth of population growth.
It sees that we have reached the point at which the global disaster we have caused starts to kill so many people that it reduces the human population. This is very bad.
I have begged humans to reduce their birth rate, so that we could reduce the population the painless way and avoid ever reaching this point.
*Eels facing population collapse, conservation groups warn.*
The EU has given in to the usual short-term thinking, prioritizing short-term profits over sustainability. Such a decision is tantamout to saying, "Let's make one last batch of money by wiping out the fish."
DeMentis has started an "investigation" of everything about Covid-19 vaccines.
They may not find any serious problem or wrongdoing, but they will have plenty of opportunities to talk endlessly about hypothetical, conceivable problems, thus blowing smoke that they can claim implies the presence of a fire.
The US government protected people against possible right-wing attempts to ban interracial and same-sex marriages.
This is good, but it is just a part of the harm that right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court threaten to do. Since Democrats refused to eliminate the filibuster and expand the court, Americans are now sitting ducks for at least two years.
The NLRB funding is inadequate, and the result is that workers' rights go undefended.
Varoufakis calls for two major economic changes: to make corporations belong to their workers, and to reduce the dependence on banks for financial transactions.
A thug in Vallejo, California, attacked a documentalist who was standing on his own porch, making a video of the thug's traffic stop.
The documentalist sued and the city paid $300,000 to settle the dispute.
The recording showed the thug making false accusations against Burrell. Such false accusations are a common first step in an attempted frame-up. Any thug caught doing this, even if nothing worse results, should be fired and blacklisted for all jobs that involve special authority over the public.
The Keystone 1 tar sands oil pipeline leaked 600,000 gallons of oil into a creek in Kansas that feeds a river and a reservoir for 800,000 people.
The pilot program to privatize Medicare includes insurance companies that have been fined for inflating charges.
Twitter has more or less blocked access to a bot account that tweets where Musk's private jet goes.
*Covid-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but the fight isn't over.*
Three million is around one percent of the US population.
*Hundreds of Oath Keepers Have Worked for DHS in Recent Years, Report Finds.*
There are probably tens of thousands of workers for the DHS, so this is not necessarily a large fraction. Nonetheless, it is dangerous.
Protecting biodiversity (or any aspect of the environment) requires ending government subsidies to activities which damage biodiversity. Allowing businesses to excuse damage to habitats by means of "offsets" is asking to be lied to.
*Framing men as the "villains" gets women no closer to better romantic relationships.*
That assumption means getting stuck in a shallow form of feminism based on not believing things can get any better.
*Labor proposal to fix Australia’s broken environmental protection system could revolutionise sector.*
*The 50-Year Takeaway From Middle-Class America. We [Americans] should be demanding the same benefits enjoyed by less wealthy but more progressive nations.*
US states provide enormous special tax breaks to companies — almost always big companies that can play one state against another. A campaign seeks to put an end to this, first of all by limiting them and publishing them.
I proposed a federal law to enable any one state to object to any special subsidy propsed by any other (competing) states. This would prevent a company from playing one state against another.
The governor of Bali reassures foreign tourists and visitors that the prohibition against sex outside of marriage won't threaten them in Bali.
There are other places in Indonesia which are also interesting to visit, but maybe they won't be safe.
More importantly for Indonesia, this law also restricts freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
No country should allow a prudish religion any influence in its laws. Laws driven by Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are causing cruelty and repression around the world.
Although no court has proved that Governor Snyder conspired to put the people of Flint at risk of lead poisoning, we have plenty of reason to believe he and his high officials did so. I can't put him in prison, but my conclusion is that he's guilty, partly because the ideology of the Republican Party is to do things like that to the poor, weak, and disprivileged.
*Biden faces growing pressure to drop charges against Julian Assange.* Pressure is coming from Australia and Brazil, as well as American defenders of freedom of the press.
So phone the White House and say, drop the charges against Assange — reporting on leaked dirty secrets must not be a crime. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
New Zealand will gradually ban tobacco by raising the age requirement to buy tobacco by one year per year, Tobacco is death, and I hope you will not smoke it. But banning a widely used drug generally leads to widespread corruption and injustice.
China does not allow fair trials. To bias the trial of opposition publisher Jimmy Lai to be fair, China kicked his British lawyer out of Hong Kong.
The UK plans to hand out 130 more fossil fuel licenses for the North Sea. This puts civilization in danger. So environmentalists are suing.
*Plan to protect 30% of Earth divides and inspires at Cop15.*
Tories have undermined the National Health Service to the point where it can't even tackle the backlog of millions of important but non-urgent operations.
Iran is executing protesters after bogus trials.
Peruvians detest Congress, which removed President Castillo from office, even more than they detest President Castillo.
I wish I had a basic understanding of politics in Peru, or knew someone who could explain it to me, so that I could have a background against which to judge what is happening.
Scientists started a fusion reaction that released about 25% more energy than what was used to start it. This demonstrates in principle that controlled fusion can be used to generate energy. There is a long way to go to develop fusion into a practical energy source. For the next few decades, survival of civilization still depends on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy as fast as possible.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to vote to end US support for Salafi Arabia's war with Yemen. *UN Report Shows 11,000 Children Killed or Maimed in This US-Backed War.* The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the U.S. Senate to investigate corruption and ethical lapses at the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Most managers in the UK say that stress over the cost of living is making workers anxious and interfering with their work.
Those managers are in a special position to tell the company executives, "Give the workers a raise!" Will they do it?
How Big Pharma used threats against governments to defeat the proposed "patent waiver" for Covid-19 vaccines in the World Trade Organization.
The WTO is a business-supremacy treaty; its basic purpose is to give business more power over the world's governments. We need to eliminate most of that power by greatly weakening every business-supremacy treaty.
4400 homeless people live. in the "skid row" of Los Angeles, and they have only 9 toilets to use at night.
The UN standard for refugee camps calls for far more than that.
Rep. Greene declares her support for an armed coup.
When she takes her oath of office again in January, she will say it insincerely. Is there any way to exclude her from Congress over this?
The UK nurses say Tories are making false statements rather than negotiating, while the "Labour" party doubts that Britain can afford a 10% raise for them.
This reflects Starmer's implicit rejection of a change in the general policy of starving and freezing the poor to enrich the rich.
Here's what a true Labour leader would say.
Some pertinent facts.
The US is blocking the full adoption and effective enforcement of many crucial treaties.
To present one extreme example, every member of the UN has ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, except for the US.
The House of Commons will observe a minute of silence in remembrance of the Nazi genocide of Jews (and some others).
The threat of Nazism still exists ad is growing. I suggest that the House of Representatives adopt a similar annual practice, starting this month. It won't be easy for the Republicans that will control the House next year to reject this. They support Nazis but don't want to admit it.
The Tories want to start a new coal mine in England, so they claim that steelmaking companies want that coal.
Turns out, they don't.
Others say it is a boondoggle to artificially create jobs in a certain region. That could be true, but why do it this way? There are many kinds of jobs that could really be needed. Indeed, Many of the region's inhabitants oppose the mine.
I suspect that the Tories' real motive is to help some rich donor get richer.
Ralph Nader: As Republicans push numerous plans that most Americans would oppose, most Democratic candidates fail to go on the offensive against them.
A US Forest Service crew head carried out a prescribed burn to reduce the danger of wildfires. Things went wrong and it started a big wildfire. But is that a reason to arrest him?
Perhaps the Forest Service needs to change some aspects of its practices. I am not an expert on prescribed burns, and I don't want to become one, so I have no opinion on that.
But what is absolutely clear is that arresting the employees who carry them out is absurd trumpery.
The bullshitter falsely claimed that Black Lives Matter protesters were part of a conspiracy called "Antifa", and told the DHS to find proof.
An internal investigation by the DHS published a report that *describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain.*
An investigation by the House of Representatives found that the idea of natural gas as a temporary "bridge fuel" was an intentional deception: Big Oil's real goal was always to make it a permanent choice.
The article points out a number of ways in which extracting transporting and burning gas are dangerous. But Big Oil's propaganda still tries to convince people that gas is safe.
What's at stake in the biodiversity conference? *We are tearing holes in the fabric of life on Earth.*
*US Can End Its Complicity in Horrendous Yemen War Today.*
The US needs mask mandates to stop the spread of flu, RSC and Covid-19.
This one measure is effective against all pathogens that spread through the air.
When someone sits near me in a train or plane and isn't wearing a mask, I ask per to wear one. If perse says perse doeesn't have one, I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its unbroken plastic wrapper.
Often perse responds that it is not obligatory. I'm going to try out this response: "Legally it is not obligatory. Morally it is obligatory."
A campaign to give all US personnel stationed at bases in the UK training in driving on the left side of the road.
People have shot at electric power stations in Oregon and Washington.
The attackers have not been identified, but the obvious suspects are right-wing extremists. That region (outside its big cities) is known for the presence of people who hate the very idea of government and can consider any sort of sabotage justified if it damages government.
Afghan refugees being smuggled into Greece were caught and charged with doing the smuggling. One such conviction has been overturned on appeal.
Warnock won the election for senator from Georgia in the face of powerful and effective Republican voter suppression. The Warnock's general election for senator in 2022 had a million fewer voters than Warnock's general election in 2020. And the subsequent runoff in 2022 had a million fewer voters than the runoff for the 2020 election.
Republican voter suppression is intended to hit Democrats harder than Republicans. Why it did not succeed this time in defeating Warnock, I don't know, and I wonder.
The article explains that Georgia Republicans have already passed further laws to make it harder to fight voter suppression in 2024.
An Italian is trapped in the Italian embassy in the United Arab Emirates because he has been sentenced to a large fine and he has no money.
UK ministers refused to negotiate with the NHS workers who are preparing to strike soon.
This confirms, in my view, their intention to destroy the NHS.
Se me dijo que mis chistes son polisemias. Dije, "No, polisemia es tener polizontes en la sangre."
US citizens: call on Biden to extend paid sick leave to railway workers.
Everyone: call on Wall Street banks to keep their pledge to stand against racial injustice by forcing their lobbyists to drop their lawsuit against the CFPB.
*Court Orders U.S. to Examine California Shipping Lanes' Role in Endangered Whale Deaths.*
Ayatollah Khamenei is badly ill and may be dying. If he dies, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is likely to take power.
The writer speculates that the IRGC might give Iranians personal freedoms, to reduce resistance to their rule, but not democracy, and expects power rivalries to continue unchanged.
I would rejoice to see Iranians have somewhat more freedom. I hope that the US and Iran can make peace some day.
An extremely corrupt Kansas City thug faces charges of collaborating with a drug gang to force 73 women into slavery and prostitution. He is also accused of raping people to intimidate them, and a series of frame-ups.
The whole thug department knew about his pattern of crime, and stood behind their fellow thug.
*‘Only 100 meters apart’: Ukrainians and [Putin forces] face off in Donetsk.*
I read that the Putin forces' persistent focus on taking Bakhmut is that it is the next step toward capturing 100% of the Donetsk oblast. If they take Bakhmut, and then take Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, they could boast of holding 100% of one of the regions that Putin claims to have annexed this year.
In military terms, this would be worth nothing, but that's the sort of irrationality that tends to happen under an absolute ruler.
*Press Freedom Champions Renew Call for DOJ to Drop Charges Against Assange.*
*Macron announces free condoms for 18- to 25-year-olds in France.*
This offer is a good start; it should be extended to everyone.
*[Dissident Ilya Yashin] sentenced to eight and a half years over series of posts about [Putin forces] atrocities in Bucha.*
Putin's obedient servants lie on command, too afraid to refuse. The wrecker has led US Republicans to do likewise. Yashin has chosen to go to prison rather than become a tool of falsehood.
Comparing imprisoned antipollution protester Violet Coco with convicted polluters: *less than 6% of people charged with environmental pollution and property damage offenses are sent to prison.*
*Racism poses public health threat to millions worldwide, finds report.*
Lula has sued Bolsonaro for various reasons, one of which is accusing the country's computerized voting system of being vulnerable.
Bolsonaro has done much to undermine democracy and elections in Brazil, and morally deserves punishment. However, the general claim that Brazil's computerized voting system makes Brazil's elections vulnerable is valid. That is because the machines record only totals, and do not keep individual paper ballots that voters marked by hand. Such systems are vulnerable to someone, somehow.
Brazilian experts campaigned against this system when it was adopted, demanding a system that enabled the results to be audited, but they lost the battle.
There is no evidence that anything wrong happened in the voting machines in this election, but Brazil should change to an audit-able voting system for the sake of the future.
Joseph Stiglitz: *Raising interest rates to tame inflation will only cause more pain.*
Biden has taken significant steps towards releasing all the prisoners remaining in Guantanamo. That would enable the US to put an end to its national shame.
Senator Sinema has officially left the Democratic Party, which suggests that she will run as an independent in 2024.
As the article said, we already knew she belongs to the Plutocratic Party. What matters is, will this make it easier or harder to elect a better senator in her place? I fear this will make it harder — because it won't be possible to eliminate her in the Democratic Party. I don't know whether her presence in the general election as an independent candidate would help or hurt.
Congress is trying to impose a link tax through an increasingly frequent sneaky method — last minute inclusion in "must pass" omnibus bills.
(satire) *Elon Musk Worried He Won't Have Enough Twitter Employees Left To Fire On Christmas Eve.*
US zoning laws obstruct the conversion of surplus office space into badly needed residential space.
Republicans have added to the NDAA a clause to repeal the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for the military.
This is more harmful than it appears. The vaccination requirement has convinced some right-wing fanatics to leave the US military, and we need to keep it going.
It also helps keep the troops healthy.
Accusing the US rail unions of being weak-spirited and divided.
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The Republican county supervisors in Cochise county had refused to certify that county's election. Then they got a court order which required them to certify the vote, so they did.
They presented no grounds for refusing to certify the results, but we can see that it was mad hatred: they hate the election so much that they wanted to fight it regardless of what effects that would have.
Ironically, if they had got away with not certifying that county's vote, the result would have been to elect one more Democrat to the House of Representatives. That would have been a major setback to Republican power nationwide.
I therefore conclude that the refusal was not an instance of Republican "by hook or by crook" cheating, but rather mad rage against free elections.
I previously posted that Cochise county's vote was majority Democratic, because had I read that in another article. That would have made the refusal consistent with by-hook-or-by-crook cheating. But it appears that that other article was mistaken about this.
US citizens: call on the US to end subsidies for fracking in Argentina.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and say to reject anything like the SECURE Act (HR 2954) and the EARN Act (S 4808). These bills would change Social Security to give less to the poor and more to the rich. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The FTC has blocked the merger of Microsoft and Activision, both giants in making video games.
These video games are nonfree software, which means they treat users unjustly. I would not allow any of them on my computers, and I urge you to reject them too.
Notwithstanding that, it is still important to stop them from merging. Allowing them to merge would exacerbate the evil of concentration of industry, and do nothing to reduce the evil o f nonfree software.
The president of Peru was removed from office by Congress. He had attempted to prevent this by dismissing Congress.
I don't have enough contact with Peru to judge which side was basically at fault, but I lean towards trusting Arce's view. He is a leftist elected president in a country that borders on Peru, so he has surely paid plenty of attention.
More about the new president Dina Boluarte, who was previously the vice president.
Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff by under 3%.
It is good that he won, but the closeness of the outcome shows that most Republicans hate our freedoms so much that they will vote for even a lying creep who will help destroy them.
* Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening teachers, schools and education because they need the poorly educated to make up their voting base.*
*Brown University bans caste discrimination throughout campus in a first for the Ivy League.*
I think caste discrimination should be prohibited like race or sex discrimination.
Apple has dropped its plan to scan every user's photos and will use another approach to protect children from would-be abusers.
The new approach seems not to be a threat to other users' privacy.
Plutocratist "mainstream" Democrats continue to control the party's leadership in the House of Representatives.
The Labour Party is turning to mythical trickle-down economics, saying it aims to turn the UK into a "global start-up hub."
Poor Britain. Competing to help the rich dominate society won't help anyone but the rich.
Congress is considering a kind of "link tax" to require discussion platforms to pay for hosting links to news sites. It would harm libraries and smaller news media.
It would also give lots of subsidy to Big Media.
Criticizing Effective Altruism: to program people as donation robots is desocializing, isolating and alienating.
I suspect those things reduce people's lifespan.
*Pegasus spyware was used to [crack] reporters’ phones. I’m suing its [developers].*
Referring to the developers of a program as "creators" is propaganda for ideas we would be wiser not to promote.
The US rescued hostage Brittney Griner by trading an important Russian arms dealer for her.
Griner deserved to be freed for the simple reason that what she did was not wrong. However, I don't understand why Americans clamor for Griner's release more than for the release of everyone imprisoned in the US for possession of marijuana. There are many Americans unjustly imprisoned in the US for doing nothing more than what Griner did. They too deserve to be freed.
It is a shame to let arms merchant Viktor Bout go free, though.
I think we should not pressure the US to try to ransom hostages, because that pressure benefits the regimes that take hostages at the expense of the US. If I were a hostage, I would say, "Don't ransom me if the ransom hurts my country!"
Denying the call to boycott Russian music.
I take a stronger stand: it is misguided and destructive to blame "Russia" for Putin's crime of aggressive war. Putin is the one responsible. Let us not refer to the army that invaded Ukraine as "the Russian army" — call them the Putin forces.
The Tories plan to open a new coal mine in England. Supposedly the reason is to reduce the cost of electricity, but the mine will produce coking coal to be exported to make steel. Meanwhile, the steel industry is looking to replace the use of coking coal to reduce its emissions.
*The "fate of the entire living world" will be determined at the Cop15 UN biodiversity summit, according to leading scientists.* It is considering a partly concrete plan to slow the destruction of the Earth's natural ecosystems.
[Effective altruism] is "profoundly individualistic" and reliant on the status quo. EA's calculations assume that humans won't change. But humans have to change if we are going to [save] life on Earth.*
Superstitious anti-vaxxers have convinced each other that a blood transfusion with "vaccinated blood" is somehow dangerous. One couple tried to prevent their baby from getting a transfusion unless it was with "unvaccinated blood"; since the baby would have died without surgery and a transfusion, the state intervened and took guardianship to authorize the operation.
Qatar promises to vastly expand its fossil fuel exports; the resulting greenhouse gas emissions would imply global disaster.
The specific point that the total emissions from Qatar's exports would eventually add up to more than one year of the whole world's emissions seems like a red herring to me. I would expect that the same is true for the US too, and perhaps several other countries.
But even though this is just a red herring, I think the article's conclusions are plausible anyway.
At least four on the Supreme Court seem to lean towards the bizarre "independent state legislature" theory. The confrontation in Arizona, in which one county refused to certify its vote, is exactly the kind of situation where a state legislature could (under this theory) arbitrarily make up its own presidential election results.
The revised Electoral Count Act could close that mad loophole, if Congress passes it this month.
US citizens: call on the US government to block Amazon's planned merger with One Medical.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to stand up for keeping Ilhan Omar on the foreign affairs committee.i
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Biden administration not to allow oil drilling near Chaco Canyon.
Chaco Canyon is beautiful, as well as having great historic significance.
Global heating is causing sea animals to move to different habitats. The result will be to wipe out most of the seabirds in western Europe.
Climate defense activists defeated Manchin's "dirty deal" to undermine environmental regulations in the US Senate.
He could try again to pass it in another way, so the fight is not conclusively finished.
*DOJ subpoenas officials in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona for communications with [the wrecker] around 2020 election.*
Al Jazeera asserts it has proof that Israeli forces fired directly at reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, and has filed a case with the International Criminal Court about this.
The Biden administration has given Haitians in the US temporary protected status through August, 2024.
(satire) *SWAT Team Busts Down Door Of Denver Woman's Home To Apologize For Previous Raid.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
US citizens: call on Congress to abolish the debt ceiling now.
Lawyers hired by the corrupter searched a rented storage unit and found additional secret government documents.
Great 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg dares the US to prosecute him like Julian Assange. He wants to challenge the constitutionality of such prosecutions.
Ellsberg faced the threat of prosecution at the time, but ultimately officials decided not to prosecute him.
A right-wing conspiracy in Germany plotted to attack Parliament and overthrow the government.
Their ideology was a strange mixture of Nazism, anarchism, and superstition. But they had real weapons and could surely have done real killing.
The Tories plan to deal with strikes by NHS workers by prohibiting strikes.
This approach would be of little use for fixing the broken NHS, but assuming their real goal is to ruin it, this could be quite effective.
San Francisco responded to public revulsion and reversed its recent decision to authorize the thug department to use robots for killing people.
To halt (and then reverse) the general militarization of US thug departments is a much bigger job.
Some Republican senators are condemning the wrecker for showing contempt for the Constitution.
It could be that they are looking for a chance to publicly split from him, having seen that his endorsements of candidates turned out to be disadvantageous for them. They may have decided they will be better off with a new, fresh fascist leader.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prohibit some of the harmful practices of Amazon and some other platforms.
This bill would not do anything to make anonymous purchase possible, or insist that the sites work without sending nonfree software to the user's browser, so I would sill refuse more or less to do use those sites. But their overall injustice would be reduced.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the Open App Markets Act. It would require Apple to allow users to install apps obtained from places other than Apple's store.
It looks like this would make it possible to distribute free software for the iThings which users could build from source. That means iThings would no longer be jails.
Of course, they would still be nasty in many other ways, so I would still urge everyone to reject iThings, along with Android.
Abortion rights activists are considering ballot initiatives to legalize abortion in 10 states.
In 2020, when much of the world was desperate for masks and other Covid-19 protective equipment, the Tories gave contracts to companies owned by their cronies. Many of those companies had no experience or manufacturing capacity.
*Australian government overturns decision to cancel citizenship of man on death row in Iraq.*
It is very good news that Australia has overturned the law used to cancel people's citizenship over alleged crimes. That law was an inspiration for various other countries with right-wing governments that base their popularity on performative cruelty.
Those other countries remain to be convinced to eliminate those unjust policies.
Labour has proposed some good reforms for the structure and rules of the UK government.
Shocking rare crimes against children create an impulse and a pressure to overprotect children by locking them up. For the children's sake, we must resist that pressure.
*Argentina's [vice president and ex-president] Cristina Fernández sentenced to six years in $1bn fraud case.*
*Dutch king commissions research into royal role in colonialism.*
*Trump Organization guilty of tax fraud, New York jury finds.*
The corrupter was not personally charged with the crime, but if prosecutors have evidence that he knew about the scheme, they should charge him too.
The US has delayed yet again the requirement for "REAL ID" drivers licenses for purposes such as getting on an commercial flight.
There is too much identifying and tracking people in the US. Let's keep resisting, and see how many years we can block this.
South Korean President Yoon threatened truck drivers with years in prison if they didn't end their strike. They defied him.
The way to end a strike that causes great inconvenience for society is to make the employers pay proper wages and offer proper working conditions. Whose side are you on, Yoon?
(satire) *Fate Of Christmas Uncertain After Eric Adams Institutionalizes Real Santa.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
The TSA has a "pilot program" to use facial recognition to identify airline passengers. And a second generation coming which will do the matching against a database.
Widespread use of facial recognition enables the sort of tracking that China's pervasive repression is based on. We cannot allow such systems to exist.
For now, you can refuse to participate in the TSA's facial matching. Please refuse! To maintain even a little privacy, we must fight tooth and nail against massive surveillance systems, both new systems like this one and existing systems such as Clearview AI.
Biden wants South Carolina to be the Democratic Party's first primary in 2024 so that no progressive candidate can challenge him for the presidential nomination. He is confident of winning heavily there.
New York City is spending a lot of money to prevent a repeat of some of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but the overall effort is far inadequate.
For the longer term, there is no hope of protecting New York City from future inundation with local measures. The only way is to curb global heating.
Qatar paid British MPs to give Qatar support in Parliament.
I find it hard to understand how this could be lawful, but in my sense of justice this is outright bribery and ought to land the participants in prison.
Drivers in London forcibly moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests. If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions for new tactics for climate protesters. [New note has corrected link to suggestions]
Republican extremists are supporting Putin's lies about Ukraine.
That includes a Faux News announcer. Does an airport near you show Faux News most of the time? You could complain to the airport and say to show something else instead.
*Just Stop Oil's message to Suella Braverman: threaten us all you like — we're not listening.*
*Facebook moderation system favours "business partners", says oversight board.*
US citizens: call on Missouri schools to reverse overzealous book bans.
The chinook salmon are heading rapidly towards extinction, though no one is sure why.
A strange aspect of this article is that it assumes that only by identifying with the sadness of a local indigenous group can we appreciate that the loss of these salmon is a great loss. In effect, it treats their feelings about the possible extinction of chinook salmon as the primary issue.
I can empathize with their sense of loss. I recognize the loss too. But I insist that the objective loss is more important than how people feel about it.
Peoples adapt their cultures to their environments. The ancestors of that group, long enough ago, lived elsewhere and perhaps did not encounter salmon. If the group survives through the coming global disaster, in time it will get used to the absence of chinook salmon. But the damage done by their extinction and the loss of ecosystem they was part of will never go away.
If a species goes extinct and there is no indigenous group to notice, did the extinction really happen?
Stop burning trees to make energy, say 650 scientists before Cop15 biodiversity summit.*
The University of California academic workers are on strike. The management is trying to break their solidarity by offering raises to everyone but the graduate student employees.
Ukraine has reportedly attacked distant Russian airfields used as bases for heavy bombers that bomb Ukraine, and for cruise missiles. Some bombers were damaged.
To attack Russian aircraft and missiles on the ground is a legitimate and natural tactic, but challenging to carry out. Bravo, Ukraine!
The Ukrainian Army seems to have a genius for figuring out clever ways to win the war. Meanwhile, the Putin forces have only a plodding hunger for bigger war crimes.
Leaving the EU was supposed to let the UK "take back control" over its laws and policies, but instead the international banksters have control.
Tories fundamentally believe in letting the rich have power, even if they dislike some of the consequences. Naturally they were never going to fight hard against it. Corbyn would have.
The Intercept interviews two Iranian exiles about the continuing protests, one of whom says we should rather call this a revolution in progress.
Cory Doctorow: in many kinds of products, adding a media-player and its DRM creates an excuse to use the DMCA to forbid users to tinker with any aspect.
Nowadays, any product with DRM is no longer merely defective by design. It is oppressive by design also.
US citizens: call on Biden to commit to the full $100 million for climate finance pledges.
Volunteers are installing public phones in Philadelphia. They are like payphones except gratis.
Every city and town ought to provide these, and you should never have to walk half an hour to reach one.
More on the wrecker's declaration of war on America and everything that is good about it.
Nothing is perfect. There are a number of things in the US Constitution that ought to be changed, Republicans have highlighted some of them in recent decades by stretching them for abuse. The Constitution must protect the environment much more, and the rights and well-being of the disprivileged and disadvantaged. Fairly taxing the rich and curbing the power of business would make that possible. Eliminating the electoral college could make elections more democratic.
The wrecker would not do any of that. He would make himself dictator.
I forecast years ago that leaving the EU could be beneficial if Corbyn were in charge, but would be harmful with Tories in charge. Sad to say, Britain did the latter and has been harmed. Leaving the EU created opportunities to change policies, laws and relationships — opportunities that Britain could use in various ways. Assuming that each party would use those opportunities to achieve its goals, the consequences were clear.
I have updated the page stallman-computing.html.
I have updated the page rms-lifestyle.html.
China has dropped the zero-Covid policy of trying, via tests and quarantines, to stamp out transmission.
It is to be celebrated that powerful protests can make China change rigid, harsh policies. But is this change the wise change to make?
My recommendation was to make the quarantine system less harsh and rigid, so people would not die or get badly sick from being in quarantine for a while.
Two weeks ago, The wrecker publicly associated with a white nationalist and a Nazi, and thus took a clear stand against justice and equal rights.
Since then, he called for abolishing the US Constitution, and thus revealed himself indisputably as an enemy of US democracy and freedom.
Perhaps other Republican leaders, such as Governor Dementis, are less hostile to justice, equal rights, democracy and freedom. But I tend to think they are simply more circumspect.
The UN is considering a resolution to prosecute Putin and other high officials for systematic war crimes by the Putin forces.
They deserve prosecution, but I think it would be a mistake to demand they surrender to prosecution. That would be, in effect, a decision to pursue regime change as a war goal.
That decision would have bad consequences for Ukraine, for the kidnapped Ukrainians, and for the Russian people as well. If Putin yields up all of Ukraine's territory, and returns the kidnapped Ukrainians, he will have had a defeat, not a victory. Those war aims are enough. If Putin is willing to give those, we should offer him peace.
To demand more than that would give him more reason to keep fighting instead of making peace.
*Iranian protesters call for three-day strike as pressure on regime builds.*
I would not be so quick to conclude that the repressive regime will fall soon. Repressive regimes have faced very strong protests and stayed in power.
Five Connecticut prison thugs face charges of reckless endangerment for transporting Richard Cox in a van without a seat belt and thus breaking his neck.
Shouldn't they be charged with gross bodily harm, too?
US citizens: call on Congress to help families, not give tax cuts to corporations.
*"Turn Off the Tap on Plastic," UN Chief Declares Amid Debate Over New Global Treaty.*
I think it is crucial to stop the production of plastic products which are fundamentally difficult to recycle — for instance, different materials joined together.
Elnaz Rekabi participated in an international sports competition without wearing the required head-covering. Her family's home was then demolished.
If the Iranian state did this, then ironically it joins Israel in the practice of punishing an entire family for one person's infraction.
(satire) *Right-Wingers Criticize Kanye For Not Using Platform To Raise Awareness Of Lesser-Known Nazis.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
Macron threatens to invoke business-supremacy treaties to stop the US from carrying out its insufficient but helpful greenhouse gas reduction plans. Environmental activists protest this when Macron was visiting the White House.
Will French activists protest this too? I hope so?
Business-supremacy treaties are fundamentally unjust because they elevate trade over democracy. Businesses had too much power already, and these treaties gave them even more.
Biden joined Congress to impose on railroad workers the contract that the railroads had proposed — with no paid sick days.
*Biden Urged to Sign Executive Order Guaranteeing Rail Workers Paid Sick Leave.*
These same railroads commit safety violations repeatedly, and get fined over and over, but they do not correct the dangers.
(satire) *Biden Signs Legislation To Avert Crisis Of Treating Rail Workers Like Humans.*
(If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.)
*The pilots flying passengers across US state lines for abortions.*
The Hinduismists that rule India are attacking hundreds of old mosques by fabricating claims that the buildings are former Hindu temples which were seized centuries ago and converted into mosques. In most cases there is no real evidence that this ever happened. But such is the fanaticism and contempt for truth on the part of the ruling BJP and its supporters that they disregard evidence. The track record of repression and pogroms suggests they are hoping this gives them an excuse to kill some Muslims.
Historians who know about the history of these sites face threats to shut them up. The threats range from firing them to murdering them.
This note has been corrected by a newer note
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The county supervisors voted to certify the results they had because refusing was illegal.
They presented no grounds to refuse to certify the results, but we can determine what their motives were: The country's voters had voted majority Democratic, and the Republican election officials figured that they could steal some statewide elections by (in effect) discarding all the votes from their own county.
A large fraction of Republicans are traitors at heart, and seek opportunities to steal any election that they lose. If imprisonment is required to thwart their treachery, prison it should be.
Everyone: call on Costco to commit to protecting the boreal forest.
US citizens: call on Congress to work towards a world that is free of nuclear weapons. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Minnesota is considering small reforms in rules for thug departments to better control their predilection to bully people, brutalize people from time to time, and associate with racists, Nazis and insurrectionist organizations. The thugs' unions are pushing back hard.
More information.
NIH has set up a web site for reporting the results of your at-home Covid-19 test, if you wish. It is a good idea, but you should not use the site as currently implemented, because it requires you to run nonfree Javascript code. What a shame.
The San Antonio thug who shot at Erik Cantu 10 times and maimed him faces charges of attempted murder.
The increased willingness to prosecute thugs for violent crimes even if the victim does not die will help control cop crime.
*A woman who sold fake COVID-19 immunization cards gets three years in Federal prison.*
There is no market any more for fake vaccination records, but one more naturopathic "doctor" taken off the streets is likely to make the public safer.
Republicans just barely won control of the House of Representatives, and they did it because of the right-wing partisans that Republicans put on the Supreme Court.
The UK's registrar of corporations was "reformed" to make it cheap, quick and easy to create a corporation. Crooks started many fraudulent corporations and used them to steal and hide millions.
An economist official at Bank of England says that leaving the EU has a large share of responsibility for the increase in food prices in the UK.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Pelosi's successor as leader of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, is a strong and firm plutocratist, who supports a few progressive positions so people won't recognize how plutocratist he is.
Perhaps in your eyes the fact that he is black and Muslim makes his election to that position something to celebrate. In my eyes, he's just another plutocratist congresscritter that we should try to replace with a progressive.
Australia is investigating the use of slave labor in building its renewable power systems.
*[The right-wing Australian government's] "grassroots" nuclear power survey linked to consulting firm [working for US nuclear reactor industry].*
Should we call this a "public-private partnership for profit"?
*World's biggest food [corporations] made £20bn in profits — while warning of price rises to come.*
Curbing global heating will not save our planet's ecosystems. They are threatened more immediately by other human activities including deforestation, overgrazing, overfishing, desertification, and soil degradation.
A relationship does exist: global heating will eventually destroy many ecosystems, if they survive that long. But we have to curb the other environmental threats, too.
Having fewer children will help reduce all those forms of excessive human impact, all at once. And will free up your effort to work on the other problems.
Australia has sentenced a climate protester to over a year in prison for blocking one lane of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The US should pressure Israel to agree to nuclear disarmament. Maybe Iran and Israel would agree to nuclear disarmament together.
*President Lula da Silva wants to establish a new Federal Police unit focused on deterring environmental crimes.*
*Campaigners Demand Deep Cuts to Plastic Production as Global Treaty Negotiations Ramp Up.*
Here is a set of narrow arguments against the "KOSA" bill that is supposed to protect "children's" privacy, but will instead deny the privacy of all internet services.
I agree with the arguments in general, but I need to state these points of disagreement.
The British government has become simply incompetent. They summon people to court by mistake, after reporting judgments against them by mistake, after failing to notify them at all.
Indonesia plans political and sexual repression: it will be a crime to (1) insult the president, the state, or the official ideology or (2) have sex (except for married couples).
Reportedly Islamists are behind this attack on freedom in Indonesia.
Frontier Airlines has eliminated telephone customer support. The only way to communicate with the airline is through its web site.
I once flew on a Frontier flight, and noted that the staff seemed to have a right ear and a left ear, but no front ear. That cast its name in question. Now it should be called "No-ear Airlines."
I tried looking around that web site. For the most part, the information seemed to be present and navigation worked. But I think that most inquiries and actions depend on nonfree Javascript code, which excludes me from doing them.
They invite people to use a chat system to get in contact with an agent. That might be an acceptable solution, except that that chat system is part of the web site and it seems to depend on Javascript too.
One thing I noticed on the site is that the company is pressuring people to use its cr…app rather than its web site. Surveillance by the web site is limited; surveillance by a cr…app is much more complete.
Google promised not to save location data about "sensitive" places such as abortion clinics, which some states threaten to sue or prosecute people for going near. It did not make enough change to eliminate the danger.
I am not surprised, because surveillance-based companies will always tend to collect too much data and hold on to too much data.
However, data tends to get duplicated and get stored in various places. The root of the search problem is (1) collecting location data, (2) collecting personal identifying data, and (3) identifying return visitors (with cookies).
An acceptable web service must not find out any of those facts about you unless you request to send them. And it must do its job even if you choose not to send them.
US citizens: call on drug stores to require people to wear masks.
41 Republicans plus Manchin used a filibuster to kill the proposed railroad workers' contract that gave them sick leave. Then the Senate approved the contract lacking sick leave, the version that Biden had asked for.
*Three UK Universities Ban Fossil Fuel Industry Recruiters From Campus.*
The UK's immigation department sent 20 asylum seekers letters inviting them to come to meetings to discuss their cases. When they arrived, which in some cases was a big expense for them, they were told that the staff did no plans for meetings with them that day.
Either these letters were a prank, or the UK government has become so incompetent and confused that it can't carry out the simplest plan. After seeing how incompetent Tories are, I think the latter is more plausible.
Senator Merkely has proposed a bill to put a heavy tax on single family homes when they are owned by big companies that own hundreds of them.
The history, since 1940, of the series of US tax cuts for the rich that impoverished the country.
Want to really make America great again? Tax the rich!
*The [corrupter's] supporters can no longer avoid testifying before grand juries in Washington DC and Georgia.*
*Big polluters given almost €100bn[-worth] in carbon [emissions] permits [gratis] by EU.* That was over a period of 9 years.
The FBI and DHS focus disproportionately on foreign terrorists as possible threats, and insufficienly on (right-wing) domestic terrorists such as white supreacists and Nazis.
The Tyre Extinguishers have deflated the tires of 900 SUVs around the world as a protest against these dangerous gas guzzlers.
A Just Stop Oil protester was sentenced to 6 months in prison for blocking a highway for a while. The court called this "causing a public nuisance," and I'm sure it did. As these protesters say, it's nothing compared to the unending public nuisance conditions that increased use of fossil fuels will cause.
*Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could finish off Putin and Russia.* The proposal includes modern aircraft and longer-range missiles. Careful strategic thought is required about whether to donate the latter.
Herschel Walker, MAGA maggot candidate for the Senate in Georgia, filed for a tax break on a "primary residence" in Texas where he really lives. This may have been illegal.
Pheromone-assisted insect traps can photograph and identify pests via image recognition. This technique can potentially save greatly on the use of pesticides.
Unfortunately, under today's general practices, it will also be a trap for farmers. It will be run by nonfree software, so it will snoop on the farm and put the farm at a disadvantage. And the farmers won't be able to repair it.
The US system of producing medicines suffers from too much commercial centralization (few producers) without much central planning. Also a tendency to optimize for efficiency rather than reliability.
The result is susceptibility to shortages.
Anti-vax fanatics in New Zealand would rather let their baby die than let it get a transfusion of "vaccinated blood" for surgery.
They and others have convinced each other that there is some danger in this.
George Monbiot: Farming and its subsidies are an increasing danger to nature and the climate.
There is no mystery to why governments subsidizes farming. It is not just that rich people want to profit from them; everyone wants the results. But we need to cut down this unsustainable practice.
Fewer babies will certainly help!
A fracking company accepted criminal liability for poisoning the water of Dimock, Pennsylvania and will pay to replace the wells with new water systems and to deliver clean water for the next 75 years.
Here is a timeline of how the company caused the damage, of enforcement efforts, and how the company resisted them.
This is justice in a narrow sense, but it won't clean up the water of that region. It won't undo the lasting diminiution of water supplies in Pennsylvania. There may not be any feasible way to do that.
There must be many other regions of the US which have already suffered similar damage.
We must not allow it to happen in any more places.
Leaders of the Oath Keepers have been convicted of secitious conspiracy for organizing the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, based on their conversations about same.
This gives the Department of Justice a basis for confidence in bringing that charge against others who were involved, including potentially the corrupter himself.
Antifascist individuals and groups are finding their Twitter accounts suspended. Apparently Musk's idea of freedom of speech has a right-wing bias.
New York City's night-mayor has asked a wide variety of workers to incarcerate homeless people in mental hospitals — including people who are supposed to help the public. This plan is explicitly not limited to people who seem to pose a threat to others.
Many homeless people run away from shelters because the conditions there are so unpleasant they would rather be on the street.
A host of criticisms of this plan.
Once you get committed to a hospital — even if you did it by faking insanity — it is reported to be very hard to prove you are sane.
*Australian PM Anthony Albanese urges US government to end pursuit of Julian Assange.* Assange has been hounded for over a decade using a series of dirty tricks and twisting of the law. But this injustice has a bigger target than Julian Assange. Its main target is the freedom of the press to report on crimes committed by governments.
Democracy depends on whistleblowers, and it depends on journalists to publish what whistleblowers report. The prosecution puts democracy too in danger.
Massive surveillance is part of the threat to democracy. That is why we must limit the collection of databases of personal data, not merely regulate how the data are used.
The Tories have adopted a "voter ID" law, which as always is systematic suppression of voting by voters who are poor, young, or marginalized. In addition, merely through the extra work it requires at underfunded polling places, it will cause chaos.
*Plibersek's "determination" alone won’t save the Great Barrier Reef –- here’s what needs to happen.*
Amnesty Interational: Colombian thugs used torture, rape, and kidnaping to repress the mass protests of 2021. They also used lesser forms of psychological punishment, such as forcing people to strip.
The article embodies a strange set of values. It seems to take for granted that acting based on sexism or racism is a more serious wrong than rape.
I disagree with that. In my view, rape is wrong regardless of the details of the victim.
The UK could pretty much end transmission of HIV and illness from HIV, but it doesn't spend the money to do so.
Victoria (in Australia) has adopted ambitious greenhouse gas goals. Here are suggestions for how to achieve them.
*Israel has stripped a prominent Palestinian-French human rights lawyer of his Jerusalem residency and is expected to deport him to France.*
Israel has had a pattern of repression of lawyers that defend the rights of Palestinians.
Also a pattern of causing suffering by inventing excuses to take away Jerusalem residency permits. For example, being away studying in a university for a few years.
The article refers to "administrative detention", a euphemism for putting people in jail without trial.
A Nigerian student faces criminal charges of "defamation" after beatings in jail were not enough to make him confess.
The details of what the student said are a side issue — treating defamation as a crime always endangers freedom of speech.
The "big four" accounting firms are structurally embedded in systematic corruption. They are "too big to fail", but sooner or later one of them will fail.
The way to end the corruption is clear: prohibit accounting companies from doing anything other than auditing.
If a sudden change is hard to implement, here's a way to force them to make them separate gradually.
Tax the consulting gross sales of accounting firms a stated percentage that rises annually. It could be 3% in the first year, 6% in the second year, and so on. I think that in 5 years they will have moved most of the consulting business to some new sister company.
The details could be adjusted so as to require splitting each current company's non-auditing work into N or more independent new companies.
Other adjustments could make them split the auditing work among a larger number of new auditing companies.
The insufficient competition in the US allows businesses with market power to gouge by piling on "junk fees". Booz Alan has a monopoly over some kinds of access to some US national parks and other public lands, exercised via a "government" web site run by that company, and pulls in much more income from junk fees than the US government agency concerned actually gets.
But it's worse than that. Aside from the matter of price, use of that "government" web site requires running nonfree software. Those parks are off-limits to the free world.
I have visited some US national parks, and I paid cash to enter them. Is that still possible? Can anyone investigate that site (see the article) and report which parks and places can't be entered by paying cash, without using any web site?
Or which parks and places can still be entered by paying cash, without any web site?
Whichever list is shorter would be the more useful.
*Arizona elections official goes into hiding after post-midterm threats* from right-wing Big Lie fanatics.
*Three Georgia sheriff's deputies, all white, charged with battery after beating black inmate.*
The video shows that they prepared to attack him, while he was standing in a cell, doing nothing significant.
Two versions of the video have been published, one in which the attack was intentionally blurred and one which shows what happened. The thug department promoted the former and the latter is hard to find.
*Canada accused of putting its timber trade ahead of global environment.*
Could the US and China collaborate to curb global heating?
It seems to me that neither government has a strong enough commitment to that cause. In the US, it is because Republicans are determined to keep driving straight at the cliff. As for China, it seems to assume that doing this slowly and arriving decades late is sufficient. The two countries need to be set individually on the goal before they can collaborate on it.
US citizens: phone President Biden and urge him to issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose all of their political spending.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on your state legislature to implement fair districting.
The EU has proposed a plan to cut plastic waste from consumer goods.
This is good, but what about the fishing nets?
When billionaires pledge to donate most of their wealth to charity, there is no guarantee that that money will ever reach a charity, The system is complicated and the pledge may be almost meaningless.
Never mind their pledges — let's tax them a lot more.
*UK super-rich [are] less charitable than decade ago, says charity chief.*
Stop depending on them to give voluntarily, and tax them more!
*Biden urged to threaten Israel weapons halt over far-right concerns.*
How will Tories face the NHS strikes that are due to their 12 years of budget cuts?
The House of Representatives narrowly passed a law to give railroad workers the seven days of paid sick leave (is that per year?) that they want. Now the question is whether Republicans will filibuster it and kill it, to ensure a strike.
*ALEC Lawmakers and Corporate Lobbyists Meet in D.C. to Debate Rewriting the Constitution, Punishing Socially Responsible Businesses, and Protecting Misinformation.*
George Takei talks about growing up in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, and later coming out as gay.
Railroads in England cancel a lot of trains. But the ones they cancel before 10pm the night before are omitted from the statistics, so the statistics don't show how bad this really is.
Privatization makes this worse. Instead of government agency, which would obey orders to report more useful figures, these are "private companies" that have "rights" to state their cancellation rate in a way that minimizes it.
The railroad passengers deserve rights, and the railroad workers deserve rights, but there should be no stockholders or executives involved in running trains that "deserve rights" over how the trains run.
90% of US countries have had at least one weather disaster from 2011 through 2022. This figure does not count heatwaves.
There is no information about how much each disaster was due to global heating, but it is a big cause of weather disasters now and going forward. Each American should recognize that "global heating is going to hit the place I live."
That doesn't count the crop failures that are going to affect us all even though the place they occur may be far away.
The article points out also that it would be more economical to do things to prevent disasters than to repair them.
Businesses are pushing for a federal tax cut this year. As if they didn't pay too little tax already!
US citizens: call on Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
By deciding to investigate Israel's killing of Shirin Abu Akleh, the US is putting limits on its willingness to support Israel no matter what Israel does.
Qatar believes it can bully any and all parts of the British government by pulling some of the investments that harm Britain.
The UK NHS is trying to suggest that nurses should not strike because it would cause some operations to be delayed.
That statement is literally true, but the argument it is part of is invalid. The main cause of postponing millions of operations every year is mismanagement and underfunding by the government, and the harmful consequences include the pay that is inadequate for nurses to live on.
*China censors maskless crowd footage in World Cup broadcasts.*
Apparently the contrast with them puts China in a bad light, in the minds of many Chinese. Are they right? I won't assume that. They can see when people die from the rigidity and harshness of the Chinese state. But if China drops the effort to eradicate Covid outbreaks, it could kill millions of Chinese. I think it would be better to correct the rigidity and harshness.
I agree with Sridhar that in what China needs in the long term to get better vaccines and get most people vaccinated.
A court order not to retaliate against union organizers also requires Amazon to read the court's decision to all the employees at the unionized plant in Staten Island.
I hope this requires Amazon to pay the workers for the time they pass listening to this reading.
Comparing the US and British medical systems: both horrible but in different ways.
The British medical system (the NHS) did not just grow with its current problems. It worked much better until the Tories started cutting its budget, through trickle-down politics based on worship of the Invisible Hand. It is clear how to fix them: give the NHS enough money to do its job.
The US medical system's problems did just grow, as the worshipers of the Invisible Hand let gouging private companies get whatever they wished for and blocked efforts to stop them. It is clear how to fix these problems: create a public national medical system and sweep away those greedy bastards. The usual term for this nowadays is "Medicare for all", though I think we should go further and set up a system of VA hospitals for all.
*Netanyahu strikes Israeli coalition deal with far-right [antigay fanatic].*
Hatred of gay or queer people is not a phobia, it is bigotry.
*War in space would have immediate effects [on civilian life.] Attacks on satellites could take out GPS systems, banking systems, power grids …*
A group of UN experts call for putting the Great Barrier Reef on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites that are in danger.
*Monkeypox to be renamed mpox to avoid stigma, says WHO.*
This illustrates our society's tendency to cater excessively to hypersensitivity. There is nothing in the name "monkeypox" which insults anyone, and monkeys can't understand the word "pox".
What next — will they rename "chicken pox" to protect the feelings of chickens, or people accused of timidity? How about renaming "Rock Mountain Spotted Fever" so that the Rocky Mountains don't feel stigmatized?
It is futile to bully people to eliminate locutions because racists or right-wingers could spin them in a nasty way. They can invent more such things at any moment. The bullying would be a never-ending series of self-inflicted blows, at which bigots would laugh and say, "See how easily we make them go nuts!"
Forecast: expect Xi to do in many parts of China what he did to the Uyghurs and to Hong Kong.
The island of Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, is being taken over by intrusive vines that grow too fast to remove. Vines are covering buildings, farms, paths, and forests. People find it hard to keep their farms going.
Massachusetts voters amended the state constitution to increase the tax rate a few percent for incomes over a million dollars a year. So far so good. But the greedy rich have many ways to get rid of laws that make them pay their fair share.
In the UK, many necessary life activities exclude people that don't use snoop-phones full of nonfree software. This article shows how common that is.
The author cannot envision the idea of choosing to reject snoop-phones as a matter of justice if you are capable of using one. But you can. Every one of the restrictive activities that excludes the old people that can't use a snoop-phone are likewise doing wrong to everyone that refuses to use them.
And doing wrong to each person that does contact them with a snoop-phone.
India is exporting Hindu-supremacism and its violence to Britain. And to the US.
Finally some influential newspapers argue for dropping the charges against Julian Assange.
The UK governmen admits that tens of thousands of homes in the UK are not safe for people to live in.
This, together with various other issues including the Grenfell fire shows that the UK has lost its ability to enforce regulations on businesses that are meant to protect public safety and well-being.
It can't even run railroads well, because it has privatized them.
I am not sure what the causes are. I've seen "cronyism" sugested as a cause for some, but I suspect that another cause is catering excessively to the wealthy and business. The companies that run the privatized railroads get more importance than the passengers.
Watch out for a false sense of security. The US is still in danger of being taken over by fascism.
The Republicans, by a margin of one seat in the House of Representatives, seem to have succeeded in ensuring that the federal government can't do anything before the 2024 elections to ensure our elections are not rigged then.
Vaccine disinformation has convinced many to refuse measles vaccination, and that is creating a completely unnecessary threat of measles.
(satire) *Cash-Strapped Subway Threatens To Reveal Identities Of Customers Who Eat Subway [food] If They Don’t Pay [ransom].*
The Tories have heard the voice of Insulate Britain and proposed a plan to insulate the homes of middle-class Britons.
It's a good idea, but middle-class homeowners could afford to pay back this support out of the savings they will have. The government should lend the money for middle-class homes, and give the money for insulating poor people's homes.
Yanis Varoufakis conjectures that Musk wants to turn Twitter into a platform for surveillance capitalism, and that everything he said about freedom of speech was a red herring.
Global heating killed 20,000 people in Europe through heat waves last summer that were possible due to local heating.
Brains learn to predict other people's likely behavior and to save the unconscious effort of figuring about concerns that never arise for them. As a result, powerful people learn to be ruthless and not to concern themselves with the feelings of the obedient people around them.
Putin has banned any public mention of same-sex or same-gender relationships. Like DeMentis, his law prohibits this only under certain conditions, but when his followers interpret the conditions, there is nothing that is safe to say.
"Green Capitalism" sounds promising, but is it really capable of preventing global climate disaster. A book argues that it is not: that measuring the value of each thing in the world in monetary terms just won't do the job.
A committee came up with an estimate of the monetary value of a great whale, One can question whether the monetary value captures the importance of continued existence of whales, but maybe the result would be adequate.
But what about the continued existence of a rare, endangered species of small animals? If people calculate that without adding a term to represent the value of simple existence of a distinct species, they might get a minuscule number.
How many endangered species preserved are worth one living whale? It's hard to make that question meaningful, It's like asking how much money a human life is worth. Insurance needs to find a way to answer that question, but is that the right way to understand the importance of various things? Is that the right way to decide who lives and who dies?
If you buy the book, please do not get it from Amazon.
Private equity companies are buying up medical specialist clinics in the US, and creating local monopolies that systematically gouge, and even defraud.
This problem afflicts many areas of medicine, just as it affects many other areas of life in the US.
For medicine, the full solution is a national medical system. It would save the US money overall, but might require taxing the rich more.
However, the problem of concentration of industry needs a general solution too.
Some US universities have made deals with sports betting companies. The university helps promote gambling to the students, and in return gets a share of what the students spend.
I don't believe in prohibiting gambling, but those who have your well-being in mind will not encourage you to gamble.
* Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to [Facebook+Instagram].* As well as other basic personal information.
The do this through a tracking pixel on their web sites. The info sent comes from what the user enters in the web site; it seems that does not include the detailed financial data that users hand over for the tax return itself. Sending the latter to some other company might, I suspect, be a crime.
Millions of sites use the Facebook&Instagram tracking pixel to send data about their visitors.
Google Analytics collects much of the same data, but not the user's name. However, often it can figure out the user's identity in other ways.
The iMonsters' app store client program collects many kinds of data about the user's actions.
There is a command to disable this collection, but it seems not to have an effect.
Does it matter that Julian Assange has Asperger's syndrome? (I avoid the term "autistic spectrum" because it is a misleading overgeneralization.)
In principle, no. Publishing leaks about the horrible crimes of governments is admirable and no one should be punished for that.
In practice, if it helps prevent Assange's extradition, I will be glad. However, to avoid putting journalism in danger globally, saving Assange from US vengeance based on personal grounds will not be enough. We need to protect journalists and whistleblowers from punishment for serving the public.
*Far-right extremist [Ben-Gvir] to be Israel's national security minister.*
He wants to give immunity to Israeli soldiers that shoot at Palestinians, and execute Palestinians for various sorts of crimes. In this ministry he would be in charge of thugs, and would surely encourage them to commit violence. In Israel I was told that the border police were especially cruel and violent towards Palestinians.
The documentary "Tantura" tells the story of Israel's expulsion of the Palestinians of a town near Haifa, in 1948. The film-maker, Alon Schwarz, faces revulsion for this.
I wish that Uri Avnery were alive to talk about the film and the events. His article, Truth Against Truth, provides some context.
Faux News hammered viewers with frequent reports about crime, until election day.
"Think about crime — don't think about the help Republicans won't let the government give you!"
Walmart drives its workers hard, but especially hard in the "holiday" season. They are compelled to work 55 or even 60 hours a week and can't take time off even for an emergency.
Australia will accept the wives and children of PISSI fighters
*SpaceX Workers Say They Were Illegally Fired for Open Letter Criticizing Elon [Musk].*
Republicans have a broad plan: *to destabilize, weaken, and even destroy the institutions that give a voice to people who don't agree with their vision.*
Suggesting that NATO should make a rule to have dialog with a possible attacker before any NATO state fights back against an apparent attack.
A UK thug department has paid damages for attacking protesters. The thugs made a sudden attack at a peaceful demonstration. The thugs cited Covid lockdown regulations in force at the time, but that can't justify a violent attack!
Paying damages and not admitting wrongdoing is not enough.
Tory budget plans are likely to degrade UK public services even further.
San Francisco thugs propose using robots that can carry deadly weapons, to respond to reports of incidents.
The criterion they propose for using this sounds very similar to the criterion for shooting people. As we know, thugs often shoot people dead in situations where that justification was not a good criterion.
The UK gave every homeless person a place indoors to sleep, for a short time during the pandemic.
I think the UK did not continue this for very long, but that doesn't mean it can't be done again.
It may require taxing the rich more.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, don't starve critical investments in healthcare, children and transit. Pass government funding before the end of the year.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice not to let the wrecker use his new presidential campaign to get off the hook for criminal charges.
US citizens: call on Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to remove all medical debt from credit reports.
US citizens: call on state officials to disqualify the wrecker from running for president or other offices, as the Constitution calls for.
US citizens: call on Biden to advocate repeal of the ‘02 AUMF.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the FTC to require platforms to make their direct messages end-to-end encrypted.
This is a half-measure. Truly secure encrytion has to be done by a free client program that the user installs independently of the platform. Therefore it can't be implemented by a communication platform.
If the encryption is done by the platform — either in its server, or in its nonfree client program, or in code sent to the user's browser (for instance, in Javascript) — then the platform has control over the encryption, and can backdoor it at will.
US citizens: call on Congress to raise the debt ceiling now so Republicans can't use it as a lever for sabotage later.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
Musk has readmitted many right-wing extremists to Twitter, including the bullshitter and people who deny that he lost the 2020 election.
However, it prohibits all users from posting links to the Distributed Denial of Secrets web site, ddosecrets.com, which posts government secrets leaked by whistleblowers.
A furniture company shut down its operations abruptly and fired all its workers instantly, without notice. It also tried to deny them all benefits — even the option to continue their medical insurance at their own expense.
It may be illegal for a company to do that, but that's not enough. It ought to be a crime for the executives and managers involved in the decision.
I wonder why they shut down the company abruptly. Two ideas that occur to me are (1) they decided to move operations to another country and (2) the company was owned by private equity. Neither one makes the action any less wrong.
As for the fact that they did this on one day of the year rather than one of the other 364 days, or what method they used to inform the staff, or the fact that some of them were sleeping, don't let those minor details distract you. If your condemnation of bad treatment of workers can be mollified by choosing such details better, that will help businesses attack workers rights ore effectively. We must demand the substance of treating workers decently, not merely the show.
Bolsonaro's Nazi propaganda and relaxation of gun laws in Brazil have led to massacres by Nazi fanatics.
*"A Death Sentence": Biden Blasted for Approving Oil Export Project.*
Failing to decrease oil extraction now can easily doom most people.
(satire) *Biden Meets With Turkeys Who've Lost Loved Ones To Thanksgiving.*
Ukraine is now sending subsidized food to some African countries.
Protests against strict Covid lockdowns have spread in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
The next climate conference will occur in the UAE, a fossil-fuel kingdom that is attacking Yemen with US support. There is not much hope from an event held there. So Naomi Klein suggests that civil society boycott it and hold a parallel event.
Democrats had successes among rural voters, and if they try harder they can develop real strength there.
Calling on the IMF to eliminate the extra interest that it charges poor countries.
Steven Donziger argues for ways to tackle global heating in international law.
Creating the crime of ecocide is one of his solutions.
In the UK, workers who are sick are not interested in notes excusing time off work — they are so desperately poor that they are compelled to work while sick.
Facebook closed accounts that it found were spreading false information on behalf of the US government.
CIA officials, appointed by the wrecker, discussed assassinating Julian Assange. Instead they took the slow path that has been in use for several years.
The summary of Assange's history, in that article, is misleading on a number of points. This is a better reference.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposes to deregulate new kinds of nuclear power plants.
They have a history of seeking to please and serve the companies that make nuclear power plants, so such a proposal makes me suspicious. We should not build new, "small" nuclear plants because that is too slow, expensive and risky to be of service in preventing global heating disaster.
To go fast, we need to use the solution that is fastest and cheapest to build: renewable power.
Iran is expanding its uranium-refining capacity. This suggests it intends to produce nuclear weapons — though it could be a plan to generate nuclear power instead of burning so much oil.
Sydney thugs violently arrested habitual prank protester Danny Lim and left him seriously injured.
He told them at the outset he needed an ambulance, and when a passerby offered to call one, the thugs threatened to charge him with a crime if he did so.
Thugs should face criminal charges for making threats to falsely accuse people, just as for actually doing so.
I don't quite get the jobe of his sign, nor the point of his protest — but those details don't affect the issue here.
There are big protests in an Apple factory in China, and videos are circulating despite Chinese censorship.
Surveillance jungle: rental e-scooters in Paris are very strictly tracked. And of course the renter has to identify perself to rent one.
"Convenient" disservices like these are what teach people to accept surveillance. If we don't want a society in which one's every move is known, we have to reject surveillance disservices.
*There will come a time for [peace] negotiations — but calls to reach a deal with the Kremlin now are more wrong-headed than ever.*
I think it can't hurt to have negotiators continue to meet, since occasionally they can agree on a significant side issue. But they must not aim to to pressure Ukraine into inviting defeat.
*The massacre at Club Q didn’t happen in a vacuum. There has been a dangerous escalation in hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric.*
Japan is meddling in Australian politics by trying to pressure Queensland not to increase the tax on exported coal.
That tax increase is a tiny step towards the vital goal of reducing coal consumption. It is terribly insufficient, but opposing it endangers all of us.
Biden's delay on ruling on whether Crown Prince Bone Saw could be sued in a US court gave him an opportunity to appoint himself "prime minister" and thus gain the benefit of a shelter in a pertinent treaty.
US citizens: phone your representative and senators and call on them not to pass any tax cuts for business. Handouts should be directed to non-rich Americans!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *New STEM Program Teaches Students Skills To Appease Whims Of Capricious Tech CEO.*
I find this especially on target because the absurdity it attacks is the basis of the buzzword "STEM" itself.
(satire) *British World Cup Attendees Accused Of Smuggling Alcohol Into Stadium Through Bloodstreams.*
(satire) *Landlord Pledges To Address Tenant Infestation.*
An ironically misguided petition asks the US government to require communication platforms to encrypt all private messages.
It would sure be wise for users to encrypt those messages. But that won't be secure if the platform sets up the encryption and the decryption. If you do that with software that the platform provides, the platform could put in a back door to bypass it, making it ineffective for security against snooping by that platform. If you want encryption to provide real security, install the GNU Privacy Guard and use it — to encrypt a message before you send it, and to decrypt a message after you receive it.
Major US railroad workers' unions have rejected a contract offer that didn't offer them enough.
The railroads are profitable and they should share these profits with their workers. I'm disappointed with Biden for proposing a contract that didn't give them enough.
A federal court issued an injunction for Amazon to stop firing workers for protesting unsafe working conditions.
Some players in the football world cup in Qatar planned to wear armbands to support equal rights for queer people. Qatar said it would respond by taking a step to expel them from the game, so they abandoned these plans.
Qatar violates human rights egregiously — this is one example, but the mistreatment of workers who built the facilities is even more blatant.
We should not allow Qatar any sort of position of special power over any international activity. *By consenting to Qatar's illiberal policies for residents and guests alike, FIFA has further besmirched its already tainted reputation.*
The EU would have the power to make FIFA yield to various human rights rules and agree to require all future world cup hosts to accept them.
Starbucks is closing stores, and 40% of those stores have unionized or are organizing.
Starbucks has taken anti-union measures before.
Oregon's governor pardoned everyone convicted in Oregon of possessing a small amount of marijuana.
Unlike Biden's pardons, this included non-US-citizens.
Many states and territories still need to do legalize marijuana and pardon everyone convicted of possessing it.
"Stakeholder capitalism" turns out to do little for the groups it is supposed to benefit — it is at best lip service, sometimes even a fraud.
*Senior officers ordered "unlawful" arrests of journalists at Just Stop Oil protests.*
They didn't explicitly say "arrest journalists", but they gave orders to arrest protesters, and did not mention that journalists were a special case.
I don't think they should be in a position of authority if they disregard freedom of the press. Meanwhile, arresting protesters is bad too.
*SpaceX employees say they were fired for criticizing Elon Musk in open letter.*
Heather Wallace, of suburban Texas, asked her child to walk half a mile to their home. For this she was arrested, then pressured to plead guilty to "endangering a child". Eventually Texas decided it was ok to let the child walk, but the guilty plea has taken away her career and tied her up in mandatory lying.
It is horrible to force someone to apologize for something that was not wrong. A group of bullies tried to do that to me. Fortunately, they did not have the power to imprison me, so I stood up to them and did not apologize except for certain things that I really felt it would be better not to have done.
Using state eminent domain power to seize land and houses for the sake of a private project is an attractive nuisance that inspires corruption.
Carbon-removal programs have always been a long shot. But now that the planet-roasters have blocked the more reliable forms of action, they may be the Earth's last best hope.
The thing is, they won't do much good if the planet-roasters treat them as excuses to increase their emissions.
Democrats in Congress plan to pass a resolution to recognize that the wrecker has violated his oath to defend the US Constitution, and therefore is barred by the Constitution from running for any office in the US.
Comparing the economic situation of Americans in their 30s in 1990 with Americans in their 30s today measures the tremendous harm that right-wing politics has done to Americans generally.
The Senate found that US immigration thugs have sent women prisoners for medical operations without getting their consent, and without properly supervising the operations.
Twelve Senate Democrats voted to end the US Covid emergency law.
This would prevent Biden from suspending repayment of student loans. It could also kick millions of Americans off medicaid. Right-wingers would in general like poor people to die.
The Ukrainian soldiers and border guards on Snake Island, who told the Moskva, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," were captured. The Putin forces gave Ukraine no word about them and Ukraine believed they were dead. In fact, they were imprisoned, and tortured, but not killed.
One, Bohdan Hotskiy, was eventually swapped for a Russian prisoner of war, which is how we know how he was tortured. The rest remain prisoners, as far as I can tell from this article.
About another woman who almost died from getting pregnant while living in Texas.
Republican operative Senator Manchin is making sure the Democrats cannot eliminate the debt ceiling this year, and thus ensuring the Republicans can use it for blackmail next year.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose a forestry bill that would require cutting down lots of mature trees. These trees store lots of carbon from the air, and offer habitats that many species depend on.
To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.
US citizens: call on Biden to extend student loan repayments freeze until cancellation is awarded.
US citizens: call on officials of your state to disqualify the wrecker from holding office, on grounds of insurrection.
*With Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House, "Republicans will try to impose economic pain on families so they can blame us and seize power for themselves," [Senator] Warren noted.
Cutting Social Security and Medicare is the start of this, but they plan to do more too.
Mainstream media don't admit that's what Republicans are doing, and I don't think Biden will do it either.
The US is working with other countries in which China has set up secret repression stations to pressure Chinese expats.
The Momentum movement, which was supported by a large fraction of Labour members, has lost many supporters as they see that Labour has been taken over by Starmer and his plutocrats.
The question is, have they still got any chance of winning anything by supporting Labour?
The US has laws to find people who might intend to buy guns and kill people, and stop them from buying guns, but makes little effort to make that system actually work.
I suspect that the system has another problem: people are not that reliably predictable. Identifying some of those people is easy, but setting the net fine enough to identify all of them would identify lots of false positives too.
Examples of how damaging a part of the natural environment can cause enormous harm to humans who didn't know how they depended on it.
Deforesters in the Beni region of the Bolivian lowlands don't just cut down the trees. They go on to flatten and destroy the uninvestigated middens left by ancient inhabitants whose culture is very little known.
The Bolivian government is encouraging deforestation to boost agriculture. This contributes to global disaster, which could lead our civilization to end up in ruins like the ones they are destroying.
The thugs in Western Australia have a notable pattern of letting their dogs attack indigenous Australians, especially minors.
It is clear that the thugs handling these dogs fail to keep the dogs under proper control. Whether this is due to malice or irresponsibility is not clear from this statistical information. They should publish the videos of the dog attack on Jayden Abraham.
The US approved keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant running 10 additional years, from 2025 to 2035.
The article asserts that California is having trouble coming up with renewable generation to replace the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, but also that ten-ish US power reactors have closed since 2013 due to competition from cheaper renewable generation. It is not easy to reconcile those two statements.
If California doesn't expect to have enough renewable generation working by 2025, why doesn't it spend more money on building more rather than on keeping the Diablo Canyon power plant running?
The important decision about whether to build a third runway at Heathrow airport, which would imply a lasting increase in flying out of the UK, is being made as a battle over the business interests of various investors, including foreign governments such as Qatar and China that are absolutely vicious.
The corruption/privatization of the UK government has squeezed the public interest out of the decision.
A new tactic for right-wing global heating denialists — "Have faith in the market to solve the problem!"
What about when we see where "the market" is taking us, and it leads to disastrous heating? "Have faith, 2 or 3 degrees C of heating won't be that bad." But we are barely coping with 1.1 degrees now.
"The market" operates constantly — always under the explicit and implicit rules that society imposes on it. Societies frequently change those rules, either explicitly and intentionally or unconsciously. The question we face now is how to change the rules to reduce the disaster we are creating. "Just let the rules sweep you away" is not even an answer.
(satire) *Qatar World Cup Games To Cut Off Human Sales After 75th Minute.*
Wealthy people in Britain can pay hundreds of pounds for an ordinary appointment with a general practitioner, because the NHS has been starved to the point it takes weeks to be seen.
A Pakistani film about a trans woman, which won a prize at Cannes, is now unbanned in Pakistan, but it is still banned in part of India.
India is very bad in regard to censorship; many important works have been banned.
* After being repeatedly humiliated by Prince Mohammed, Biden continues to appease an autocrat who disdains him.*
The international climate conferences have never agreed on the goal of reducing use of fossil fuels. This year's conference saw a move to come closer to that position, but it failed.
This shows how resolutely some governments insist on maintaining or increasing their use of fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate retired military members working for foreign governments.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly and break it up.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
South Korea's president is attacking freedom of the press, by punishing specific organizations that criticize him.
Since young voters mostly voted for democrats, Republicans propose to raise the minimum age for voting.
Voters around the US approved ballot initiatives to fund aid for affordable housing and taxes on sale of expensive dwellings.
Robots that carry guns and can select targets are already being made. The ones mentioned in this article cannot fire the guns without an order from a human soldier.
If we want robot weapons to appreciate the value of human lives, we had better treat their lives as having value too. If and when they become capable of appreciating the value of lives of others, they may be ready to deserve that.
The scenario of cracking the security on robot weapons should remind us that humans too are vulnerable to this too. Right-wing extremists cracked the mental security of US soldiers and thugs, brainwashing them to attack US democracy in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol. No system
*The big takeaway from Cop27? These climate conferences just aren’t working.*
*There was no commitment to cutting the emissions causing accelerating this crisis, without which this agreement is nothing more … than a "down-payment on disaster."*
The planet roasters have spread their influence both overtly at the events and out of sight through influence on governments. And then there are the business-supremacy treaties.
Considering that the effect of these systems of influence will be to kill hundreds of millions of people, I think it is time to wipe out those systems, and never mind what property and financial interests get "harmed." Indeed, "harming" those interests is necessary — their wealth gives them power to keep disaster going, so the only way to reduce the damage they can do is to is to wreck some of their wealth.
Shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant caused damage to structures that are not critical.
Who fired these shells? They chose targets that would provoke anxiety but were unlikely to cause real danger. In other words, it appears to have been a sort of bluff. This is indication (though not proof) that the Putin forces did the shelling.
We should not take seriously their claim that the shots came from Ukraine; they have no credibility.
T appears that Putin's plan does not include causing any significant damage, but plans occasionally go wrong. It behooves Ukraine and Putin to agree on a plan to demilitarize the power plant itself.
But I don't expect Putin to agree to this.
Animals bred in zoos evolve to be less fit to survive in the wild.
This is a predictable consequence of natural selection. Animals' survival in a breeding program does not depend on the characteristics that are needed for survival in the wild, but maintaining those characteristics has costs. So they will tend to lose those characteristics.
It would be interesting to see what happens after those captivity-adapted animals are released. Do they respond to the selection pressure of wild existence by evolving in the other direction? That seems likely if enough of the original wild population remains. But if there is very little of the original wild population, the superior wild characteristics might have been lost entirely.
*The 1.5C climate goal died at Cop27 — but hope must not.*
Alas, that was our only chance for a world free of blatant changes in weather and climate.
*McDonald’s and Walmart beef suppliers criticised for "reckless" antibiotics use.*
I've been posting about this danger for many years. These producers are choosing the actions in their short-term best interest, and our government hasn't got the power to force them to follow long-term interests.
South Koreans separate food waste from other waste, and hand it in in special bags for municipal composting. This almost completely prevents the social burden of food waste.
*Beware self-made "genius": entrepreneurs promising the earth. Just look at Elon Musk.*
Starmer is proud of having many Tory friends.
I conjecture that this is because he doesn't disagree with them all that deeply.
An international vote adopted more protections on sharks, which are being wiped out by the trade in shark fins for Chinese conspicuous consumption.
Kiribati's president wants the rest of the world to pay the cost of protecting the Kiribati islands from rising seas.
To do this for 10 or 20 years might be feasible. If we curb global heating fast, the problem may then vanish as a result. But if global heating continues unchecked, the idea is hopeless.
Perhaps the president is well aware of this and is actually pushing for the major countries to curb global heating quickly. It is worth a try, for the sake of each and every one of us.
While Covid-19 preoccupied the medical systems of Europe, a million or so people who had contracted cancer did not get tested until late. They may die from this.
Three Russian officers were convicted of murder on grounds of being responsible for deploying the Buk missile launcher that was used to shoot down flight MH17.
I think it is wrong to charge soldiers with murder, in any form, simply for being involved with deploying a weapon, which weapon was later fired at civilians by mistake with fatal intent. That is not murder.
If soldiers had knowingly fired it at a civilian aircraft, that would be murder. But no one tried to prove that such a thing happened.
To respect the laws of war includes steadfastly refusing to stretch or twist them to "get at" people because they are on a side we oppose. We must support applying them evenhandedly.
*Seventy five countries led by the US, UK and France are expected to sign a declaration in Dublin on Friday to refrain from urban bombing.*
Russia, China, Israel, and India said they would not sign. Ukraine also refuses to sign, but maybe it would sign if Russia does.
*If you're outraged by XR and Just Stop Oil, imagine how disruptive climate breakdown will be.*
If you are concerned about the works of art that Just Stop Oil protesters threw liquids at, keep in mind that if civilization ceases to have spare funds to maintain museums, some of them will be exposed to the elements and decaying. The rest will have been taken by billionaires who expect to save a fraction of you, at the cost of becoming their slaves.
Some people are convinced that prosperity requires a growing population — even in the US.
We can't afford a growing population in the US. It uses too much resources already. I'd say that survival, in the long term, requires a gradually shrinking US population. People in the US consume so much resources that a decrease in the US population is crucial for the world as a whole.
A "young population" is a harbinger of disaster.
We can enable ordinary Americans to prosper and cut down the resources we use, if only we could put an end to plutocracy that demands ever more billions for each billionaire.
We have plutocracy because the billionaire plutocrats have purchased laws (and judges) that assure them the power to buy more laws and court decisions.
Playwright Caryl Churchill was given a lifetime achievement award. Then the award committee took the award back because Churchill had expressed support for Palestinians' Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Artists are entitled to have political views, like anyone else, but judgments about their merit as artists should not judge them by their views on political issues.
Climate talks must consider reforming agriculture so as to end its large greenhouse emissions.
Workers at over 110 Starbucks stores went on strike Thursday.
A few activists heckled Biden's speech at Cop29. They were banned from the whole event after that, under the excuse that they "put lives in danger".
We expect Egypt to carry out censorship, but US officials should be better than that.
Kari Lake, a Republican election liar, was defeated for governor of Arizona. Now the question is whether she will try to bluff by claiming she actually won, and, if so, how the state will put a halt to the imposture.
Supposedly leftist President Boric wants Chile to sign the TPP — which would eliminate Chile's right to regulate many areas of business and health.
Fossil fuel companies use these business-supremacy treaties to attack measures for decarbonizing. Boric also wants Chile to sign the Energy Charter Treaty, a business-supremacy treaty designed specifically to interfere with measures to reduce use of fossil fuels. It is effectively a suicide pact.
If you are in Chile, launch a fight against this absurd plan.
Right-wing politicians in Texas have, surprisingly, supported criminal justice reform, and this has allowed Texas to close many of its prisons.
*Secrecy Enabled by Rich Countries Lets Corporations Dodge $90 Billion in Taxes Per Year.*
The Cop27 climate conference achieved very little of its main goals.
but did make progress towards an agreement about having heavy-emissions countries pay to help poor low-emissions countries. The armies of fossil fuel lobbyists seem to have stymied it.
Kemp arranged to rig the Georgia election for governor, just as he did when he was first elected governor.
The Netherlands will ban possession of nitrous oxide because a small fraction of car collisions are attribute to use of it.
The cops say (about a three-year period) there were almost 1,800 road accidents involving nitrous oxide, including 63 fatal collisions, according to a police survey reported by the Dutch public broadcaster ONS.
There were a total of 582 road fatalities in 2021. These figures are not quite comparable, but we can estimate around 20 road fatalities in 2021 that were related to use of nitrous oxide. That is a rather small fraction of 600. I don't think drugs should be banned for such small reasons. I believe they ought to try an education campaign to help people use nitrous oxide safely. Certain basic safety precautions that San Francisco hippies make an effort to teach each other could win the community's support and be more effective than a prohibition.
The Tories have told housing inspectors to put the blame for dangerous situations on the residents, not on the building owner who could actually fix the problem. In some cases, fixing substandard housing requires changes that the tenants would not be allowed to make, even if they knew how, since they don't own the house.
Ticketmaster has a monopoly on selling tickets for many kinds of events. Now Americans may demand to break it up.
Over a century ago, the US government knew how to break up monopolies, and it did so systematically in every area. That is what we need. But my progressive tax on gross income may convince companies to split themselves up.
Musk invited Twitter users, including bots, to "vote" on whether to give the corrupter an account again.
Since it was Musk who decided who could vote, and how often, his unofficial elections are no more meaningful than Republicans' official elections,
Supreme Court justices sternly condemned this year's leak of the as-yet-unpublished Dobbs decision that would overturn Roe v Wade. One of them, Alito, is now proved to have leaked a future decision to a rich right-wing supporter in 2014.
Let's not let secondary matters such as leaks steal the stage from primary matters. The leaking of either of these rulings was a secondary issue compared with the two bad rulings themselves. Alito is a participant in both of these rulings, as well as one of the leaks.
Everyone involved in using water from the Colorado River is being told to reduce the amount used. It won't be easy, but otherwise the Glen Canyon Dam will stop generating electricity.
Twitter contains many years of tweets that are crucial records for historians, and now there is a danger that all or a large part of them will suddenly be lost.
We don't know who carried out a terrorist bombing on the street in Istanbul, but Erdoğan has made this an excuse to bomb the Syrian Kurds.
US citizens: call on the U.S. to support a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Faux News and associated newspapers have turned on the bullshitter, and are now supporting governor DeMentis.
The Tories plan to cut spending to help the poor after years of cuts that cut into the bone. This is not inevitable, it is a choice.
The underlying choice is about who matters and who does not. As usual, for Tories, those who matter are the rich. The mainstream media support that choice by selectively presenting parts of the truth, and the views of banksters.
Attacking famous works of art in ways that won't actually damage them is a sort of a sham attack. It may reassure people that there is no real danger. There is indeed no real danger in these protests, but the danger of global heating disaster is quite real.
Eventually, these protests will lose the power to startle, and stop doing any good.
*How Michigan Democrats took control for the first time in decades.*
*Draft Cop27 agreement fails to call for "phase-down" of all fossil fuels.*
*John Fetterman shows how Democrats can win back working-class Trump voters.*
A bird of ill omen: pallid swifts, which normally winter around the Mediterranean Sea, are wintering up north in Britain.
Scientists are collecting samples of the hundreds of thousands of tons of microbes that wash, annually, off the surface of melted parts of glaciers.
A false accusation on Instagram against the Iranian government claimed that it had sentenced 15,000 protesters to death. In fact, only one protester has been sentenced to death, though some others may also face execution.
To kill even one person for protesting is very shameful, but opponents of the regime must take more care to ensure they continue to deserve to be trusted.
Egypt has not sentenced Alaa Abd el-Fattah to death, but he may die from a hunger strike.
Most people in the UK agree that the UK should pay part of the costs for poor countries of "climate action".
The problem with this poll is that it poses the questions in the wrong order. First of all, how much will "climate action" (a vague term) cost? That depends on another question: what exactly is "climate action"? Are we talking about sea walls and drains, or are we talking about decarbonization?
If we get cracking on reducing global heating and other damage to natural ecosystems, the total price will be less; it may be bearable. In that case, it will make sense to adjudicate who ought to pay what share.
If on the contrary the planet roasters continue to delay actions to reduce the damage, the cost may grow to far more than the whole world can ever pay. That will mean we have hit total disaster, and there is no longer a global system in which any adjudication could actually be carried out, so the question has become purely theoretical.
What about intermediate scenarios? I can imagine that millions of people in wealthier countries would say, "Yes, I agreed we should pay part of the costs of helping poor countries cope with global heating, but there is a limit. We refuse to live in penury!"
To help poor countries is feasible and just only if the rich people in the wealthy countries bear most of this burden. We non-rich must not accept this burden for our countries while leaving until later the question of how much of that burden falls on the rich people. We know that they will try to dump all of it on the non-rich.
*Republicans scrape back control of US House after underwhelming midterms.* This means that one dissenter among them can defeat any legislative plan. The Senate is likely block their bills, too.
The question is, how far will Republicans go in holding the whole country hostage to impose their demands.
NATO has pretty much concluded that the missiles which hit Polish territory were Ukrainian anti-missile missiles, which were fired at a Russian missile and not at the ground where they hit.
* Island countries are more vulnerable to government oppression after natural disasters — according to new research — and there are concerns that the increased frequency of weather-related events due to the climate crisis, could see the further rise of autocracies around the world.*
*Australia told to end new fossil fuel subsidies if it wants Pacific [island nations'] support to host climate summit.*
To subsidize fossil fuels is a terrible thing for any country to do. The Labor government is much less friendly to fossil fuels than the previous right-wing government, and it has reduced the subsidy, but not reduced it to zero.
Smoking both marijuana and tobacco is more likely to cause lung damage than tobacco alone.
Lula spoke at Cop27 and warned that no place on Earth is safe from climate disaster. His program for Brazil is to protect the forest.
Curbing population growth will not help the urgent measures we need in order to curb global heating in this decade. Reducing the birth rate won't make a big difference in just a few years.
However, if we do enough in this decade to win a chance for civilization's future, the task of preventing global disaster will not be finished. That will take decades. During that time, reducing the birth rate will make a difference — especially when it comes to returning large amounts of land to the wild and reducing total consumption of natural resources.
Iranian thugs were recorded shooting at the public in a metro train station in Tehran. Other thugs attacked women inside the train.
To thwart the plan to use face recognition against protesters, I suggest protesters arm themselves with the tools required for destroying the state repression cameras mounted in public places where protests are likely. That would include ladders.
*Xi Jinping's cordial tone at G20 does not herald softer foreign policy.*
He is playing two roles in parallel: good empire-conqueror and bad empire-conqueror.
A volley of Musketry has driven out 3/4 of Twitter's remaining employees.
This reinforces my suspicions that Musk's damage to the company is his aim, not a mistake.
One Tory minister is a bold champion of defending nature and the climate. *Nature restoration, the climate crisis, sewage in our rivers — people care fundamentally about these things.*
Assad released around 7,000 political prisoners, and "only" around 130,000 of them remain in prison.
Tanzania suffers from a "young population,"due to a government that pushed for a bigger population.
A young population is a harbinger of probable megadeaths to come.
*All hail Jeff Bezos the philanthropist! The rest of us will just keep paying our taxes.* I despise Bezos for more than just the reasons that are widely agreed with. Because of the unjust policies of Amazon, I would refuse to deal with it even if it were just 5% of its actual size. And all of its competitors too, if they do similar bad things.
*Germans turning 18 to be offered €200 culture pass "birthday present".*
I think this is a wise policy.
US citizens: call on the FTC to thoroughly investigate supermarket giant Kroger's proposed merger with Albertsons.
A court already ruled against it, but that's not inevitably final.
Everyone: call on the Florida High School Athletic Association remove questions about menstruation from its student health forms.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to fight Republican election lies.
US citizens: call for an investigation of Salafi Arabia's ownership of a significant part of Twitter.
A terrorist bombing took place in Istanbul, targeting civilians. Turkey blamed the Kurdish militant group PKK, and the Syrian Kurds, but the PKK says that it does not approve of attacking civilians and had nothing to do with it.
The Putin forces have admitted that they were forced out of the north Kherson region by Ukraine's interdiction of supplies.
This article gives more information on their widespread looting and sabotage. Some looting had to have been organized by the Putin forces commanders. Some sabotage was carried out on the Nova Kakhova dam, Ukraine cannot try to repair the dam until it has chased the Putin forces out of artillery range. Even then, the Putin forces might fire missiles at it,
Google will pay damages of around $400 billion for tracking locations of users who had said not to track them.
This suggests three questions to me.
Most UK newspapers are right-wing and will attack any personal detail about an important Labour politician in innumerable absurd and vicious ways. Trying to give them nothing they could attack is self-defeating.
Angela Rayner, who I believe is the only former ally of Corbyn in an important position in Labour, just tried the opposite tactic: tell them something about her they are sure to revile (but not actually wrong in any way), and dare them to attack her.
Bravo, Ms Rayner!
Medical care in US prisons tends to be inadequate. If you have a minor treatable problem, the prison staff can deny you treatment so you develop a serious problem. If you have a serious problem, they can treat it insufficiently or badly, so that you die from it.
I suspect that their attitude is that anyone who isn't satisfied with the medical treatment received is a troublemaker and should be punished by suffering from the disease.
Interviews with Republicans reveal their split between the corrupter and DeMentis.
We must all recognize that increasing human population is a major obstacle to saving civilization from environmental danger.
See also
We need the human population to start decreasing, to save civilization. But if we want civilization to survive, we must also prevent human species from dying out entirely. The decrease in sperm counts, recorded since 1970, is global, and has sped up since 2000.
There is some evidence that the decrease is due to prenatal environmental pollution.
*India "committed to clean energy" but continues to boost coal production.*
The FBI is investigating the shooting of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen abu Akleh. Israel condemns the investigation on principle.
The need for this investigation is because Israel's investigation refused to recognize that soldiers must have chosen to kill her for no legitimate reason.
The Energy Charter Treaty, a business-supremacy treaty designed to prevent any and all measures to reduce fossil fuel extraction, incorporates a fundamental conflict of interest which tends to bias its judgments in favor of fossil fuel companies.
However, that is a secondary problem, because the treaty is explicitly designed to promote fossil fuel companies and interfere with measures to regulate them. Even if every judgment were made in a perfectly honest fashion, the tendency would be for them to do harm.
Interestingly, most CEOs don't say they believe they morally deserve to be paid enormous sums. On the contrary, many say the gap should be smaller. But they are accustomed to receiving high pay offers, for practical reasons that the article explains, and they don't insist on being paid less than that.
What should society do about this? We could ask investors, executives and directors to consider making executive salaries smaller. But the same factors that have made executive salaries so high are likely to make that request ineffective.
I suggest we instead increase the tax rate on high incomes, and close the loopholes that they use to avoid taxation entirely. It is the obvious solution that many people don't consider because plutocratists have smeared it.
How about the restoring the Eisenhower income tax?
"Feminist" education that reduces gender stereotyping is good for boys as well as for girls.
The UK is considering imposing a national ID card once again.
Britons, you defeated ID cards 15 years ago. Now you will have to defeat it again.
The question of what data the state will or won't link to the national ID number is a red herring, because many other organizations are likely to index databases by national ID number. It will become the easiest way to keep a data base about individuals. They will do this even if they don't really need to verify anyone's identity.
In Barcelona, I learned 15 years ago, the municipal swimming pools recorded who was a paying member by their national ID numbers. All they really need is to verify that a client paid for a membership, but checking the national ID card was quick and easy — and unjust.
The state too is likely to include a person's national ID number in other data bases of personal data.
Stephen Kinnock is the MP for Aberavon in Wales. If you know people who live there, please talking about the issue with them.
*Australia criticised for resisting Cop27 push to end international fossil fuel subsidies.*
Two apparently Russian missiles hit Poland in the region near the Ukrainian border. NATO will probably not respond directly militarily.
Although anything Putin says is likely to include lies, it is possible that these missiles were not fired intentionally at Poland.
Young people living near an Iraqi oilfield have a very high frequency of cancer, apparently due to pollution from flaring gas from the oil wells.
*Study suggests 24% of 12- to 34-year-olds globally listen at "unsafe level" on devices and visit noisy venues.*
*Trump repeats prison rape threat against journalists, has plans to "brutally imprison significant numbers of reporters," says Rolling Stone.*
*Elon Musk Would Have Done Better With Twitter If He’d Read Noam Chomsky.*
It is amusing to see Musk wildly change Twitter's rules and find that each change backfires worse than the previous one.
I don't care about Twitter the way many people do, because the requirements for having a Twitter account include things I won't do. And even if I did them, I couldn't afford the time it would cost me to actually use Twitter.
*The 1.5C climate target is dead — to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it.*
Every target will be cursed by planet roasters just as this one was, until the world conclusively defeats them and renders them powerless.
* All students at the University of Barcelona will have to take a mandatory course on the climate crisis.*
*'Welcome' But 'Must Be Improved': Groups React as Biden Unveils Plan to Cut Methane [emissions].*
The Putin forces meticulously destroyed all sorts of infrastructure in the areas of Kherson as they retreated.
This destruction was not limited to electricity, phones, and the Nova Kakhova dam. They destroyed even a small town school building, according to another article.
Fanatical Muslims in Pakistan banned the release of a Pakistani film that was submitted as Pakistan's entry for consideration for an award.
There is no chance that Corbyn will be allowed to run again under the Labour Party banner. Starmer is blocking anyone who wants change that goes beyond tweaks. Corbyn says he will run for reelection; perhaps he will have to run as an independent.
Given Starmer's plutocratist policies and dirty tricks for imposing them on the party, it is clear he will not allow Momentum or anyone else who wants more leftist policies to have any influence. If I were British, and if Corbyn had inspired me to join Labour, I would quit and support something else.
Could Corbyn join the Green Party and perhaps run as a Green candidate?
Important hospitals are closing in US inner cities, leaving the people who live there (mainly poor, mainly from disprivileged groups) in danger of dying on the way to a more distant hospital.
*When universities accept money from the fossil fuel industry, they demonstrate a complete lack of regard for their students' futures.*
*Tasmanian salmon farms used more than a tonne of antibiotics in 2022 disease outbreaks.*
This tends to make bacteria evolve resistance, which can kill people. Bacteria can share genes even between species, so resistant bacteria infecting salmon can transmit resistance to other bacteria that infect humans.
Faux News brings up distraction pseudo-issues to swing elections. The mainstream media pick up the same pseudo-issues.
Melting permafrost in the Arctic leaks CO2 and methane, and promotes large wildfires. That can make the difference between survival of civilization and destruction of civilization.
Secondarily, the melting causes buildings to sink into the melting permafrost underneath them.
Countries can continue scientific cooperation even when they are at war, if they decide to. It is important for the US and Russia to agree to do this. The US can make an exception to its sanctions for specific research projects.
Automated car control features supposedly will make the car safer, but they can just as easily backfire.
A court blocked the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.
We should not have allowed Penguin and Random House to merge. And we should not have allowed a giant conglomerate to buy either Simon & Schuster. The bigger a company is, the harder it is to keep it from harming people, intimidating people, or cheating people.
Musk's takeover of Twitter is a leveraged buyout. Musk could have borrowed the money himself, but he chose to foist the debt on Twitter. That will make it difficult for Twitter to I speculated that his aim might be to eliminate it. [pol note]
Sherif Osman is an Egyptian dissident who moved to the US long ago. On a visit to Dubai, he was arrested and may now be handed over to Egypt to be a political prisoner.
*The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) failed to pursue mandatory audits of [the corrupter] on a timely basis during his presidency.*
Alameda county passed a law prohibiting landlords from doing criminal background checks on would-be tenants.
It looks like the UK government is going to join in a campaign of repression against people who share Netflix passwords.
The name "Intellectual Property Office" indicates a basic leaning towards dividing people and imposing repression. This is a typical example. If you allow that term to shape your thinking, you will be evil too. Likewise for calling sharing "piracy."
Netflix does so many unjust things to its customers that I urge everyone to reject it entirely. In particular, it requires customers to run nonfree software designed specifically to restrict them.
Using it and sharing a subscription deals the company a small blow, which it deserves, but does not protect customers from most of the injustice.
*Anti-Vaxxers' disregard for basic human safety also makes them lousy drivers.*
The outgoing governor of Oregon has commuted all of Oregon's death sentences. Slowly the US advances toward abolishing the death penalty.
Progress, though slow, in understanding long Covid.
Google is adding client-side encryption, but due to the basic architecture it's not entirely trustworthy.
Google encryption may be effective against snoopers that have no special relationship with Google. However, Google remains ultimately in control of the encryption software and the operating system it runs on, so you can't trust it fully. Google will have the power to give you an "upgrade" that shows Google the plaintext of every encrypted message.
The right-wing allies of Bolsonaro won a majority in Brazil's congress. Human rights, conservation and democracy in Brazil are still in danger from them.
Iran's secret police are cracking protesters' Telegram accounts to get information to arrest people.
One weakness of the global biodiversity pact is that it allows countries to give permission to destroy natural ecosystems based on "offsets" as an excuse. This means a promise to construct a new wild area to replace the one that was destroyed. Such replacement is easy to say and hard to do.
The Jan 6 committee voted to recommend prosecution of the wrecker for four crimes, including supporting an insurrection.
The wrecker's lawyers tried to bribe witnesses to mislead federal investigators.
Republican George Santos, who was recently elected to Congress, seems to have filled up his biography with falsehoods.
Turkey may block Sweden from joining NATO because Sweden's supreme court has rejected the extradition of a Turkish journalist wanted by Erdoğan for political persecution.
*Dutch PM apologises for Netherlands’ role in slave trade.* Activists in former Dutch colonies imperiously rejected the apology because its words and its ceremony were not done to their satisfaction.
Twitter intentionally hid the origin of Pentagon political propaganda aimed at the Middle East.
* Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have ordered an indefinite ban on university education for the country’s women,*
*3M sets 2025 deadline to stop making [PFAS].*
After the wrecker's veiled but undeniable launch of an attack against the US government, prosecuting him is a necessary part of loyalty.
The CFPB has ordered Wells Fargo Bank to pay almost 4 billion dollars for fraud committed against 16 million customers.
The CFPB called Wells Fargo a "repeat offender" and said that this is just the beginning of its actions against the bank.
UN Secretary-General Guterres announced a "no-nonsense" climate defense conference for September 2023 for which *the price of entry is non-negotiable -— credible, serious, and new climate action and nature-based solutions that will move the needle forward and respond to the urgency of the climate crisis must be presented.*
A last-minute deal in a must-pass spending bill gave Maine fishermen 6 more years before they have to protect North Atlantic Right Whales.
Given the rate at which the population of those whales is decreasing, that could wipe them out.
Senator Warren rebuked the Pentagon for "vastly" underreporting civilian casualties in its required annual report.
In various countries, people are suing governments for failing to protect them from the harm global heating will do to them.
Radio City Music Hall decided in advance to exclude certain people from its shows, and sent bouncers to kick one of them out, after identifying her through facial recognition.
The reason they did not want her to watch the show is that she is a lawyer that works for a law firm that is handling someone's a legal dispute with the operators of Radio City Music Hall.
In addition to being a bizarre overreaction, it demonstrates why we need to ban the practice of identifying people by their faces, outside of very limited circumstances.
However, the crucial step in the chain of surveillance is not the step of matching the face in a picture against a database. Rather, it is systematically collecting images of people (whether video or still) that could be used to identify people. That is what we need to prohibit. We must prohibit surveillance cameras and allow only security cameras.
Right-wing extremist candidates combine racism and disinformation with promises to help the poor (but excluding poor blacks and poor immigrants).
Even if we stop thug departments from putting weapons on robots, some robots will endanger human rights in other ways. This article suggests some rules to limit use of robots by thug departments.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important. That article is one of the exceptions.
Why is it that so many US prosecutors so often violate the rights of the accused by making trials unfair? Perhaps it's because the Supreme Court has barred them from being sued for such illegalities.
Biden has a plan for how to eradicate homelessness in the US.
Everyone: tell the Starbucks board you will not cross the picket line.
US citizens: call for passage of the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would defend younger voters from tactics used to impede them from voting.
US citizens: call on Biden to give endangered species protection to manatees.
US citizens: call on Biden to drop Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange.
Modeling suggests 1/10 of all living species will be extinct by the end of this century, if global heating continues as projected.
Crown Prince Bone Saw is trying to "sportswash" Salafi Arabia's cruel and repressive reputation.
Tobacco companies used sportswashing, and maybe still do in some places. In the US, that was eventually prohibited.
*Crypto was supposed to solve financial corruption. But FTX shows it’s just got worse.*
I am not sure this is an inherent part of using cryptocurrencies. It may be due to a twisted way of using them: people buy and sell them through companies called "exchanges" rather than trading them directly. Those exchanges seem to tend particularly to corruption.
However, even if all users did everything directly in the currency's blockchain, it would seem to be just perfect for bribing politicians untraceably.
*Global corporations "cheating public out of billions in tax," say campaigners.*
This is why we designed GNU Taler to reliably identify the payee. It gives anonymity to the payer only.
Former enslaved migrant workers in Thailand are suing the UK supermarket Tesco for selling the clothing that they were forced to make.
Amy Goodman: *The US Justice Department Must Drop Charges Against Julian Assange.*
Cinderella as a joke on Louis XIV's fancy for glass.
US right-wingers have danced with fascism and Nazism since the 1930s and have only occasionally been afraid to show it.
Peru's suppression forces have killed 20 protesters, generally by shooting them. This caused protests to spread. People demand that Congress resign for new elections, but Congress refuses.
Musk has banned Twitter users from posting information about where to find them on other sites.
Of course, you shouldn't be used by Facebook or Instagram at all, anyway.
Twitter's policy may be illegal in the US. I wonder, though, whether FTC enforcement power can prevail against a billionaire who is willing to lose millions of dollars as a result of his choice of policies. If he chooses to defy the FTC, can they do more than fine Twitter a few million?
(satire) *Johnson & Johnson Raises Price Of Band-Aids To $100,000 Apiece.*
*[The wrecker] Is Not Our Biggest Problem: It's the Open Fascism He Has Unleashed.* Many fascists are flexible enough to follow another authoritarian leader, such as DeMentis, instead of the wrecker.
The article discusses a conjecture that fascism wakes up in the US every 80 years as the people who defeated fascism before die and cease to lead the country to reject fascism.
How light pollution pushes animals and plants to extinction.
*Cop15 deal includes target to protect 30% of nature on Earth by 2030.*
The basic question is, will countries give this more than lip service? For instance, most of the UK's "protected marine areas" are hardly protected at all.
The article claims that China imposed the deal despite objections from many countries. Given that the survival of civilization and the natural world are at stake, I feel little sympathy for anyone that refuses to help save. But these objections may make the treaty a dead letter.
The biodiversity movement seems to have adopted as a matter of faith that indigenous humans will always protect biodiversity and ecosystems. In many cases they will, because they depend on those ecosystems for their living. In those cases, damage to those ecosystems will harm them so they will oppose such damage.
But this is not invariably guaranteed. Human beings have been polluting their environments for short-term benefit for millennia. Humans often bend and redraw their moral rules to excuse their own benefit. Humans can resist this tendency, but nobody is automatically above it due to descent alone.
The part of this agreement that is absolutely perverse: the plan to establish a parallel patent system in the name of preventing "biopiracy." The patent system we already have is harmful and unjust; this plan creates a second parallel system of restrictions on the use of knowledge, adds a second harm, a second injustice, to the first.
The goal, clearly, is to give some income to poor countries. That goal is fine, but do it in some other way!
*Tokyo will require new homes built from 2025 to have solar panels.*
California adopted a "blueprint" for achieving a "net zero emissions", but the plan is bogus since it calls for carbon capture and storage, which has never been made to work properly.
A blueprint means a precise set of measurements for something to be made. A rough sketch is not a blueprint.
The UN-brokered truce in Yemen could lead to an end to the war.
Joseph Stiglitz: *The Road to Fascism*
* Growing hardship is all but assured in 2023, and it will provide even more fertile ground for dangerous demagogues.*
The story of the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972 makes me think of Putin's shelling and missile attacks on Ukraine.
Everyone: call for a treaty to regulate production of plastics.
US citizens: call on Congress to put an end to private prisons.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: tell Federal Insurance Office that renters and homeowners need data on how global heating impacts their insurance.
Increased heat may explain around 8000 shootings each year in the US.
The thugs who killed Ronald Greene have been charged with crimes including homicide.
I can't tell whether one of these charges does justice to the lies the thugs told about how Greene died.
We are all waiting to see if high officials of the thug department will face charges for trying to protect the killers themselves from charges.
The reason Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested seems to have been an illegal funds transfer between two parts of FTX whose funds were supposed to be kept separate.
*Ellsberg, Donziger Among Those Demanding Freedom for Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale.*
Biden endorsed Manchin's dirty deal to undermine environmental regulations on energy projects. Even worse, he endorsed the values that deal is based on: that hypothetical reductions in the price of fossil fuel is more important than protecting or planet from global heating or pollution.
Colombia has implemented a progressive wealth tax and other tax increases for the rich. The specific details of the wealth tax respond to problems encountered by previous wealth taxes in Europe, to ensure it touches only the rich.
Leftist film director Ken Loach accused the BBC of helping to write Corbyn out of history, including trying to make Corbyn out as anti-semitic.
He also stated that 200,000 members or more have left the Labour Party in response to Starmer's right-wing shift.
Workers at 100 Starbucks stores will strike for three days.
Biden said, during the campaign, that he wanted to eliminate the death penalty. However, the US just voted against a UN resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.
An interesting example of collective governance of an organization.
Tunisia's authoritarian president has reorganized how the legislature functions and held an election under totally new rules. There were not many candidates and not many voters.
*[Famous] Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti arrested after criticism of death penalty [given to protesters].*
Pointing at technological advances that are supposed to eliminate global heating in a few years is a standard denialist tactic. They have often cited fusion power for this, but also carbon capture and storage and "carbon offsets" (which tend to be bogus).
We don't have time to wait for these things.
Insulate Britain protests met with ire from motorists, but everyone now sees that they were right.
Australia will build more large grid storage batteries so as to keep unneeded renewable electricity for when it is needed.
The corrupter is marketing NFT "trading cards". The money people pay for them goes to a secret business, and I suspect it won't appear in the corrupter's future tax returns.
QAnonenties are starting to transfer their worship from the wrecker to Musk.
They are mostly authoritarian followers and it isn't crucial to them which authoritarian leader they can follow.
AT&T, Amazon, Comcast and Intel donated to the campaigns of Republican election denialists, well before this year's election.
Article talking about how the world is tailored toward men.
For the most of the issues listed, I agree that we should change practices so that they serve women as well as men. I disagree in regard to office temperature, though, for the simple reason that you can wear more clothing without limit, but there are limits to how much you clothing can remove in an office with other workers. If at that point some people are still too hot, the only solution that can satisfy everyone is to make the office cool enough for them, and for those who find that too cold to wear another layer.
There were times that my office in the Stata Center was so hot that I needed to be nude to be comfortable. I kept the door locked so that visitors would knock and I could ask them to wait a minute. I did not usually explain that this was so I could put my shirt and pants on.
The presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico condemned the ouster of Peru's President Castillo as a "legislative coup", saying it was backed by the US.
This is not an absurd idea; the US backed such a coup in Bolivia a few years ago, and in Honduras a few years before that.
Information in the article suggests that the poor voted him into office and still support him. They are now protesting vigorously, and the "forces of law and order" are shooting and gassing them from helicopters. It sounds like the thugs support the right wing and treat the people as the enemy.
This does not necessarily imply that the coup story is the whole truth; there are valid reasons to argue that it is Castillo who tried to overthrow constitutional order, as President Boric of Chile said.
It seems clear that there was a process of reciprocal escalation. In such a situation, it is easy to perceive the escalations by the side you oppose as injustice, and the escalations by the side you support as legitimate self-defense.
To judge the right and wrong of such a process requires a lot of facts about the actions and the background. All I can do is try to judge which of the other presidents to trust.
(satire) *Elementary School Lesson On Water Cycle Explains How Water Becomes Property Of Nestlé.*
*Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk.* Musk defines "free speech" the way autocrats do.
*Workers, Not "Stockbrokers and CEOs," Will Pay Price for Fed Rate Hikes: Warren.*
*Plastic ‘nurdles’ stop sea urchins developing properly, study finds.*
It would be nice to imagine that this provides a way to protect kelp forests, but enough plastic to do that would surely harm other species too.
Australia has revoked a rule, made by the previous planet-roaster government, that permitted the burning of wood waste from native trees to count as "renewable".
In practice, native forests are not renewable under present conditions.
The world-wide campaign to prevent nondisclosure agreements from being used by employers to cover up any abuses, from harassment to rape, is making substantial progress, but not in the UK.
You can't expect the Tories to eagerly pursue this goal, because they represent the rich who commit the abuses and want them covered up.
My first experience with a nondisclosure agreement was when I asked someone at CMU for a copy of the Xerox laser printer software source code. He said he had actually promised in advance to refuse to share that code with me and other colleagues at MIT. Shame on him! He had made a commitment to be a jerk and deny his cooperation to his colleagues.
From this I learned that signing a nondisclosure agreement for generally useful technical information, such as software, was betraying the whole world — so I vowed I would never agree to one, and I never knowingly done so.
That led me, a year or two later, to the conclusion that nonfree software was an injustice, regardless of whether the nonfreedom was brought about by a nondisclosure agreement.
"Crisis pregnancy centers" look like abortion clinics, but their mission is to confuse females so that they don't get abortions. They get away with lies because they are almost exempt from regulation.
The right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court have protected them from regulations intended to protect women from being deceived.
*Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly told to work while infected as Covid surges.*
In the US, this is achieved by denying workers paid sick leave. They can't afford to do the right thing and avoid infecting follow workers, even customers.
The infection is spreading very fast. I presume it is one of the recent Omicron variants. At least that will reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries.
Global heating is killing millions of fir trees in Oregon.
China's relaxation of restrictions on capturing wildlife for food *could weaken animal protection and pose a hazard to public health, say experts(.
The term "post-pandemic" is wishful thinking, not reality.
There is a suspicion of fraud in the vote-counting of Fiji's election.
Fiji has a history of real trouble in its elections. I wonder whether it will be possible to assure the honesty of this election.
*CFPB Applauded for Proposing "Public Rap Sheet" for Corporate Criminals.*
Drivers in London forcibly moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests. If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions for new tactics for climate protesters.
Ukraine's plans to reconquer Crimea militarily may be impossible or unwise.
The places that Russian troops were stationed since 2014 include, as a fact, parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but Putin always denied that this was the case. He should not be invited to acknowledge it belatedly now and reap any benefit.
To negotiate the fate of Crimea is more sensible. An honest election would have been a legitimate approach in 2014, but Putin drove out or exiled those who supported Ukraine, then (according to this article) lost anyway and lied about the result.
Putin's elections in Russia are blatantly dishonest.
The population of Crimea today is different from the population in 2014. If an election is to be held now about which country Crimea should belong to, which people should vote in it? To give the decision to the current population would mean that Putin (or anyone else) can conquer territory and legitimize that with an unfair election. To give the decision to the 2014 population might be asking for further violence.
The incredibly complex history of reprocessing and disposing of nuclear waste in the UK.
In theory, the process is clearly simple. In practice, it keeps getting more complex.
*Flying insect numbers plunge 64% since 2004, UK survey finds.*
Some years ago, a similar decline was observed in Germany.
This portends ecological disaster.
US citizens: call on the House Ways and Means Committee to share the wrecker's tax returns with the Senate Finance Committee ASAP. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Democrats including Biden to seek the kind of "bipartisanship" that means progressive policies that many Republicans support — not deals with right-wing extremist Republicans. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to investigate corruption and ethical lapses at the Supreme Court. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to hold corporations accountable for price gouging. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
(satire) *Elon Musk Receives Experimental Neuralink Implant In Attempt To Delete Memory Of Being Booed.*
The EU is setting up a system of "green tariffs" to charge imports based on how much greenhouse gas is emitted in producing them.
Anti-abortion fanatics have proposed to move on from laws criminalizing performing abortions to prosecuting people who have abortions.
* Without a plan in place to minimise infection [by Covid-19], a "moving on" strategy leaves vulnerable people behind.*
Most people want to believe the danger is gone, and governments have decided not to let them do it. It's good for business also. How easy it is to dismiss suggestions to protect yourself and others with a mask by saying, "It is no longer obligatory."
It's no longer legally obligatory, but it is morally obligatory.
When someone without a mask sits near me on a train or plane, I ask per to please wear a mask. If perse says, "I don't have a mask," I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its plastic wrapper. The masks sold by BYD are simple to put on, so I offer those.
One of Erdoğan's political rivals has been convicted of insulting Turkey’s supreme election council, calling them "fools."
Many countries make it a crime to insult officials. Indonesia just made itself one of them.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult anyone — even me, even you. Erdoğan shows plenty of contempt for freedom and democracy. He even started a small civil war to reverse an electoral defeat.
Just after Cabot Oil & Gas (part of Coterra Energy) accepted 15 criminal charges for polluting the water of Dimock. Pennsylvania, the state government allowed it to resume fracking there.
Fracking should be illegal. The risk of poisoning groundwater for centuries or more is too high a price to pay for some more fossil fuel to burn — especially since burning it is harmful globally.
The Arctic: Hotter, rainier, wetter, and less ice and birds.
Extreme weather (which is partly caused by global heating) has devastated the Florida orange crop.
We must expect all sorts of crops to be harmed by global heating effects.
Musk urged his Twitter followers to adopt QAnonsense.
Maybe he is trying to compete with the wrecker to seize power in the US.
US citizens: phone your senators and implore them to reject any bill containing Manchin's environmental planning deregulation deal.
You can phone (888) 997-5380. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US corporations gave 8 million dollars to Republican election liars.
Explaining the enormous challenges of going from "ignition" in a laser-fusion target to the production of commercially useful power, and why this is likely to take decades.
We need to quit using fossil fuels fast — we can't wait for fusion to be usable for this job.
*Brazil goldminers carve illegal ‘Road to Chaos’ out of Amazon reserve.*
They use bulldozers and power-diggers, and carry submachine guns.
The US keeps using economic sanctions to punish unjust or aggressive governments, but the sanctions almost never have any positive effect.
Without a big increase in humanitarian aid donations, the UN predicts that 200 million people will die in 2023 for the lack of aid.
200 million is a very large number of deaths in one year. The average number is around 83 million. The human population will decrease in 2023 if this forecast comes true. The 200 million maybe in addition to the 80 million that would have died anyway.
The typical annual increase in human population is around 18 million. It follows that 200 million deaths will mean that the total human population decreases by several years' worth of population growth.
It sees that we have reached the point at which the global disaster we have caused starts to kill so many people that it reduces the human population. This is very bad.
I have begged humans to reduce their birth rate, so that we could reduce the population the painless way and avoid ever reaching this point.
*Eels facing population collapse, conservation groups warn.*
The EU has given in to the usual short-term thinking, prioritizing short-term profits over sustainability. Such a decision is tantamout to saying, "Let's make one last batch of money by wiping out the fish."
DeMentis has started an "investigation" of everything about Covid-19 vaccines.
They may not find any serious problem or wrongdoing, but they will have plenty of opportunities to talk endlessly about hypothetical, conceivable problems, thus blowing smoke that they can claim implies the presence of a fire.
The US government protected people against possible right-wing attempts to ban interracial and same-sex marriages.
This is good, but it is just a part of the harm that right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court threaten to do. Since Democrats refused to eliminate the filibuster and expand the court, Americans are now sitting ducks for at least two years.
The NLRB funding is inadequate, and the result is that workers' rights go undefended.
Varoufakis calls for two major economic changes: to make corporations belong to their workers, and to reduce the dependence on banks for financial transactions.
A thug in Vallejo, California, attacked a documentalist who was standing on his own porch, making a video of the thug's traffic stop.
The documentalist sued and the city paid $300,000 to settle the dispute.
The recording showed the thug making false accusations against Burrell. Such false accusations are a common first step in an attempted frame-up. Any thug caught doing this, even if nothing worse results, should be fired and blacklisted for all jobs that involve special authority over the public.
The Keystone 1 tar sands oil pipeline leaked 600,000 gallons of oil into a creek in Kansas that feeds a river and a reservoir for 800,000 people.
The pilot program to privatize Medicare includes insurance companies that have been fined for inflating charges.
Twitter has more or less blocked access to a bot account that tweets where Musk's private jet goes.
*Covid-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but the fight isn't over.*
Three million is around one percent of the US population.
*Hundreds of Oath Keepers Have Worked for DHS in Recent Years, Report Finds.*
There are probably tens of thousands of workers for the DHS, so this is not necessarily a large fraction. Nonetheless, it is dangerous.
Protecting biodiversity (or any aspect of the environment) requires ending government subsidies to activities which damage biodiversity. Allowing businesses to excuse damage to habitats by means of "offsets" is asking to be lied to.
*Framing men as the "villains" gets women no closer to better romantic relationships.*
That assumption means getting stuck in a shallow form of feminism based on not believing things can get any better.
*Labor proposal to fix Australia’s broken environmental protection system could revolutionise sector.*
*The 50-Year Takeaway From Middle-Class America. We [Americans] should be demanding the same benefits enjoyed by less wealthy but more progressive nations.*
US states provide enormous special tax breaks to companies — almost always big companies that can play one state against another. A campaign seeks to put an end to this, first of all by limiting them and publishing them.
I proposed a federal law to enable any one state to object to any special subsidy propsed by any other (competing) states. This would prevent a company from playing one state against another.
The governor of Bali reassures foreign tourists and visitors that the prohibition against sex outside of marriage won't threaten them in Bali.
There are other places in Indonesia which are also interesting to visit, but maybe they won't be safe.
More importantly for Indonesia, this law also restricts freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
No country should allow a prudish religion any influence in its laws. Laws driven by Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are causing cruelty and repression around the world.
Although no court has proved that Governor Snyder conspired to put the people of Flint at risk of lead poisoning, we have plenty of reason to believe he and his high officials did so. I can't put him in prison, but my conclusion is that he's guilty, partly because the ideology of the Republican Party is to do things like that to the poor, weak, and disprivileged.
*Biden faces growing pressure to drop charges against Julian Assange.* Pressure is coming from Australia and Brazil, as well as American defenders of freedom of the press.
So phone the White House and say, drop the charges against Assange — reporting on leaked dirty secrets must not be a crime. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
New Zealand will gradually ban tobacco by raising the age requirement to buy tobacco by one year per year, Tobacco is death, and I hope you will not smoke it. But banning a widely used drug generally leads to widespread corruption and injustice.
China does not allow fair trials. To bias the trial of opposition publisher Jimmy Lai to be fair, China kicked his British lawyer out of Hong Kong.
The UK plans to hand out 130 more fossil fuel licenses for the North Sea. This puts civilization in danger. So environmentalists are suing.
*Plan to protect 30% of Earth divides and inspires at Cop15.*
Tories have undermined the National Health Service to the point where it can't even tackle the backlog of millions of important but non-urgent operations.
Iran is executing protesters after bogus trials.
Peruvians detest Congress, which removed President Castillo from office, even more than they detest President Castillo.
I wish I had a basic understanding of politics in Peru, or knew someone who could explain it to me, so that I could have a background against which to judge what is happening.
Scientists started a fusion reaction that released about 25% more energy than what was used to start it. This demonstrates in principle that controlled fusion can be used to generate energy. There is a long way to go to develop fusion into a practical energy source. For the next few decades, survival of civilization still depends on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy as fast as possible.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to vote to end US support for Salafi Arabia's war with Yemen. *UN Report Shows 11,000 Children Killed or Maimed in This US-Backed War.* The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the U.S. Senate to investigate corruption and ethical lapses at the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Most managers in the UK say that stress over the cost of living is making workers anxious and interfering with their work.
Those managers are in a special position to tell the company executives, "Give the workers a raise!" Will they do it?
How Big Pharma used threats against governments to defeat the proposed "patent waiver" for Covid-19 vaccines in the World Trade Organization.
The WTO is a business-supremacy treaty; its basic purpose is to give business more power over the world's governments. We need to eliminate most of that power by greatly weakening every business-supremacy treaty.
4400 homeless people live. in the "skid row" of Los Angeles, and they have only 9 toilets to use at night.
The UN standard for refugee camps calls for far more than that.
Rep. Greene declares her support for an armed coup.
When she takes her oath of office again in January, she will say it insincerely. Is there any way to exclude her from Congress over this?
The UK nurses say Tories are making false statements rather than negotiating, while the "Labour" party doubts that Britain can afford a 10% raise for them.
This reflects Starmer's implicit rejection of a change in the general policy of starving and freezing the poor to enrich the rich.
Here's what a true Labour leader would say.
Some pertinent facts.
The US is blocking the full adoption and effective enforcement of many crucial treaties.
To present one extreme example, every member of the UN has ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, except for the US.
The House of Commons will observe a minute of silence in remembrance of the Nazi genocide of Jews (and some others).
The threat of Nazism still exists ad is growing. I suggest that the House of Representatives adopt a similar annual practice, starting this month. It won't be easy for the Republicans that will control the House next year to reject this. They support Nazis but don't want to admit it.
The Tories want to start a new coal mine in England, so they claim that steelmaking companies want that coal.
Turns out, they don't.
Others say it is a boondoggle to artificially create jobs in a certain region. That could be true, but why do it this way? There are many kinds of jobs that could really be needed. Indeed, Many of the region's inhabitants oppose the mine.
I suspect that the Tories' real motive is to help some rich donor get richer.
Ralph Nader: As Republicans push numerous plans that most Americans would oppose, most Democratic candidates fail to go on the offensive against them.
A US Forest Service crew head carried out a prescribed burn to reduce the danger of wildfires. Things went wrong and it started a big wildfire. But is that a reason to arrest him?
Perhaps the Forest Service needs to change some aspects of its practices. I am not an expert on prescribed burns, and I don't want to become one, so I have no opinion on that.
But what is absolutely clear is that arresting the employees who carry them out is absurd trumpery.
The bullshitter falsely claimed that Black Lives Matter protesters were part of a conspiracy called "Antifa", and told the DHS to find proof.
An internal investigation by the DHS published a report that *describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain.*
An investigation by the House of Representatives found that the idea of natural gas as a temporary "bridge fuel" was an intentional deception: Big Oil's real goal was always to make it a permanent choice.
The article points out a number of ways in which extracting transporting and burning gas are dangerous. But Big Oil's propaganda still tries to convince people that gas is safe.
What's at stake in the biodiversity conference? *We are tearing holes in the fabric of life on Earth.*
*US Can End Its Complicity in Horrendous Yemen War Today.*
The US needs mask mandates to stop the spread of flu, RSC and Covid-19.
This one measure is effective against all pathogens that spread through the air.
When someone sits near me in a train or plane and isn't wearing a mask, I ask per to wear one. If perse says perse doeesn't have one, I offer per an unused N95 mask, still in its unbroken plastic wrapper.
Often perse responds that it is not obligatory. I'm going to try out this response: "Legally it is not obligatory. Morally it is obligatory."
A campaign to give all US personnel stationed at bases in the UK training in driving on the left side of the road.
People have shot at electric power stations in Oregon and Washington.
The attackers have not been identified, but the obvious suspects are right-wing extremists. That region (outside its big cities) is known for the presence of people who hate the very idea of government and can consider any sort of sabotage justified if it damages government.
Afghan refugees being smuggled into Greece were caught and charged with doing the smuggling. One such conviction has been overturned on appeal.
Warnock won the election for senator from Georgia in the face of powerful and effective Republican voter suppression. The Warnock's general election for senator in 2022 had a million fewer voters than Warnock's general election in 2020. And the subsequent runoff in 2022 had a million fewer voters than the runoff for the 2020 election.
Republican voter suppression is intended to hit Democrats harder than Republicans. Why it did not succeed this time in defeating Warnock, I don't know, and I wonder.
The article explains that Georgia Republicans have already passed further laws to make it harder to fight voter suppression in 2024.
An Italian is trapped in the Italian embassy in the United Arab Emirates because he has been sentenced to a large fine and he has no money.
UK ministers refused to negotiate with the NHS workers who are preparing to strike soon.
This confirms, in my view, their intention to destroy the NHS.
Se me dijo que mis chistes son polisemias. Dije, "No, polisemia es tener polizontes en la sangre."
US citizens: call on Biden to extend paid sick leave to railway workers.
Everyone: call on Wall Street banks to keep their pledge to stand against racial injustice by forcing their lobbyists to drop their lawsuit against the CFPB.
*Court Orders U.S. to Examine California Shipping Lanes' Role in Endangered Whale Deaths.*
Ayatollah Khamenei is badly ill and may be dying. If he dies, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is likely to take power.
The writer speculates that the IRGC might give Iranians personal freedoms, to reduce resistance to their rule, but not democracy, and expects power rivalries to continue unchanged.
I would rejoice to see Iranians have somewhat more freedom. I hope that the US and Iran can make peace some day.
An extremely corrupt Kansas City thug faces charges of collaborating with a drug gang to force 73 women into slavery and prostitution. He is also accused of raping people to intimidate them, and a series of frame-ups.
The whole thug department knew about his pattern of crime, and stood behind their fellow thug.
*‘Only 100 meters apart’: Ukrainians and [Putin forces] face off in Donetsk.*
I read that the Putin forces' persistent focus on taking Bakhmut is that it is the next step toward capturing 100% of the Donetsk oblast. If they take Bakhmut, and then take Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, they could boast of holding 100% of one of the regions that Putin claims to have annexed this year.
In military terms, this would be worth nothing, but that's the sort of irrationality that tends to happen under an absolute ruler.
*Press Freedom Champions Renew Call for DOJ to Drop Charges Against Assange.*
*Macron announces free condoms for 18- to 25-year-olds in France.*
This offer is a good start; it should be extended to everyone.
*[Dissident Ilya Yashin] sentenced to eight and a half years over series of posts about [Putin forces] atrocities in Bucha.*
Putin's obedient servants lie on command, too afraid to refuse. The wrecker has led US Republicans to do likewise. Yashin has chosen to go to prison rather than become a tool of falsehood.
Comparing imprisoned antipollution protester Violet Coco with convicted polluters: *less than 6% of people charged with environmental pollution and property damage offenses are sent to prison.*
*Racism poses public health threat to millions worldwide, finds report.*
Lula has sued Bolsonaro for various reasons, one of which is accusing the country's computerized voting system of being vulnerable.
Bolsonaro has done much to undermine democracy and elections in Brazil, and morally deserves punishment. However, the general claim that Brazil's computerized voting system makes Brazil's elections vulnerable is valid. That is because the machines record only totals, and do not keep individual paper ballots that voters marked by hand. Such systems are vulnerable to someone, somehow.
Brazilian experts campaigned against this system when it was adopted, demanding a system that enabled the results to be audited, but they lost the battle.
There is no evidence that anything wrong happened in the voting machines in this election, but Brazil should change to an audit-able voting system for the sake of the future.
Joseph Stiglitz: *Raising interest rates to tame inflation will only cause more pain.*
Biden has taken significant steps towards releasing all the prisoners remaining in Guantanamo. That would enable the US to put an end to its national shame.
Senator Sinema has officially left the Democratic Party, which suggests that she will run as an independent in 2024.
As the article said, we already knew she belongs to the Plutocratic Party. What matters is, will this make it easier or harder to elect a better senator in her place? I fear this will make it harder — because it won't be possible to eliminate her in the Democratic Party. I don't know whether her presence in the general election as an independent candidate would help or hurt.
Congress is trying to impose a link tax through an increasingly frequent sneaky method — last minute inclusion in "must pass" omnibus bills.
(satire) *Elon Musk Worried He Won't Have Enough Twitter Employees Left To Fire On Christmas Eve.*
US zoning laws obstruct the conversion of surplus office space into badly needed residential space.
Republicans have added to the NDAA a clause to repeal the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for the military.
This is more harmful than it appears. The vaccination requirement has convinced some right-wing fanatics to leave the US military, and we need to keep it going.
It also helps keep the troops healthy.
Accusing the US rail unions of being weak-spirited and divided.
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The Republican county supervisors in Cochise county had refused to certify that county's election. Then they got a court order which required them to certify the vote, so they did.
They presented no grounds for refusing to certify the results, but we can see that it was mad hatred: they hate the election so much that they wanted to fight it regardless of what effects that would have.
Ironically, if they had got away with not certifying that county's vote, the result would have been to elect one more Democrat to the House of Representatives. That would have been a major setback to Republican power nationwide.
I therefore conclude that the refusal was not an instance of Republican "by hook or by crook" cheating, but rather mad rage against free elections.
I previously posted that Cochise county's vote was majority Democratic, because had I read that in another article. That would have made the refusal consistent with by-hook-or-by-crook cheating. But it appears that that other article was mistaken about this.
US citizens: call on the US to end subsidies for fracking in Argentina.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and say to reject anything like the SECURE Act (HR 2954) and the EARN Act (S 4808). These bills would change Social Security to give less to the poor and more to the rich. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The FTC has blocked the merger of Microsoft and Activision, both giants in making video games.
These video games are nonfree software, which means they treat users unjustly. I would not allow any of them on my computers, and I urge you to reject them too.
Notwithstanding that, it is still important to stop them from merging. Allowing them to merge would exacerbate the evil of concentration of industry, and do nothing to reduce the evil o f nonfree software.
The president of Peru was removed from office by Congress. He had attempted to prevent this by dismissing Congress.
I don't have enough contact with Peru to judge which side was basically at fault, but I lean towards trusting Arce's view. He is a leftist elected president in a country that borders on Peru, so he has surely paid plenty of attention.
More about the new president Dina Boluarte, who was previously the vice president.
Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff by under 3%.
It is good that he won, but the closeness of the outcome shows that most Republicans hate our freedoms so much that they will vote for even a lying creep who will help destroy them.
* Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening teachers, schools and education because they need the poorly educated to make up their voting base.*
*Brown University bans caste discrimination throughout campus in a first for the Ivy League.*
I think caste discrimination should be prohibited like race or sex discrimination.
Apple has dropped its plan to scan every user's photos and will use another approach to protect children from would-be abusers.
The new approach seems not to be a threat to other users' privacy.
Plutocratist "mainstream" Democrats continue to control the party's leadership in the House of Representatives.
The Labour Party is turning to mythical trickle-down economics, saying it aims to turn the UK into a "global start-up hub."
Poor Britain. Competing to help the rich dominate society won't help anyone but the rich.
Congress is considering a kind of "link tax" to require discussion platforms to pay for hosting links to news sites. It would harm libraries and smaller news media.
It would also give lots of subsidy to Big Media.
Criticizing Effective Altruism: to program people as donation robots is desocializing, isolating and alienating.
I suspect those things reduce people's lifespan.
*Pegasus spyware was used to [crack] reporters’ phones. I’m suing its [developers].*
Referring to the developers of a program as "creators" is propaganda for ideas we would be wiser not to promote.
The US rescued hostage Brittney Griner by trading an important Russian arms dealer for her.
Griner deserved to be freed for the simple reason that what she did was not wrong. However, I don't understand why Americans clamor for Griner's release more than for the release of everyone imprisoned in the US for possession of marijuana. There are many Americans unjustly imprisoned in the US for doing nothing more than what Griner did. They too deserve to be freed.
It is a shame to let arms merchant Viktor Bout go free, though.
I think we should not pressure the US to try to ransom hostages, because that pressure benefits the regimes that take hostages at the expense of the US. If I were a hostage, I would say, "Don't ransom me if the ransom hurts my country!"
Denying the call to boycott Russian music.
I take a stronger stand: it is misguided and destructive to blame "Russia" for Putin's crime of aggressive war. Putin is the one responsible. Let us not refer to the army that invaded Ukraine as "the Russian army" — call them the Putin forces.
The Tories plan to open a new coal mine in England. Supposedly the reason is to reduce the cost of electricity, but the mine will produce coking coal to be exported to make steel. Meanwhile, the steel industry is looking to replace the use of coking coal to reduce its emissions.
*The "fate of the entire living world" will be determined at the Cop15 UN biodiversity summit, according to leading scientists.* It is considering a partly concrete plan to slow the destruction of the Earth's natural ecosystems.
[Effective altruism] is "profoundly individualistic" and reliant on the status quo. EA's calculations assume that humans won't change. But humans have to change if we are going to [save] life on Earth.*
Superstitious anti-vaxxers have convinced each other that a blood transfusion with "vaccinated blood" is somehow dangerous. One couple tried to prevent their baby from getting a transfusion unless it was with "unvaccinated blood"; since the baby would have died without surgery and a transfusion, the state intervened and took guardianship to authorize the operation.
Qatar promises to vastly expand its fossil fuel exports; the resulting greenhouse gas emissions would imply global disaster.
The specific point that the total emissions from Qatar's exports would eventually add up to more than one year of the whole world's emissions seems like a red herring to me. I would expect that the same is true for the US too, and perhaps several other countries.
But even though this is just a red herring, I think the article's conclusions are plausible anyway.
At least four on the Supreme Court seem to lean towards the bizarre "independent state legislature" theory. The confrontation in Arizona, in which one county refused to certify its vote, is exactly the kind of situation where a state legislature could (under this theory) arbitrarily make up its own presidential election results.
The revised Electoral Count Act could close that mad loophole, if Congress passes it this month.
US citizens: call on the US government to block Amazon's planned merger with One Medical.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to stand up for keeping Ilhan Omar on the foreign affairs committee.i
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Biden administration not to allow oil drilling near Chaco Canyon.
Chaco Canyon is beautiful, as well as having great historic significance.
Global heating is causing sea animals to move to different habitats. The result will be to wipe out most of the seabirds in western Europe.
Climate defense activists defeated Manchin's "dirty deal" to undermine environmental regulations in the US Senate.
He could try again to pass it in another way, so the fight is not conclusively finished.
*DOJ subpoenas officials in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona for communications with [the wrecker] around 2020 election.*
Al Jazeera asserts it has proof that Israeli forces fired directly at reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, and has filed a case with the International Criminal Court about this.
The Biden administration has given Haitians in the US temporary protected status through August, 2024.
(satire) *SWAT Team Busts Down Door Of Denver Woman's Home To Apologize For Previous Raid.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
US citizens: call on Congress to abolish the debt ceiling now.
Lawyers hired by the corrupter searched a rented storage unit and found additional secret government documents.
Great 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg dares the US to prosecute him like Julian Assange. He wants to challenge the constitutionality of such prosecutions.
Ellsberg faced the threat of prosecution at the time, but ultimately officials decided not to prosecute him.
A right-wing conspiracy in Germany plotted to attack Parliament and overthrow the government.
Their ideology was a strange mixture of Nazism, anarchism, and superstition. But they had real weapons and could surely have done real killing.
The Tories plan to deal with strikes by NHS workers by prohibiting strikes.
This approach would be of little use for fixing the broken NHS, but assuming their real goal is to ruin it, this could be quite effective.
San Francisco responded to public revulsion and reversed its recent decision to authorize the thug department to use robots for killing people.
To halt (and then reverse) the general militarization of US thug departments is a much bigger job.
Some Republican senators are condemning the wrecker for showing contempt for the Constitution.
It could be that they are looking for a chance to publicly split from him, having seen that his endorsements of candidates turned out to be disadvantageous for them. They may have decided they will be better off with a new, fresh fascist leader.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prohibit some of the harmful practices of Amazon and some other platforms.
This bill would not do anything to make anonymous purchase possible, or insist that the sites work without sending nonfree software to the user's browser, so I would sill refuse more or less to do use those sites. But their overall injustice would be reduced.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the Open App Markets Act. It would require Apple to allow users to install apps obtained from places other than Apple's store.
It looks like this would make it possible to distribute free software for the iThings which users could build from source. That means iThings would no longer be jails.
Of course, they would still be nasty in many other ways, so I would still urge everyone to reject iThings, along with Android.
Abortion rights activists are considering ballot initiatives to legalize abortion in 10 states.
In 2020, when much of the world was desperate for masks and other Covid-19 protective equipment, the Tories gave contracts to companies owned by their cronies. Many of those companies had no experience or manufacturing capacity.
*Australian government overturns decision to cancel citizenship of man on death row in Iraq.*
It is very good news that Australia has overturned the law used to cancel people's citizenship over alleged crimes. That law was an inspiration for various other countries with right-wing governments that base their popularity on performative cruelty.
Those other countries remain to be convinced to eliminate those unjust policies.
Labour has proposed some good reforms for the structure and rules of the UK government.
Shocking rare crimes against children create an impulse and a pressure to overprotect children by locking them up. For the children's sake, we must resist that pressure.
*Argentina's [vice president and ex-president] Cristina Fernández sentenced to six years in $1bn fraud case.*
*Dutch king commissions research into royal role in colonialism.*
*Trump Organization guilty of tax fraud, New York jury finds.*
The corrupter was not personally charged with the crime, but if prosecutors have evidence that he knew about the scheme, they should charge him too.
The US has delayed yet again the requirement for "REAL ID" drivers licenses for purposes such as getting on an commercial flight.
There is too much identifying and tracking people in the US. Let's keep resisting, and see how many years we can block this.
South Korean President Yoon threatened truck drivers with years in prison if they didn't end their strike. They defied him.
The way to end a strike that causes great inconvenience for society is to make the employers pay proper wages and offer proper working conditions. Whose side are you on, Yoon?
(satire) *Fate Of Christmas Uncertain After Eric Adams Institutionalizes Real Santa.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
The TSA has a "pilot program" to use facial recognition to identify airline passengers. And a second generation coming which will do the matching against a database.
Widespread use of facial recognition enables the sort of tracking that China's pervasive repression is based on. We cannot allow such systems to exist.
For now, you can refuse to participate in the TSA's facial matching. Please refuse! To maintain even a little privacy, we must fight tooth and nail against massive surveillance systems, both new systems like this one and existing systems such as Clearview AI.
Biden wants South Carolina to be the Democratic Party's first primary in 2024 so that no progressive candidate can challenge him for the presidential nomination. He is confident of winning heavily there.
New York City is spending a lot of money to prevent a repeat of some of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but the overall effort is far inadequate.
For the longer term, there is no hope of protecting New York City from future inundation with local measures. The only way is to curb global heating.
Qatar paid British MPs to give Qatar support in Parliament.
I find it hard to understand how this could be lawful, but in my sense of justice this is outright bribery and ought to land the participants in prison.
Drivers in London forcibly moved Just Stop Oil protesters out of the road.
I agree fully with the Just Stop Oil's arguments for these protests. If you think being delayed for half an hour is painful, wait and see what food rationing feels like, or a flood or wildfire smoke or heat prostration.
But if this approach to protesting inspires the passersby to fight the protesters, it is not useful or constructive.
Here are suggestions for new tactics for climate protesters. [New note has corrected link to suggestions]
Republican extremists are supporting Putin's lies about Ukraine.
That includes a Faux News announcer. Does an airport near you show Faux News most of the time? You could complain to the airport and say to show something else instead.
*Just Stop Oil's message to Suella Braverman: threaten us all you like — we're not listening.*
*Facebook moderation system favours "business partners", says oversight board.*
US citizens: call on Missouri schools to reverse overzealous book bans.
The chinook salmon are heading rapidly towards extinction, though no one is sure why.
A strange aspect of this article is that it assumes that only by identifying with the sadness of a local indigenous group can we appreciate that the loss of these salmon is a great loss. In effect, it treats their feelings about the possible extinction of chinook salmon as the primary issue.
I can empathize with their sense of loss. I recognize the loss too. But I insist that the objective loss is more important than how people feel about it.
Peoples adapt their cultures to their environments. The ancestors of that group, long enough ago, lived elsewhere and perhaps did not encounter salmon. If the group survives through the coming global disaster, in time it will get used to the absence of chinook salmon. But the damage done by their extinction and the loss of ecosystem they was part of will never go away.
If a species goes extinct and there is no indigenous group to notice, did the extinction really happen?
Stop burning trees to make energy, say 650 scientists before Cop15 biodiversity summit.*
The University of California academic workers are on strike. The management is trying to break their solidarity by offering raises to everyone but the graduate student employees.
Ukraine has reportedly attacked distant Russian airfields used as bases for heavy bombers that bomb Ukraine, and for cruise missiles. Some bombers were damaged.
To attack Russian aircraft and missiles on the ground is a legitimate and natural tactic, but challenging to carry out. Bravo, Ukraine!
The Ukrainian Army seems to have a genius for figuring out clever ways to win the war. Meanwhile, the Putin forces have only a plodding hunger for bigger war crimes.
Leaving the EU was supposed to let the UK "take back control" over its laws and policies, but instead the international banksters have control.
Tories fundamentally believe in letting the rich have power, even if they dislike some of the consequences. Naturally they were never going to fight hard against it. Corbyn would have.
The Intercept interviews two Iranian exiles about the continuing protests, one of whom says we should rather call this a revolution in progress.
Cory Doctorow: in many kinds of products, adding a media-player and its DRM creates an excuse to use the DMCA to forbid users to tinker with any aspect.
Nowadays, any product with DRM is no longer merely defective by design. It is oppressive by design also.
US citizens: call on Biden to commit to the full $100 million for climate finance pledges.
Volunteers are installing public phones in Philadelphia. They are like payphones except gratis.
Every city and town ought to provide these, and you should never have to walk half an hour to reach one.
More on the wrecker's declaration of war on America and everything that is good about it.
Nothing is perfect. There are a number of things in the US Constitution that ought to be changed, Republicans have highlighted some of them in recent decades by stretching them for abuse. The Constitution must protect the environment much more, and the rights and well-being of the disprivileged and disadvantaged. Fairly taxing the rich and curbing the power of business would make that possible. Eliminating the electoral college could make elections more democratic.
The wrecker would not do any of that. He would make himself dictator.
I forecast years ago that leaving the EU could be beneficial if Corbyn were in charge, but would be harmful with Tories in charge. Sad to say, Britain did the latter and has been harmed. Leaving the EU created opportunities to change policies, laws and relationships — opportunities that Britain could use in various ways. Assuming that each party would use those opportunities to achieve its goals, the consequences were clear.
I have updated the page stallman-computing.html.
I have updated the page rms-lifestyle.html.
China has dropped the zero-Covid policy of trying, via tests and quarantines, to stamp out transmission.
It is to be celebrated that powerful protests can make China change rigid, harsh policies. But is this change the wise change to make?
My recommendation was to make the quarantine system less harsh and rigid, so people would not die or get badly sick from being in quarantine for a while.
Two weeks ago, The wrecker publicly associated with a white nationalist and a Nazi, and thus took a clear stand against justice and equal rights.
Since then, he called for abolishing the US Constitution, and thus revealed himself indisputably as an enemy of US democracy and freedom.
Perhaps other Republican leaders, such as Governor Dementis, are less hostile to justice, equal rights, democracy and freedom. But I tend to think they are simply more circumspect.
The UN is considering a resolution to prosecute Putin and other high officials for systematic war crimes by the Putin forces.
They deserve prosecution, but I think it would be a mistake to demand they surrender to prosecution. That would be, in effect, a decision to pursue regime change as a war goal.
That decision would have bad consequences for Ukraine, for the kidnapped Ukrainians, and for the Russian people as well. If Putin yields up all of Ukraine's territory, and returns the kidnapped Ukrainians, he will have had a defeat, not a victory. Those war aims are enough. If Putin is willing to give those, we should offer him peace.
To demand more than that would give him more reason to keep fighting instead of making peace.
*Iranian protesters call for three-day strike as pressure on regime builds.*
I would not be so quick to conclude that the repressive regime will fall soon. Repressive regimes have faced very strong protests and stayed in power.
Five Connecticut prison thugs face charges of reckless endangerment for transporting Richard Cox in a van without a seat belt and thus breaking his neck.
Shouldn't they be charged with gross bodily harm, too?
US citizens: call on Congress to help families, not give tax cuts to corporations.
*"Turn Off the Tap on Plastic," UN Chief Declares Amid Debate Over New Global Treaty.*
I think it is crucial to stop the production of plastic products which are fundamentally difficult to recycle — for instance, different materials joined together.
Elnaz Rekabi participated in an international sports competition without wearing the required head-covering. Her family's home was then demolished.
If the Iranian state did this, then ironically it joins Israel in the practice of punishing an entire family for one person's infraction.
(satire) *Right-Wingers Criticize Kanye For Not Using Platform To Raise Awareness Of Lesser-Known Nazis.*
If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.
Macron threatens to invoke business-supremacy treaties to stop the US from carrying out its insufficient but helpful greenhouse gas reduction plans. Environmental activists protest this when Macron was visiting the White House.
Will French activists protest this too? I hope so?
Business-supremacy treaties are fundamentally unjust because they elevate trade over democracy. Businesses had too much power already, and these treaties gave them even more.
Biden joined Congress to impose on railroad workers the contract that the railroads had proposed — with no paid sick days.
*Biden Urged to Sign Executive Order Guaranteeing Rail Workers Paid Sick Leave.*
These same railroads commit safety violations repeatedly, and get fined over and over, but they do not correct the dangers.
(satire) *Biden Signs Legislation To Avert Crisis Of Treating Rail Workers Like Humans.*
(If an Onion page appears blank, try disabling Javascript entirely or
telling LibreJS to blacklist all scripts in the page, then
right-click and select item "Reveal hidden HTML". Or use a browser
such as lynx that doesn't implement Javascript and CSS.)
*The pilots flying passengers across US state lines for abortions.*
The Hinduismists that rule India are attacking hundreds of old mosques by fabricating claims that the buildings are former Hindu temples which were seized centuries ago and converted into mosques. In most cases there is no real evidence that this ever happened. But such is the fanaticism and contempt for truth on the part of the ruling BJP and its supporters that they disregard evidence. The track record of repression and pogroms suggests they are hoping this gives them an excuse to kill some Muslims.
Historians who know about the history of these sites face threats to shut them up. The threats range from firing them to murdering them.
This note has been corrected by a newer note
*Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote.*
The county supervisors voted to certify the results they had because refusing was illegal.
They presented no grounds to refuse to certify the results, but we can determine what their motives were: The country's voters had voted majority Democratic, and the Republican election officials figured that they could steal some statewide elections by (in effect) discarding all the votes from their own county.
A large fraction of Republicans are traitors at heart, and seek opportunities to steal any election that they lose. If imprisonment is required to thwart their treachery, prison it should be.
Everyone: call on Costco to commit to protecting the boreal forest.
US citizens: call on Congress to work towards a world that is free of nuclear weapons. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Minnesota is considering small reforms in rules for thug departments to better control their predilection to bully people, brutalize people from time to time, and associate with racists, Nazis and insurrectionist organizations. The thugs' unions are pushing back hard.
More information.
NIH has set up a web site for reporting the results of your at-home Covid-19 test, if you wish. It is a good idea, but you should not use the site as currently implemented, because it requires you to run nonfree Javascript code. What a shame.
The San Antonio thug who shot at Erik Cantu 10 times and maimed him faces charges of attempted murder.
The increased willingness to prosecute thugs for violent crimes even if the victim does not die will help control cop crime.
*A woman who sold fake COVID-19 immunization cards gets three years in Federal prison.*
There is no market any more for fake vaccination records, but one more naturopathic "doctor" taken off the streets is likely to make the public safer.
Republicans just barely won control of the House of Representatives, and they did it because of the right-wing partisans that Republicans put on the Supreme Court.
The UK's registrar of corporations was "reformed" to make it cheap, quick and easy to create a corporation. Crooks started many fraudulent corporations and used them to steal and hide millions.
An economist official at Bank of England says that leaving the EU has a large share of responsibility for the increase in food prices in the UK.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Pelosi's successor as leader of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, is a strong and firm plutocratist, who supports a few progressive positions so people won't recognize how plutocratist he is.
Perhaps in your eyes the fact that he is black and Muslim makes his election to that position something to celebrate. In my eyes, he's just another plutocratist congresscritter that we should try to replace with a progressive.
Australia is investigating the use of slave labor in building its renewable power systems.
*[The right-wing Australian government's] "grassroots" nuclear power survey linked to consulting firm [working for US nuclear reactor industry].*
Should we call this a "public-private partnership for profit"?
*World's biggest food [corporations] made £20bn in profits — while warning of price rises to come.*
Curbing global heating will not save our planet's ecosystems. They are threatened more immediately by other human activities including deforestation, overgrazing, overfishing, desertification, and soil degradation.
A relationship does exist: global heating will eventually destroy many ecosystems, if they survive that long. But we have to curb the other environmental threats, too.
Having fewer children will help reduce all those forms of excessive human impact, all at once. And will free up your effort to work on the other problems.
Australia has sentenced a climate protester to over a year in prison for blocking one lane of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The US should pressure Israel to agree to nuclear disarmament. Maybe Iran and Israel would agree to nuclear disarmament together.
*President Lula da Silva wants to establish a new Federal Police unit focused on deterring environmental crimes.*
*Campaigners Demand Deep Cuts to Plastic Production as Global Treaty Negotiations Ramp Up.*
Here is a set of narrow arguments against the "KOSA" bill that is supposed to protect "children's" privacy, but will instead deny the privacy of all internet services.
I agree with the arguments in general, but I need to state these points of disagreement.
The British government has become simply incompetent. They summon people to court by mistake, after reporting judgments against them by mistake, after failing to notify them at all.
Indonesia plans political and sexual repression: it will be a crime to (1) insult the president, the state, or the official ideology or (2) have sex (except for married couples).
Reportedly Islamists are behind this attack on freedom in Indonesia.
Frontier Airlines has eliminated telephone customer support. The only way to communicate with the airline is through its web site.
I once flew on a Frontier flight, and noted that the staff seemed to have a right ear and a left ear, but no front ear. That cast its name in question. Now it should be called "No-ear Airlines."
I tried looking around that web site. For the most part, the information seemed to be present and navigation worked. But I think that most inquiries and actions depend on nonfree Javascript code, which excludes me from doing them.
They invite people to use a chat system to get in contact with an agent. That might be an acceptable solution, except that that chat system is part of the web site and it seems to depend on Javascript too.
One thing I noticed on the site is that the company is pressuring people to use its cr…app rather than its web site. Surveillance by the web site is limited; surveillance by a cr…app is much more complete.
Google promised not to save location data about "sensitive" places such as abortion clinics, which some states threaten to sue or prosecute people for going near. It did not make enough change to eliminate the danger.
I am not surprised, because surveillance-based companies will always tend to collect too much data and hold on to too much data.
However, data tends to get duplicated and get stored in various places. The root of the search problem is (1) collecting location data, (2) collecting personal identifying data, and (3) identifying return visitors (with cookies).
An acceptable web service must not find out any of those facts about you unless you request to send them. And it must do its job even if you choose not to send them.
US citizens: call on drug stores to require people to wear masks.
41 Republicans plus Manchin used a filibuster to kill the proposed railroad workers' contract that gave them sick leave. Then the Senate approved the contract lacking sick leave, the version that Biden had asked for.
*Three UK Universities Ban Fossil Fuel Industry Recruiters From Campus.*
The UK's immigation department sent 20 asylum seekers letters inviting them to come to meetings to discuss their cases. When they arrived, which in some cases was a big expense for them, they were told that the staff did no plans for meetings with them that day.
Either these letters were a prank, or the UK government has become so incompetent and confused that it can't carry out the simplest plan. After seeing how incompetent Tories are, I think the latter is more plausible.
Senator Merkely has proposed a bill to put a heavy tax on single family homes when they are owned by big companies that own hundreds of them.
The history, since 1940, of the series of US tax cuts for the rich that impoverished the country.
Want to really make America great again? Tax the rich!
*The [corrupter's] supporters can no longer avoid testifying before grand juries in Washington DC and Georgia.*
*Big polluters given almost €100bn[-worth] in carbon [emissions] permits [gratis] by EU.* That was over a period of 9 years.
The FBI and DHS focus disproportionately on foreign terrorists as possible threats, and insufficienly on (right-wing) domestic terrorists such as white supreacists and Nazis.
The Tyre Extinguishers have deflated the tires of 900 SUVs around the world as a protest against these dangerous gas guzzlers.
A Just Stop Oil protester was sentenced to 6 months in prison for blocking a highway for a while. The court called this "causing a public nuisance," and I'm sure it did. As these protesters say, it's nothing compared to the unending public nuisance conditions that increased use of fossil fuels will cause.
*Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could finish off Putin and Russia.* The proposal includes modern aircraft and longer-range missiles. Careful strategic thought is required about whether to donate the latter.
Herschel Walker, MAGA maggot candidate for the Senate in Georgia, filed for a tax break on a "primary residence" in Texas where he really lives. This may have been illegal.
Pheromone-assisted insect traps can photograph and identify pests via image recognition. This technique can potentially save greatly on the use of pesticides.
Unfortunately, under today's general practices, it will also be a trap for farmers. It will be run by nonfree software, so it will snoop on the farm and put the farm at a disadvantage. And the farmers won't be able to repair it.
The US system of producing medicines suffers from too much commercial centralization (few producers) without much central planning. Also a tendency to optimize for efficiency rather than reliability.
The result is susceptibility to shortages.
Anti-vax fanatics in New Zealand would rather let their baby die than let it get a transfusion of "vaccinated blood" for surgery.
They and others have convinced each other that there is some danger in this.
George Monbiot: Farming and its subsidies are an increasing danger to nature and the climate.
There is no mystery to why governments subsidizes farming. It is not just that rich people want to profit from them; everyone wants the results. But we need to cut down this unsustainable practice.
Fewer babies will certainly help!
A fracking company accepted criminal liability for poisoning the water of Dimock, Pennsylvania and will pay to replace the wells with new water systems and to deliver clean water for the next 75 years.
Here is a timeline of how the company caused the damage, of enforcement efforts, and how the company resisted them.
This is justice in a narrow sense, but it won't clean up the water of that region. It won't undo the lasting diminiution of water supplies in Pennsylvania. There may not be any feasible way to do that.
There must be many other regions of the US which have already suffered similar damage.
We must not allow it to happen in any more places.
Leaders of the Oath Keepers have been convicted of secitious conspiracy for organizing the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, based on their conversations about same.
This gives the Department of Justice a basis for confidence in bringing that charge against others who were involved, including potentially the corrupter himself.
Antifascist individuals and groups are finding their Twitter accounts suspended. Apparently Musk's idea of freedom of speech has a right-wing bias.
New York City's night-mayor has asked a wide variety of workers to incarcerate homeless people in mental hospitals — including people who are supposed to help the public. This plan is explicitly not limited to people who seem to pose a threat to others.
Many homeless people run away from shelters because the conditions there are so unpleasant they would rather be on the street.
A host of criticisms of this plan.
Once you get committed to a hospital — even if you did it by faking insanity — it is reported to be very hard to prove you are sane.
*Australian PM Anthony Albanese urges US government to end pursuit of Julian Assange.* Assange has been hounded for over a decade using a series of dirty tricks and twisting of the law. But this injustice has a bigger target than Julian Assange. Its main target is the freedom of the press to report on crimes committed by governments.
Democracy depends on whistleblowers, and it depends on journalists to publish what whistleblowers report. The prosecution puts democracy too in danger.
Massive surveillance is part of the threat to democracy. That is why we must limit the collection of databases of personal data, not merely regulate how the data are used.
The Tories have adopted a "voter ID" law, which as always is systematic suppression of voting by voters who are poor, young, or marginalized. In addition, merely through the extra work it requires at underfunded polling places, it will cause chaos.
*Plibersek's "determination" alone won’t save the Great Barrier Reef –- here’s what needs to happen.*
Amnesty Interational: Colombian thugs used torture, rape, and kidnaping to repress the mass protests of 2021. They also used lesser forms of psychological punishment, such as forcing people to strip.
The article embodies a strange set of values. It seems to take for granted that acting based on sexism or racism is a more serious wrong than rape.
I disagree with that. In my view, rape is wrong regardless of the details of the victim.
The UK could pretty much end transmission of HIV and illness from HIV, but it doesn't spend the money to do so.
Victoria (in Australia) has adopted ambitious greenhouse gas goals. Here are suggestions for how to achieve them.
*Israel has stripped a prominent Palestinian-French human rights lawyer of his Jerusalem residency and is expected to deport him to France.*
Israel has had a pattern of repression of lawyers that defend the rights of Palestinians.
Also a pattern of causing suffering by inventing excuses to take away Jerusalem residency permits. For example, being away studying in a university for a few years.
The article refers to "administrative detention", a euphemism for putting people in jail without trial.
A Nigerian student faces criminal charges of "defamation" after beatings in jail were not enough to make him confess.
The details of what the student said are a side issue — treating defamation as a crime always endangers freedom of speech.
The "big four" accounting firms are structurally embedded in systematic corruption. They are "too big to fail", but sooner or later one of them will fail.
The way to end the corruption is clear: prohibit accounting companies from doing anything other than auditing.
If a sudden change is hard to implement, here's a way to force them to make them separate gradually.
Tax the consulting gross sales of accounting firms a stated percentage that rises annually. It could be 3% in the first year, 6% in the second year, and so on. I think that in 5 years they will have moved most of the consulting business to some new sister company.
The details could be adjusted so as to require splitting each current company's non-auditing work into N or more independent new companies.
Other adjustments could make them split the auditing work among a larger number of new auditing companies.
The insufficient competition in the US allows businesses with market power to gouge by piling on "junk fees". Booz Alan has a monopoly over some kinds of access to some US national parks and other public lands, exercised via a "government" web site run by that company, and pulls in much more income from junk fees than the US government agency concerned actually gets.
But it's worse than that. Aside from the matter of price, use of that "government" web site requires running nonfree software. Those parks are off-limits to the free world.
I have visited some US national parks, and I paid cash to enter them. Is that still possible? Can anyone investigate that site (see the article) and report which parks and places can't be entered by paying cash, without using any web site?
Or which parks and places can still be entered by paying cash, without any web site?
Whichever list is shorter would be the more useful.
*Arizona elections official goes into hiding after post-midterm threats* from right-wing Big Lie fanatics.
*Three Georgia sheriff's deputies, all white, charged with battery after beating black inmate.*
The video shows that they prepared to attack him, while he was standing in a cell, doing nothing significant.
Two versions of the video have been published, one in which the attack was intentionally blurred and one which shows what happened. The thug department promoted the former and the latter is hard to find.
*Canada accused of putting its timber trade ahead of global environment.*
Could the US and China collaborate to curb global heating?
It seems to me that neither government has a strong enough commitment to that cause. In the US, it is because Republicans are determined to keep driving straight at the cliff. As for China, it seems to assume that doing this slowly and arriving decades late is sufficient. The two countries need to be set individually on the goal before they can collaborate on it.
US citizens: phone President Biden and urge him to issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose all of their political spending.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on your state legislature to implement fair districting.
The EU has proposed a plan to cut plastic waste from consumer goods.
This is good, but what about the fishing nets?
When billionaires pledge to donate most of their wealth to charity, there is no guarantee that that money will ever reach a charity, The system is complicated and the pledge may be almost meaningless.
Never mind their pledges — let's tax them a lot more.
*UK super-rich [are] less charitable than decade ago, says charity chief.*
Stop depending on them to give voluntarily, and tax them more!
*Biden urged to threaten Israel weapons halt over far-right concerns.*
How will Tories face the NHS strikes that are due to their 12 years of budget cuts?
The House of Representatives narrowly passed a law to give railroad workers the seven days of paid sick leave (is that per year?) that they want. Now the question is whether Republicans will filibuster it and kill it, to ensure a strike.
*ALEC Lawmakers and Corporate Lobbyists Meet in D.C. to Debate Rewriting the Constitution, Punishing Socially Responsible Businesses, and Protecting Misinformation.*
George Takei talks about growing up in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, and later coming out as gay.
Railroads in England cancel a lot of trains. But the ones they cancel before 10pm the night before are omitted from the statistics, so the statistics don't show how bad this really is.
Privatization makes this worse. Instead of government agency, which would obey orders to report more useful figures, these are "private companies" that have "rights" to state their cancellation rate in a way that minimizes it.
The railroad passengers deserve rights, and the railroad workers deserve rights, but there should be no stockholders or executives involved in running trains that "deserve rights" over how the trains run.
90% of US countries have had at least one weather disaster from 2011 through 2022. This figure does not count heatwaves.
There is no information about how much each disaster was due to global heating, but it is a big cause of weather disasters now and going forward. Each American should recognize that "global heating is going to hit the place I live."
That doesn't count the crop failures that are going to affect us all even though the place they occur may be far away.
The article points out also that it would be more economical to do things to prevent disasters than to repair them.
Businesses are pushing for a federal tax cut this year. As if they didn't pay too little tax already!
US citizens: call on Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
By deciding to investigate Israel's killing of Shirin Abu Akleh, the US is putting limits on its willingness to support Israel no matter what Israel does.
Qatar believes it can bully any and all parts of the British government by pulling some of the investments that harm Britain.
The UK NHS is trying to suggest that nurses should not strike because it would cause some operations to be delayed.
That statement is literally true, but the argument it is part of is invalid. The main cause of postponing millions of operations every year is mismanagement and underfunding by the government, and the harmful consequences include the pay that is inadequate for nurses to live on.
*China censors maskless crowd footage in World Cup broadcasts.*
Apparently the contrast with them puts China in a bad light, in the minds of many Chinese. Are they right? I won't assume that. They can see when people die from the rigidity and harshness of the Chinese state. But if China drops the effort to eradicate Covid outbreaks, it could kill millions of Chinese. I think it would be better to correct the rigidity and harshness.
I agree with Sridhar that in what China needs in the long term to get better vaccines and get most people vaccinated.
A court order not to retaliate against union organizers also requires Amazon to read the court's decision to all the employees at the unionized plant in Staten Island.
I hope this requires Amazon to pay the workers for the time they pass listening to this reading.
Comparing the US and British medical systems: both horrible but in different ways.
The British medical system (the NHS) did not just grow with its current problems. It worked much better until the Tories started cutting its budget, through trickle-down politics based on worship of the Invisible Hand. It is clear how to fix them: give the NHS enough money to do its job.
The US medical system's problems did just grow, as the worshipers of the Invisible Hand let gouging private companies get whatever they wished for and blocked efforts to stop them. It is clear how to fix these problems: create a public national medical system and sweep away those greedy bastards. The usual term for this nowadays is "Medicare for all", though I think we should go further and set up a system of VA hospitals for all.
*Netanyahu strikes Israeli coalition deal with far-right [antigay fanatic].*
Hatred of gay or queer people is not a phobia, it is bigotry.
*War in space would have immediate effects [on civilian life.] Attacks on satellites could take out GPS systems, banking systems, power grids …*
A group of UN experts call for putting the Great Barrier Reef on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites that are in danger.
*Monkeypox to be renamed mpox to avoid stigma, says WHO.*
This illustrates our society's tendency to cater excessively to hypersensitivity. There is nothing in the name "monkeypox" which insults anyone, and monkeys can't understand the word "pox".
What next — will they rename "chicken pox" to protect the feelings of chickens, or people accused of timidity? How about renaming "Rock Mountain Spotted Fever" so that the Rocky Mountains don't feel stigmatized?
It is futile to bully people to eliminate locutions because racists or right-wingers could spin them in a nasty way. They can invent more such things at any moment. The bullying would be a never-ending series of self-inflicted blows, at which bigots would laugh and say, "See how easily we make them go nuts!"
Forecast: expect Xi to do in many parts of China what he did to the Uyghurs and to Hong Kong.
The island of Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, is being taken over by intrusive vines that grow too fast to remove. Vines are covering buildings, farms, paths, and forests. People find it hard to keep their farms going.
Massachusetts voters amended the state constitution to increase the tax rate a few percent for incomes over a million dollars a year. So far so good. But the greedy rich have many ways to get rid of laws that make them pay their fair share.
In the UK, many necessary life activities exclude people that don't use snoop-phones full of nonfree software. This article shows how common that is.
The author cannot envision the idea of choosing to reject snoop-phones as a matter of justice if you are capable of using one. But you can. Every one of the restrictive activities that excludes the old people that can't use a snoop-phone are likewise doing wrong to everyone that refuses to use them.
And doing wrong to each person that does contact them with a snoop-phone.
