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.
Venezuelan TV channels give plenty of coverage to the opposition and to the opposition's protests.
The Koch brothers pretend to be defenders of Americans with cancer, except when it comes to releasing carcinogens from their factories.
State subsidies to movie companies screw the public to the tune of almost 2 billion dollars a year.
The general practice of giving business tax cuts to win business away from other cities, states or countries makes different regions compete to kowtow to business. It is nothing but dooH niboR, and every company that asks for this should be told to jump in the lake.
The US government's sleazy dealings with John Kiriakou about his treatment in prison have convinced him he is a political prisoner.
Even a hero can be slow to catch on to some things ;-).
The US Congress seems likely to legislate permission to unlock a portable phone from a phone company — but only until 2015.
The ban on unlocking portable phones is one specific case of a broad injustice: the DMCA's prohibition on breaking digital handcuffs of any kind, and on distributing software or hardware that can do so. The obsession with this tiny part of the injustice has distracted people from the rest. Instead of banning people from breaking digital restrictions management (DRM), we should ban DRM.
Join our campaign against DRM!
Exploring for oil in the US Atlantic coast would injure and kill marine mammals including endangered whales.
Burning the oil would endanger most species on Earth.
Background to the Dan River ash spill: business-subservient Republicans ordered the water pollution inspectors to think of businesses as their "customers".
Plutocratist politicians (mostly Republicans, but Democrats do it too) aim to abolish "job-killing" regulations so as to open the door to people-killing pollution.
Global heating in Australia has brought heat waves that kill lots of bats.
This is a sign of the massive extinction that we are bringing on the world. I've seen estimates that 2/3 of all species will be wiped out, but nobody can really predict this; it might be as few as half, or it could be a lot closer to 100%.
The EPA says it will oppose the Pebble Mine.
I have signed and posted several petitions against that mine.
The starvation wages of tea pickers in Assam makes their children vulnerable to slave traffickers.
A Russian stooge in the Crimea is asking Putin for military assistance, which of course Russia says it will grant.
It also appears someone in the Crimea is fighting back.
A few days ago I suggested that the Crimea should hold a plebiscite in two years to choose whether to be part of Ukraine. I still think that would be the proper course. If the Crimea's inhabitants are determined to rejoin Russia, it would be wrong to stop them by force. However, if Ukraine gets its democratic act together, a couple of years' reflection may convince the Crimeans that being ruled by Putin is undesirable.
Putin does not want them to have a chance to reflect.
Pakistani Taliban attacked the guards of a polio vaccination team.
Everyone: call on Israel to allow Shuhada Street in Hebron to reopen.
The Service Employees International Union will picket the Oscar ceremony to protest the company that was hired for security.
Ocean acidification has wiped out three years of production at a scallop farm in British Columbia.
Since ocean acidification will get progressively worse with each year's emission of CO2, you can see that there won't be a lot of scallops growing in 30 years. In 80 years they may be extinct, along with clams and lots of species of fish.
The proposed Nicaragua canal, whose environmental impact study seems to be being written in a corrupt way, threatens lots of ecosystem damage.
The US Navy knew the USS Reagan was contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.
Lying to the public is the Reagan tradition.
Poking holes in Monsanto's "scientific" arguments for pesticide-resistent GMOs.
The US-imposed government of Haiti arbitrarily seized an island, Ilavach, inhabited by 16000 people, to turn it into a resort that will provide income for business owners and a few employees.
The inhabitants were not asked their opinion. Colonial regimes see no need to ask the colonized people what they want.
US courts exempt corporations from the legal and moral responsibilities of human beings even while absurdly granting them the rights of human beings.
This is plutocracy at work: the rich demand society find an excuse to place them legally above you and me.
Developments in Lidar threaten our privacy.
I wonder if we could regularly jam lidar.
Australia must cut carbon emissions 15% by 2020 to do its share to avoid global heating disaster.
That is three times what the Australian government says it plans to achieve.
Two girl scouts launched a campaign that eventually resulted in a commitment to make girl scouts cookies from ethically produced palm oil.
While commitments of this sort, from the girl scouts and from Kellogg, are steps forward, I am skeptical that this sort of commitment can be enough to end deforestation for palm oil production. The problem is that many companies buy palm oil, and if we convince the well-known companies to reject palm oil made by deforestation, the other companies will buy it instead.
For real victory we need stiff punishment for everyone that cuts down rainforest and grows palm oil, together with a tax on palm oil to pay for helping the forest reclaim land from seized plantations.
Steps like these can contribute by building a movement strong enough to eventually succeed in enacting such laws.
This winter is the wettest ever recorded for England and Wales.
Israel's lobby in the US has gone off the deep end, presenting a massive collection of falsehoods instead of history.
Florida's save-all-the-money-for-the-rich government wants to send just a single fireman when a wildfire is reported.
Moazzam Begg was inspired by his torture in Guantanamo to become a human rights defender; now the UK has accused him of "terrorism", apparently twisting that word in the usual way.
Honoring the persecuted dissidents who opposed fighting World War I.
I won't say that the UK (or France, or the US) should have stayed out of World War I, but even without totally agreeing with these dissidents, I can condemn the way they were oppressed by the state.
Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, and this is causing rioting around the world.
What Does a Soviet Submarine Have to Do With US Government Secrecy?
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has been banned from communicating with the press or the public.
From Guantanamo to Limitless War, Obama's Failure to Live Up to His Own Five Commandments.
Wang Yam was convicted of murder after a secret trial (obviously unjust), and there is evidence that the UK government is covering up some sort of skullduggery. Not the least of this evidence is the decision to prohibit him from telling the European Court what happened.
I hope he told someone else who is in a position to tell the public these secrets.
01 March 2014 (Urgent: Oppose all kinds of fast track for business empowerment treaties)
US citizens: tell Senator Wyden to oppose all kinds of fast track for business empowerment treaties.
The Express Tribune has given up covering Taliban terrorism after the murder of several of its employees.
Pro-Russia forces (probably Russian soldiers out of uniform) have taken over two airports in the Crimea.
It seems to be a full-scale Russian invasion in disguise.
The EU will require large companies to report on the environmental and social impacts of their operations.
This could be the basis for actions to protect the environment and reduce abuse of workers, but results are not guaranteed; they depend on followup to these reports.
Proposed FDA labeling standards could be a small step forward, but Americans need a lot more information about what their food contains.
A British man starved to death after his welfare benefits were cut off because he was declared "fit to work".
In the US, where such benefits are essentially not available to single adults, I'm sure thousands of unemployed homeless people die from their situations every year.
Burma has ordered Medecins sans Frontieres out of Rakhine state, site of ethnic/sectarian violence, apparently to prevent information on the extent of the violence from getting out.
Everyone: call on Texas to investigate the possible murder of Alfred Wright and the possible cover-up.
Obama says $47k a year makes you "wealthy" so Medicare should charge you more.
How Ohio Pulled 4 Billion from Communities and Redistributed It Upwards (to the rich).
It started with a trickle-down tax cut that was supposed to make more jobs (but naturally didn't).
US citizens: call on the EPA to stop approving pesticide-resistent genetically engineered crops, and instead focus on non-toxic integrated pest management.
US citizens: phone Senator Reid to support limiting massive general surveillance.
The US Freedom Act is just the beginning of what we need, but we need to start somewhere.
Everyone: tell Ohio officials to cancel their plans to hinder urban blacks from voting.
Although these measures were chosen to disproportionately hit blacks, the motive for them is not racial hatred as such. Rather, it's a plan to rig the election by Republicans who know that blacks won't vote for them.
Tony B'liar has thrown off his Labour pretensions and endorses right-wing views while he hangs around with plutocrats.
For Britain's honor it must prosecute him, just as the US needs to prosecute Dubya.
The UK government ordered a disabled woman to look for work even though she is in a coma.
Deciding whether someone is disabled or capable of working calls for care and thought, if it is to be done right. However, the right-wing government would rather treat it as a no-brainer. Indeed, the job could be done exactly to the government's liking by a woman in a coma. Just tell her to "push this button if the person really is disabled."
Since the state wants to reexamine disabled people frequently, this could provide work for every comatose person in the UK.
A US appeals court twisted copyright law to justify banning the video, "The Innocence of Muslims".
The video is full of bigotry and intolerance, and is of no value in my opinion. However, the pressure to censor it reflects bigotry and intolerance too, and courts should not cater to this.
Above all, we must never surrender freedoms to rescue hostages taken by the enemies of freedom, and that's in effect what the plaintiff's situation was.
The European Commission, which opposes network neutrality, is using a tricky plan to outfox the MEPs that support it.
The US government says it will keep companies suggestions for reforming NSA surveillance secret — for privacy's sake!
These suggestions are probably worthless, because they are about details of implementing a minor change that would not really restore our privacy rights. (That's why Obama proposed it.)
Nonetheless, the hypocrisy of citing privacy as a reason when the whole point is wholesale trampling of Americans' privacy stinks.
The State Department is squinting very hard not to see the conflicts of interest in its environmental evaluation of the Keystone XL pipeline. A very narrow investigation saw nothing wrong.
The sophisticated way to rig an investigation is to decide precisely what to investigate, how, and who will do it, so as to assure the desired result. I think this result reflects a decision to approve the pipeline no matter what level of obtuseness and dishonesty it may require.
"Stand your ground" laws have shielded over 130 killers, in a racially biased fashion, and more states are adopting them.
Paradoxically, "stand your ground" gives everyone the same privilege that thugs enjoy.
The privilege is dangerous in the hands of a thug, and dangerous in anyone else's hands too.
Around 1/3 of the thugs of King City, California, were arrested for impounding the cars of poor residents in order to make off with them.
EU citizens: Please answer the copyright consultation by the March 5 deadline.
US citizens: call on Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to delay cutting off food stamps for some families.
EU citizens: Please answer the copyright consultation by the March 5 deadline.
US citizens: by March 4, submit a comment to the USDA to insist that companies that make or grow GMOs must be responsible for genetic contamination of other farms.
Everyone: call on Israel to allow Shuhada Street in Hebron to reopen.
Hong Kong's press freedom is threatened by the business ties of its mainstream media, much as occurs in the US, but Hong Kong journalists are often physically attacked too.
Unidentified professional soldiers have seized the regional parliament of the Crimea on behalf of Russia.
I suppose this was arranged by Russia.
Egyptian workers have concluded that the new government will do nothing for them, and have started a wave of strikes.
Documents Say Navy Knew Fukushima Dangerously Contaminated the USS Reagan.
DOJ Still Ducking Scrutiny After Misleading Supreme Court on Surveillance.
The UK Conservatives reject plans to reduce child poverty. I guess they conflict with the Conservatives' plans to increase poverty.
The US Senate is pursuing Credit Suisse for helping 22000 Americans evade US taxes.
GCHQ collected Yahoo webcam images of almost 2 million people, some of them nude.
It's irrelevant for investigation but handy for blackmail.
Author Stieg Larsson made progress in investigating the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.
The Prevailing Myth of Consumer Clout Distracts Us From the Reality of Cartel And Monopoly.
Proposed geoengineering methods have inherent limits and can't counteract global heating.
The US NAS and the Royal Society go on record affirming that global heating has not ceased since 2000.
A South Korean missionary arrested months ago in North Korea has confessed he was setting up a spy ring. Under the circumstances, I am skeptical of this confession. Truth is of little importance to the North Korean state.
Bullying people to make false confessions is, alas, not limited to North Korea.
Fast food companies are working hard to market unhealthful foods to children.
Foreign workers in Qatar and some other Gulf states are forced into a sort of indentured servitude called Kafala.
The cost of caring for disabled middle-class old people in the US regularly bankrupts them.
Amnesty International has accused Israeli soldiers of killing and wounding many Palestinian civilians for no reason.
These soldiers enjoy almost total impunity.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to oppose two anti-environment bills.
Everyone: call on Proctor and Gamble to commit to stop buying palm oil made via deforestation.
The Australian government offers aid to farmers hit by drought now, but hides from the need to stop making drought more frequent.
A 30% insufficiency in fresh water is predicted for 2030.
I think the fresh water scarcity demonstrates that humanity needs a new ethic of reproduction and resource use.
A UN warning: the effect of fracking is to delay the adoption of renewable energy.
Companies are trying to make plastic by taking CO2 out of the air.
Plastics made in this way should not have to compete on an equal basis with plastics made from petroleum. Rather, they should be subsidized through a greenhouse gas emissions tax, which in their case would be negative (a subsidy).
15-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ubaida Asaid, who is imprisoned without charges, needed two hunger strikes to get transferred to a political prison rather than being locked up with criminals.
Convicted anti-fracking protester Natalie Hynde calls for more to resist fracking.
The US continues to claim that it works to "promote democracy", although its actions often hardly fit that description.
Tiny GPS trackers on birds are providing a wealth of surprising information about their migration practices.
I'm entirely in favor of this, but the threat of using such trackers on people should be obvious.
Right-wing criticism of needed cuts in the US Army illustrate the political power of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about.
The US will take steps to make school meals less fattening.
This seems like a positive step, but the fact that it needs the support of beverage companies illustrates the lack of democracy in the US. In a democracy, the people would be strong enough to adopt policies that some businesses don't like.
Please don't buy any Coca Cola Company products; please support the world-wide boycott of Coca Cola Company, launched because of the murder of union organizers in Colombia.
Credit cards will be connected with cell-phone location tracking.
Schemes like this, that pressure people to let themselves be tracked, worry me greatly for the future. However, this one will only pressure those that are already surrendering to pressure, by paying with credit cards. Don't be tracked — pay cash!
A few Palestinian children threw stones at some Israeli occupation soldiers, so the soldiers fired tear gas at a crowd of fleeing children.
Israel arrested a Palestinian journalist for calling an Israeli official "the mayor of occupied Jerusalem".
Does that look like a crime to you? I don't know whether I agree with the statement or not, simply because I don't know the pertinent facts about that man's office; but even if the statement is a stretch, it must not be a crime.
For a Palestinian, getting a permit to bring a 7-year-old child to Gaza after surgery is not easy.
Cutting back on nurses in European hospitals increases the death rate after surgery.
US hospitals cut back on nurses 20 years ago. A friend who was a nurse quit the profession rather than take legal responsibility for supervising lots of untrained personnel, more than she could effectively supervise, and be at risk of a lawsuit if any of them screwed up.
People who smoke a few cigarettes a day underestimate the danger to their health.
[Somali] Security Agents Still Hound Journalist After Detaining, Torturing Him.
Kareem Khan was grabbed by Pakistani thugs and tortured for campaigning against US drone attacks.
Turkish PM Erdogan is accused of corruption with phone call recordings he claims are falsified.
I don't know what the truth is about these recordings, but it is clear that he is the enemy of freedom in Turkey.
Iranian journalist and dissident Mohammad Nurizad was attacked and arrested by thugs as he protested in front of the "intelligence ministry".
In the Crimea, with a Russian-descent majority, there is agitation for secession from Ukraine.
It seems to me that if the inhabitants of the Crimea want to become part of Russia, they should be allowed to do so; therefore, I suggest committing to hold a plebiscite in two years time to decide this.
That will give the Crimeans a chance to see whether the government of Ukraine is democratic and to think about whether they really prefer to be ruled by Putin.
North Korean escaper Park Sang Hak sends balloons with leaflets over the sky of North Korea.
The US Army infiltrated antiwar protesters in Washington State.
Chinese Man Demands Local Government Repay Cost Of His Treadmill In Landmark Anti-Pollution Lawsuit.
Over 60 West Virginia Facilities Could Contaminate The Elk River's Water Supply, Report Finds.
A Uighur Chinese faces possible execution for calling for independence for the Uighurs.
I have no opinion on the question of independence for the Uighurs, but criminalizing his point of view is clearly wrong.
Pilots that flew US planes that had previously been used to drop Agent Orange on Vietnam were exposed to the toxin, perhaps to high levels of it.
Keep this in mind with regard to the corn that is designed to be resistant to Agent Orange.
Don't shrink the US post office — what the US needs is jobs.
A complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a good idea.
Which expenses the media blame for tight budgets reflects assumptions about values.
When we're talking about proprietary software such as Mr Bill profits from, don't get distracted by the price paid for it; that's a secondary problem: proprietary software is an injustice even if it costs nothing.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which was supposed to hold nuclear waste and never ever leak, is leaking.
I'm not sure that this leak is dangerous, but until people understand how it happened, there is no way of guessing how much more may leak.
Ireland faces a lot of embarrassment for imprisoning anti-military protester Margaretta D'Arcy.
Right-wing extremists have been arrested for plotting an attack on the US government.
I have no more sympathy for these right-wing militants than for Islamists, but in both cases we must beware of letting the state manufacture plots to prosecute people who would otherwise never have done any harm.
Foreign domestic workers in Qatar are subject to slave-like conditions.
This happens in the UK too, and it's unacceptable in either place.
Personalized "news" feeds are atomizing society and facilitating well-funded pseudoscience such as global heating denialism.
For a thug to visit a person with a sign is not violence and doesn't deny that person's human rights. Thugs often bully and threaten people, but if all the thug does is show up at someone's door with a sign, that is not bullying.
Thus far, I don't see any reason why this needs to be restricted or why it matters what the algorithm is that selects people for visits.
The real question here is, does that visit tend to make a person less likely to commit crimes? And if so, what other effects does it tend to have?
If the visits — or other consequences of selection — tend to have harmful effects on the person selected, that would be a real problem, and whether race indirectly causes people to be selected would become a real issue.
The patent system is, at best, not work keeping.
A $10.10 Minimum Wage Would Make A DVD At Walmart Cost One Cent More.
President Obama Is Fighting Cuts to the Military, Not Demanding Them.
The growth and retreat of the giant Qori Kalis glacier in Peru has been linked to world temperature.
Public Knowledge has condemned a bill to legalize unlocking of portable phones because it has been modified so as to endorse in principle the idea that copyright should control this activity.
I agree. The DMCA provisions that ban breaking DRM must be repealed entirely and replaced with a ban on DRM (digital restrictions management).
Everyone: tell the CEO of ExxonMobil that he's not the only one whose backyard shouldn't be fracked in.
Don't let the oil companies drive us to frack and fruin.
Denial of global heating is a form of pseudoscience.
LinkedIn is setting up a censored Chinese subsidiary.
A man in Japan tried to kill strangers, but since he couldn't find a gun, he had to use a car, and didn't succeed in killing anyone.
New York City postponed a plan to wake up all the homeless people sleeping on the E train line.
Edward Snowden's moral courage, and why massive surveillance made it necessary.
I know something about moral courage. Thousands of programmers could, in 1983, have decided to reject the enticing profits of proprietary software and develop a free operating system, but I'm the only one who did it.
I had the determination to swim against the current, and keep doing so despite ridicule, insults, and attempts to convince me to ruin everything by compromising too far. But I didn't have to face a threat to put me in prison.
Snowden's act demanded far more moral courage than mine, and I honor him for that.
Boko Haram murdered school children sleeping in their dormitory.
Prestigious journalistic outlets now publish advertising designed to look just like news articles.
The perpetrators of mass murder in Indonesia in 1965/6 remain in power and honored. A documentary that offered them a chance to re-enact the crimes they are proud of has started a debate about the crime.
China's air pollution is so bad that it interferes with agriculture.
If Hillary Is the Only Candidate, Where Does She Stand on Keystone XL?
I won't vote for a right-winger like Hillary Clinton. I did not vote for her husband in 1996 after I had seen what a right-winger he was, and I did not vote for Obama for the same reason. It was clear even in 2008 that he was talking about "Change" to avoid taking a stand for any important change.
I think it will be an advance if a woman can get elected president, just as it was an advance that a black man can get elected president, but I won't support a candidate because of that person's sex or race. Nor will I support the Democrats merely because Republicans might be worse. Voting for the "lesser of two evils" is a road to ever worse. If Ms Clinton is the Democratic candidate, I will vote Green (again).
I hope to have the chance to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
Former plantation colonies of the UK want reparations for the slave trade.
The descendants of slaves in the US deserve reparations because the effects continue. Whether this applies to most of the countries in the Caribbean, I don't know, but Haiti certainly deserves reparations from France.
The people of Ukraine should think carefully before making a deal with the EU.
Proposing a world-wide fishing police force.
Yanukovych's hidden millions spotlight how easy it is to hide the fruit of corruption offshore.
Volcanic eruptions since 2000 have caused a temporary cooling that cancels out part of the heating effect of greenhouse gases.
To cancel it out entirely would require a higher level of vulcanism. However, that would work only for a time. As we pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, cancelling them out would require a steadily increasing level of vulcanism.
Setting aside the harm those eruptions would do if they occurred, there is no reason to expect them to happen.
Moreover, eruptions can also emit greenhouse gases, so over the long term they can make things worse.
GCHQ uses dirty tricks to ruin people's reputations. It uses this tactic against dissidents who are in no sense terrorists.
There may be an active whistleblower inside the NSA now.
Is digital delivery of bills and such more sustainable than mailing paper? It's not clear.
What is clear to me is that I'd rather not have the information going through the internet. I don't do banking over the internet, and I get my statements in paper.
Anatomy of the Deep State: Beneath Veneer of Democracy, The Permanent Ruling Class.
Australians rallied against the government's secrecy about how it is treating refugees.
Sea Shepherd says Japanese whaling ships attacked one of its vessels in an attempt to damage it.
Australia's right-wing government does not know what is happening because it cancelled a commitment to send a ship to monitor the whaling fleet.
The anti-Putin protesters of 2012 have been sentenced to 4 years in prison, a little less than some US protesters.
Economic growth in Africa is going mainly to the rich.
I suspect "free trade" and other neoliberal dooH niboR policies that are designed to transfer wealth to the rich.
11 million homes are empty in Europe, as many are homeless.
Homeless is still increasing in Ireland.
US citizens: call on Obama to cut the nuclear weapons budget.
Ever since Obama told the NSA to stop snooping on Angela Merkel, it has snooped on her aides instead to get the same data.
Obama's men continue promoting the TPP with a long string of falsehoods and half-truths.
Ukraine now faces the threat of IMF shock treatments and "free trade" with the EU.
Uganda's president signed the anti-homosexuality and censorship bill.
Artificial intelligence could make massive surveillance even more dangerous.
Everyone: support Russian environmentalist Yevgeniy Vitishko.
US citizens: call on the US Olympic Committee to reject Billionaire Polluters as a sponsor.
US citizens: call on the EPA not to lift Billionaire Polluters' suspension from new federal contracts.
Make BP mean Billionaires Punished.
Some US businesses install lots of sensors to monitor employees' movements and conversations.
The proposed HTTP 2 spec includes allowing ISP proxies to decrypt communications between your computer and any web site. Just what the NSA wants!
Uganda's president Museveni is backtracking on signing the anti-homosexuality legislation.
The most clearly unjust provision I've seen listed in this law is its prohibition on expressing the position that homosexuality is acceptable. I'm not saying this provision is more unjust than the others (I am not trying to compare them on that dimension), but rather that the injustice of this provision is the most indisputable, because it violates freedom of speech.
In Ukraine, Chaos and Violence Hide Nefarious Role of US.
This article points out a side of the situation which our media tend to ignore; but it seems to ignore the other side which our media focus on. President Yanukovych's thugs were the ones that started shooting the protesters, and as long as they continued, there was no reason to criticize the protesters for shooting back.
A lesson in real life for the foolish judges that tell activists they should limit themselves to the ineffective and ignored methods of protest that have not been prohibited.
If any lawful method of protest starts to be effective, the state finds an excuse to ban it or crush it. Consider how the Occupy protests were violently crushed. Now consider the ag-gag bills.
Global heating's reduction of Arctic sea ice has accelerated global heating worse than scientists expected.
Is drug kingpin Guzmán the Mexican state's prisoner or its ally and honored guest?
Everyone: tell the Justice Department that protesting nuns shouldn't be imprisoned while banksters enjoy impunity.
It is impossible to tell whether some of the people in the Yemeni wedding party were supporters of al Qa'ida, but even if some were, is it right to attack a wedding party?
The US military produces propaganda clothing in foreign sweatshops.
Egypt's military rulers are saying the US is plotting against them while continuing to accept lots of US support.
Honeybees are spreading diseases to bumblebees.
Egyptian soldiers attacked alleged terrorists from helicopters.
If the people attacked were indeed bombers associated with al-Qa'ida, that's a good reason to arrest and prosecute them; but does Egypt need to attack criminals in Egypt with the army? This attack is the sort of thing one would expect in a civil war.
Pension funds that invest in fossil fuels are ruining their clients' descendants' lives.
The campaign for privatization of US public schools started from a false report of a nonexistent fall in US educational results.
Governments that want more control over the Internet are using the revelations about government snooping as an excuse to promote dangerous changes in "internet governance."
The Athabasca River in Alberta is being contaminated by waste from tar sands oil, which was disposed of in the cheapest possible way: dumped on the ground.
US citizens: call on Congress to preserve funding for vital conservation programs.
The UK government still denies that its policies have pushed many Britons into hunger, and still pretends that they are poor because they are lazy, as an excuse to waste their time applying for an inadequate quantity of jobs.
Food banks are admirable, but their inadequacy demonstrates the need for adequate government aid for the poor.
Anti-Putin protesters from 2012 have been convicted of "rioting" and attacking thugs.
It's probably the "He hit my stick with his head" accusation that thugs around the world like to make after they attack someone. Even in the US, courts tend to believe the thugs if there's no hard evidence to the contrary.
California is considering a law to make schools protect personal data of students.
The proposal is well-meaning, but I think its provisions are inadequate because the US government will find some way to collect that personal data.
The law really should order schools not to release data about their students to any one except the student, or to another school that the student wishes to enroll in.
Fix the Debt's campaign to cut government spending on the non-rich has failed.
However, if Obama is presenting a smaller deficit as an improvement, rather than a sign of a failure to stimulate the economy, he is still a right-wing influence.
US citizens: phone the Bureau of Prisons to demand an end to (illegal) threats against whistleblower John Kiriakou.
The IRS proposals for campaign spending by 501(c)(4) organizations don't go far enough to stop them from filtering dark money from billionaires and businesses.
The FCC is trying to defend network neutrality with half-measures instead of the common carrier status that really should apply.
Venezuela is filtering the internet as a reaction to the protests.
US citizens: tell the Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling for oil in Arctic waters.
Islamist fanatics in Syria reportedly killed a girl for being used by Facebook.
Being used by Facebook is bad enough — these people need help quitting, not punishment.
Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Says Any Damage Was Caused by Reporters Who Exposed It.
Everyone: call on Ms Clinton to heed Jeffrey Sachs and oppose the Keystone XL pipeline.
Recommendations for what the UK NHS should do to allay fears of misuse of people's medical records.
I think this does not go far enough. No companies should be given access to any of this data. We can't trust pharma companies to investigate the effects of their own drugs, so that work should be done by universities with no direct contact with the company.
In Ukraine, the protesters and the president have made a long-term peace deal.
US citizens: call on Senator Leahy to change the practice that enables a solitary Republican senator to veto a judge nominee.
US citizens: tell the FDA to ban the practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock even when they are not sick.
The Committee for Public Safety — oops, Department of Homeland Security — has not canceled its plans for systematic tracking of drivers via license plate recognition.
It should be illegal for companies to systematically accumulate records of license plates unless they are (1) invalid or (2) subject to specific surveillance orders issued by a court.
Ukraine's parliament removed President Yanukovych, but the country may be in the process of splitting up anyway.
Accusations that Germany and the US are paying protesters in Ukraine.
A new canal through Nicaragua could cause tremendous ecological damage and is likely to be of no benefit to most Nicaraguans.
Container shipping has no need for a canal. The containers can be offloaded at one coast, then shipped by rail to the other coast. This would require a little more work, but (with a fast train line) could even reduce shipping time.
A study concludes that hot weather increases violent crime and theft.
Global heating might then lead to an increase, though it is not certain that the effects of week-to-week temperature variation would apply also to a permanent temperature rise.
Supposed limits on US surveillance of journalists' communications are meaningless because they don't apply to using the PAT RIOT act against journalists.
AT&T's surveillance report is more misleading than accurate, because it omits 80 million NSA targets.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operated entrapment mills across the US.
A proposed ban on aiding military interrogations won 53% of the votes at the American Psychological Association's conference, but failed because it needed a 2/3 majority to pass.
Egyptian thugs crammed 45 prisoners into a van meant for 24, left them for hours in intense heat without water or air, then finished off most of them with a tear gas bomb.
Then, of course, the thugs made up lies to excuse this.
US citizens: call on the FAA to respect the wildlife refuge on Merritt Island.
US citizens: call for regulating emissions of methane.
Cop Allegedly Shot And Killed Teenage Boy After Mistaking His Wii Controller For A Gun.
The important issue is not the mistake made on this one occasion but the general factors that make such mistakes likely.
The Troubling Fine Print In The Claim That Raising The Minimum Wage Will Cost Jobs.
Saturated with Oil Money, Texas Legislature Saved Industry from Pollution Rule.
US courts are moving to discard the "third party" doctrine which says that people have no "expectation of privacy" in information that they provide to a "third party".
If this change is universally adopted, it will only partly reduce the harm done by accumulating massive digital dossiers about everyone.
Colombia spied on email between FARC peace negotiators and foreign journalists.
The FARC is Colombia's second-worst terrorist group. The worst one is the army-backed paramilitaries.
US citizens: call on the Navy to drop its plans for sonar exercises that will kill lots of marine mammals.
Prostitutes in Italy demand the right to pay tax and get a pension.
New Report Exposes America's Highest Paid Government Workers.
Wal-Mart firmly denies the idea that it will give its workers a raise.
However, the worst thing about working for Wal-Mart is that it usually is too few hours to make a living, and has no benefits or job security.
EU citizens: call on certain MEPs to support a specific aspect of network neutrality when they vote on Feb 24.
People are exposed to low levels of toxic and hormone-disrupting substances throughout their lives, as they leach into food from plastic packaging. There is very little research into the effects of this.
It is a difficult question to study; there is no way to do a controlled experiment, and it is hard to find comparable populations that differ mainly in how much they keep food and beverages in plastic packaging.
Journalist Luke Harding reports that someone was messing with his word processor as he wrote a book about Snowden.
US citizens: call on Rep Pelosi and Senator Reid to advocate changes going the opposite of fast track.
Privatization of electricity in parts of Australia turned out to be inefficient: it caused prices there to shoot up.
High prices of electricity might have a positive effect: incentivizing conservation efforts. But it would have been better to do that with a tax increase, rather than giving away the increase to private parties.
Wages in Australia have been falling, but right-wingers warn of the danger of a "wage explosion".
This is standard right-wing tactic.
Australia has put refugees in danger by leaking their personal data to the countries they fled from.
In the UK: opt out of the UK's lax medical records sharing system.
Islamic oppression reaches a new extreme: in Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to go to a medical clinic without a male guardian.
New Hampshire is considering a bill to restrict local thugs from acquiring armored vehicles, machine guns, and so on.
The local citizens would be empowered to permit exceptions.
Let's have this in every state!
Criticizing "voluntourism": don't think that your brief participation in an aid project will be constructive if you don't have a special skill to do the job.
HIV denialists are using the DMCA to censor criticism of their video.
Vindictive San Francisco thugs arrested and beat up a man for helping people who had a bicycle accident.
Some poor Venezuelans have joined in protests.
It would take many Snowdens to give Americans a picture of all the things the US government is secretly doing that might be dangerous.
Snipers killed protesters in Kiev.
Ukrainian thugs burned down the internet tent at the protest camp.
The western part of Ukraine is starting to break away.
Naturally, the government calls the protesters "terrorists".
I hear that some sort of deal has been made.
The Ethiopian woman raped in Sudan won't be executed, but faces a fine she surely cannot pay.
Al-Jazeera journalists are now on trial in Egypt for their journalism.
South Africa tried to force a gay rights activist unto a flight to Uganda where he would face imprisonment for his political views.
Drone Report: US Must Account for 'Turning Wedding Into a Funeral'.
Chevron: if our frack well explodes, you get a free pizza!
Readers have served Penguin India with a demand to surrender the copyright on The Hindus if it is not going to publish the book there.
I wonder if Doniger's contract says the rights revert to her when the book goes out of print.
The existence of one billionaire who plans to support candidates that intend to curb global heating does not make it ok to let billionaires determine the results of elections.
The massive extinction at the end of the Permian period occurred in a time span between 10,000 and 110,000 years — rapid in geological time.
One candidate is a supervolcano that emitted tremendous amounts of CO2.
US citizens: tell Congress to bring the minimum wage raise bill to a vote.
A Republican extremist claims he wants to reduce poverty by pushing more of the right-wing policies that have increased poverty in the US so far.
Rand Paul: telling Americans that the NSA spies on us all does not make it right to do so.
I disagree with his "cheating spouse" analogy, since I do not believe monogamy should be a requirement for love.
Right-wing ideologues deny global heating because confronting it requires massive governmental activity.
This is not to say there is no room for markets in preventing this disaster. One of the advantages of the carbon tax is that it puts the free market to work in reducing emissions.
One good use of massive surveillance surveils forests rather than people.
A web comic explains the injustice of the TPP.
Even if we defeat the TPP, we should not forget the politicians who are trying to inflict it on us. They have proved they are on the wrong side, the 1%'s side.
Ukrainian protesters defeated riot thugs to take control of Independence Square, but it seems the right-wing extremists are taking the lead among them.
A delusional man faces the death penalty in Pakistan for blasphemy.
This law is the reason I will not go to Pakistan. Nobody should go there.
More about the protests in Venezuela.
I do not find it implausible that the US has helped organize the protests. I do not find it implausible that a provocateur (either working for the Venezuelan government or working for the US) has killed people on both sides.
In any case, it is clearly wrong to prosecute the leader of a protest because violence breaks out later. This resembles what the US did to the Haymarket martyrs.
The cleanup manager at the Hanford nuclear facility was fired after informing the public about safety faults.
Previous whistleblowers were fired, too. I guess we can't believe anything the employees say unless they get fired.
Republican state politicians in Tennessee bullied Volkswagen workers, who then voted not to unionize.
Republicans have seized on a study that predicts that increasing the minimum wage would eliminate 500,000 jobs but lift 900,000 workers out of poverty.
The minimum wage needs to be combined with a welfare system for those who are unemployed. That way, all low-paid workers benefit, whether they are still working or not.
To work out an example, suppose half a million jobs are eliminated, and 50 million minimum-wage workers get a raise. If those workers pay 3% of their increase in income as tax, that would cover the costs of supporting the other half-million, and all will be better off than they are now.
This sort of system to transfer income from the rich (who have grabbed an ever-increasing share) to the rest is exactly what we need.
A new land-grab for US farmland by big companies threatens to increase consolidation and could make working conditions worse.
G8 Brings Big Ag Colonialism to Africa
It's the usual neoliberal "solution": big foreign companies lobby for permission to "invest", which means taking control.
The G8 New Alliance facilitates investors' "access to land", which means local people lose their land and end up in penury.
Another aspect is pushing farmers to seeds they can't reproduce. This makes them dependent on agribusiness and reduces diversity.
The G8 New Alliance also threatens Ethiopia's distributed seed bank.
Australia is practically giving away its natural resources to foreign mining companies.
I would guess that a few strategically chosen Australians receive some of those profits.
US citizens: sign this petition for bringing back postal banking.
Ecuador's oil drilling in the Yasuni National Park is supported by roads it calls "trails", as it pushes indigenous people off their land. To cover up the truth, it restricts access by journalists.
I would not criticize Ecuador for starting the planning to exploit the area before formally announcing failure of its plan to permanently protect the area. That plan depended on donations from wealthier countries, and it was already clear that the funds requested were not forthcoming. Its failure was not Ecuador's fault.
However, it appears that Ecuador treated this as more than a contingency plan.
Meanwhile, Chevron, which is grasping at even imaginary straws to get out of its judgment for pollution in Ecuador, is twisting the RICO law to claim that any criticism of Chevron is "racketeering".
US citizens: call for extending unemployment benefits by cutting the war budget.
Kellogg has agreed to buy palm oil only from suppliers that protect wildlife and human rights.
We will have to keep after Kellogg to truly implement this agreement, since it will have an incentive to wink at abuses. However, what worries me even more is that the unethical suppliers will simply sell to other companies. To stop the deforestation caused by palm oil requires systematic enforcement not dependent on one purchaser.
Residents of Ile a Vache, Haiti, are resisting an attempt to evict them all for an ecotourism scheme.
The Ukraine thugs attacked 20 journalists as well as many civilian protesters.
The fighting in Kiev was started by thugs who had been positioned as snipers.
Comcast regularly mistreats its broadband customers.
If it gets permission to merge and get bigger, this can only get worse.
US citizens: call on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to support the use of eminent domain to rescue US home owners from the banksters.
The Australian shark cull is driven by the aim of reducing tiny risks to zero, together with exaggeration of those risks, stirred up by sensationalist media.
It's too bad we don't attend with similar determination to the really big risks: obesity, environmental pollution, plutocracy and its consequent often-deadly poverty, and global heating.
A deal between protesters and the government broke down and thugs attacked the protesters, who fought back.
Guatemala's attorney general, who prosecuted the corrupt and genocidal elite, has been forced to leave office early.
Thugs broke up a Pussy Riot performance by attacking the performers with whips.
US protesters for nuclear disarmament have been sentenced to as much as 5 years in prison.
The "sabotage" they were convicted of was symbolic.
Keep this in mind when other countries threaten large penalties against protesters. It's equally wrong when the US does it.
US citizens: reject the idea that presidents are allowed to kill at will.
US citizens: call on the Department of Agriculture not to let poultry agribusinesses inspect their own chickens.
That would be letting the fox watch the henhouse.
Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López has surrendered to the state, daring the state to prosecute him.
I don't know what his political platform is. I suspect it is to benefit foreign businesses and their local allies, which I do not support at all. Nonetheless, he is also standing for political freedom, in a short-term sense. Maduro had better get behind this too.
On the erroneous idea that everyone needs to be good at math.
Speaking as one who loves math as it ought to be loved — for its beauty — I agree with the article. My knowledge of mathematical logic informs me that it is a fallacy to think that "There are mathematical jobs available now for workers who are good at math" implies "If everyone were good at math, there would be mathematical jobs for everyone."
The US, especially, has no need to increase workers' productivity. Its production is high enough. The US needs to change the economic system so that everyone can have a decent life, not just the small fraction whose labor is still in high demand.
Now we see why same-sex marriage rights have gained so much in the US: businesses want to be able to hire gay professionals.
Legalizing same-sex marriage is the right thing to do. But if we need to depend on business support to win for a worthy cause, we can't defeat the plutocrats' class war that is driving most Americans, gay or straight, into poverty.
The Casualty of America's Same-Sex Marriage Fight: Civil Unions.
North Carolina riverbed coated by toxic coal ash, officials say.
The UK's excuse to crush the poor is to demand they futilely apply for jobs at a grueling pace, or be left to starve.
This "culture of fear" often leads to hunger and homelessness.
Refuting the apologists for the 1%'s class war.
"Free trade" agreements block vital regulations on banks.
Where Syrian Islamists take control, they oppress women, and men too.
A UK court ruled in favor of the interrogation of David Miranda even though it was intended to interfere with press freedom.
Laws that authorize oppression are typical of unjust regimes. All that court did was confirm, yet again, that the UK is one of them.
The proposed "European internet" is not meant to protect Europeans from massive surveillance.
South Dakota is considering a law to give purchasers of digital products a right to be able to repair them.
The US government has published a falsified history of the Vietnam War — a work of propaganda directed at misleading future generations of Americans.
Mozilla is planning to put advertising into Firefox, and talking about it in ways that don't acknowledge that.
The Ethiopian government snuck spyware into an Ethiopian exile's computer through a Word file.
This is one of many reasons you should refuse to open a Word file.
FEMA falsified the flood risk for 500 rich people's seaside mansions so they could get cheap government flood insurance at our expense.
An Ethiopian migrant in Sudan faces capital charges for getting raped.
Wikipedia Mounts Courtroom Defense for Editor Sued by Politician.
The editor (i.e., contributor) was ordered to delete the text that he wrote in that politician's page, and did so, but others restored it immediately. The judge does not seem to understand this.
Two banksters get lots of money from Bank of America and Citigroup and then were hired by the White House to work on the TPP.
This is the worst kind of corruption of the government.
Former members of Pussy Riot were arrested in Sochi, apparently to prevent a hypothetical protest.
Sochi is under special Olympic repression that is worse than the usual repression of Russia.
One proprietary software developer fights with other proprietary software developers, with the user's computer as battlefield.
Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus, has been "recalled" in India by its publisher, which was threatened legally by a Hindu militant group that didn't like the book.
The censorship has extended to web downloads.
This act of censorship has provoked a world-wide reaction.
Many important works are banned in India, including the book Lajja by Taslima Nasrin which describes persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh.
Corporate Cronyism: The Secret to Overpaid CEOs.
How the NSA combines phone call data with internet contact data to collect more information about Americans in general.
Two UK thugs face criminal charges for arresting a student protester.
High-tech fishing operations are leaving Senegal's traditional fishers with no fish.
Ray McGovern is suing the CIA for putting him on a watch list because of his lawful political activity.
True Free Market Proponents Should Support Private-Public Competition.
The antidemocracy movement in Thailand attacked with guns and teargas.
Over a million EU citizens have filed an initiative petition against water privatization.
The legal effect of the initiative is only to direct the European Union to consider the issue. We will have to see whether this has more influence than a petition on whitehouse.gov.
University students in Venezuela have been protesting for days against Maduro's government, and a leader of the opposition has been accused of terrorism.
Several other South American countries condemned the protesters' violence.
I can well believe that US diplomats are plotting to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The US supported the coup attempt a decade ago. However, the shortages, caused by price controls, and other real grievances are stimulating real opposition.
Accusing protesters of "terrorism" is wrong in Venezuela just as it's wrong in the US or Russia or Egypt.
Sousveillance in a competitive situation can become, in effect, a form of nearly obligatory self-implemented surveillance.
Everyone: call on Monsanto to stop selling its wildlife-destroying pesticide, Roundup.
Debate: Was Snowden Justified? Former NSA Counsel Stewart Baker vs. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
US and UK surveillance specifically targeted Wikileaks.
US banks make tremendous money from the fees on credit card payments.
In addition, when you use a credit card, they get data about your purchases. That's more important to me than the 2% fee. Don't be tracked, pay cash!
The frequency of heat waves in parts of Australia has already exceeded what was forecast for 2030.
Kerry gave a strong speech about the danger of global heating.
Will he practice what he preached, and kill the Keystone XL pipeline?
Free enterprise does a great job…except for certain giant and sometimes deadly flaws.
Farm deregulation, based on right-wing pander-to-business ideology, exacerbated the floods in England.
Fossil fuel use is subsidized almost 2 trillion dollars a year, which makes renewable energy appear discouragingly expensive.
Karzai said he will change the law that would have stopped abused women from testifying against the relatives that did it.
The latest right-wing bigotry tactic is to claim bigotry is an expression of religious freedom.
Venezuela banned a Colombian TV channel which was the only one that gave substantial coverage to anti-government protests.
US citizens: support clarifying IRS rules about electioneering by nonprofits.
US citizens: oppose the bill to ban states from mandating GMO labeling.
US citizens: phone to ask your Congresscritter to cosponsor the Government By The People Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Egypt in 2012 experienced a dangerous jump in births.
This was perhaps due to Morsi's policies.
Gay rights activist Vladimir Luxuria was arrested for a nondisruptive protest in Sochi.
Banning any point of view is an offense against human rights.
The US had subservient UK agents harass Jesselyn Radack, Edward Snowden's lawyer, as she was going to the UK.
They told her she is on a sort of US no-fly list, the "inhibited persons" list. Perhaps as a lawyer she appears "inhibited" when asked to talk about her clients' affairs.
The UN warns Kim Jong-un that he could face charges at The Hague for crimes against humanity.
Here are details of the charges.
Even if the Security Council approves the charges, I see no way the court could have a chance of getting him and trying him. Still, this recognition of how monstrous North Korea is may do some good.
5 Obnoxious Libertarian Oligarchs Who Earned Fortunes from the Government They'd Like to Destroy.
The US taught Australia how to spy on the Indonesian government about its position in a trade dispute with the US.
If the trade dispute was the one about clove-flavored cigarettes, Indonesia deserves no sympathy for insisting the US allow those deadly addictive products. Trade treaties are being used world-wide to block measures to discourage smoking, which is an additional reason those treaties must be abolished. But these treaties and the surveillance are different issues.
US citizens: call for repeal of "stand your ground" laws that provide an excuse for what is effectively murder.
US citizens: tell Congress to reject politicization of the NSF grant procedure.
to shaft the employees on their benefits because a couple of them had big medical expenses.
In this context, I have to mention that I don't think it serves society's interests to go to such lengths to save a very premature baby which hasn't even started to become a human being. But that does not justify Mr Armstrong's position. There are lots of reasons why employees (or their family members who are already human beings) might need expensive medical care. Also, the point about commercial pressures that lead women to delay having children and thus face greater risks when they do is valid.
Resistance is growing against the Gates Foundation's plan for redesigning education in the US.
A series of spills and explosions have highlighted the danger of fossil fuels under a right-wing deregulating state.
Investigating all sorts of dangerous facilities, and punishing infractions with stern rectitude, is one of the many necessary jobs that only a state can do well.
The Moral Movement (against right-wing cruelty) brought 80,000 people to Raleigh, North Carolina, and is spreading to other nearby states.
Bravo!
The ACLU warns that Obama's drone assassination program is illegal.
Supposedly, in post-constitutional America, Obama can kill anyone anywhere for any reason.
Future global heating is likely to cause Britain worse droughts some of the time, as well as worse floods at other times.
Why the Comcast-Time Warner Deal Is Far More Dangerous Than You Think.
Obama is rewarding donors with ambassadorships a lot more than his predecessors did.
Thugs in California tased and beat up a deaf man for trying to sign at them.
US citizens: call on Obama to appoint more public interest lawyers as judges rather than corporate lawyers.
The Australian government is trying to intimidate the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Earth has had six massive extinction events, each apparently for a different cause. This one is caused by humans.
Leaked orders show Congolese exiles face torture if sent back by the UK.
400 construction workers have died working on sports facilities in Qatar, due to the abusive conditions. 4000 are expected to be killed by the time they are used in 2022.
The wealthier Americans are increasingly unwilling to "pay for them" (i.e., all the rest).
We should not give those arrogant bastards any choice about it.
Senator Sanders restored cuts in veterans' pensions by taking the money out of the war budget.
It is a net plus for Americans because military spending (especially overseas military spending) benefits mainly a few businesses and makes few jobs.
The New York Times reported on a sham right-wing "institute", but then for the sake of "balance" criticized Liberal groups that don't do the same thing.
NAFTA and the US-Korea free exploitation treaty have both done US workers documented harm.
US companies said they would create more jobs if NAFTA were signed, then did the opposite.
"Child pornography is great" — as an excuse for internet censorship.
US citizens: call on the US to restore Snowden's passport.
The US now allows banks to deal with state-legalized marijuana businesses.
Everyone: call on the US to promise no foul play against Snowden.
Fish farms accused of destroying wild salmon in Scotland.
UK citizens: support the Don't Spy on US campaign.
This campaign does not go far enough, but it is worth supporting anyway.
US cities and states are discovering that privatization is costly and harmful.
A private operator has a financial incentive not to do the whole job. If it sells to the public in a competitive market, people will judge it on that. Otherwise, it will screw people without restraint.
EU citizens: talk with your MEPs to support network neutrality.
Uganda's law censoring "promotion of homosexuality" and imposing prison for any touching in public has been approved.
The influence of genes on homosexuality is not a secure base for arguing for equal rights for homosexuals.
I think the issue is simple. People who don't want to have sex with you have a right not to have sex with you, and aside from that it's none of their business who you have sex with.
A global heating denialist tactic is to misrepresent the consensus of nearly all climate scientists and pretend it is something very weak.
As business increasingly looks for land grabs, efforts to confirm indigenous people's land rights are stalling.
The Syrian peace talks are hopelessly deadlocked.
No one has any idea of a feasible form of intervention that would make things better.
A British Muslim extremist, perhaps a convert (judging from his name), has been banned from preaching on pain of arrest.
Incitement to murder is legitimately punished. This man's "vigilante patrols" may have included attacking passers-by. (Some such Islamist vigilantism in Britain has done that.) If he advocates Shari'a law, then he has no respect for others' human rights. He is evidently an example of the tendency for religions to inspire hatred, which is common today in Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism.
But that doesn't justify banning him from stating his views, which is not a crime. That tramples his human rights.
The UK fails to distinguish between "discrimination and persecution" and stating a political position.
The Turkish government is taking control of the judiciary so as to resist corruption charges against relatives of ministers.
When US politicians stimulate fear of terrorism in order to take more control, the US mainstream media support them.
Thugs implementing the War on Drugs shot Eugene Mallory to death in his bed, then made false accusations about him (as usual).
A former FCC commissioner regrets the media consolidation that the FCC permitted over and over.
Although the water in West Virginia is supposed to be "safe", people are still having horrible reactions to it.
A Utah law banning private license plate recorders is being challenged in court.
This sort of law is vitally needed to curb massive surveillance. People must be free to take photos and videos, but companies should not be allowed to systematically watch everyone.
The perverse Corporations United decision (to call it what it really is) in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are entitled to human rights may lead to a bad decision on this law. Please support the campaign for a constitutional amendment to cancel that decision.
Pakistani anti-drone activist Kareem Khan was arrested and tortured by Pakistani thugs.
Congresscritters in the pocket of the copyright industry abolish and create subcommittees to make sure Hollywood has power over you.
I recommend people join in my almost-boycott of Hollywood: never pay to see a movie unless you have some reason to believe it is actually good. While in theory this is not a complete boycott, in practice the difference is small.
Of the 19 places where winter Olympics have been held, 13 will be too warm in 2080 to do so again.
By 2080 I expect the world economy will be too shattered to continue holding events like the Olympic games. Thus, I have to admit that global heating will have occasional minor benefits. However, they will be minuscule compared to the disaster.
The thugs who shot innocent women in LA (while looking for one man) won't even be fired.
For the US government, leaks from people who like drones are good; leaks from people who don't like drones are bad.
The latest clever idea for persecuting homeless people: Pensacola has banned using a blanket or newspaper to protect oneself from the weather.
Everyone who supported that deserves to be sentenced to a year of homelessness.
Another danger from massive surveillance: once investigators believe someone is guilty of a crime — any crime — confirmation bias will encourage them to focus on whichever parts of the surveillance information confirm that suspicion, and ignore the parts that say otherwise.
California and the US government are considering laws requiring a remote kill switch and erasure feature in all smartphones.
This would make them even more open to attack by the state.
Obama said, "We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government", but that's exactly what the government continues to do.
"How far would [officials] be willing to go to cover up serious crimes such as torture and assassination?"
Brazil is persecuting sex workers to "clean up its image".
Idaho's "Ag-Gag" Law Latest to Criminalize Defenders of Animals.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Obama's anti-abortion judge nominee.
US citizens: call on congressional Democrats to stand firm against Republican hostage taking.
US citizens: object to GM corn designed to be used with Agent Orange.
The Other NRA: National Restaurant Association Eviscerates Rights of Customers, Workers, and Children.
Natural gas leaks a lot more methane, and contributes a lot more to global heating, than was previously believed.
Ocean heating seems to have caused grave damage to an old, remote coral reef whose location keeps it safe from other human-caused depredations.
A privatized prison in Idaho covered up its understaffing by fraudulent overbilling.
The million dollar non-fine seems inadequate as a punishment. The company ought to be prosecuted and put in its own prison.
It has been pointed out that one aspect of white privilege is that whites are less likely to be prosecuted for certain crimes than blacks are. By the same criterion, the most privileged class in the US is that of corporations.
Comparing protection of elephants with prohibition of drugs.
There is a significant difference between the two. Ivory has no physiological effect; if people like owning ivory, that is just an acquired taste, which they could easily learn to change. Nonetheless, the article could be right.
TEPCO Blasted for Withholding Data as Fukushima Radiation Levels Soar.
Almost 6 million Americans can't vote because of previous criminal convictions,mainly from minority groups because members of those groups are more likely to be prosecuted. This is enough to change the outcome of elections.
US citizens: tell the State Department not to follow its joke of an environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL pipeline, and reject it.
US citizens: call on Obama to have the EPA block Pebble Mine.
Geologists are seriously considering the idea that humans, through global heating and ecological disruption, have caused a new geological period, which they propose to call the Anthropocene.
I am concerned that the name "Anthropocene" may provoke irrational pride: some humans may think, "An epoch named after US humans proves our importance — we've really made it now." Even people who would not say this may feel it and be subtly influenced by it. That would be most unfortunate, since considering the epoch as an award would lead people not to recognize this development as the catastrophe that it is.
I therefore suggest choosing another name. The name that best characterizes what's coming in this epoch is "Obscene".
Seriously, since the change consists primarily of global heating, how about "Thermocene"? The heating is caused mainly by combustion (of fossil fuel and forests), so how about "Pyrocene"?
An ACLU victory: a federal court ruled that the government needs to get a warrant before it can access the confidential data base of people's prescriptions.
It's a step in the right direction, but access is still too easy. The state should not create a centralized data base of everyone's prescriptions.
School shootings are happening in the US at record pace, and 3/4 of the shooters found their guns at home.
Congresscritters say Deputy Attorney General James Cole's testimony about snooping on their phone calls was "not entirely accurate". It was the usual misleading half-truth.
21 things you can't do in the US while black.
US citizens: call on the US to block the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable.
These are the two biggest US cable operators.
It should be a no-brainer to block such a merger, but the US government is too corrupt to be counted on even for no-brainers.
These two companies are both ALEC members, and ALEC supports their lobbying campaigns to eliminate local regulation of cable TV and ban public network access.
Freedom to protest in the US is under systematic attack.
The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement is protesting against President Rousseff's support for agribusiness.
In the 1990s, I was told, activists of this movement were arrested on the pretext that they were using unauthorized copies of Windows. They could not afford authorized copies, of course. Then I heard that they had switched to GNU/Linux to protect themselves.
US citizens: tell the mainstream media to start talking about the TPP.
Everyone: Support Children 404 and demand Russia drop charges against Elena Klimova.
Iran has executed an Arab poet, labeled as "terrorist".
Belgium will give children dying slowly in great pain the option of euthanasia.
The devastating UK floods are part of a trend: 4 of the 5 wettest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000.
Elizabeth Warren Calls for Closing Loopholes for the Rich to Cut Student Loan Debt.
US citizens: tell Obama, no chained CPI — no cuts in Social Security, not even veiled cuts.
US citizens: call for extending the Clean Water Act to all waterways.
US citizens: call on the Fish and Wildlife Service not to delist wolves from protection.
NSA Whistleblower: USA Freedom Act Will Not Go Far Enough To Protect Civil Liberties.
It falls short in other ways too.
We should support it, but we must demand more.
The Australian plan to kill large sharks violates a treaty meant to protect migratory endangered species such as the great white shark.
ISP lobbyists have pressured (or paid?) 20 states' legislatures to ban public broadband.
If US Republicans are serious in their concern for future generations, they should protect them from global heating disaster.
This reasoning won't influence congressional Republicans, because they don't care about future generations except for the wealthy. Their pretended concern is nothing but an excuse to kick the poor today.
The protests in Bosnia are aimed at privatization which (as usual) was done so as to screw the non-rich, and at the corruption of the state.
I don't know the facts, but my guess is that some of the ex-Yugoslav industries should have been privatized, because they made products for a competitive market. That doesn't justify cheating the workers. Perhaps they should have been turned into worker cooperatives.
Russian environmentalist Evgeny Vitishko faces three years in prison for spray-painting on a fence.
Similar repression of nonviolent protest is found also in the US.
Biggest Rises and Falls in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index.
The big music factories are trying to force a major Irish ISP to start punishing customers accused of sharing.
To make a deal with the copyright industry is self-delusion. If you try to "meet them half way", they come back later and demand the rest.
Janet Yellen acknowledged that the US "economic recovery" has failed to provide jobs.
While I am glad Yellen recognizes the problem, interest rates have little leverage for correcting it. Low interest rates help banksters make more money, but they have no reason to put this into the rest of the economy. What we need is to expand deficit spending. When Obama endorsed the Republicans' goal of deficit cutting, he screwed the US until we replace him.
The Stasi, the East German secret police, collected metadata too. But it could not collect everyone's metadata as the US does.
Obama is considering launching an assassination of an American in a country where the US is not at war.
The fact that no attempt has been made to charge that person with a crime adds to the scandal, but if there were charges against that person, that would not justify summary execution.
More about how CIA drone attacks are aimed at SIM cards identified based on metadata.
Glenn Greenwald says he will not remain in exile forever, even though the US government refuses to say whether he will be prosecuted for his journalism.
The Committee to Protect Journalists warns that mass surveillance endangers journalism.
Israeli soldiers shot and killed unarmed Mohammad Mahmoud Mubarak as he was busy directing traffic. Then they claimed he has shot at them first, although he was unarmed and nobody shot except them.
The Israeli army arrests Palestinian children and tortures them into signing confessions they can't read.
North Carolina's first response to Duke Energy's coal ash spill was to minimize it and protect the company from penalties.
The EU envoy to Israel says that relations will depend on the outcome of peace talks with Palestine.
Since the peace talks began, Israel has accelerated its demolitions of Palestinians' houses.
A bill in the US congress would punish universities for making statements in support of a boycott of Israel.
It might be harder to punish them for supporting a boycott of companies and institutions that support the illegal Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory.
The US and UK have fallen down in ratings for freedom of the press.
It may not be enough to help us but it is a start.
After floods have caused tremendous damage to houses and transport in the UK, the government says it will provide "unlimited" funds for repairs.
Given their perverse austerity policies, they will take those funds out of aid for the poor. But why didn't they offer unlimited funds to prevent floods — including curbing CO2 emissions that are likely to make for worse floods in the future?
US Sailors Sick From Fukushima Radiation File New Suit Against Tokyo Electric Power.
Iowa farmers tell a presidential hopeful that supporting big food processing companies does not mean supporting them.
Canada's government is attacking democracy on behalf of oil companies.
US citizens: support the campaign for proper prosecution of rape by soldiers.
Everyone: Endorse the Google shareholder resolution aimed at Google's support for right-wing groups such as ALEC.
Google wants to detect that lots of people are taking photos or videos with their phones — and call the thugs.
Why should Google be allowed to know what people are doing?
Anger in Bosnia, But This Time the People Can Read Their Leaders' Ethnic Lies.
Everyone: tell the governor of North Carolina to start protecting people rather than the mining companies that make toxic pollution.
US citizens: call on Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to implement the Farm Bill in a way that favors healthful food.
It is so warm in Sochi that snowboarders are having trouble.
In 2054 they will need to hold the winter Olympics in a far more northerly place. By 2074, the world will have no attention or money left to hold such games.
UK victims of undercover thug infiltrators in political groups have launched a campaign for an independent inquiry into the practice.
One sheriff in the Seattle area wants to run a police department instead of a gang of thugs.
UK thugs arrested student protesters for no reason except to get their names, then the university suspended them for protesting.
The thugs had besieged the students for hours.
Greenwald/Scahill: How the NSA Helps the US Assassinate.
The railroading of human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart demonstrates the degradation of the US trial system.
You can see the effects of this in the repeated convictions of "criminals" who only went along with plans suggested by thugs and would never have been able to carry them out.
Cecily McMillan elbowed the person attacking her from behind, who turned out to be a thug, so she is threatened with 7 years in prison.
I wonder who groped her breast — was that the thug?
Thugs often attack innocent people, and make a special point of attacking people who are particularly virtuous (such as protesters for good causes). They are hardly ever prosecuted for this. If once in a while they get hit back, that's only a small step towards justice.
An Indian mining company is suing poor villagers as well as destroying their forest.
Xenophobia is rising around the world: "these are dangerous times to look foreign".
I understand the pressure to limit immigration. As millions start to flee from land that has turned into desert or ocean, this pressure will become enormous. No country is obliged to accept millions of refugees.
However, it makes a difference that our carbon emissions are responsible for the spreading deserts and oceans — and stop them. If we don't want to accept those millions of refugees we should stop destroying their land.
A Spanish judge has opened a criminal investigation of Chinese ex-officials for crimes against Tibetans.
I suspect that the mostly-right-wing US government is pressuring Spain's government to end this practice. Obama protects Bush and his torturers from criminal prosecution.
Obama will imprison another whistleblower, who was identified by massive surveillance of journalists' phone call records.
European Parliament candidates are asked to sign this proposed Charter of Digital Rights.
It is not strong enough on certain issues. For instance, it fails to oppose the censorship which many EU countries have already imposed, and fails to call for an end to existing mass surveillance measures such as the mandatory data retention for ISPs and phone companies.
However, I support it anyway.
Now that US network neutrality has been eliminated, Verizon is slowing Netflix traffic.
It would be great if Verizon killed off Netflix, whose business is fundamentally unethical because of DRM. But there is little chance of that; eventually they will make a deal, with Netflix paying Verizon some money.
Aristide reported in 2005 that Dubya had him removed because he was unwilling to privatize as the US demanded.
Thugs in Egypt and Sudan regularly conspire with kidnapers that torture Eritrean refugees to squeeze money out of their relatives.
To ransom hostages is cowardly; the right thing to do is to hold a funeral for them, in effect spitting in the kidnapers' faces. This takes courage, but discourage kidnapers, whereas a cowardly response keeps it going.
It is not clear how the Eritreans first fall into the hands of traffickers.
The US government destroyed and hid photos of Osama bin Laden body in contempt of a Freedom of Information Act request.
What can you expect from these thugs? They murdered bin Laden to avoid the inconvenience of putting him on trial.
Under today's British laws, the volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco and fascism would be charged with "terrorism."
Qatar will undertake to protect construction workers from abuses, but only on a few specific projects.
Republicans controlling state governments are trying to amend the US Constitution to require a balanced budget, which would mean making recessions worse.
Overseas, Culture of 'Impunity' for US Soldiers Guilty of Sexual Assault.
The first rule of ensuring that a foreign army can get along with local civilians is to punish any crimes by soldiers against civilians very sternly. The US may think it doesn't need to do this. The US is mistaken.
The enormous US military aid to Israel includes bombs and planes used to attack civilians in Gaza.
Everyone: tell General Mills to remove GMOs from all its cereals, not just from Cheerios.
Everyone: demand that the World Bank stop financing land grabs in Kenya and elsewhere.
An Australian supporter of boycotting Israel is being sued for refusing to support a study application by an Israeli academic.
If Lynch's grounds for refusal were as stated, that the scholar was associated with a university with a campus in a colony in Palestinian territory, that was political, not racial. So I think the lawsuit is mistaken.
However, I criticize Lynch's decision to apply the boycott to an individual person. The American Studies Association, in adopting a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, emphasized that this was not aimed at Israeli scholars.
California's drought may be the worst in 500 years, and it is going to get worse.
A Catholic school in the US fired a teacher for getting pregnant.
China has started helping Kenya prosecute ivory smugglers.
The Thai government has arrested a leader of the antidemocratic protest movement.
I can't criticize the arrest of people that represent a minority and try to sabotage elections.
Tar sands leaks in Canada that were reported last May have not been stopped.
An unprecedented speed-up of the trade winds is driving the Earth's heat gain into the ocean instead of letting it accumulate in the atmosphere.
Aside from the point that the speed-up is cyclical, there's also the point that the reason it causes heat to go into the ocean is that the air is hotter than the ocean. Once the ocean gets sufficiently hotter, heat will start to remain in the air.
Today's extreme weather is just a foretaste of what we have already made inevitable in a few decades. The question is whether we will take steps now to prevent it from getting even worse.
To prevent all but the rich from being squeezed out of major cities, we must build, build, build.
The obstacle is zoning that was designed to prevent the sort of density that we need in order to accommodate everyone.
US citizens: call on the government to make college tuition gratis.
(I try to avoid using the word "free" to mean "zero price" even when we're not talking about software.)
Once again, Turks protested state-imposed internet censorship on the street.
Across the US, businesses and products that aim at middle-class customers are failing — because those customers aren't there any more.
Substitute drug maintenance problems are pretty effective at saving addicts' lives and enabling them to do useful work.
I speculate that what makes the substitute drugs safer is that they are regulated and medically administered. In other words, part of what makes the original drug so dangerous is prohibition.
The US spent 7 years covering up the fact that it had put Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list by mistake.
This list is punishment without trial, and as such is a prima facie injustice.
Syngenta's own documents prove that it tried to sabotage and discredit Professor Hayes, whose work showed that Syngenta's pesticide atrazine was dangerous.
US television has a nearly total blackout about the TPP.
Republicans set up fraudulent web sites pretending to represent Democratic candidates so as to divert donors' money.
This reflects the motto of the Republican Party, "By hook or by crook", as observed in voter suppression laws and distribution of false information about where to vote, as well as just plain lying about Democrats.
Everyone: tell Whole Foods to stop firing workers because they have to leave for an emergency.
The time scale of global heating makes it hard to treat as news, but it could be the end of all news.
US states are slowly passing laws to allow the terminally ill to get help in suicide.
This is a step forward, but it is a shame to limit this escape route to those who are going to die soon anyway, and exclude people who can't commit suicide on their own because they are totally physically incapacitated. Some of those people face possibly decades of futile boredom, in some cases combined with horrible pain.
Mexican gangsters roam villages and kidnap girls as young as 7 for prostitution. No one dares openly resist them; the corrupt thugs are no help.
Widespread flooding has shown what a disaster global heating will bring to Britain.
The hard part will be to make the government confront the costs of avoiding the disaster, which get higher with delay.
Now that homosexuals fleeing Uganda can claim asylum because they'd face persecution there, how to decide if someone is not faking being gay?
Why Are Bitcoiners Going to Jail for Money Laundering While Big Banks Walk?
A bunch of protesters were convicted of being led by thugs to prepare molotov cocktails, but they were acquitted of "terrorism" charges.
Another blow to Australia's immigration policy secrecy, which consists of "We won't tell you what we're doing" and "How dare you make accusations?"
Shezanne Cassim was imprisoned in Dubai for posting a humorous video that didn't even criticize country's despicable government.
Humans are depleting groundwater around the world, just as global heating is reducing rainfall in many areas.
Britons: tell the NHS not to sell patient data to companies.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter in favor of network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The UK's environmental research organization has made a dirty deal with Shell.
Protesters in Rio de Janeiro occupied the main train station and let everyone travel gratis.
The Australian plan to kill large sharks, which migrate very far, pushes this endangered species towards extinction to save a tiny number of humans.
South Africa is concerned that this will wipe out sharks there too, since sharks swim between the two continents.
Boat people towed to Java by the Australian Navy in an Australian lifeboat say the Navy sailors burned people as punishment for asking to use a toilet.
Since the Australian government is covering up the whole activity, its denials are worthless. If it wants to convince us, it should make recordings as proof. As long as it covers up its actions we should believe all the accusations.
If vitamins don't address medical problems, will university researchers funded by a vitamin company tell us?
I need to point out that the same exact problem exists for the Big Pharma companies.
The US Green Party says the Farm Bill should be vetoed.
Mainstream media are still struggling to cover up US and UK's actions in the Middle East.
Sponsors of the Olympic games that refused to publicly criticize Putin's repression: Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald's, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung and Visa.
Garry Kasparov says that the Sochi Olympics are all about Putin's cult of personality.
Part of the cause of lower pay for women is that male senior managers are afraid of being accused of sexual harassment if they socialize or meet with women employees.
Israeli thugs attacked a Palestinian protest camp near Jericho.
Japanese women are organizing a sex strike against men that vote for a sexist candidate.
The UK's privatization of its post office was a giant give-away to the investors.
If you are like most Internet users, the way you use the net is bad for you directly, in addition to snooping on you.
Ralph Nader: The Law Must Be Free and Accessible to All — Not Secret and Profitable.
It's no use retraining US workers to fit jobs better, because the available jobs are simply far too few.
Perverse economics contribute to the lack of jobs.
US citizens: Tell Senator Reid, don't allow a vote on Fast Track.
US citizens: call on your senators to defend EPA regulation of power plant CO2 emissions.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on Kerry to get the facts right about the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Please do not access this page with Javascript enabled. I would be ashamed to have posted the link if you did that.
Brazil's Government Has Set the Favelas And Middle Classes Against Each Other.
The Ukrainian Protesters Must Make a Decisive Break with the Far Right.
The FBI is forcing ISPs and phone companies to install metadata monitors called "port readers".
Haiti deserves more than forgiveness of it dictator-imposed debt. It deserves reparations.
Palestine has been negotiating for 20 years under grave threat; now Israel is starting to feel the pressure of possible European boycott.
ABC spins very hard to pretend that stock market trends are relevant to most Americans.
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to support bills that would end the war on marijuana at the federal level.
US citizens: call for stopping the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion.
Children of the Occupation: Growing up in Palestine.
3000 civilians were killed by fighting in Afghanistan in 2013, mostly by the Taliban (as usual).
New video surveillance systems can see everyone's movements in a whole city.
Here's the ACLU's response.
What matters is not which people they do track, but which people they could track after the fact. If they can track where journalists or whistleblowers went in the past, democracy is sunk.
In the US it is legal to pay partially disabled workers a pittance, and thousands of people are exploited in this way.
A test of 900 foods in the UK found that over 300 were falsely labeled.
In Egypt people are arrested for carrying cameras on the street.
Assad has agreed to a truce and to allow civilians to be evacuated from Homs.
Privatized probation companies in the US jail poor people who can't pay the fees.
These companies have thousands of poor Americans jailed when they are too poor to pay the fines they owe.
Cambodian journalist Suon Chan, who reported on use of illegal fishing methods, was killed by fishermen.
Campaigning for women's rights in Morocco.
The practice in which relatives despise girls that have been raped is found in many parts of the world. In Samoa, men used (and perhaps still use) surreptitious rape to as a means to force girls to come and live with them; they knew their families would reject them for being raped. This happens because the girl's parents think of her as an asset rather than as a person.
US citizens: call for extension of unemployment benefits.
Senator Warren challenged other senators: does anyone believe that US enforcement of banking regulations is working?
The UK plans to entrust everyone's medical records to proprietary software (which is asking for trouble) made by a company with a track record for shafting the public, thanks to an inadequate concern for privacy starting from the top.
The system will also allow the state easy access to all the data. Naturally.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Empty Oceans Act.
Now that Obama can get judges confirmed, he should appoint public interest lawyers as judges.
A Ukrainian protest leader says that thugs captured him and tortured him into making a confession that he was paid by the US.
A UK thug has been sentenced to prison for making a false accusation, saying that an important politician called him a "pleb". The politician, being a Tory, probably thought this but apparently did not say it.
While this is the right thing to do, I wonder when the UK, US, and other countries will start sentencing thugs to prison for making more serious false accusations against people who are not important politicians.
Philip Seymour Hoffman Is Another Victim of Extremely Stupid Drug Laws.
Teenage girls in Britain are campaigning against female genital mutilation.
They know that girls in their communities are at risk.
Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is held and interrogated for hours every time he returns to the US.
Turkey's new internet law allows the state to block a web site by administrative decree, and requires ISPs to record people's contacts.
Several European countries also block web sites by decree, and the US government "seizes" domain names by decree. India has the power to take down a web site by decree. These practices are unjust in any country.
The tracking of web visits also exists in Europe and to some extent in the US.
Citizens of Massachusetts: sign this petition for establishing a public health care option.
The Australian government, which will do anything to boost the fossil fuel industry, is now fabricating an excuse to end the program to promote renewable energy.
More than half of the world's marine reserves are inadequately protected and fail to encourage wildlife.
The DEA's guide for how to disguise use of secret snooping data has been published.
The Chaos Computer Club has filed a criminal complaint accusing the German government and other governments of illegal surveillance.
Five predictions made by Karl Marx that fit today's extreme form of capitalism.
Cities and states are lured to paying millions in subsidy for big sports events based on wildly exaggerated estimates of how much the local economy will gain from the events.
This article refers to the Superbowl, but it's the same for the Olympics or the World Cup.
I would tell the boosters of these games to seek private investment if they are so profitable.
Qatar Airways subjects flight attendants to a regime almost like prison, firing them for the slightest infraction of absurd rules.
Qatar is one of the countries I would never visit. The required iris scan is just one of the reasons. I won't even change planes in the U.A.E.
Nobody should ever work in a country that demands exit visas.
New Zealand's digital snooping agency says it failed to preserve the data for Kim Dotcom's lawsuit alleging illegal snooping.
UK agents ran DDOS campaigns against Anonymous, interfering with their chat sites and with all the other sites co-hosted with them.
I reject the term "DDOS attack". When activists do it, it is a form of online protest; I won't call it an "attack" when someone else does it. What happened here is that the state sent a crowd of state agents to protest at a people's houses and the pubs where they meet.
US citizens: support fixing the Voting Rights Act.
US citizens: Support the Government By The People Act.
Egyptian journalist Hossam al-Meneai was tortured by thugs, says the American journalist who was arrested with him.
Americans need to be concerned about Japan's secrecy law.
2013 was the second-hottest non-el-Nińo year since records began.
Iraq's US-installed government imprisons women without trial, tortures them into confessing (or threatens to rape their daughters), then executes them. All this to punish their male relatives.
French protection for organizers of the Rwandan massacres may be exposed in court.
The NSA spied on German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because he refused to help Dubya conquer Iraq.
Evidence that Sri Lankan soldiers and thugs destroyed graves to cover up murders, under orders from the high command.
There is evidence also against the LTTE, which is no surprise. But those responsible are dead.
What's good and what's bad in the US Farm Bill.
Evidence that the Three Mile Island meltdown made lots of people sick in Pennsylvania, and killed animals.
Israel continues making a mockery of peace talks by authorizing additional construction of colonies in Palestinian territory.
The European Parliament strengthened the weak energy targets that the European Commission had proposed.
Congress and Obama, with the cuts in food stamps, are making America's children go hungry.
Republicans aim to force US women to have more children and prevent them from feeding these children.
Oil and gas drilling in the US are using up lots of water in the driest areas.
Although Russia has banned saying "It's not bad to be gay", its law is does not go as far as some other countries' laws against homosexuality.
Obama harps on "opportunity" to distract from high US inequality, but the US poor haven't got much opportunity either.
CVS has decided to stop selling tobacco.
I don't advocate banning tobacco, because prohibiting addictive drugs does great social harm. However, it should not be sold in pharmacies because selling it there gives tobacco a sort of medical endorsement.
The US has temporarily ceased drone attacks in Pakistan to try to encourage peace talks.
Extractive agriculture is part of the cause of the UK's floods.
Russia is arresting people who monitor environmental damage from the Olympic games, using bizarre and meaningless pretexts.
Some US claims about the use of chemical weapons in Syria can't be true.
Chomsky reports on how Syria was destabilized by effects of global heating and by the consequences of Dubya's occupation of Iraq.
This does not in any way excuse Assad for his tyranny and crimes. It also does not excuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia for funding and encouraging an armed rebellion in Syria when peaceful protests were going strong.
The recent report about execution of prisoners by Assad's men was paid for by Qatar.
That doesn't mean the it isn't true, but Qatar should not succeed in hiding its atrocities behind Assad's atrocities.
The NOAA has retreated from trying to abolish state bans on shark fins.
Facebook's mobile app snoops on SMS messages.
Indian thugs attacked a demonstration by Christian Dalits outside the parliament.
Republicans want to make it easier for employers to leave workers without health care: just give them only 39 hours a week of work.
Since the US deficit has gone down greatly, why do Republicans keep trying to hurt the unemployed?
Because the misguided goal of cutting the deficit was always just an excuse to take from the non-rich.
The Republicans will pursue their War on Drug Users to the end, but only against non-rich drug users.
NAFTA hurt family farms in Mexico, the US and Canada, at the expense of agribusiness. The TPP threatens to do the same in many more countries.
Researchers say that tar sands oil companies have greatly underestimated the amount of toxic pollution they produce.
To build the Olympic games venue, Russia destroyed forests and wetlands and "replaced" them with ecologically worthless artificial substitutes.
Is Freeing a Duck "Terrorism"?
I only partly agree with the idea of animal rights, but I do support human rights, and labeling animal rights activism as "terrorism" clearly violates them. I don't have to agree with them to support their right to campaign for their views.
Google, Facebook and other companies have released statistics showing at most 100,000 users have been subject to FISA orders and national security letters.
That's a small fraction of the users — but if they include journalists, whistleblowers and dissidents, democracy is in danger.
What matters is not how many people's data the state has looked at but how many people's data the state could look at when it wishes.
US citizens: call on Obama to stop South Dakota from taking Lakota children away from their relatives on trivial excuses.
I think the word "kidnapping" used in the petition is incorrect, but I signed anyway because I think the substance is valid.
US citizens: urge your congresscritter to oppose several bills intended to attack wildlife and wetlands.
US citizens: call on your senators to extend the Production Tax Credit for renewable energy.
With the International Olympic Committee supporting Russian repression, the Olympic Spirit means repression.
This is not surprising given that the Olympic Games have for many years brought repression to every place they have been held.
Colombia's principal terrorist group, the state-linked paramilitaries, have announced bounties for the murder of political candidates.
Karzai has been holding peace talks with the Taliban for months.
I wish these talks had made progress. Given that the Afghan government lacks the support necessary to defeat the Taliban, and that it increasingly spits on women's rights, I don't think trying to "win the war" makes any sense.
Pakistan is also trying to talk with the Taliban.
The Antidemocratic Party in Thailand has sued to invalidate the elections on the grounds that the actions of the Antidemocratic Party interfered with voting.
Several foreign journalists succeeded in escaping from Egypt before they could be captured by the forces of state repression.
The coup has taken Egypt from a danger of repression to blatant repression.
With cancer rates increasing world-wide due to tobacco, alcohol and obesity, cancer treatment is not enough — laws are needed to make it easier to avoid those dangers.
Superstitious Nevada farmers are holding prayer sessions asking for an end to the drought in the southwestern US.
They ought to be holding Keystone XL protests instead: that would at least have a chance to reduce the future droughts that are expected to be much worse.
One writer tried to "opt out" from tracking by commercial data brokers and found that the possibility of doing so is rather spotty.
I have opted out from these data brokers by paying cash.
NPR published a whitewash of toxic sewage sludge.
The hiring collusion between big tech companies shows that their adoration of the "free market" is just a story they tell to fool the gullible.
A competitive market is a kind of social system. For certain purposes, is a good solution. Keeping it competitive depends on state regulation.
The West Virginia toxic spill isn't over yet. Moreover, it's just part of a permanent toxic spill that usually goes unnoticed in the media.
Mexico's supposed crackdown on pimps that force women into prostitution has got off to a weak start.
Clever tricks that web sites use to collect information about visitors and correlate those with names.
How these companies currently use the data they collect is not significant because (1) they could change those policies tomorrow and (2) those policies don't apply when government agencies such as the NSA collect the data.
Uganda's first step to impose control on women is to ban miniskirts, not to mention bikinis, and any pictures of them, and any writing about them.
I think even the song "Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polkadot bikini" will be criminalized by this law, not to mention lots of movies that could get a G rating in the US.
One user writes that Facebook led her to be in love with "the projection of [her] own desired life".
Cutting down on the amount of her usage by Facebook may have addressed this problem, but not all the others.
People in Rio de Janeiro are mocking the surreal prices provoked by the coming World Cup.
Seafood caught in Galveston Bay, Texas, is contaminated with dioxin.
Prince, who briefly thought of changing his name to Jerk, has dropped a lawsuit against his fans for distributing "bootleg" recordings.
I see nothing wrong with that practice.
The US "War on Drugs" has cost a trillion dollars in South America, and resulted in over 100,000 killed.
Clothing, even for children, often contains toxic substances.
Japan wants to sell India some potential meltdowns.
The Pentagon spends millions on directing Hollywood to make pro-military propaganda and convince Americans to support military adventures.
Obama's "MyRA" retirement accounts won't do much good for the Americans who might try to use them.
Ten arguments against prohibition of prostitution.
It's not just Muslims that try to shut down art that makes fun of their religion. In Australia, Christians are trying.
Sea Shepherd described Japanese whalers' violent tactics.
The Theater of Security Agency and all its staff knew in advance that X-ray scanners were useless and dangerous. The TSA delayed and endangered passengers with those machines solely to give the impression it was Doing Something.
The article also says that power-tripping TSA agents impose extra searches and delays as a form of harassment, while dishonestly claiming it is a "random search".
Obama says he thinks prohibition of marijuana is unfortunate but fails to recognize that he could end that prohibition any day.
Staples and many other stores offer different prices to different customers and don't admit that they are doing so.
This is a consequence of letting them have too much information about the purchaser. When I buy something, the store doesn't know who I am, because I pay cash.
In gaming terms, Straight White Male is the lowest "difficulty setting" for real life.
The anti-government movement in Thailand, a substantial minority with some powerful backing, has blocked tens of thousands of people from voting in the election.
We have to consider them the anti-democracy movement.
Afghanistan is trying to have a democratic election for president.
Canada is negotiating a business rights treaty with the EU, and says it has to be kept secret in order to negotiate it, even the parts that are supposedly finished.
Leaked: Pakistan's secret record of the casualties of US drone attacks. In 2009, it abruptly stops treating which casualties are civilians.
Refuting the pseudoscience that the US Senate was told about global heating.
George Lakoff's advice on framing is vital for progressives.
It's also vital for the free software movement. We reject the weak compromises advocated under the term "open source"; we take a clear moral stand.
The Australian government is secretly transferring boat people onto its own lifeboats and towing those boats to Indonesia.
Studies confirm that "free trade" is the main cause of increased inequality in the developed world.
Many companies say they support action to curb global heating, then contribute to groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce that try to prevent it.
Obama still supports Clapper even after admitting (euphemistically) that Clapper lied to Congress.
Obama was never much of a supporter of human rights.
More about Canada's WiFi tracking scheme, which seems to have been a dry run for the NSA.
China struggles to pretend it is not kicking out foreign journalists in retaliation for criticism in the press.
The US is not spotless on this issue either: it requires journalists to apply for a special visa, even if they come from countries whose citizens normally don't require a visa.
The Gates Foundation and the US government want to track all students from preschool to workforce.
Utah School Threw Out Students' Lunches Because They Were In Debt.
It is disgusting for public schools to make students pay for lunch, or for anything.
The UK wants to secretly subpoena journalists' notes.
The US State Department adopted another bogus evaluation of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Global heating was expected to bring flooding to the UK in 2030, but it is hitting already.
The US is going to pressure Sri Lanka to investigate war crimes committed against Tamil civilians.
This is the right thing to do, but when will the US investigate the war crimes committed by Dubya in Iraq?
If Obama wants to save our climate, he must drop the "all of the above" energy policy.
US citizens: call on Congress to raise the minimum wage.
I've promoted similar campaigns before, and it is good to keep showing Congress pressure to do this.
Citizens of California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin: call on your senators to oppose the cuts in food stamps, which will fall mainly on those states.
Surveillance in the US today exceeds Orwell's worst nightmare.
This level of surveillance is incompatible with democracy.
7 big omissions in the State Department's whitewash of Keystone XL.
Global heating is helping fungus kill the Douglas fir trees of the Pacific Northwest.
Record-Breaking Long-Term Unemployment in Virtually Every State, and Obama Turns to Big Business?
The Indian ID card is the world's biggest biometric scheme, and the state has tried to impose it on everyone.
Media Suffer Winter Chill in Coverage of Sochi Olympics.
Bayer CEO says, "We did not develop this medicine (Nexavar) for Indians, We developed it for Western patients who can afford it."
Heed the Warnings in Extreme Weather — Or Risk Losing Earth.
Proposed vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems for cars could turn out to be a way to track them.
It's possible to design such a system so that it provides the same benefits and can't be used for tracking. All it requires is political will.
The More We Learn about Nuclear Past, the More an 'Accident' Seems Likely.
Most Americans consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failures.
The conquest and occupation of Iraq were much worse than a failure — the right term is "crime against humanity". Bush deserves to be prosecuted for it.
But was it a failure? In terms of its stated purpose, eliminating Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, it was a success before the start — since he didn't have any.
New product: mobile surveillance robots for shopping malls.
I do feel irritated when I get checked by "security", usually at airports. I hope you do, too. If this robot keeps permanent records, which I expect it will, it will be like a mobile surveillance camera installation.
In coal country, toxic spills happen continually and people are disposable. It has been that way for over a century, as companies find excuses to block or ignore regulations against pollution.
The EU has a secret plan to put devices in all cars to allow them to be stopped remotely.
This would be used by the state against criminals and protesters, but experience shows that others will find out how to use it too.
Islamist terror is growing in Egypt.
Forget Iron Man-Child — Let's Fight the White Maleness of Geek Culture.
The Spanish government's plan to nearly ban abortion has roused big opposition.
Canada's spy agency snoops on WiFi users in airports, then follows them through other connections. We don't know how it does this.
US citizens: call on Obama not to approve the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
US citizens: call on Minority Leader Pelosi to oppose "fast track" for the TPP.
Clapper thinks Japan's state secrecy law, which impedes access to information about the handling and status of the Fukushima meltdowns, is a great thing.
Assad's army has demolished entire neighborhoods whose inhabitants were thought to favor the rebels.
For-profit colleges in the US prey on people desperate for a way to escape poverty using exaggerated claims and high-pressure sales.
Federal student loans should not be available for these schools. However, the underlying problem is that of the plutocratic policies that favor the rich and have driven 1/3 of the middle class down and out.
The evolution of the death penalty in the US responds to a philosophical conflict.
The skinflint UK government is rationing access to health care through the NHS.
That dumps Britons into a US-like situation where the wealthy can pay for their own care while the rest are screwed.
The Great Barrier Reef faces death by a thousand cuts.
As some cities consider removing their money from the big fraudster banks, they need another place to put that money, such as public banks.
Some penguin species are threatened by the effects of global heating.
US citizens: call on Congress to end the NFL's tax exemption.
US citizens: call on Obama to permanently cancel plans to drill for oil in Alaskan Arctic waters.
India passed a law to end manual scavenging of human wastes, but isn't implementing it very energetically.
Simply dictating "no more manual scavenging of human wastes" won't change anything in places where the systems require manual scavenging. What's needed is a program to build sewer systems and toilets connected to them. That will take money and time.
17 rural communities in California are about to run out of water. They contain at least 11,000 people.
The drought extends across most of the state, but it is only a foretaste of what global heating will bring.
The only independent TV channel may be pushed off the air for asking a question about Russia's strategy during World War II.
Whatever you think about the question, the response seems suspiciously extreme.
In the US: join a protest vigil against the Keystone XL pipeline on Feb 3.
Armed, masked Israelis attacked some Palestinian farmers; Israeli troops came and molested the Palestinians further.
Netanyahu's proposal to give Palestine sovereignty over some Israeli settlements was meant to provoke Palestinian rejection, but some Israelis rejected it first.
More comments on the situation in Ukraine.
A review of Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat.
The article dares to raise the question of how many children we should have. Having no children is an important way to contribute to civilization's survival. It also frees you to do something that matters with your life, even if you're not rich.
A new study shows that a neonicotinoid pesticide damages bumblebees' ability to collect pollen for their young.
Bumblebees are important pollinators; endangering them is playing with fire. The doubts that are raised in the article might affect the level of damage that normally occurs, but not the fact that it happens.
The axolotl seems to be extinct in the wild.
Public pressure made the UK government back down from prosecuting the men who tried to 'steal' food from a supermarket's garbage bin.
Persecution of gays in Nigeria ranges from betrayal to trial to lynching.
Egypt plans to charge 20 al-Jazeera journalists with ludicrous charges ranging from belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood to "harming the national interest" and illicit possession of broadcast equipment.
This is Putinesque contempt for freedom of the press.
Some of these journalists are being kept in brainwashing conditions similar to those Bradley Manning suffered.
This also reminds me of the Yemeni journalist imprisoned at Obama's request for interviewing terrorists.
China is installing solar generating capacity at an amazing pace, but coal generating capacity 3 times as fast.
This is not progress, merely regress a little slower than it might have been. Progress will be when the amount of coal-based generation goes down.
The US government is advancing a regulation about sharks that would overturn state and local bans on selling shark fins.
Flooding Experts Say Britain Will Have to Adapt to Climate Change — And Fast.
This is the result of failing to curb global heating a decade ago. With the fossil policies of today's fossil governments, it will be a lot worse in 30 years.
The NSA spied on other countries' participation in the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference.
This was when the attempt to reach a global agreement to reduce CO2 emissions and avert disaster failed spectacularly because many governments were unwilling to agree on a real solution. The US was unwilling, and this NSA surveillance surely helped the US government achieve its aim of "no deal, burn away!"
Clapper told Congress that al-Nusra, one of the Syrian factions that labels itself as "al-Qa'ida", would like to attack the US.
Clapper has lied to Congress before with impunity; I would not put it past him to lie about this too. Whether this is true or not, his am is surely to convince us that massive general surveillance is necessary.
If he is not lying, perhaps he is exaggerating. Perhaps some member of al-Nusra said to others, "Wouldn't it be great to attack Americas some day?" and others said, "Sure, after we kill all the Syrian Shi'ites and Christians, let's kill Americans next."
An interesting point is that al-Nusra is part of the group of Syrian factions that the US may support because it is fighting against ISIS.
Syria is a fight involving at least three sides that are murderous and evil. If any one of them were the only one, we could envision intervening against that side if the Syrian people wanted us to. Those who want an intervention against one side can easily cite valid reasons for it.
But it is not feasible to intervene against all the evil sides; and if we were to intervene against only some of them, in effect we would be supporting the others.
I don't see any military way to make things better in Syria; at least let's avoid making them worse.
Now that "school choice" proves to give no academic benefit, the advocates of this indirect scheme of privatization hunt for bizarre excuses.
How many other UK convictions of protesters and others are invalid because of dishonesty by the thugs? Their own investigations can't be trusted.
US and EU citizens: sign this petition for network neutrality.
US citizens: tell Obama to stop pushing the TPP.
Right-wing "marriage promotion" programs are an excuse for shafting the poor, and do nothing to reduce the obstacle that make poor people's marriages fail: poverty itself.
The article also shows that ease of access to divorce has nothing to do with successful marriages.
As for Ross Douthat's idea of trying to force women to have babies so that they might feel it necessary to get married, it's not only a nonsequitur, it is perverse. We need fewer babies to be born.
Israel is blocking Gaza's wastewater plant from operating, which is causing further pollution of Gaza's aquifer.
I guess the plan is to make Gazans get sick and die.
Tony B'liar has endorsed the Egyptian military government.
It's true that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood trampled Egyptians' human rights. That's what Islamists stand for. However, the coup government has gone much further in this harm.
Shell abandoned plans to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic this year.
That delays the damage but we need to block it entirely.
Unable to do both, Scarlett Johansson chose to promote SodaStream rather than Oxfam.
I guess SodaStream pays more.
Activist Vera Scroggins has been banned from going to the local hospital, the local supermarket and the local Chinese restaurant by an extremely broad anti-protest injunction for a fracker.
Merely to ban someone from really protesting is injust in itself.
Roundup is responsible for the great decline in Monarch butterflies.
Fanmi Lavalas activists face criminal charges, which seem to have been fabricated.
Pakistan's Prime Minister wants negotiation with the Taliban.
US citizens: condemn the House's foodstamp cuts and call on the Senate to undo them.
Justin Bieber is Lucky That He's Rich. Poor Immigrants Don't Get Off so Lightly.
If Bieber was driving drunk, that charge should not be dropped. Drunk drivers risk killing someone, and stars are no exception. On the other hand, people shouldn't be deported for minor things.
Does Obama Administration View Journalists as Snowden's "Accomplices"? It Seems So.
US citizens: Call on the American Pharmaceutical Association to ban pharmacists from making up drugs for executions.
Everyone: call on Wilmar to carry out its promises to stop causing deforestation.
Schools where US taxpayers fund teaching of anti-science.
Obama's efforts aimed at ending imprisonment without trial are so slow and narrow that we can conclude they are programmed not to do the job.
US citizens: call on the EPA to ban the pesticide sulfoxaflor, which is known to hurt bees.
Israeli troops attacked a peaceful protest in the Jordan Valley. The authorities arrested two activists, handcuffed them, kicked them in the ribs, blindfolded them, lodged false charges against them, and did not let them contact lawyers.
Frackers should have to pay a lot of money to cover the environmental damage they will do.
A Ukrainian Explains 10 Things The West Needs To Know About The Situation In Kiev.
The rich in Haiti say that Port-au-Prince is being rebuilt, but the poor don't see much improvement since the earthquake.
Boat people accuse the Greek Coast Guard of causing their boat to sink and then kicking people who tried to cling to the Coast Guard ship.
If these charges are false, why didn't the Coast Guard make a video to document the truth?
The migrants share the responsibility for the death of the children, having brought them on such a dangerous trip, but that doesn't excuse the Coast Guard for killing them.
This doesn't mean that migrants are entitled to go to Greece just because they would like to. I understand that they had to flee Afghanistan and Syria, but they could stay in Turkey (which is where they were coming from).
Pakistan has imposed a state of emergency, including secret courts and allowing thugs to freely shoot to kill, supposedly as part of a plan to suppress the Taliban.
A British lawyer told members of Parliament that much of GCHQ's spying is illegal.
Karzai accuses the US of carrying out false-flag suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
I don't think it is true in this case, but the US has done things like this before.
Global heating may be responsible for making many species of fish smaller, up to 1/3 smaller than 38 years ago.
Intense fishing may be responsible, because there is usually a size limit on allowable catch; that selects for fish that become mature with a smaller size.
US citizens: phone your senators to support extension of unemployment benefits.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to end prohibition of marijuana.
Some obvious ideas for what San Francisco techies could do to help convince the rest of the city's residents not to resent them.
However, there is no substitute for building a lot more living space in San Francisco.
US states can't get drugs to execute people with, so they are trying experimental combinations with unpredictable results.
I think the means of execution is a secondary issue — the death penalty is wrong regardless of how it is done.
US prison is illegally harassing prisoner John Kiriakou, for instance by reading the letters he sends, and reading mail from his lawyer, and claiming he is forbidden to write to the media.
When users log in to a site through Facebook, Facebook gives the site access to lots of information about the user.
If this is what a site demands from you, you should not touch it anyway!
Australian protesters are trying to block the clearance of a forest which is needed to launch a coal mine.
Both the means and the end endanger civilization's survival.
If you use Google Maps from a smartphone, you're giving data to the NSA.
To some extent this is because Google designed it to track you. This includes the fact that it asks you which address you're interested in. I used to use Google Maps, back when it worked without running nonfree Javascript code, but I never entered an address; instead I scrolled around in the area I was interested in and found the address for myself.
I've pointed out for years that the system could do the same job while respecting privacy more by searching the map data in your own computer for the addresses you're interested in.
ALEC claims it does not track the progress of bills that follow its proposals, notwithstanding proof that it does so. It could be that ALEC faces an IRS investigation and is trying to cover up.
The UK will prosecute three men for taking food from a supermarket's garbage bin.
This decision is coherent with the rest of UK policy. The UK government has worked hard to drive Britons to starvation. To allow them to eat food meant for the landfill would spoil all that work.
In a place with a sufficiency of food overall, hungry people who can't afford food are entitled to steal food.
Alabama's legislature is on the verge of extending the Republican War on Women by authorizing hospitals and medical personnel to refuse medical care (even in an emergency) involving ending a pregnancy.
NYC thugs beat up an old man who was crossing the street against the light, then charged him with "resisting arrest" (he ignored their orders because he doesn't understand English). Naturally, the New York thug commissioner stood up for the thugs.
The author may be right that most thugs would not engage in such violence. But nearly all thugs will defend their fellow thugs who do carry out such attacks, and that's why they deserve the name of "thugs".
The US is suffering from its growing inequality.
Robert Gates' former boss in the CIA evaluates him again.
FDA Concealed the 'High Risk' Livestock Antibiotics Pose to People.
A study suggests a connection between DDT and Alzheimer's disease.
Costs of Privatization Hidden in Plain Sight.
It is no accident that privatizations are set up to give the public a bad deal. They are designed to do that.
Information-gathering companies want to know so much about you that they can tell when you're about to buy something.
If these companies know what you're likely to do, the NSA will know if you are planning to be a whistleblower. The existing level of general surveillance in the US is already too much for democracy.
I will continue not to use most of the systems that would give companies such information about me. Don't be tracked — pay cash!
The government has made a small concession allowing companies to publish the rough numbers of certain kinds of demands for people's data.
This is not quite enough for us to tell whether we are all being surveilled. One single order (such as the one for Verizon) can cover the data of millions of people.
What we really need is for each company to publish a figure (even if approximate) for how many people's data was actually delivered to the government.
RNA interference can be used to make pesticides, but they can go wrong.
The proposed applications vary in terms of the danger of bad side effects. Dosing bees with RNA to kill varroa mites is unlikely to result in exposing other wild insects to that RNA; if it doesn't hurt the bees, it won't do harm. By contrast, corn that generates interfering RNA can't avoid exposing all the species that live near the field, and there are lots of those.
I think that the interfering RNAs should be delivered in sprays, not made by crops, for two reasons:
The predicted fastest-growing US jobs for the next decade are, mostly, very susceptible to automation.
It looks like the US is heading for a situation where millions of people who are fit to work can't find any jobs. The plutocrats would like to take advantage of this to force wages down for just about everyone. Instead we must redesign society so that everyone can have a decent life, even those who get no work. This could involve welfare for everyone. This could involve rejecting, even banning certain forms of automation. One way or another, it must be done.
A Dutch appeals court says ISPs are not required to block access to the Pirate Bay.
This is a victory for internet freedom.
Rick Falkvinge says the copyright industry is doomed, because it can survive only by surveilling all forms of private correspondence.
I wish I could be so confident. I fear that states, which already seek to surveil all private correspondence and already act as agents for the copyright industry, will extend their surveillance to the point of achieving what Falkvinge considers impossible.
There is another way that the copyright industry can succeed in subjugating everyone: through streaming. If people are so foolish as to tolerate streaming instead of having a copy, no one will be able to share.
It is clear that we must reject any streaming service that doesn't allow users to download copies. And if it does allow users to download copies, we must make a point of using it that way.
Out, out, damned Spotify!
If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox.
This is comparable to searching all the apartments in 20 blocks of Manhattan just in case their might someday be warrants against some of the residents.
Police Banned From Enforcing Traffic Laws In Oklahoma Town Over Abuse Of Traffic Tickets For Money.
Can we get governments to fund research in integrated pest management instead of supporting Monsanto?
Ukraine has repealed the new repressive law that forbid protests and imposed censorship.
Thugs in the Philippines tortured suspects for fun.
US citizens: support Bernie Sanders' bill to use money allocated for war to pay for benefits for veterans.
Plutocrats often compare progressive taxation with Nazism.
Propaganda: The Dominant Grand Narrative Of Our Time.
Angry Birds spies for the NSA as well as for companies.
UK residents who were sentenced in effect to restrictive probation without a trial for suspicion of perhaps intending to commit crimes, who ran away and hid, are appealing the probation order.
One of them faces criminal charges for violating the restrictions of this punishment without trial.
Peru has approved gas prospecting deep inside an indigenous people's reserve.
1/3 of the US middle class in 2008 is no longer middle class.
Edward Snowden responds to Obama's proposals for minor changes in the general surveillance of everyone.
Everyone: tell Kellogg's to adopt a firm policy to stop causing deforestation.
Obama's "Promise Zones" promise very little.
A US bomb attack in Somalia killed one of the main leaders of the Shabaab.
I have no sympathy for Sahal Iskudhuq, or for the Shabaab, which is an Islamist extremist group. However, the death of a leader in such a group is generally not much of a setback. Lots of others are ready to take his place. What affects the success of the group is its power to recruit. Did this attack reduce that, or increase that?
Given that there is a civil war in Somalia, in principle the US can legitimately give the government military support. Did that government ask for this attack? Maybe in general terms.
But let's not forget that this government was imposed by outside intervention. While it now has control of substantial territory, it's not clear that it qualifies as more than a puppet. Furthermore, al-Shabaab is the result of the previous US-organized intervention, carried out by Ethiopia as a proxy, which destroyed Somalia's previous stable government, which was Islamist too but not as extremist as al-Shabaab.
It all raises the question of whether these interventions are good for anyone except arms companies, participants in the perhaps puppet Somali government, and Islamist extremists.
Right-wing US policies have made American workers and students so afraid of losing the competition with each other that they dare not fight back.
The Taliban are intimidating Pakistani journalists who might criticize their crimes.
Tunisia has adopted a constitution that recognizes religious freedom. However, freedom of expression may not be strong enough.
8 years after Hurricane Katrina, the poorest neighborhood in New Orleans has only partly rebuilt.
Global heating is raising sea level. What would be considered today a 100-year-flood will in 50 years be much more frequent.
The right to a public trial is threatened in the trial of Chicago protesters accused of terrorism.
DNA from plants humans eat gets into the human bloodstream. This adds to the reasons for concern about genetically modified plants.
It's clear that these GMOs can't be broadly toxic to humans, for the consequences would have been impossible to miss. However, problems affecting particular classes of people (perhaps depending on the details of their immune systems) are not impossible.
What worries me most is the spread of pollen. Plants do hybridize in nature.
The UK press fears a system of mandatory prior censorship will be imposed.
The maker of fraudulent "bomb detectors" paid the UK government to help sell them.
The US government also acts as the marketing arm for companies such as Microsoft. In 2011 the Indian state of Tamil Nadu switched from distributing computers with GNU/Linux to distributing them with Windows, and this is suspected to be the result of a visit by Hillary Clinton.
This adds to many other reasons for not supporting her candidacy for president.
The anti-government Thai protesters, representing a substantial minority with a lot of clout, have seized and shut polling stations to block the election.
Half the children in Afghanistan are stunted from early malnutrition.
I think people should not have children under such circumstances, but women in Afghanistan are not given the choice.
Snowden says the NSA does industrial espionage.
The CIA paid Poland $15 million to run a secret prison there.
Activists have used "citizen's search warrants" to make governments come clean about dirty plans.
Yes, Things are Very Bad at Fukushima but it's not the Apocalypse.
The word "disaster" can be applied to events considerably less severe than the end of humanity, and it clearly applies to the Fukushima meltdowns even though no significant radiation reaches the US.
JP Morgan shows that crime does pay.
How wolves in the US, and big cats in Africa, keep ecosystems in balance by preventing population explosions of their prey.
Sea otters protect the kelp forests of the Pacific coast; the decline of sea otters fuels global heating.
Ukraine's president has started offering concessions to the opposition, but the torture of many protesters and journalists by riot thugs has made the protesters so angry that they demand more.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose S. 1881, the bill to provoke war with Iran.
Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe are being sued for conspiring to keep wages down.
US citizens: call on the World Bank to stop funding coal.
US citizens: tell your state legislators not to be scared when Big Food companies spread false claims that state laws to label GMOs are unconstitutional.
Indian villagers have obtained a demolition order for a Coca Cola plant that sucks the water from their farmland.
5 journalists have been killed in Egypt since the coup in July, dozens have been attacked, and dozens imprisoned.
Anti-government protesters (some pro-Morsi, some pro-democracy) faced repression in Cairo.
With pro-government rallies too, it is not easy to tell which side has more popular support.
A UK politician faces threats for saying that a shirt showing Jesus and Mohammed greeting each other is not horrible.
Companies say the US has a "skills gap", but really it's just that employers are trying to push wages down and skilled workers are not enthusiastic.
Even if there were enough job offers to give every American that would like to work a low-paid job, that wouldn't make the country prosperous. Additional demand for workers is needed in order for wages to rise. So we need to create more jobs — until we reorganize society so you can have a decent life without working if nobody wants your labor.
Electric cars can reduce pollution (including greenhouse gas) provided they are combined with a push for cleaner electric generation.
San Francisco residents are up in arms against employees of Google and other companies for driving up the price of housing there.
I sympathize with them, and with everyone that wants to live in San Francisco, and I think the real solution is to build a lot more housing space there.
Obama banned physical torture, but authorizes brainwashing techniques such as long-term sleep deprivation and long-term solitary confinement.
Long-term solitary confinement is also practiced on many US convicts.
Medical marijuana is the only hope for some children with epilepsy.
A court ruled that Texas law doesn't require keeping a corpse on life support for the sake of the deformed fetus inside it.
The campaign to eliminate toxic substances from clothing factories.
Everyone: call on Monsanto to stop hiding the costs of GMOs.
Fracking in the UK may produce marginally less CO2 than using imported gas; but if that gas is used elsewhere, the emissions from fracked UK gas will add to the total.
When demand is elastic, increased supply causes a lower price and increased consumption. To burn less fossil fuels we must reduce the supply. A rising price would indicate success.
The UK has passed a law that will restrict organized political activity, except by the companies that can afford their own lobbyists.
Three protesters are on trial in Chicago for alleged terrorism, although it seems that thug provocateurs may have fabricated everything.
The intense security and obstruction of public and press access to the trial is, in effect, a way of prejudicing the jury to think the defendants are very dangerous people.
The result of skimping on higher education is that most teachers are exploited "adjuncts" with no hope of tenure and intolerably low pay.
Proprietary video games give the illusion of agency because the players can choose the little details of what they do. The important choices are imposed on them.
Further emission of CO2 will cost business money. Given plutocratic (thus, illegitimate) government, that seems to be a crucial point to try to limit global heating.
Egypt's repression includes arrest of an al-Jazeera news team, supposedly accused of "broadcasting false news" although they have never actually been charged.
For such a thing to be a crime indicates tyranny.
A series of terror bombings in Egypt have been claimed by self-described Islamists.
The regime blames the Muslim Brotherhood for these bombings, with no evidence. A few months ago I predicted that some Islamists who formerly supported the MB would turn to violence in response to the massacre of protesters.
However, another possibility occurs to me. Given how much these bombings benefit the military rulers, I wonder whether some of them are false flag attacks — carried out by the military and attributed to Islamists.
Neither explanation seems impossible. I can envision Islamist extremists who continue using violence even when it is self defeating, and I would not put anything past al-Sisi's men.
A mentally ill man has been sentenced to death in Pakistan for claiming to be the prophet Mohammed.
Muslims who don't want their religion to be equated with oppression had better demand the repeal of laws against blasphemy.
The European Court of Human Rights has demanded information from UK ministers about GCHQ for a case about whether it violates privacy rights.
Chinese dissident in exile Wang Yam was sentenced to life imprisonment in the UK through a secret trial, almost as if he were in China.
Genetically modified crops might produce the "fish oils" that are made in nature by algae and accumulated by fish.
Will these crops be safe for humans to eat, and for wildlife? I don't see any obvious reason why they would not be, but you can't predict what will happen in complex systems such as the human body or natural ecosystems. Only trial will tell.
It could be that it is safe for most people but a few are allergic to it. It is important to maintain alternatives, so that anyone who is allergic can avoid this.
These crops would be patented, which means they would deny farmers their traditional right to save seeds. Note how the person interviewed cites the bogus term "intellectual property" to justify the radical claim that the results of publicly funded research should be used to extract money from the public.
Why did the thugs in Wisconsin mistake a basketball victory gesture for "gang membership" and arrest three happy teenagers?
Everyone: call on Iraq not to execute prisoner al-Qahtani, who was tortured into a confession (like many others in Iraq).
Everyone: support the bill in the State of Washington to refuse cooperation to NSA massive surveillance.
US citizens: support the science-based estimate of the cost to society of emitting CO2.
US citizens: Call on Obama to order a living wage for federal contract workers.
US citizens: Call on China to free imprisoned Tibetan singers.
There was a second possibly toxic chemical in the West Virginia toxic spill, which the company didn't bother to report.
Since the company is already bankrupt, its owners probably see no reason to care what happens.
Once the spill happens, our system for preventing spills has already proved inadequate. We must inspect chemical plants frequently, and tax them enough to pay for it. They must be required to report about the storage of toxic materials, too; we cannot cater to their desire for secrecy.
"Homeland Security" attacked a man who wore his Google Glasses into a movie theater, because the MPAA suspected him of "movie theft".
I would ask people to remove Google Glasses in any private gathering. It's not a wise idea to depend on them for your lenses.
Attempting to convince finance ministers that they need to curb global heating for the sake of economic growth.
It makes perfect sense if you want growth in jobs and income for most people. It's not good for fossil fuel billionaires, though.
Beijing will go all-out to reduce air pollution from both cars and power plants. This includes moving away from coal.
Iran's president is at Davos asking for western investment.
Western investment comes with dangerous strings, which would add to (not replace) Iran's home-grown repression.
Väexjö, in Sweden, builds "passive houses" that need no heating even in the coldest winters.
The US could do this too, if it appreciated the extent of the danger that threatens.
The Australian government says it can't afford the welfare system. Meanwhile it proposes to offer amnesty to rich tax-evaders.
It's just a matter of priorities: the rich or the poor.
Assad has cut off polio vaccination in rebel-controlled areas, as well as other supplies necessary for public health such as preventing water-borne disease.
The Ukraine anti-protest law also abolishes fair trials and imposes arbitrary censorship.
It also bans collecting information about thugs, which I presume includes photos or videos of what they do. In the US, that's not illegal, but the thugs wish it were, so they fabricate accusations against those who take photos.
Thugs have been fighting with protesters in Kiev, and the protesters have been fighting back.
Subsequently a truce was agreed, for talks between the president and the opposition. However, no deal was reached.
This report claims that the violence was started by right-wing infiltrators. I have no way to evaluate this claim.
A clever scheme for distributing anti-censorship software in China.
People should try this in the UK!
The Canadian government liquidated the library of Health Canada. The scientists are scrambling to create their own research resources.
Tunisia's new constitution seems pretty good in regard to freedom of expression, but some points need improvement.
The EFF explains how the presence of software in products is used to prevent people from owning them.
It's a good article but has two flaws. It uses the weak term "digital locks" to refer to DRM, and refers to the confusing term "intellectual property".
Tracking phone calls to a newspaper, to find a leaker, has created a scandal in Costa Rica.
I wish the US courts responded with such diligence to the scandal of its own far worse surveillance.
In cereals other than Cheerios, General Mills will continue to mean Genetically Modified.
China plans to stop using agricultural land as large as Belgium because it is polluted with heavy metals.
US citizens: call on congressional Republicans: if they want to interfere with abortions, they should support the rights of pregnant workers.
The ACLU is suing to make South Carolina public schools stop imposing Christianity (and mocking students that don't agree).
The school teaches bogus science, too.
The independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded that NSA massive surveillance is illegal.
The US systematically imposes harsh punishments for minor cyber "crimes".
I don't think most of these "crimes" should be punished at all. In particular, net protests at a web site virtual are the equivalent of a protest on the street. It is a mistake to call them "attacks".
Bugs in Chrome allow sites to turn its speech recognition into a listening device.
If the speech recognition is implemented, as I suspect, by a Google server (this would be SaaSS) then Google and the NSA are certainly listening to anything you say to this "feature".
Utah has a solution for homelessness: give homeless people apartments.
Another attempt to do a citizen's arrest on Tony B'liar failed, but eventually we will make him stand trial.
The NSA and GCHQ collect 200 million phone text messages a day, and look through them with little restraint.
The FISA court judges have recognized they cannot truly oversee the NSA, but they oppose any change that might fix this.
A woman in India was sentenced to be raped as a punishment for not paying the fine for having unauthorized sex.
Her lover seems to have been fined as well, but it was his wife who actually paid the fine.
California is in drought, perhaps the worst ever recorded. Little snow has fallen in the US west this winter — it has all gone to the center and east.
Global heating is expected to make the US southwest more arid, so this is just a foretaste.
The Gates Foundation's investments, compared with its stated principles.
The article presents the information annoyingly via images, which help the companies by presenting their logos. I see no reason to do that. Here's what the text in those images says.
Gates Foundation says: "Our nutrition efforts focus on delivering proven interventions and developing better tools and strategies for providing pregnant women and young children with the foods and nutrients they need"
The foundation's trust invested in:
Bill Gates says: "As a businessman, I believe the free market fuels growth. Unfortunately, the market often fails to address the needs of the poorest".
The Gates foundation trust invested in Walmart.
Gates Foundation says: Bill and Melinda Gates "Have defined areas in which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that they find egregious".
The Foundation's trust invested in:
Gates Foundation says: "The foundation believes that climate change is a major issue facing all of us, particularly poor people in developing countries …"
The foundation's trust invested in:
14 things that conservatives compare to slavery.
I won't say that nonfree software is as bad as slavery. It's oppressive, but not as much so as slavery.
Republican wreckers in Congress have repealed the energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.
US citizens: tell the SEC to bring back its rule to make public corporations disclose their political spending.
In Massachusetts: call on Stop and Shop to label products with GMOs.
US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the authorization for war with Iraq.
UK thugs demand water cannon to use against the people, saying that austerity is going to cause riots.
Nobel laureate Randy Schekman campaigns against the "luxury journals" that use their prestige to maintain an exploitative relationship with science.
The percentage of US adults in or looking for employment fell to under 63%. Large numbers have recently given up looking for work.
Perhaps they gave up hope of finding a job long ago, and were counted as seeking employment only because of their unemployment benefits. Once those were cut off, they had no reason to keep looking for work that they know they can't find.
NOAA says 2013 is tied for the 4th warmest year on record.
Snowden refutes the absurd charges that he spied for Russia.
It is no coincidence that Snowden is in Russia. It is because the US blocked him from going anywhere else.
Why does the US want Snowden to be in Russia rather than Bolivia or Venezuela? I conjectured last July that it is in order to smear him one way or another.
A new supermarket plans to sell edible but slightly bruised or wilted food, that is currently wasted.
Reportedly Kerry wants to extend the Israel-Palestine peace talks, because they are deadlocked (of course).
Netanyahu would like the talks to continue so that (1) he can say he is trying to make peace, and (2) occasionally the US will make a concession to him.
An Israeli teacher may be fired for saying negative things about the Israeli army and the occupation of Palestine. His students have taken to the street to support him.
The most ironic part is the claim that such ideas should not be heard in a civics class.
The London thugs are so committed to institutional racism that they systematically attack the organizations that resist it.
They offer money to innocent victims of their attacks, but never admit responsibility.
Erdogan's struggle to retain power in Turkey at all costs now endangers rule of law.
The EU has adopted targets for greenhouse gas reduction and for renewable energy generation, for 2030.
Announcing a target is only the first step to reaching it. It is a good thing that the corrupt EU governments (mainly UK) that serve the fossil fuels were overridden, but they did weaken the targets.
Meanwhile, these targets are insufficient to prevent disaster.
The big question, for civilization, is whether the US, Canada and Australia, effectively subservient to fossil fuel companies, will frustrate hopes for a climate protection agreement in 2015. They have won every time so far.
Success requires cooperation from China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and other major countries.
Many Chinese anti-corruption activists are being put on trial.
The Chinese government hardly tries to disguise the fact that they are being tried for political activities, unlike the US where protesters face charges of a "terrorist hoax" for the glitter that fell off their banner.
Shell has been blocked from oil drilling in Alaskan waters on the grounds that the threats to the environment have not been studied.
The European Union's new renewables target does not apply to individual countries; the UK now has no target for renewable energy.
This is what the UK government fought for, so that it could slow the increase of renewable energy and burn as much fossil fuel as possible.
The Russian law against "homosexual propaganda" has stirred up a wave of private violence against homosexuals.
9 of the 10 hottest years on record were since 2001, the exception being 1998 which had a very strong El Niño. In 2013, the short-term variable factors operated for cold; despite them, it was tied for fourth hottest on record.
When we get another strong El Niño, we will see what hot is.
The American Psychological Association dismissed the ethics complaint against its member John Leso, who help plan Bush regime torture policies, despite conclusive evidence.
The organization claims to have high ethical standards but apparently will go to great lengths not to uphold them in practice.
The Koch brothers paid for ALEC's report, "Rich States Poor States", which ranks states based on how little they spend.
Students in London supported a planned strike by university staff.
Poor women in various countries face more abuse from men and use less contraception.
Lack of money to meet ordinary needs could be responsible for both. The sense of desperation causes stress that leads to anger; some men would express that anger with violence. Poverty may also impede access to contraception.
A decent society offers everyone a decent life. This can involve having to work, but should not impose the stress of being poor.
Two Australian thugs were convicted of shooting a prisoner repeatedly with tasers.
Heavy air pollution from China spreads smog to the US west coast.
An artificial island built near Lagos for Nigeria's wealthy shows how the elite plan to wall themselves off and leave the rest to suffer from human and environmental disasters.
Victoria (in Australia) is considering laws that would empower thugs to ban a protest based on their subjective impressions. This is tantamount to a policy of no protests but the state could pretend it is not so.
Major western banks help the Chinese political elite hide their wealth.
The US, UK and Canada are turning their "national security" system on peaceful protesters, on behalf of fossil fuel companies.
Bristons convicted of a protest against coal-fired electricity had their convictions overturned because prosecutors concealed evidence in their trial — for instance, that an undercover thug was snooping on them.
This is good, but prosecuting people for a peaceful protest is an injustice even with a fair trial.
The UK thugs continue attacking protesters arbitrarily; a legal advisor at a fracking protest was left injured after thugs attacked him as he was talking to them.
Syrian refugees strongly wish for a negotiated settlement and a cease-fire.
Everyone: call on Iceland to stop killing whales.
US citizens: call on your congressional representatives to counteract the Corporations United (*) decision.
* Officially called the "Citizens United" decision.
In my message I urged legislators to work on various corrective approaches in parallel.
Australia has converted Nauru into a quasi-satellite and is therefore responsible for Nauru's absolution of independence for the judiciary.
The growing opposition to the TPP means we may be able to defeat "fast track", which would make it hard for it to be ratified at all.
19 things that conservatives compare to slavery.
I won't say that nonfree software is as bad as slavery. It's oppressive, but not as much so as slavery.
As Obama's health care program starts giving Americans health coverage, people who were taught to despise it become grateful.
Everyone: answer the European Union's copyright survey. You can answer even if you are not European.
Here are explanations of what's behind the questions, and suggestions for answering.
Here's more advice.
US citizens: support Senator Reid in blocking the impetus for war with Iran.
The Pakistani Taliban fatally attacked a Pakistani TV team, and it's not the first time.
My not having a TV or a DVD player and not doing internet shopping protects me from the deepest level of that strange trap.
Mining may expose Haiti to the "resource curse".
Denial of global heating had no political influence in 1990. That movement results entirely from a paid political influence campaign.
A Syrian government photographer defected with his photos, which showed 11,000 prisoners' corpses that appeared to have been tortured as well as killed.
A widely used pesticide makes bumblebees smaller, which tends to harm colony survival.
The Turkish government has prohibited offering first aid to injured protesters.
France is considering a wide range of laws to give women social equality.
The UK government holds millions of old files that have been withheld from publication, apparently illegally. Some of these files go back to the 17th century.
US citizens: sign 350.org's petition against the TPP.
350.org is against the treaty because it would obstruct efforts to avoid global heating disaster.
Centralized digital medical records risk privacy violations, but the UK's lax policy is turning "risk" to "ensure".
A group of multinational tech companies, probably including Google, are lobbying secretly to prevent the EU from taxing their earnings.
Large numbers of protesters, enraged by new limits on protests, battled thugs in Ukraine.
The anti-protest restrictions are interesting. The ban on amplifiers follows New York City, which restricted Occupy Wall Street the same way. The ban on masks is found in France and in many other places. These restrictions on protesters are antidemocratic no matter where they are found.
Fighting 'extremism' in Syria by supporting whoever its enemy is at the moment is not well thought out.
Iran has stopped enriching uranium to 20% U235, with inspectors to witness.
Turks protested again on the street against internet censorship, and were attacked by thugs.
CO2 emissions are being 'outsourced' by rich countries to rising economies.
Global inequality is rising due to plutocratic governments. The richest 85 people own more wealth than half of humanity.
Cuba is moving to allow private business, in a limited territory.
This can be good if it leads to respect for human rights. It will be bad if, as in China, it leads to corrupt plutocratic tyranny.
Thirty Years Since Betamax, and Movies Are Still Being Made.
A study suggests unusual "extreme" El Nińo events, which cause economic damage and can kill thousands of people, will double in frequency due to global heating.
Today's face recognition technology can't recognize you as you walk on the street, but the US government is setting out to develop that.
Congress added a rider to a large bill to bar Obama from transferring CIA drone attacks to the Pentagon.
The reason for that transfer is that the Pentagon has to obey laws of war which the CIA secretly ignores. It is bizarre for Congress to concern itself with such a thing. I wonder if some members of Congress were blackmailed.
"Freedom Industries", the company responsible for the toxic spill in West Virginia, has gone bankrupt.
In a small way, this is deserved punishment for the owners — but nowhere near enough. Chemical and fossil fuel octopuses operate by atomizing their facilities under lots of tentacle corporations, so that in the event of an accident, only one tentacle goes bankrupt and the victims can't get compensation.
Perhaps we need laws to make holding companies responsible for the debts of their tentacles.
An NSA whistleblower says that the only way to do sufficient oversight is to appoint a team that can investigate anything the NSA does.
How many members of Congress does the NSA control through blackmail?
The UK appears to have snooped on Belhaj's communication with his lawyers, and played legal games to get the judge in his lawsuit to disregard that violation of his rights.
The End of Ownership: Why You Need to Fight America's Copyright Laws.
The Iraqi government is attacking Ramadi.
I've seen reports that local Sunnis are allied with the government, and reports that they are the ones being attacked. I don't know which to believe.
The World Bank lent millions to a Honduran palm oil company that peasants say forced them off their land.
The CPFB is considering whether to stop banks from requiring customers to use arbitration rather than going to court.
This is good, but mandatory arbitration is found also in other contexts, including between companies and employees.
The Mayor of Hoboken says Chris Christie is blocking Hurricane Sandy rebuilding funds to extract support for a building project for rich cronies.
A specialized machine can replace human cooks for making hamburgers. This threatens to eliminate millions more jobs in the US.
Keeping wages low is not a solution. That would force people into worse poverty, and then the machines would get cheaper.
Although it is a different issue, keep in mind that it isn't healthy or sustainable to eat lots of hamburgers.
UK prosecutors falsely claim that prostitutes are controlled by unidentified pimps as an excuse to evict them and force them to work on the street.
98% of Egyptians voted for constitutional changes, which combine greater rights for women with greater power for the suppression forces.
I have no knowledge with which to weigh the good of the former against the bad of the latter, but I would guess that the Egyptian constitution still fails to defend human rights, including the right to change one's position regarding religion (including ceasing to be a Muslim) and the right to criticize or mock any idea (including, for instance, Islam).
The one-sided result convinces me that charges of intimidation are valid.
Tiny transmitters allow scientists to track migrating birds.
That's very good, but I fear they will track us too.
A few heroic Nigerians continue defending the rights of gays.
West Virginia Chemical Spill: When Small Government Doesn't Work.
The privileged few businesses that have access to the TPP text give lots of money to the congresscritters most closely involved.
Ukraine has plans to adopt the whole suite of standard forms of Internet repression.
The DMCA takedown system undermines fair use by making it easy for bullies to get fair use taken down.
Pennsylvania's voter-ID law was struck down as unconstitutional.
This is not final; it will probably be appealed to other courts.
US citizens: Sign this petition calling on your congresscritter and senators to support the USA FREEDOM Act.
It is not enough to protect democracy from digital surveillance, but it is a step in the right direction.
US citizens: support paid family and medical leave.
US citizens: call on the EPA to promote biofuel made from plant waste and cut down the use of ethanol made from food.
Everyone: call on Google, Facebook and Yelp to stop supporting ALEC.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose S.1881, which is designed to get the US into war with Iran.
Bizarre accusations in Egypt that the US wants to assassinate General al-Sisi.
This is ridiculous. The US is more or less a supporter of the Egyptian military government, as it was of Mubarak.
US media repeat persistent government smears against marijuana.
US citizens: call on Congress to replace the part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down.
US citizens: tell Obama not to propose veiled cuts in Social Security again.
London wants to use RFIDs in cars to charge for parking. And track people.
Poaching of rhinos in South Africa is accelerating and on track to wipe them out in 20 years.
Of course, the last few will be better protected, so it might take a few more years for poachers to get them all. However, when a species is reduced to a few individuals, its genetic diversity is reduced and it is more vulnerable for hundreds of thousands of years thereafter.
Former undercover thug Peter Francis was given immunity and testified about the infiltration practices of UK thugs.
The UK government worked closely with fracking companies to manipulate the public and overcome opposition.
It's no surprise. The UK government's goal is to emit as much CO2 as possible, as soon as possible, while slowing down development of renewable energy as much as it can get away with.
The soldiers that control US nuclear missiles are prone to various peccadilloes which, in that context, might lead to something really important.
Obama's NSA 'Reforms' Are Little More Than a PR Attempt to Mollify the Public.
Advocates and Digital Rights Defenders Reject Obama's Whitewash of Intrusive Spying Regime.
The small improvements in US bank regulations may be doing some real good: the banksters profits are down.
Obama's drone killings have roused all Yemen to demand the US stay out.
Israel is considering a plan to ban the word "Nazi" outside a few specific exceptions.
Would it be forbidden to call a right wing-group "Neo-Nazi"? What about "Soup Nazi"? Would Seinfeld be banned in Israel?
Now that many of Rio's favelas are peaceful, and relatives are returning to them, they are threatened with eviction in the name of possible landslides, or as schemes for gentrification.
The UK Labour leader says he will forcibly break up the big 5 banks … a little.
Why push for just 7 big banks? Why not make them split into 20 or even 50, so that none of them is too big to fail? It's the same work either way.
Instead of micromanaging the splitting, my tax proposal would pressure the banks to split themselves up.
Greenhouse gas output grew faster from 2000 to 2010 than in the previous decades, says the IPCC.
The report cites growing human population as part of the cause. For decades this problem has been the one whose name most people dare not mention.
One proposed genetically modified organism seems like probably a good idea.
Genetic engineering is a method of modifying organisms, not a kind of organism. The results are disparate. Whether any given genetic modification is safe (for humans that eat it, for the environment, for the rights of farmers) depends on the details. It has to be tested and evaluated separately for each GM variety, since we have too little experience to generalize about the effects. Likewise, whether it really improves anything is also a matter of details. The GMOs now in use mostly go with use of pesticides.
Ellen Brown is running for treasurer of California as a campaign to set up a state-owned bank for the state to deposit in and borrow from.
Censorship in Greece: a satirist has been imprisoned for making fun of a long-dead monk.
Calls Intensify for Obama to Fulfill Campaign Promise on GMO Labeling.
If you put together what Obama says with what NSA officials say, it adds up to an assassination threat against Snowden.
New York City had to pay 18 million dollars' compensation to protesters injured by thugs in 2004.
These compensation claims don't make up for the initial wrong, and if they don't convince the city to make the thugs stop attacking protesters, they are totally inadequate.
The US military infiltrates internet multiuser games such as Second Life, and may be using them to propagandize Americans in favor of certain policies. Perhaps increased military spending, or war, or whatever the president tells them to propagandize for.
US citizens: Tell the USDA you oppose the growing of corn designed to be resistant to Agent Orange.
Changes in marijuana have made it impact memory a lot more now than it did 30 years ago.
As Australian heat waves get ever worse, the government cracks down on renewable energy projects.
Greg Palast reports Chris Christie's financial connections with the Koch brothers.
More about surveillance of Americans by "border" patrol drones.
Ukraine has adopted a new anti-protest law, banning unauthorized megaphones and also masks.
If face recognition software comes into widespread use, wearing a mask will be the only way to avoid being tracked everywhere on the street.
The UN still does not screen its peacekeepers for cholera.
An Australian was kept in solitary confinement for a month, before trial, on charges of being in a pub with four members of a banned motorcycle club.
These charges, whether true are false, are obviously unjust. It is prima facie injustice to ban groups without trial.
Asylum seekers parked permanently on Christmas Island have started a hunger strike.
The EPA reports that the Pebble Mine would devastate salmon fisheries in the region of Bristol Bay.
Heat waves in Australia have become considerably more frequent since 1971.
The West Virginia chemical storage facility that leaked did not maintain adequate safety precautions, and neither does the site where the company moved the chemicals after the spill.
The US Trade Representative spreads distortions and lies about "fast track".
US citizens: call on the EPA to go ahead with stricter rules on emissions from cars.
A secret UK report from 2003, recently leaked, said that criminal gangs had infiltrated several UK agencies including prosecution and customs, as well as the thugs.
This is the small-time organized crime. The big-time cheating occurs in the banks that compose the City of London, and they have made most of it legal.
Very little is known about the health effects of the chemical that spilled in West Virginia. No research has been published.
Everyone: urge Brazil to offer asylum to Snowden.
Cesium from Fukushima has spread around the Pacific Ocean and plankton samples contain small amounts of cesium.
A lot of the fish caught in the Pacific Ocean are showing small levels of cesium from the Fukushima meltdowns.
When large numbers of people are exposed to small levels of radioactivity, a small danger for each person can add up to a substantial number of additional deaths. It might mean, for instance, 101,000 cases of a certain kind of cancer in a population of 10 million, instead of 100,000. 1000 deaths is worth avoiding if possible, but there is no reason for any one person to go to great lengths to avoid this small danger.
Some of Europe's "foreign aid" is really loans to countries that would struggle ever to repay.
The UN climate head calls for a trillion dollars a year of investment to avoid 2C of global heating.
Each year we wait will increase the rate of spending required.
NSA to Sen. Sanders: We Can't Legally Tell You if We Spied on You.
Will Congress dare pass a law saying "yes you can tell us"?
The environment chapter of the TPP has been leaked. It offers toothless pretend protection for the environment.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to go after the company (perversely named "freedom industries") that spilled toxic chemicals in West Virginia's water.
Everyone: call on West Virginia to hold the company responsible for the large toxic spill fully responsible.
The world cannot address economic inequality without preventing global heating disaster.
Whole Foods, under pressure, agreed to stop selling food grown in recycled sewage sludge.
NAFTA's harmful legacy affects more than just the three countries that signed it. NAFTA introduced the unjust "investor-state" provision.
Drone surveillance of the US "border" goes beyond what the US government says.
The "border" area stretches a considerable distance from each frontier or coast, and includes the homes of most Americans.
Even US farmers are starting to reject GMOs.
In principle, genetic engineering could be great for agriculture. But not when it's developed by companies that are always seeking opportunities to cut corners on safety.
Kurdish protesters leaving the UK for Paris were robbed of their cash by the border guards who accused them of planning to give it to the PKK.
The is a rebel group; I don't know whether it is terrorist. Banning contributions to the PKK is legitimate, but taking away small amounts of cash like this on unproved suspicion is gratuitously nasty. The PKK would be on its knees if it depended on that funding mechanism.
Global heating at work: signs of spring in January in the UK.
Trees grow faster as they get bigger.
This means that cutting down old forests and replacing them with new tree plantations — as the UK government wants to do — would require the new plantations to be far larger.
Global investment in clean energy is falling, reflecting powerful efforts by politicians whose goal is to keep people burning lots of fossil fuel.
Billionaire Polluters predicts that greenhouse gas emissions will rise 30% by 2035.
In effect, it predicts that the half-hearted efforts to curb global heating will fail, partly thanks to the lobbying of fossil fuel companies such as BP itself.
US emissions of CO2 rose slightly in 2013 due to increased burning of coal.
Coal spews lots of toxic pollution, including radioactive fallout. The EPA needs to make rules to reduce use of coal.
Canada says it will increase CO2 emissions almost 40% by 2030, which is probably an underestimate of the emissions that extraction of oil from tar sands will cause. Furthermore, it doesn't count the emissions from burning that oil in other countries.
How Israel obtained nuclear technology, with the help of various western countries, and the US was eventually drawn in to the pretense.
People in Britain are accused of arranging to have children sexually abused in the Philippines and get video streamed to them.
Censorship laws are not needed to prosecute this, since they have participated in conspiracies to abuse those children. In general, the real abuse of real children can be stopped without censorship.
Georgina Roberts obtained poison, then helped her hopelessly ill parents kill themselves.
It is horrible that people find themselves in such situations. It's even more horrible if they are denied escape.
German and British companies sold goods made by prison factories in East Germany during the 70s and 80s.
The companies may not have done this intentionally, but it should not have been able to happen.
The idea of making an agreement with the Great Satan is creating deep debates in Iran.
Everyone: call on the governor of Maryland to reject a huge natural gas export terminal which would push for more fracking.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, no new sanctions against Iran — allow diplomacy to work.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The latest election in Bangladesh was won by banning opposition parties.
Megan Rice is likely to be imprisoned for the rest of her life for a protest in which she trespassed in a US military base. The maximum sentence is 30 years, and she is already 83 years old.
Her protest demonstrated that security protecting US atomic weapons is totally inadequate; that alone was a service. She did, and intended, no harm.
Contrast this with Putin's threat of only 15 years' imprisonment for Greenpeace protesters.
Non-fanatical Islam in Pakistan is under attack from Saudi-funded strict fanatics.
The incorporation of lots of superstitions in Barelvism makes it vulnerable to rationalist criticism, but the replacement they propose is not rationality.
This is one of the dangers of Islam: the forms that are not cruel and harsh are vulnerable to fanatics who claim that it isn't true Islam if it isn't cruel and harsh.
US citizens: call on the FCC to classify ISPs as telecommunications services and make them common carriers.
US Black leaders signed a declaration of empathy with Indian Dalits.
Survey found that 1/5 of Britons borrowed money to pay for their housing last year.
This is what the totally unnecessary cruelty of the government causes.
Netanyahu's ally called Kerry "obsessive and messianic", which is ironic given how far Kerry has acceded to ridiculous Israeli demands and ignored the Israeli government's contempt.
Israel is using these negotiations to kill time, and demonstrating how much contempt the US government will swallow from that direction.
Time after time, new GMOs are touted in the media as solutions to big problems, and they turn out not to do the job after all.
US citizens: sign this petition against "fast track" for the TPP.
There was a shooting in a school in Roswell, New Mexico.
It has not yet been claimed that a UFO or an alien is involved, but I think it's only a matter of time.
Senator Warren's program goes deeper than Mayor de Blasio's.
Under a judgment from India's Supreme Court, the Dongria Kondh people denied approval for a giant mine in their territory.
Victories like this are not final. Businesses generally make another attempt to undermine the same opposition.
Google's purchase of Nest indicates that Google wants to control the "internet of things" — and entice people into handing over lots more information about their lives to Google.
If you want something to figure out that it should turn up your home thermostat because you're heading for home and the day is cold, there is no a priori reason why that should involve any company's server. That computation is yours, personally, and need not involved anyone else.
Google wants it to involve a Google server, but doing it that way is SaaSS (service as a software substitute).
A memo shows that Kissinger directly urged the Argentine government to do away with dissidents.
All the governments in South America that worked together in the 70s to crush dissent said they were fighting "terrorists". Remember that any time a government proposes an "anti-terrorist" law.
A study of real cases finds that the US government's general surveillance has very little to do with stopping terrorism.
The UK has established quotas for defeating asylum seeker appeals.
The UK thug who demanded journalists' notes etc. about an undercover thug whistleblower says he wants this because the whistleblower refuses to testify. The whistleblower says he won't testify because other UK thugs have threatened to prosecute him if he does.
In effect, the thugs' left hand pleads it is justified in attacking journalism to compensate for the right hand's attack on justice.
Thugs who beat a man to death were acquitted of murder.
It makes no difference that the man was suspected of a crime. That would be grounds to arrest him, but not to batter him to death once he was held down on the ground.
What could possibly have been in the minds of those jurors? Were they kept in the dark about important evidence? Do they give "officers of the law" improper respect?
Bulgaria is considering a law that would punish journalists working for foreign news organizations.
Everyone: call on Northern Dynasty to cancel the Pebble Mine
The other two companies have already dropped out.
Citizens of the EU: ask your MEP to oppose the European Commission's plan to allow ISPs to censor the internet, blocking or slowing down sites however they wish.
A Florida thug has been charged with murder after shooting a man in a theater in an argument.
I hope that the "stand your ground" law won't let him get off.
Apple is trying to sabotage and replace a court-appointed monitor whose job is to make sure Apple obeys anti-trust requirements.
I guess this is what happens when a court-appointed monitor tries to do his job right. It suggests that Apple is too big to monitor, and therefore too big to be allowed to exist.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose "fast track" for the TPP.
The TPP is a dooH niboR treaty, designed to give more riches to the rich, and would do it based on taking freedom and safety from everyone.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The FCC'snet neutrality rules were found unconstitutional because it didn't go all the way to make ISPs common carriers.
The solution is obvious: make them common carriers.
Rima Najdi walked around Beirut in an unrealistic suicide bomber costume to encourage people to think.
President Hollande refused to answer questions about a sex scandal in his private life, insisting that it is a private matter.
I agree. Furthermore, I think scandals about the "other lover" are to be blamed on the misguided demand for monogamy, which is tantamount to demanding "perfection or nothing".
How oil heated up the factional and interethnic rivalry in South Sudan to the point of warfare.
The UK, Poland and a few other governments that are evidently for shale have blocked EU-wide fracking regulations.
Noorzia Atmar, former member of Afganistan's parliament, had to flee when threatened by reprisals from her family and her ex-husband's family.
Sahar Gul, tortured by her in-laws, faces the danger of a law that would ban women from testifying when they accuse their relatives or in-laws of torturing them.
I wish we could do something to protect Afghan women, but supporting Karzai's government isn't doing it. There isn't enough will in Afghan society to do this.
The only idea that occurs to me is to arm Afghan women and help them form refugee camps where they can defend themselves. That plan might be inadequate for various reasons, but it illustrates the though of new thinking that we have to try.
US citizens: insist on no cuts to food stamps.
US citizens: call on Obama to close the Guantanamo prison.
Plain packaging for cigarettes in Australia was followed immediately by a big jump in the numbers of people asking for help in quitting.
Individual banksters face criminal charges for falsifying the Libor rate.
They were in charge of local trading activities, and must have been 2 or more levels down from the top management. Was it possible that Libor rigging could be so widespread without encouragement from above?
An experiment shows that humans can often detect that there has been a small change in a scene, even though they cannot determine what the change was.
This mental ability provides a rational explanation for many experiences that people often interpret as premonitions or otherwise supernatural.
Egypt's vote on the new constitution, which gives the military too much power, is being run in unfair conditions.
Many Egyptians intend to vote yes, but the point is that the unfair conditions mean they have never been exposed to arguments against.
Another victory for bigotry, as Nigeria imposed long prison sentences on homosexuality and even membership in organizations associated with homosexuality.
ACLU Stops Suspicionless Home Searches in Etowah County, Alabama.
The US is good at starting wars, but doesn't seem to be able to end them.
9% of wetlands in China have been lost in the last decade.
Apple's ibeacon gives physical stores a new way to track patrons.
E-commerce already enables the abuse that you can't tell what price is offered to someone else. Things like ibeacon could extend the abuse to physical stores.
An Iranian woman fled in a boat to Australia, only to find out on arrival that Australia had just announced a policy to refuse asylum to anyone that arrived by boat.
She had to struggle to get medical care for her husband.
The Palestinian Authority won't allow Israeli colonies to use its landfill, so Israel has shut it down entirely.
Pseudoscience: there is no evidence that yoga can cleanse anyone's liver.
Everyone: tell Starbucks to stop trying to undermine San Jose's living wage law.
Ten Examples of Welfare for the Rich and Corporations, in the US.
Israel shoots at Palestinian fishing boats that get 4 miles from shore.
Sometimes they get shot even closer to shore.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose the lunatic plan to tie restoration of unemployment benefits with an attack on the EPA.
The Israeli government asked for bids to expand colonies in Palestinian territory.
When Israel demolishes a colony in Palestine that it has not authorized, the fanatical "settlers" retaliate against any Palestinians that are handy.
Even settler children age 12 participate in pogroms.
The fanatics enjoy protection from the Israeli army even in the act of attacking Palestinians.
There have been dozens of such attacks, amounting to a sustained campaign of robbery.
A man from Afghanistan has been given asylum in the UK because he is an Atheist.
Afghanistan follows most Muslim countries in having legal retribution against Muslims that convert to any other position. The world needs to be more aware that Islam in political power means persecution.
The UK thugs are fishing for an excuse to punish the whistleblower who revealed that UK thugs spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence.
This is the way whistleblowers are generally treated.
EU farm subsidy policies pressure farmers to cut down forests for no use at all.
Comparing the West Virginia chemical spill, which has poisoned the water for a while region, with the New Jersey bridge harassment.
While it was an accident that this particular plant leaked toxins into the river just now, it is no accident that the US has lots of chemical plants that have a certain chance of poisoning people or exploding at any time. That is the result of policy choices.
Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed faces charges of "lack of respect for the prophet" for an article criticizing Mohammed.
What else would you expect from a man whose name parodies "Mohammed" twice ;-).
Mauritania is not alone in this sort of injustice: most countries that identify themselves as Muslim trample religious freedom and freedom of expression. It is one of the standard injustices of Islam.
A study finds that in nondemocratic states, the internet does not boost democracy; rather, it has become an instrument to suppress dissent.
It can do this in the US too: the US massive surveillance system is the seed of what the elite will want whenever anything makes the populace desperate enough to demand change.
William Binney proposed to give the NSA a spy system that wouldn't spy on ordinary Americans, but the highest officials rejected it.
The Ugly Truth about Charter Schools: Padded Cells, Corruption, Lousy Instruction and Worse Results.
Charter schools are a form of privatization. In general, privatization is presented as a way to make some service more efficient, but its real effect is to enrich a few. That's true in this case, but it also represents a way for the state to abandon poor people, now increasingly considered superfluous by the plutocratic state.
Some restaurants are replacing waiters with computerized order-takers. This threatens to leave millions more Americans unemployed.
Applebees alone may cut half a million jobs.
Using an ithing to take the orders is bad for restaurant, too. It is full of nonfree software that tramples the freedom of the user (in this case, the restaurant) and exposes the user to malware
For the sake of sales clerk's employment, I refuse to use the self-checkout machines in supermarkets and drug stores. When I go into a drug store that has these machines, I shout to the people who use them, "Using those machines puts Americans out of work".
I think we should prohibit those machines simply to keep employment up.
Handing over personal data to stores turns out to be no safer with big stores than with any other stores.
The risk that the store's copy of your personal data might be obtained by crackers should not distract you from the bigger risk — the use that will be made of your personal data with permission of companies that possess it.
I won't give any personal data to a store, because I don't want my purchases to be associated with me. I won't give the store even my name.
The worst piece of data to give to a store is your credit card number. Even if it is never obtained by crackers, it will identify you to the store's data base together with what you bought.
Do as I do: pay cash, and never give stores your personal data. If you never give it, you won't learn it as a habit, so you won't start handing it over as a habit.
The UK government is entirely for shale, and hopes that local councils are for shale as well.
Iran and other countries have worked out the last details of the nuclear agreement, and the implementation will begin on Jan 20 — provided Congress doesn't ruin everything.
Everyone: urge Brazil to reject Monsanto's BRM (Biological Restrictions Management), also known as "terminator seeds".
Syria outside Assad's control is a mosaic of mutually hostile militias.
Global heating has pushed the giant Pine Island Glacier into irreversible melting, and will melt away over the next few decades.
This is expected to raise global sea level by just one centimeter. If only the melting ice were limited to this! However, melting for the whole Antarctic melting is speeding up.
This demonstrates once again pro-surveillance officials' predilection for stretching the truth. Aside from that, the issue is a secondary one. Even if terrorists change their tactics, and even if that helps them a little, they are a secondary threat. A government that surveils everyone and thus eliminates democracy is more dangerous than any independent terrorists.
A lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center pushed the US government to recognize that x-ray body scanners could be dangerous. Now EPIC has made the DHS yield its information on test results and radiation risk estimates for airport body scanners.
Cultivation of genetically modified soybeans by plantations has taken over most of Argentina's agricultural land, and this involves taking land away from lots of peasants.
US sailors say they were drenched with radioactive fallout which caused them persistent medical problems, while their ship was rescuing people swept out to sea near Fukushima.
UK generals in the Bush forces, and politicians, face possible prosecution in the International Criminal Court because they did not prevent torture of prisoners.
Yoshitatsu Uechi, a worker at Fukushima, says he repeatedly encountered dangerous cost-cutting and slipshod work there.
A tracking company is encouraging stores to track customers through the WiFi chips of mobile phones.
This particular company doesn't know anyone's name, but there are other companies that can relate the phone's MAC address to a name. Put those two data bases together and presto, it says who has gone where.
If the phone talks to the phone network, then the phone company already records where it goes. The two methods of tracking lead to the same intolerable result.
A few congresscritters are trying to smear Snowden by saying that his disclosures "could" do harm to US national security.
Such a weak assertion could be said of anything you do, even getting out of bed.
Since the security of America includes the security of our democracy, massive general surveillance by the US government does great harm to our democracy.
Snowden is a hero because he gave us the beginning of a chance to defend our democracy from that threat.
Everyone: support the Feb 11 action against NSA surveillance.
To fight surveillance effectively, our target must go beyond the NSA. Other branches of government do surveillance too; we must limit license plate recognizers and face recognizers even if they are run by local governments.
The root of surveillance is when digital systems record data about people. We must demand the redesign of digital systems to retain little data about people in general.
Quantifying the social cost of carbon emissions might encourage governments and companies to take necessary steps.
If you understand that global heating is probably leading to disaster, and we don't know exactly how far away the disaster is, you don't need to a measure of the cost of short-term effects. However, that measure may help to convince short-term-minded people.
Privatization of electric generation in Argentina was supposed to attract investment, but the companies extracted money instead of investing.
The UK's "lobbying" bill threatens to restrict civil society, while business lobbying will simply adapt.
The Australian government's plan to reduce CO2 emissions is to give money to the companies that produce it, then let them do whatever they wish.
It also endorses cap-and-trade, which pretends to reduce emissions but really promotes pretend reductions.
That government will say anything whatever, but its actions are in service to fossil fuel companies.
Hrant Dink, martyr for freedom of speech, was tried in Turkey for the "crime" of affirming the genocide of the Armenians. Then, when France first considered a law to make it a "crime" to deny the genocide of the Armenians, Dink said he would go to France and deny it as a protest.
Turkey now plans to increase internet censorship and make it harder to evade.
Banning "hate speech" is an excuse for dangerous policies. No matter what we think of views, we must not ban their expression.
Former Merck employees claim in a lawsuit that Merck falsified data about the effectiveness of its vaccine against mumps, and used incorrect test procedures designed to make the vaccine look more effective than it really was.
I found out about this through a site called nvic.org, but that site exaggerated and distorted this issue by presenting the vaccine as unsafe. Another page claimed that a tiny amount of formaldehyde in a vaccine was dangerous on principle, though it is much less formaldehyde than is normally found in the human body. While that site is not 100% false, it is not reliable either.
Unfounded rumors claiming vaccines are dangerous has led people to refuse vaccination for their children, which ironically has resulted in disease outbreaks that really damage children. The most glaring instance is the opposition to polio vaccination in Pakistan and Syria, which results in permanent palsy for some children.
Obama talks about helping small areas in the US with lots of poverty, but part of the "help" is cutting taxes for business.
Once a tax cut gets applied to a part of the US, businesses will push to spread it to more parts. Then businesses elsewhere say that "fairness" means they should get a tax cut too. Eventually it spreads into a general tax cut for business.
Business pays too little taxes in general. If we want to put specific zones at an advantage, let's raise taxes for business everywhere except those zones.
Study: Polarization and Gridlock Work Well for the Wealthiest Americans.
The idea that Congress is "not functioning" represents a fundamental misunderstanding, comparable to saying that a football game is "not functioning" because the score is 0-0. What it means is that neither side can overcome the other side to score.
However, that analogy goes only so far. In Congress, it's not a mere game. The two sides are "totally for the rich" and "mostly for the rich but with some concern for the rest", and the points that are occasionally scored against the poor do tremendous harm.
The US has replaced checks and balances and rule of law with the national security jihad.
Nauru, where Australia stores unwanted asylum seekers, now demands $7000 dollars for a journalist's visa, effectively saying Australia's dirty deeds are off limits to journalism.
It is an injustice to require special visas for journalists. The US should set a good example by abolishing the practice.
Exposure Chris Christie's underlings' disguised retribution scheme has called attention to bad decisions that are clearly the responsibility of Christie himself.
I won't claim that Christie must have known about this particular scheme. I would not expect a governor to personally pay attention each specific action taken, whether ethical or not. However, he may have told, or led, his underlings over the years to plan various kinds of political pressure and retaliation and not bother him with the details. That would still make him responsible overall.
Medecins Sans Frontiers has wrestled with various ethical and political questions about how to carry out its mission.
One form of massive surveillance, usually ignored, is surveillance of prescriptions.
Baraa Shiban has received a death threat for investigating the casualties from a drone bombing in Yemen.
The Pakistani internet rights group Bytes for All is suing the UK government for surveillance of its communications.
India has implemented massive surveillance of communications, with no court supervision.
Two points Gates does not mention when criticizing Obama about Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding these points, Obama is ultimately responsible for his decisions.
Feminist playwright Meltem Arikan was driven out of Turkey by threats from fanatical supporters of the ruling party.
They accuse her experimental play Mi Minor of being a plan for the Gezi Park protests.
Everyone: call on California Governor Brown not to permit fracking.
Global heating may have to do with more frequent blooms of plankton in certain parts of the Pacific, but they have nothing to do with radiation or Fukishima.
Canada's government in 2013 displayed a record of blatant and shameless corruption and pandering.
The UK is pushing a law to make arbitrary prohibitions (ASBOs) even more sweeping and arbitrary.
People could be subject to two years in prison for almost any sort of behavior that judges dislike. Protests and meetings could be banned arbitrarily.
The FBI has shifted its focus to terrorism, neglecting white-collar crime. The attorney general sets an example of neglecting white-collar crime by declaring the banksters too big to jail.
The US Fish And Wildlife Service plans to drop rat poison on the Farallon Islands to eradicate mice that threaten the survival of endangered storm petrels there.
To eradicate mice (or rats or cats) from an island in order to protect endemic wildlife is entirely legitimate. It is only the method they propose that threatens to be very foolish.
Lester Grinspoon explains how his clinical observations convinced him that marijuana is not harmful and should be legal.
A committee of the European Parliament has decided to invite Snowden to give testimony remotely.
What It's Like When The FBI Asks You To Backdoor Your Software.
I am shocked that anyone would agree to do this — or that anyone thinks most developers would agree to do this.
An artist who visited Guantanamo was not allowed to speak with prisoners, or even see them clearly, but she could see the evil that has contaminated the US.
Guantanamo attacks the freedom of prisoners' relatives, too, when it requires them to communicate through the Skype client, a program that denies freedom to its users.
The campaign against eating shark fin is making great strides in China.
The only reason banquets ever serve shark fin soup is to prove how much the sponsor is willing to spend.
Life in the electronic concentration camp: the many ways that you're being tracked, catalogued and controlled.
Advocates Hail 'Groundbreaking' Guidelines to Stop 'School-to-Prison Pipeline'.
I think another crucial point is to make sure that no thugs are stationed normally in the school.
Over 40,000 people may have been falsely convicted due to dishonesty in a Massachusetts crime lab. The ACLU wants the State of Massachusetts to take the initiative to reinvestigate the cases and free anyone who ought to be freed.
How "too big to fail" turns into "too big to jail".
Taxing banks' gross income, at a percentage that increases with the size of the bank, would put large banks under financial pressure to split up.
US citizens: support the Truth in Settlements Act.
I might suggest going even further: rather than publicizing the details of these settlements so as to embarrass the government out of accepting weak provisions, why not rule out weak provisions?
Israel is proposing to raise the threshold for a party to enter parliament, in the aim of excluding the Arab parties. Juggling the threshold is the parliamentary system's equivalent of US voter suppression laws.
Meanwhile, in a complex of ironies, the extremist Lieberman wants to transfer some Arab villages from Israel to Palestine, as a drop of ethnic cleansing, but the inhabitants would rather be Israeli Arabs.
US citizens: call on the EPA to require and help chemical plants to switch to safer chemicals and processes.
The series of heavy rains (and floods) experienced by the UK in the past month is more likely due to global heating.
It would not have been impossible before, but CO2 and methane emissions are making it more probable in the future.
Corporations hide in cyberspace, with no physical address, making it hard to sue them.
US mainstream media talk about the Bush forces' destruction of Falluja as if it were a heroic sacrifice, rather than an atrocity.
A cell phone for children that's turns the child's whole world into a cell.
The aim is total robotic tracking of children, then old people, then everyone.
Don't make the mistake of postponing your rejection of intrusive surveillance technology till it gets even worse. I started years ago.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose putting new sanctions on Iran.
Give diplomacy a chance!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: support the Social Security expansion bill.
US citizens: tell the FDA you oppose the plan to stop states from requiring GMO labeling.
Everyone: call on Morocco to change the law that allows rapists to escape punishment by forcing their victims to marry them.
For a politician to be a "strong leader" overlaps with being a bully.
Peak oil has not gone away: the supply of oil per unit time may contract, and cause economic problems.
The crucial question, not apparently addressed here, is: would it be possible to burn oil faster than it's going to be available, while avoiding the worse disaster that global heating is taking us towards?
A limit at a place that, for other reasons, we must not even approach is no real limit.
Maybe the forces in control in Falluja are not al Qa'ida.
This would be entirely plausible, except for the report that local Sunnis said they are allied with the Iraqi government against al Qa'ida.
I'm not sure what to make of this.
US protesters could be imprisoned for 10 years because prosecutors called their banner a "terrorist hoax".
We should tell those prosecutors to go to Russia if they don't like American freedom.
Senator Leahy's "privacy and security" act would make the CFAA even easier to stretch. People could face years in prison for just proposing to violate the terms of service of any web site.
A lawsuit might allow Verizon to trash net neutrality for cabled Internet even as AT&T trashes network neutrality on mobile devices.
CREDO Mobile is the first phone company to report how many times it had to give customer data to the US government.
This information does not really tell us much, since any one of these requests might have covered all of the company's customers. But it shows their heart is in the right place.
US data brokers sell lists of people with HIV, lists of people with drug addictions, lists of elderly gamblers, and other lists that are particularly subject to abuse.
Senator Rubio's "reforms" for US help for the poor have hidden dangers.
New modeling concludes that global heating won't limit itself by causing more clouds.
When Wisconsin's anti-worker Governor Walker was facing recall, the Koch brothers bought TV ads invoking a peculiar principle that it's unfair to recall an official merely to stop him from pushing horrible laws.
The NSA's capabilities for breaking security of specific systems are an argument against "need" for massive surveillance of everyone.
Robots are being developed for many farm tasks.
These jobs are done inefficiently by humans, often at very low pay and in bad conditions. If new the robots are able to do the jobs, it will be good that people don't have to live like that. On the other hand, it will not be good if they starve instead.
At a meeting in Cambridge, some 15 years ago, a man said, "If robots make it, we've gotta take it." We must not let the owners of the robots own what the robots produce, leaving most people with only trickle-down.
If you're a farmer, watch out for nonfree software in these robots!
Senegal's coast guard captured a Russian intensive fishing ship. Russia's response is to blame Greenpeace.
Several Republican governors are being attacked for soliciting secret-source money to support their campaigns.
Personal insults directed against Edward Snowden reflect a general pattern of smearing whistleblowers, but the real target is not Snowden but the act of whistleblowing.
Ford says its cars have GPS so they know everywhere the car goes.
This is a consequence of the fact that the GPS data is stored by software that is nonfree, not controlled by the driver or car owner.
It is not clear to me whether this applies only when the car has a GPS navigator installed, or whether it means all new Ford cars.
More about surveillance of cars in the US.
NSA whistleblowers warn that Obama's "reforms" are being managed so as to avoid any real improvement. They make recommendations for real reform.
The loss of large carnivores around the world is causing damage to plants and animals through ecological effects.
US citizens: call on the FCC to enforce the requirement for TV stations to say who pays for ads.
Everyone: call on 60 Minutes to clean up its smear of US clean energy industry.
Four Years after Earthquake, Housing, Sanitation, Health Care are Still Pressing Needs in Haiti.Aid has been misused, or diverted into plans to employ more Haitians working for export for a pittance.
What Haiti really needs is to end the US occupation.
US citizens: email your congresscritter to oppose "fast track" for the TPP.
US citizens: support the EPA's plan to regulate carbon emissions from new power plants.
The Liberal Democrats in the UK are looking at a platform involving reducing the collection of data.
US electric utilities are slamming the brakes on installation of solar panels, and homeowners are fighting back. I've heard that the same is happening in Spain.
Many homeowners would be delighted to disconnect from the electrical grid, and depend on their own solar power and their own batteries. If they use heavy equipment such as washing machines only when the sun shines, and leave refrigerators closed at night, it might work. However, some cities in California prohibit this: I'm told that in San Jose, a house with no electric utility account will be condemned just for that.
A campaign in the UK to reduce the general level of sugar in foods.
NSA's Harshest Critics Meeting With White House Officials Tomorrow.
A last-ditch scheme to block mandatory labeling of GMOs: a scheme for voluntary labeling.
California Introduces Landmark Bill to Deny the NSA State Resources.
This effort is good because it is resistance, but a real solution can't be reached in this direction.
20 million Indians work making bricks, many of them children, and many of them as slave labor.
Citizens of Massachusetts: demand a clean minimum wage bill that doesn't cut unemployment benefits.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, oppose HR 2279, which would turn the laws requiring cleanup of polluted land into a sham.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
While it's the cold that directly kills homeless people, the underlying cause is the inequity that makes them poor and therefore homeless.
The NSA wants to have companies accumulate dossiers for the NSA to look at later.
To a large extent, this is how the massive surveillance system already works.
Thugs in Nebraska seized the victims' cameras that held proof of their crimes, but fortunately there was a third camera.
There won't always be another camera. For thugs to seize or destroy cameras or their contents should be a crime, regardless of other circumstances.
The fans of Insane Clown Posse are suing the US for harassing them by labeling them as gang members.
UK ISPs, by applying censorship, have made themselves liable for anything illegal that they do transmit.
I fear that the UK government will respond by immunizing them.
The incidence of hypoglycemia is highest at the end of the month, because poor people with diabetes have spent the month's money and can't afford food.
The solution is difficult if we accept as immutable that they can't get more money. However, Congress could give them more money easily enough. The problem is ill will.
Mystery: why does chicken meat from chicken never exposed to antibiotics carry superbugs just as often as other chicken?
The jury ruled that London thugs lawfully shot Mark Duggan.
It's possible that the thugs really believed Duggan had a gun. It's possible he did have one, in the box. It's possible the thug who shot Duggan really believed at the time that the gun was in his hand. These are not implausible.
But it seems clear that someone other than Duggan put the sock-covered gun on the other side of the fence, and the obvious suspects are thugs trying to make the shooting look justified.
I think that calls for its own investigation.
Warning: antibiotic resistance is creeping up on us.
Wetlands are being contaminated with neonicotinoid pesticides, which threatens disastrous effects on wildlife.
These pesticides are persistent Even if we stop using them, it could take years for them to dissipate.
NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico. (Not to mention the US.)
How Obama and Clinton made Afghanistan go from bad to worse.
How Uncle Sam's Cash Is Funneled Into Abusive Sweatshops (in Bangladesh).
The Internet of Things Is Wildly Insecure — And Often Unpatchable.
When the article says "Linux operating system", I think it really does mean Linux — the kernel Linux, not a complete operating system such as GNU/Linux.
In Brazilian Amazonia, enforcement of laws to protect the forest is so weak that the loggers barely put a fig leaf over it.
Puncturing the right-wing claim that the US should have kept the Bush forces in Iraq.
The USDA's standards for approving GMOs are limited to such narrow concerns that they are little different from deregulation.
In 1971, heroic activists stole FBI documents that proved the FBI was infiltrating US dissidents.
They found that the FBI had specifically tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide.
One of the activists explains what they did and why.
Large parts of Australia are stricken by drought again, after just a couple of years of adequate rain since the previous drought.
This combines with the effects of the hot weather. Global heating is expected to make Australia more arid as well as generally hotter. It is also expected to reduce global food production; indeed, it seems to be already doing so.
India has imposed the usual tax rate on commercial use of the grounds of the US embassy.
Bravo for this, but the government of India would do a lot more good for Indians by cracking down on inadequate wages for Indian workers, whether they are working in the US or in India.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose bill HR.7, which would require women who were made pregnant by rape to prove the rape to justify an abortion.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The "sharing economy" smears the word "sharing" — "sublet/resale economy" would be a better term. And note that these activities generate few jobs, so they can't solve society's real problems.
Congress must hold a real investigation of the NSA.
The UK government considered making alcohol more expensive to encourage people to drink less, but changed course after 130 meetings with lobbyists.
Pumping sulfur dioxide into the air could cancel global heating, but it would cause massive droughts.
Israeli intelligence continues using torture, distorting a Supreme Court ruling against torture into meaninglessness.
Professor Ahmad Qatamesh has been freed from Israeli prison after 2.5 years. He was never charged with a crime, and Amnesty International pushed for his release.
The government of Ghana wants to close the refuges for people accused of witchcraft; this is likely to cause those people to be killed.
Comparing Arab and Israeli racist insults.
Journalists in Burma protested the jailing of a journalist.
The charges are typical of states that want to punish journalism and pretend that it is something else.
Honduran peasants' land was stolen to grow palm oil, which provides "carbon offsets" for international businesses, so they can avoid cutting emissions. Crushing the resistance peasants' resistance seems to have part of the motive for the coup.
Emissions trading is a mistake in general; it has been gamed so much that it achieves nothing, while promoting evil like this in Honduras. A tax on fuels can't be gamed.
The Syrians fighting the Islamic State of Iraq include al-Nusra, another al-Qa'ida supporter.
Cuts in UK support for offshore wind energy has led to cancellation of many projects.
Spain reduced fossil fuel use in electricity by around 30% last year due mainly to installation of a lot of renewable energy generators.
Various methods are being tested to reduce the numbers of birds and bats that are killed by wind turbines.
New Jersey ignores 99% of accusations about attacks by thugs.
Stealing Americans' retirement funds in 4 despicable steps.
The network of pollinator species and the plants that depend on them could collapse suddenly if it is stressed past a certain point.
US mainstream media persistently disparage the idea that banksters should be punished for well-documented crimes, including the fraudulent foreclosures against thousands (maybe millions) of American homeowners.
Obama gave up on the war in Afghanistan in 2011.
So why didn't he end the war? Fear of being called a quitter, I guess.
86% of Americans believe the government has the responsibility to fight poverty.
The fact that so many politicians are elected who oppose this is a measure of voter suppression and dishonesty of the media.
JPMorgan Chase seems to be involved in just about every banking scandal.
Highly profitable Boeing has imposed pay and benefit cuts on its workers by threatening to move production.
This is, of course, what the rich generally want to do: pay workers less. Laws and treaties need to be changed so that they can't.
The body of a brain-dead woman in Texas who is 20 weeks pregnant is being kept alive so the fetus can be born.
This might make sense if the father wanted that baby as a relic of his deceased wife — which he doesn't — except that nobody knows whether it is healthy.
Paradoxically, the extreme cold in the US today may be due to to the heating of the Arctic.
In the US: Call on Disney to stop promoting fracking to children.
The longest running sequence of measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentration may come to an end because funding has been cut.
A wild dolphin that lives near the Australian coast keeps trying to play with humans and ignores other dolphins.
There are reasons to avoid accustoming wild animals to people, but when that has already occurred, there's no use denying it. At some point, we might as well accept that this dolphin needs human company.
There have been thousands of complaints that fracking wells harmed water supplies in he US. Only a few of the complaints have been confirmed, and maybe many of them are spurious. However, I suspect that the tests miss some real problems.
Secrecy about what chemicals are used in the wells may make it hard to confirm that contamination is due to fracking.
AT&T invites web services to pay to for exemption from data caps, thus proving the supposed reason for data caps does not exist.
The result will be to give bigger companies an advantage of smaller competitors.
Of course, many of these services are bad in their nature, such as the movie rentals with DRM. But that's an independent issue.
Everyone: call on Hanes to stop robbing and swindling workers in Haiti.
It appears that rhinos can no longer survive in Kenya except in special sanctuaries. And maybe not even there.
Digital Rights Ireland asks for help coping with legal costs imposed when it asked for permission to intervene in a trial and was denied.
If not helped, the organization could get shut down.
CIA Lawyer: Stopping Torture 'Would Have Been Easy,' But I Approved It Anyway.
LBJ's War on Poverty cut poverty in the US by 40%.
It proves that governments can reduce poverty. But then right-wingers took power, put an end to these efforts, and drove poverty up again.
Conservative media provide a platform to the 3% of climate scientists who deny global heating, and don't mention how their predictions have proved wrong in the past.
The enemies of al Qa'ida in Syria include other Islamist groups.
Five Australians face charges of being members of a motorcycle gang and staying in the same hotel. Being in a hotel is not a crime for people in general, only for them.
Next will they pass a law making it a crime to breathe and have your name?
A heat wave killed thousands of bats in an area of Australia.
In a couple of decades, none of those bats will live anywhere near.
New South Wales gave permission to build a house near the coast, on condition it be demolished in 20 years if sea level rises as expected.
It is a kind of foresight — at least it does not ignore the issue — but it seems wasteful and foolish to build a house that will need to be demolished in 20 years.
What the court appears to have done is much more foolish: permission with no foresight at all.
Judging who to hire based on Facebook pages seems to be completely ineffective. (As well as an invasion of privacy.)
China has destroyed a large stockpile of confiscated ivory to campaign against buying ivory.
I can't understand the mentality of a person who would buy something totally frivolous at the cost of rushing a species to extinction.
Bluefin tuna are so overfished that most of the fish caught are juveniles.
Peace negotiations in South Sudan failed to get started.
Part of the basis for the fighting is tribal hatred, but when interethnic hostility reaches the point of fighting, often it has been stirred up by politicians.
I have a suspicion that the oil in the ground has something to do with it, and that the US government is playing some sort of game to get control of that oil.
The UK government announces more punishment for Britons on the way to a mythical, meaningless "recovery".
"The [unlikely] possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures."
The US government didn't need any more surveillance to stop the Sep 11 attacks. It had plenty of warnings — here are the details.
Even to preserve the public domain from further attacks requires a fight.
Preserving the public domain is not enough. Copyright is too restrictive and we must reduce it.
The US government goes to cruel extremes to collect college debt.
The idea that the US government needs to collect student loans from those who are unable to work is absurd. The only "economy" that depends on collecting this money is that of the evil rich. Even asking students to pay for college is right-wing. If they have to pay, it should be based on their incomes, as in the Oregon plan.
What's more, a large part of these debts were for payments to for-profit colleges that tend to be a waste of money in the first place. By allowing loans for those colleges, the government entices people into debts they can't pay.
Drug trafficking involves lots of killing; the number murdered, over decades, may amount to millions.
Those directly responsible are the killers. Drug users help create the circumstances that encourage the traffickers/killers, but they are not alone in doing so. Prohibition plays an equally crucial role.
Rich Republicans have put 50 million dollars into defeating Tea Party loonies whose risible statements have imperiled their dooH niboR agenda.
The Canadian government trashed archives of scientific data and research, especially pertaining to the environment.
Canadian scientists say this was done to sabotage informed resistance to the extractivist agenda.
US citizens: call on your senators to oppose new sanctions against Iran. Give diplomacy a chance.
Long-term unemployment makes many young people despair and think of suicide.
The "defensive patent license" ought to be called the "still offensive patent license", because of the exclusion of anything it calls a "clone" — which is itself dishonest, since it the way they define it, it includes a lot more than clones. It includes any similar functionality.
Apple could license its patents this way and still use them against free software smart phones.
The US is plagued by redistributionist politicians, redistributing as usual to the rich.
I'm proud to be a redistributionist: I say we should move that money back.
Peer pressure turns children into competitive consumers.
The NSA refuses to say whether it snoops on Congress.
I suspect it makes special efforts to snoop on Congresscritters, in order to blackmail them.
Underfunding of medical care in the UK kills people by slowing down the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
The UK government wants to destroy old-growth forests and replace them with tree plantations.
The full text of Jacob Appelbaum's speech about NSA attack methods and what they can do to computer systems.
Everyone: call on the US and UK governments to stop persecuting journalists that write about the wrongdoing of the state.
The non-al-Qa'ida Syrian rebels say they have launched outright war with al Qa'ida.
Before rejoicing, we need to get confirmation of what is really happening, though that won't be easy to get.
The USDA says it wants to deregulate GM corn that is resistant to Agent Orange.
Talk about "bringing the war back home"!
The Government Accountability Project Statement on Edward Snowden and NSA Domestic Surveillance.
The US does not have a choice between fixing unemployment and fixing inequality. Fixing one requires fixing the other.
The Israel Lobby in the US is trying again to kill the deal with Iran.
As the US endorses letting Israel retain control of the Jordan valley, maintaining a permanent siege of Palestine, Netanyahu demands even more.
Idaho will take back a privatized prison that has been run horribly.
For a company to squeeze a profit out of a prison, it has to mistreat the prisoners somehow.
Imploring Mayor de Blasio to close the school-to-prison pipeline.
2013 was Australia's hottest year, and for each of its regions too.
Abbott says he will bring about a small, insufficient reduction in emissions by 2020, by methods that aren't likely to work at all. Planting trees may be good in other ways, but it takes a long time for them to pull CO2 out of the air, assuming they don't die or even burn.
The new planned coal mines would swamp that.
Meanwhile, Abbott has appointed a "business advisor" that campaigns loudly to deny global heating.
We can guess what business his advice represents.
What will we see next on the Abbott and Australia show? Perhaps this: Abbott lights a match on Australia, and Australia says, "Hay, Abbott!"
The carbon price in emissions-trading schemes has fallen so low that the schemes do nothing to reduce emissions.
Large UK landlord companies are refusing to rent to people on welfare.
The Tories are evil, greedy monsters that deserve to live on the street along with the banksters.
Senator Sanders has asked the NSA whether it snoops on Congress.
As poor in the UK face hunger and homelessness, the government has announced it will cut off another aid program which is meant to help in "emergencies".
It would defeat the purpose of pushing millions into emergencies, if there's a program that would help.
Cambodian thugs shot garment workers protesting for higher pay.
We must put an end to the treaties that drive countries to compete to offer foreign business the lowest wages.
The Australian government wants Greenpeace activist Colin Russell to pay for the useless "assistance" it gave him when he was persecuted by Putin.
In effect, Abbott seeks a way to punish him financially after Putin jailed him for months.
This is because Abbott and Putin are on the same side — the extractivist side.
How MIT's callousness and exaggerations condemned Aaron Swartz.
David LaMacchia set up an internet bulletin board site where anyone could upload and download files. He didn't put the files in it himself, but the US government wanted to hold him personally responsible for the files that were uploaded. US government representatives systematically smeared LaMacchia, who on his lawyer's advice did not dare say they were wrong; but he had already explained the facts to people at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and that's where I heard them. This article repeats the givernment's claim.
The government used this smear to push for the passage of the law that criminalized noncommercial sharing on the Internet, an attack on our rights that we will have to fight to undo.
The US regularly puts nonviolent accused "terrorists" in solitary confinement for years, blocking them from discussing their cases properly with their lawyers, and eventually gets them to plead guilty after their minds have broken.
US suppression of possible Muslim "radicalization" has been stretched to the point of prosecution of thoughtcrime.
You don't have to be Islamist, or even Muslim, to think that people in a country conquered by the US have the right to resist occupation. Anyone who hates oppression believes that. Why shouldn't Muslims say that?
On the other hand, anyone who is such a "good" Muslim as to support Islam's contempt for women, its cruel Shari'a law, or its disrespect for everyone's religious freedom, deserves plenty of criticism. You can't duck the odium of those views by saying it's a religion.
US citizens: Sign this petition calling on Congress not to turn the Endangered Species Act into a hollow absurdity.
US citizens: sign this petition calling for prosecution of Clapper for lying to Congress.
US citizens: sign this petition for Obama to give Snowden amnesty.
And this one: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD
There is another campaign asking people to fax Obama copies of the New York Times editorial that says Snowden should be offered a reduced punishment. I think that is an insult to a hero, and I didn't support it. I support this instead.
Just about all the sides in Syria and Iraq are fighting against al Qa'ida. Even some other Islamist militias.
The defeat of al Qa'ida would mean the defeat of the worst sort of fanaticism. However, if the other Islamist militias are part of the winning side, I fear that women, human rights and non-Muslims in those areas will still be on the losing side.
Taliban attacked and murdered foreign climbers on a mountain in Pakistan, as an intentional reprisal against people who had nothing to do with the war.
This is much nastier than US drone attacks. Imagine if the US had deliberately targeted a wedding party while believing that everyone there was a noncombatant, and you'd have an equivalent for this.
Pakistan says it has arrested those responsible.
The US participated directly when Colombia attacked a FARC camp just across the border in Ecuador.
The argument that a state has the right to fight its enemies when they are sheltered by another state is valid in some circumstances, but one must look at the rest of the situation. For instance, did the Ecuadorian government shelter or sponsor that camp (or even know about it)? Did Colombia ask Ecuador for assistance in dislodging it?
There may be other relevant factors. The Colombian state was and still is closely connected with the worst terrorist group in Colombia, the paramilitaries.
Although the FARC have degenerated into drug trafficking and kidnap for profit, they are still better than the paramilitaries. Is support for the FARC justified on these grounds?
Michael Moore: The Obamacare We Deserve.
I'm a real Liberal, and Obama is hardly much of a Liberal, so I don't silence my views to support him.
Israel Cages Palestinian Children in Outdoor Holding Pens During Freezing Storm.
Employees of Mèdecins Sans Frontières seem to have been kidnaped in Syria.
Ralph Nader calls on Dubya to accept responsibility for turning Iraq into a place of horror.
US citizens: call on the Senate to extend unemployment benefits.
Bretons are protesting and destroying cameras to prevent implementation of a tax on truck travel.
Taxes like this are necessary to conserve fuel, and the pain they impose is nothing compared to the pain they will avoid. I think the protesters are making a mistake — like protesting about a visit to the dentist.
The tax money should be to stimulate the economy in other ways.
The Iraqi state has allied with non-radical Sunnis to fight al Qa'ida.
If Sunnis and Shi'ites can work together, it might offer some hope for ending the terror in Iraq.
Everyone: call on Peru to ban hunting dolphins to use as bait for sharks.
The dolphins are not endangered, but the sharks are on the road to being wiped out.
US citizens: tell the Senate, no cuts in food stamps!
UK local governments use "back to work" schemes as a way to make people do real work for much less than the minimum wage.
UK austerity is about to create a wave of mass homelessness.
Newly released papers expose several lies by and about Margaret Thatcher.
In particular, there was her lie to the striking miners, claiming she had no plans to close additional mines. What else would right-wing politicians do besides lie?
Selling out to business has made India rich, while making half of all Indians abjectly poor.
What India needs most is to provide reliable modern contraception to every woman in India.
The UK's "porn filter" is a system of outsourced state censorship, based on the standard idiotic excuse.
Mesh networks could make the internet more flexible and reduce surveillance.
Iceland's ice is melting fast, and when it goes, Iceland will be short of water.
Its longest bridge spans a river that has gone permanently dry.
The plan to remove the grey wolf from the endangered species list is based on twisting the meaning of the law so as to make it systematically ineffective.
Information about the tiny physical surveillance devices that the NSA (or anyone) can install.
I am not especially bothered by the NSA's having these, since they won't be installed everywhere (and in the US would require a court order). What's dangerous to democracy is general surveillance applied to everyone.
An Indian girl who reported rapes was subsequently murdered by the rapists.
Giant mines planned in Sweden will block reindeer migration, and dust spread by the mines will kill reindeer anyway.
If someone tells you that the ship now caught in sea ice near Antarctica disproves global heating, here's the real science.
The software freedom fight comes to the farm, as computerized farm machines have created a battle over whether farms will control their own computing and data, or be prey to Monsanto and other large companies.
It's regrettable that this idealistic author adopts the anti-idealistic term "open source", which was designed to suppress this sort of idealism. Clearly, the suppression does not work 100%, but it continues to weaken our movement.
An Economy That Benefits Ordinary People? What We Learned From the 1%.
How to reverse financialization.
2013 was Iraq's deadliest year since 2008.
Republicans are planning a new series of artificial impediments to abortion.
Considering the many ways not having an abortion can harm a woman — before, during, and years after birth — it would make more sense to require a waiting period for the decision not to have an abortion.
Chomsky on the NSA, earth's destruction, the loss of journalism, the downgrading of education, and more.
NSA, Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation: the US government knows everything but learns nothing.
The same can be said about al Qa'ida in general. Despite all its intelligence gathering, the US has only managed to make al Qa'ida stronger.
The ACLU is trying to find out about the surveillance of Americans that the NSA does as a byproduct of supposedly spying on foreigners.
NSA Intercepting Laptops Bought Online to Install Spy Malware.
Gmail was planned from the start as a massive surveillance system, to make psychological profiles not only of Gmail users but of everyone who sends mail to Gmail users.
The New York Times (and other media) use truncated time lines to claim that fighting between Israel and Gaza is always started by Gazans.
A few years ago it was noted that it was typically Israel that broke the truce with Hamas.
US citizens: call for allowing the Monsanto Protection Act to lapse.
From Turing to Snowden: How US-UK Pact Forged Modern Surveillance (of everyone).
It should be noted that the US got various warnings of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, but officials did not take the warnings seriously.
A world-wide poll found that the world's population considers the USA to be the biggest threat to world peace.
An ACLU victory: families applying for welfare in Florida can't be required to take drug tests.
I joined the ACLU when George I criticized Governor Dukakis for being a "card-carrying member", effectively likening the defense of civil liberties to Communism. I asked myself, "If Michael Dukakis can be an ACLU member, why am I not one?" Then I joined.
22000 students in New York City are homeless.
Will Mayor de Blasio help them find shelter? There are places in New York City where tents could be set up.
Transporting oil by rail is very dangerous, but pipelines are becoming less safe, too.
Why are pipelines less safe than previously? Maybe they are just getting old. Maybe the government doesn't require as much inspection and maintenance as before. Maybe the government has fewer inspectors, or doesn't dare fine companies enough to make them comply. It certainly isn't trying hard enough.
Abbott is using his "business advisor" to spread global heating denialism.
Abbott warned Australia that he isn't the suppository of all wisdom, but who needs a suppository with shit like this?
Ideas for compromise about Netanyahu's demand for recognizing Israel as "a Jewish state" rather than just a state.
The Israel double standard: other countries get sanctions for violating human rights, but Israel only gets a boycott.
10,000 Palestinian children living with their parents in Jerusalem can't get Jerusalem residency cards, or health care , and after they reach 16 they won't be allowed to live with (or even visit) their mothers.
Required identity cards are an injustice in themselves, of course, even if not applied in this discriminatory fashion.
Daily Kos: 15 things everyone would know if there were a Liberal media.
Congressional Republicans ask the IRS to produce a one-sided report, creating an appearance of a scandalous political bias, which the same Republicans then attacked.
Japanese companies recruit homeless people to work on the Fukushima cleanup, then cheat them of their wages.
I'm glad that there is work available for homeless people, but cheating them is despicable. (It's common practice for businesses to cheat workers.) And this work might be dangerous to them, and to others if not done right. It needs to be done by people who know what they are doing.
Services that claim to test your DNA and predict risk of various diseases don't really know what they are doing.
Some researchers expect that 10 to 20 percent of jobs for college graduates will be replaced by AIs in the next two decades.
This is in addition to many other jobs that will be eliminated — drivers, for instance, and supermarket sales jobs.
We are already seeing the effects of this, in long-term unemployment of people who have given up looking for jobs. All economic growth goes to the rich few, so it creates few jobs. The jobs lost to computerization will not be replaced by other jobs.
If you are a young person now and you are not brilliant or aiming at a career such as medicine, I recommend that you not get yourself in debt to go to college. You'll never pay that debt off. Instead, organize for your state to adopt Oregon's plan for funding a college education. If it takes ten years to win, you can go to college then, and you'll still be better off.
Passing the entrance exam for a Japanese university is less challenging for an AI than you might suppose. Those exams focus on rote learning, so passing requires a lot of knowledge but no creativity. It does, however, require human-style common sense for the reading comprehension, and that is the central challenge in AI.
Oil extraction from Canadian tar sands spews out mercury, which is toxic.
Burning coal also spews mercury.
Letting companies "regulate themselves" is a standard right-wing agenda. The conservative regime in the US is considering letting chicken factories inspect themselves.
The NSA's methods of spying on computers include physical spy devices such as radio-transmitter USB plugs, as well as devices they insert into a computer while it is being shipped.
Greenwald and an ACLU lawyer comment on how Obama is the NSA's trojan horse in the Democratic Party.
We had a name, in the 1980s, for politicians with views like Obama's: "Republicans". I used to be a Democrat … until the Democratic party as a whole turned conservative and no longer deserved my support. However, we are now electing some Democrats worthy of the name, such as Elizabeth Warren.
The owners of the factory in which fire killed 112 workers now face murder charges.
I don't think that the executives of western clothing lines deserve to be charged with murder. It is more effective to make them responsible for the working conditions of the factories that make their clothing — and prosecute every time they fail to check, not just on the rare occasions when that kills someone.
3 more prisoners in Guantanamo have been released.
The US has known for 10 years that there was never any reason to imprison them.
Obama keeps lying to whitewash the NSA.
Shoot-to-kill rangers protected elephants, but oppressed humans.
What can the replacement be?
Egypt is applying US-style forfeiture to 500 leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Extreme weather disasters in the Caribbean.
The Shocking Redistribution of [US] Wealth in the Past Five Years.
A new climate model says we are on track for 4C of global heating by 2100.
The Israeli government displayed its contempt for Kerry's "peace negotiations" by backing a plan to annex a large fraction of the West Bank in order to keep it permanently under siege.
Netanyahu does not care how this affects the "negotiations", since he has no intention of making a peace agreement. I think his goal is to show that he still has the US government cowed; that he can ridicule the US and the "negotiations" and Kerry won't dare make a peep.
The NSA's catalog of attack software: they can attack BIOSes, routers, even the firmware of hard drives.
The NSA has a special unit to crack security of machines that are hard to crack.
It is legitimate to have a unit like this, but its operations must be very strictly controlled, and we cannot trust officials that lie to Congress to do that.
The comparison with "plumbers" is telling, since Nixon used the same metaphor to describe his team of burglars, whose best known crime was in the Watergate hotel.
States that vote right-wing tend to take from the Federal government, while Democratic states contribute.
Another oil train collided and started another big fire.
We were lucky this time — the collision took place in a deserted area and it seems nobody was directly hurt. Oil trains go through towns and cities, and we can't be lucky every time.
Everyone: On Jan 3, make a sign saying "Edward Snowden", go to an airport, and wait for him to arrive.
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