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.
Fundamentally, the large number of people with no home, or a cramped
home, is due to the combination of inequality (and its consequent
poverty), urbanization, and population growth. Urbanization is itself
the result of economic causes related to inequality.
The new US government program of handouts for the biggest companies
has no conditions of honesty or decency. Nothing would stop them from
handing the money straight to the CEO,
except that the other
stockholders might demand a cut.
This suggests to me that it is safe to release most of them so they
don't catch and spread Covid-19 in prison. But also that a special
kind of sentence might be invented that would serve in place of prison
and achieve the same results.
This will build resistance, and few new antibiotics are being
developed. Our neoliberal governments have left the decisions in the
hands of business, which mostly considers antibiotics not profitable.
His argument, that he is tested "regularly" for the coronavirus and
therefore knows he can't transmit virus to anyone else, is not absurd.
However, we don't know how frequently "regularly" is. If it is once a
week, he might become infected and start transmitting virus between
tests.
In any case, there was no reason for the hospital to make an exception
for him. I expect the hospital management were afraid of reprisals
if they did not.
An app for parole monitoring is so buggy that it is very hard for
people to keep the requirements. They live in fear of being
imprisoned again because something did not work. It needlessly drains
the battery, and when the battery runs dry at the wrong time, the user
can be imprisoned for that. In addition,
it
can listen through the phone at any time.
I'd choose an ankle bracelet if I had the choice. However, those
don't work in the smooth way you might imagine. Parolees using ankle
monitors have
to pay for them, also,
thought they
don't also have to pay hundreds of dollars at the start to buy one.
And ankle bracelets too are unreliable, and run out of charge too often,
which puts the user in danger of being imprisoned or missing work.
Every portable phone, whether smart of not, can be converted into a
full-time listening device. Let's learn to think of every portable
phone as a form of virtual prison.
Around 20 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance, but a
study
suggests roughly 50% more are unemployed but have been blocked or discouraged from doing this.
It would be unreasonable, perhaps even harmful, to demand too much.
If not enough protective gear is available made, when medical personnel
have trouble getting them, we must not blame an employer for not getting
some -- or insist it outbid the hospitals for them. Some companies
might get gear by bribing the conman, and medical personnel might
get sick as a result.
However, it would be a mistake to jump to the opposite extreme. For
instance, if unsophisticated masks will prevent most transmission
in the work place, companies must get them and provide them. There
is no sense in giving businesses license to be totally careless with
employees' health.
The New York State Democratic Party cancelled its presidential primary
on the grounds that all the candidates except Biden have withdrawn.
The
election will be held anyway, since it includes other offices as well.
The Sanders campaign objected to this move, since it could reduce
the turnout of progressives for other candidates.
I hope progressives understand the importance of replacing right-wing
Democrats, and vote as if their lives depend on it -- since they will.
Democrats are coming to understand the
danger
of Republican voter suppression. However, anything that artificially
discourages progressive voters from voting will have a similar effect.
Large parts of the US economy cannot recover as long as people are
worried about catching Covid-19. Even if US states allow them to
reopen,
not
many people will make use of them.
The article mentions a restaurant reservation service called
OpenTable.
I've read it gouges restaurants, so that overall they are worse off
due to its existence, but no restaurant can afford to reject it while
its competitors don't.
That is a reason to boycott OpenTable, but the strongest
reason not to do business with it is that it identifies customers
and feeds the surveillance industry. Once I stepped into an interesting-looking
restaurant and learned that the only way to dine there was to reserve
via OpenTable. Which implied that I would never dine there.
When I make a restaurant reservation, I do not identify myself in
a way that a database could track. Usually I give a false name —
which will not alter how much I pay for the meal. And I pay only
in cash.
The right thing to do is extract concessions to the environment in
exchange for saving a part of the industry with a smaller amount of
plastic going forward.
Immigrants crowded up in US immigration jails are trying to tell us about their
vulnerability
to Covid-19. The deportation thugs sometimes punish them to shut them up.
Texas
has backed down on its scheme to ban abortion by calling it a "nonessential" procedure.
I hope the women who were blocked from getting abortions can get it
done now, but some of them might have been pushed past the 3-month
limit, up to which they don't need to offer justification.
The lesson here is that a lockdown can be effective, if it is complete
enough to stop nearly all transmission and thus eliminate the need
for the lockdown.
(satire)
*[The bully] publicly accused New York health officials Monday of
inflating the state’s Covid-19 mortality rate by including African
Americans in their calculations of the total dead.*
One thing we need to change is the operation of factory farms for meat.
Agribusiness demands reducing the controls against disease, which
means moving in the wrong direction. Thus,
the
US under the saboteur is cutting back on meat inspection,
which is crazy, since it will promote the spread of antibiotic resistance.
You don't need to have any preexisting conditions to die from
resistant bacteria.
Poland says that people can trust its centralized quarantine tracker
because the data will be saved for "only" six years and
only the Polish
government will have access to it.
That doesn't make it very trustworthy.
On the one hand, 14 days of location tracking data, which on each
occasion reports that you are in the same place (at home), is nothing
to worry about in itself. If I were in quarantine for a few weeks,
infected with coronavirus, I would not object to being tracked for
that period.
I would not let them do it with a portable phone, though, because
that device can also listen and transmit at any time, and it can be
tracked by others aside from the quarantine authority. I would not
install a nonfree program on my computer to do it, either.
I would invite the government to lend me a portable phone with a
broken microphone for the duration of my quarantine. Then I would
uncover its camera when agents call me through it. I would not care
what software they have installed on their phone while I borrow it, as
long as it could not do anything except the job it is officially
supposed to do. If they wanted to hear my voice as well, they could
call my landline at the same time.
On the other hand, the general defeatist attitude in the quotation at
the end, "They know all about us, so why resist their systems to know
all about us," is a very important mistake. All we need, to force
systems to be redesigned so that "they" won't "know all about us", is
to throw off the defeatism and start demanding they do so.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose bailouts for weapons
companies and military contractors. That includes mercenaries — the US army
should stop hiring mercenaries.
The copyright industry is trying to use Covid-19 as an excuse to
impose
robotic copyright filters in the US, similar to the devastating
directive that was passed by the EU a year ago.
Evidence including DNA sequences and sequences of events makes it
pretty clear that the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain evolved in animals and
did
not escape from a virology lab.
The saboteur in chief
set
up a panel to recommend ways to promote
nuclear power. Its recommendations would throw loads of money into
radioactive waste.
Hungary's oppressive ID requirements — one must show government ID
even to buy a bus pass or pick up a parcel — are being used to
repress
trans people.
The crisis caused by Covid-19
may
pulverize the right-wing assumption
that the state must not help people. But it can also encourage state
actions to hurt people.
[The saboteur in chief]
has
been hesitant to invoke the Defense
Production Act for medical gear. But he's already used it hundreds of
thousands of times for weapons and bombs.
"Tea Party" Republicans
undermined
the US stockpile of N95 masks.
They pretend that no one could have guessed that the US would need
hundreds of millions of masks, but they didn't need to guess, only to
listen.
Their ideological opposition to making use of government to serve all of
society throws us into helpless dependence on the plutocrats that they serve.
We need to reclaim control of the state, so that it can do
the many jobs
that only a state can do.
I highly recommend Ted Chiang's book, Stories of Your Life and Others.
If you buy a copy, please pay cash only — don't let a business track
what you read. And especially don't get the
commercial
ebooks that
impose DRM and require you to promise to act like a jerk.
Bizarrely, the article does not mention that this will help
civilization survive. Why not? Why do the Guardian's editors
want business journalist that doesn't look beyond the effects
on the profit prospects of certain businesses.
I say it is not enough just to survive Covid-19. We need to survive
with some privacy left. My policy is to refuse to let companies know
that I am the one buying.
The argument that some vulnerable people depend on a wet market is not
strong enough sustain the conclusion that the market should stay open.
There are less dangerous ways to help those people.
The UK is prosecuting supporters of independence for Scotland, and
others who have reported on the trial of Alex Salmond, for publishing
information that could have helped people identify one of the
witnesses that testified for the prosecution.
One
of them is Craig Murray.
Murray says that mainstream newspapers published more or less the same
information but were not prosecuted. He concludes that this is a
politically biased prosecution. He will not get a jury trial,
so
he could be railroaded as Assange is being.
Alex Salmond was the leader of the Scottish National Party, which
advocated independence for Scotland (and still does). He was accused
of raping or groping women (I don't know the details), but the jury
rejected the charges.
I have no position on the issue of Scotland, but politically biased
prosecution is evil.
However, it is an exaggeration to say we have 6.5 months to "save the planet",
because whatever happens in November, the president elected then won't try
to do it.
Is there still "enough for everyone"? If that is true today, it won't
be true ten years from now. If and when there are too many of us,
the only humane and ethical remedy is to
reduce births.
When Sérgio Moro resigned he
revealed
some illegal actions by Bolsonaro that could justify impeaching
him. However, the military are now in control, and impeaching Bolsonaro
would replace him with an ex-general who admires the military dictatorship.
Not much better, but perhaps little worse.
I expect the US will work for military rule in Brazil.
Amazon has been
caught
cheating against companies that sell through Amazon, by using
data about their sales to compete with them.
Due to a paywall, I cannot access the article that reported on this,
and even if I saw a copy I would not post a reference to it. But
I am confident that it would not have reported this without convincing
evidence.
Palestinians report that
Israeli
colonists attacked Palestinian farmers while Israeli soldiers
encouraged them. A Palestinian tried to record this but one of the
colonists stole per camera.
The human rights group B'tselem reports that
these
attacks have increased in April, now running more than one per
day. They attack buildings, olive trees, cars, and persons, often
destroying or damaging them. They have not killed people this month,
but they have grievously wounded helpless people. They often carry
guns, so they could easily kill many at any time.
Often Israel soldiers are present and attack the Palestinians out of sheer hatred.
Another flaw in the the extremely flawed CARES Act: the small business
loans are supposed to be forgiven later if used to keep staff on the
payroll, but the
loan
contracts don't guarantee this forgiveness.
This will give banks an opportunity to cheat or harass those businesses later.
If that is true, it means that China more or less owns the conman,
unless he has amassed so much money through his corruption that he
can pay back the loan now.
UN Secretary General Guterres warns that
Covid-19
endangers human rights, threatening freedom (attacked by authoritarian
governments) as well as other human needs.
It appears that the law does not apply to businesses, indeed to anyone
other than government agencies. That makes the law inadequate, since
it does nothing to limit the businesses, such as
Safran
that accumulate face recognition dossiers about everyone and sell access to these dossiers.
There is no activity more essential than protesting when necessary.
But the thugs of Raleigh, North Carolina, say it is forbidden because
it is
"non-essential".
However, we should recognize that one of the ways Covid-19 threatens
to do permanent harm is by allowing governments (including the US)
and companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Zoom and others) to increase
their levels of surveillance and control over people.
Ironically, even as government threatens us with repression, it is also a
necessary
platform for serving many vital needs, and the only tool we could
use to keep the companies and plutocrats in check, and
stop
global heating before it destroys technological civilization.
This means we must first take control of our government, then use
it to defeat the plutocratists. It's a devil of a situation, but
it's that or serfdom.
We must not allow discrimination between protests based on what cause
they advocate. If we permitted that, the plutocrats would ban protests
against them.
“Every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010–2016"
was developed using public research funds, according to the National
Academy of Sciences. The NIH used to have a rule that
drugs
developed with public research funds had to be sold for a reasonable price,
The plutocratist president, Bill Clinton, eliminated that
rule.
Congress could restore that rule now with a law, if we replace the plutocratists in it.
Big Pharma says it needs monopolies to get the money to pay for the
large studies of the effects of drugs. Those studies are crucial but
we must not allow pharma companies to play any role in them —
because
when they pay for studies, they corrupt the studies.
If we are wise, we will pay for those studies with public funds, too.
After all, it's our money either way, whether we pay it via the government
or through the pharma companies.
Rather than sending thugs
to question people on the street who are
suspiciously bringing people food, the government should improve its
own efforts to do the job.
Building "resiliency" is a useful medium-term measure, that could help
Boston survive while we curb global heating
— if we do. But without
that, it is futile; all such efforts will be overwhelmed by the sea.
I agree with them aside from one: funding to extend broadband
internet.
In order for "digital inclusion" to be an advance, it has to respect
freedom. The internet today, used as people normally use it, devours
freedom. When society as a whole depends on such use of the internet,
it becomes a trap that keeps people under the thumb of surveillance
capitalism and state repression. Making that sort of internet faster
is a mistaken goal.
Indeed, even if they don't directly give all the money to giant
agribusiness corporations, those will grab most of it because of their
domination of the market. Smaller farms typically sell to giant
monopsonies, which effectively set the price farms receive for their
production. These prices
keep
farmers right on the edge of going under.
To support actual farm prices would require different systems.
The US had such systems in the past, but plutocratists won't be
in favor of bringing them back.
We hope to develop a vaccine, or a treatment, but the way to get rid
of Covid-19 that we already know can work is that of testing,
tracing and isolation. If that is our only way to do it, that too
must be implemented globally.
Covid-19 is temporary, but if it acts as an excuse to impose
surveillance, the surveillance is likely to be forever. The time to
resist is now.
One way to resist is to join me in always paying cash when you
purchase goods, publications (textual or not), and ground transport.
If a store declines to take my cash, I say politely that cash is the
only way I can pay. If the store refuses to make an accommodation, I
say "Too bad," and leave.
It is useful to tell your local and state politicians that you want
laws to require retail businesses to accept cash.
New York City
passed one last year.
Above all, don't be defeatist: don't give in to the attempted
self-fulfilling prophesy that Covid-19 will terrify us into paying
only through surveilled systems.
Investing in research on those machines, and on the less radical carbon
capture and storage, is a good thing to do. It has a chance of making
a big difference.
But research is always a risk. We must not assume this will work out.
In some states, these bans have been overturned. In others, upheld.
I suppose the Supreme Court will study the case, and its right-wing
majority will seize the opportunity to interfere with abortion rights
by hook or by crook.
This indicates that the population of the region is hitting a resource
limit. Whether or not that competition leads to an actual war, people
will die as a result.
Showing that you can't overcome resource shortages with dams alone. You need birth control too.
I would not obey a rule like that. Since I do not wish to get sick,
I go out only occasionally and take care when I do. But I will not
live by an absurd zero-tolerance rule that demands I avoid even small
risks, regardless of what that does to my freedom and privacy.
For instance, I buy groceries in the supermarket and I pay cash.
I will not order them delivered or pay for them in a way that would
identify me.
The Trump Hotel in Washington DC leased a building from the US government
so as to profit if the bullshitter became president. Now it is having
trouble paying its rent, so it is
asking
for rent relief.
There is a glut of oil, and oil companies are paying others to take
massive quantities of oil and store it until someone wants
it.
Many fossil fuel companies are facing bankruptcy, and many investors are facing losses.
We need those investors to lose money, and learn the lesson not to
invest in fossil fuels. As always, the saboteur in chief doesn't
want rich people and big companies to suffer the negative consequences
of their actions, so he has announced a big
"bailout" for them.
Bailouts for fossil fuel companies are not merely wasteful, not merely
dooH niboR.
If they spare investors from learning the lesson that their investments
are damaging, the bailouts are damaging.
*A political system that is structurally incapable of acting for the
common good, even when millions of lives are at stake, is not just
failing
to solve our problems. It is the problem.*
The US government's evident corruption and incompetence in dealing
with Covid-19 demonstrates that this is the situation. Now we need
to fix it so the government can protect us from the even bigger dangers
such as
global heating and world-wide wars.
The House of Representatives is considering
remote voting.
I see no particular problem in the interim plan to use proxies for
votes. However, remote voting creates a security problem that is
impossible to correct if it uses nonfree software or services
operated by companies. It has to be with free software and the server
must belong to the House of Representatives.
US officials say China organized a
disinformation
campaign in March saying that the bullshitter was going to use
soldiers to clamp down on movement in the US.
The bullshitter makes the US more vulnerable to disinformation from
whatever source. Perhaps he should ask someone to tell him the children's
story, "The President That Cried 'Fake!'". Eventually the president
said "fake" about news that really was fake, and nobody believed him.
This gives the company an opportunity to pressure hospitals to modify
their relationships with that company in ways that will benefit the
company in the future, and perhaps even today.
Why did the corruptor choose that company? My guess is that it is paying him off.
Lobbying
turned a supposed "loan program for small businesses" into a loan
program for larger businesses — some of which just want to go
bankrupt.
In effect, Congress is assuming that the officials that administer
the program are making strong efforts to keep it honest — but
with the conman in charge, you can be sure that will not happen.
The chief of the department had the decency to condemn the
thug's
actions unreservedly. That condemnation goes beyond an apology.
But this is not enough by itself. It is necessary to punish that
thug firmly, so that the others know they won't be winked at if they
do this again.
Human rights lawyer
Wang
Quanzhang has been released from formal prison, but remains a
prisoner in some undisclosed location while he is trained to say what
his guards wish.
Succeeding in this, would help the planet-roaster government resist
doing anything to limit global heating
itself. Even making the attempt
will help that.
The article does not mention ocean acidification, which is
the other
big effect of increased CO2 in the air.
In a few decades perhaps,
that will kill all corals, and many molluscs, crustacians, and
starfish. The excess CO2 may interfere with the thought processes of
fish, which could wipe out some species.
Australia principal river system, the Murray-Darling system, gets only
half as much water nowadays as in the 20th century, due to global
heating —
so
it will get worse.
Australians believed the water was there but they were taking out too
much.
Privatized medicine has mostly abandoned rural America, and laws
assure a nationwide shortage of doctors, few of whom choose to go
there. This causes
helplessness
in facing any sort of epidemic.
With copious testing, contact tracing, and isolation of those
infected, it is possible to eliminate Covid-19 from an area, or pretty
close. Taiwan
and South Korea have done it.
Just waiting won't make ending stay-at-home safe, so how does the US
plan to achieve that? If we are waiting for some major change in the
situation, what change is it, and how do we plan to make it happen?
An internal investigation in the Labour Party, which was leaked,
concluded that some of its staff, who opposed Corbyn, weaponized
accusations of antisemitism so as to ensure the party would not win an
election under Corbyn. The mainstream media
did
its best to support that campaign.
Part of the campaign was to demand a zero-tolerance approach to
eliminating antisemitism from the party. A zero-tolerance approach to
enforcing any rule tends to create dissention and hostility, because
it means that very small differences in conduct lead to enormously
different treatment.
In addition to blocking various abusive forms of surveillance, they
also prevent any sort of contact-tracing app that accumulates a list
of phones that have passed nearby, even if it were up to the user
to decide to send it in.
If such an automated recording of nearby-passing phones is an effective
method of contact tracing —
which
some experts doubt —
then preventing it from being used seems to be a bad thing.
In addition, governments can do this in other ways, as China does. I
think China's app operates by reporting the phones GPS location to the
state. If everyone is forced to install that app, the state can
figure out which phones passed nearby.
Even voluntary schemes for tracking people's movements
can become effectively mandatory if employers, landlords, and services
punish
people who don't do it.
I have to point out that the UK began tracking all car travel over 10
years ago, and has
already abused the system to sabotage protests.
Of course, now it is sabotaging all protests, and not that there
is less to protest now than there was.
Slow sidewalk-travelling robots can now deliver food orders
to customers willing
to be surveilled.
I see only two things wrong with this system. For customers, there is
no way to buy anonymously, so I would not use it. For workers, it
means a lot of unemployed people. The Tories would have them living on
the street faster than you can say "Tories".
Why would US workers want to sue their employers about this?
I see two rational motives.
Because treatment costs money and they can't afford it.
Making treatment gratis for all would eliminate this motive.
Because they experience working conditions that could encourage
contagion. Workers who have no savings and no union will be unable to
change such working conditions, except to sue.
It is impossible in general to determine whether a worker contracted
Covid-19 at work or elsewhere, so I think a company should be
responsible for maintaining working conditions that make transmission
unlikely, according to a clear and adequate standard.
*The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT)
consortium … removed [all] mention of the decentralized
protocol proposal Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity
Tracing (DP3T) from its website.* The people developing that
protocol found
out when they saw their work had been deleted.
This stinks of an intentional effort to increase surveillance. Europeans, fight this now!
If you don't put as much effort into protecting your freedom as into
protecting your immediate health, your effort to "stay safe" is unbalanced!
Contrast the behavior of
rich
people, such as Richard Branson, who
think the government owes them loans after shirking taxes, with
the responsibilities they say poor people have.
*"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," billionaires are fond of telling
us. All while making us pay for their boots.*
The UK welfare system has been compelled by circumstances to abandon
some of its cruel practices because of the staff requirements. More
importantly, the Tories no longer dare pretend that citizens prepared
to work reasonably hard will never need
government
assistance.
They might go back to that pretense once Covid-19 is out of the way.
Some of those people have Covid-19 and would bring it to their home
towns if they go. However, the overwhelming majority do not have
Covid-19, and would die if they stay in Lima. Covid-19 is going to
reach those places sooner or later, but it could take time,
A better-organized and wealthier state would test them all, then
quarantine those who are infected and let the rest go home. But Peru
is not capable of that.
This shows us the sort of disasters that massive inequality can cause.
Meanwhile, the plutocrats labor every day to make more inequality.
The fact that they are using some sort of neural network to identify
that topic seems like a side issue to me. It would be just as bad
if humans were listening for such discussion.
Greg
Palast: Absentee ballots in the US place many obstacles in the
voter's way, and the votes of people from marginalized groups are more
likely to be blocked.
Thus, switching to voting by mail will not automatically assure that
all registered voters get to vote.
I hope the US does set up effective contact tracing, and if I am ever
called because of a rational suspicion that I am infected and asked
about my contacts, I will do my best to cooperate. If I am told I am
likely to be infected, I will stay inside to protect others. But I
will not use something that would let the state track my movements
even if I do not become infected. I will not carry a
portable phone.
To throw freedom and privacy overboard to avoid a small incremental
risk to health is folly. We need to maintain our freedom and privacy
along with our health.
Leaders appear strong (and win support) by visibly making someone else
back down. Business is so powerful nowadays that it is generally
easier to make the non-rich back down and serve the rich. So that is
what they do.
When the article talks of "squandering" this money, it understates the
danger. Having negated all existing oversight, Mnuchin and the conman
will have no obstacles to stop them from exercising favoritism in
whatever way they wish, in effect using this money as bribes. They
could pressure large companies to spend more on Republican campaigns.
It was terribly foolish for
Democrats in the House of Representatives to agree to this loan
program — foolish to imagine those corrupt officials would not
exploit every opportunity for corruption.
The Miami Herald
decided
to sue the State of Florida demanding release of information about
which nursing homes have had Covid-19 fatalities. Thegovernor intimidated
the newspaper's law firm into refusing to do this work.
I would say, rather, that the Republican Party has merged with a
variant of Christianity that is death cult.
Starting from their mad premises, their reasoning is rational. If
there were a heaven where you would be eternally happy, why hesitate
to die in a way that would get you in? Indeed, Christians had to
decide that suicide was a sin, or their believers would have eagerly
begun the trip to heaven.
This simply demonstrates that madness requires nothing more than the
adoption of mad premises.
Beware the temptation to go to the opposite extreme. There is no
reason to take risks to continue the
dooH niboR economy, but there are
parts of the economy we must take risks to continue. We need to grow
food -- and make sure everybody gets enough. And we must be ready,
now as in the past, to take risks to defend our freedoms.
Their campaign is based on valid principles, but it does not get to
the root of the matter and the solution it advocates is inadequate.
It supposes that schools could somehow insist, and verify, that
nonfree programs do only what they are supposed to do, and that
dis-services don't manipulate students or allow their data into the
hands of anyone that would misuse it.
The one solution that will really fix the problem is to switch
completely to free software, keep all the school's data about students
on the school's own computers, and not even collect data that could
be used to hurt the students.
Perhaps that is seen as too radical even to advocate, the way some
Democrats in Congress see Medicare for All as too radical no matter
how much we need it.
It makes me terribly sad to see this praise for a tablet full of
nonfree software. Surely he is running several nonfree apps designed
to mistreat the user.
I won't deny the benefit he reports. A computer can be very useful,
even while mistreating its user in ways most people don't recognize.
However, the mistreatment is entirely avoidable. A tablet with free
software could have done the same jobs.
The damage from the Big Spill reached all the way to the coast Mexico,
and big
decreases in seafood catch afflict the coast ten years after.
Mexican President Peña made a settlement that effectively let
Billionaire Polluters off the hook. Whether or not a bribe can be
identified, I call this corruption. The US has seen similar corrupt settlements recently.
If the electricity comes from hydropower, this really does eliminate the
greenhouse emissions.
There is just one bad aspect: most electric car charging systems require
payment by credit card. It is very hard to travel without being tracked
by this. That is an injustice.
Electric cars don't have to be tracking devices. There is no
fundamental obstacle to doing this right. But countries are turning
them into tracking devices.
The UK is delivering food to people who dare not go out, but following
its usual practice, the UK has set
strict
criteria for who qualifies to receive these deliveries.
It would be unthinkable to risk handing out food to someone who
might not deserve it.
While I can appreciate the disappointment of those who wish to have
children, I say we must not cater to it, because far worse things than
being childless are coming. Having children nowadays (with or without
medical assistance) places a large burden on the future. It reduces
civilization's chances of survival, even as
it
adds more one person to suffer in civilization's coming crisis.
Rather than spending public money to help people make a child, we
should tell them to consider adopting a child — to satisfy their
yearning in a way that helps future humanity rather than burdening it.
The "cramped" living conditions of the poor, in the US and the UK and
some other countries, get their impetus from the general economic
situation that draws large numbers to a few successful cities — but
this turns into real hardship because of favor-the-wealthy government
policies that don't
build enough housing in those cities, combined with the right-wing
squeeze-the-poor policies
that squeeze some poor people onto the street.
The concessions that the richer countries agreed, eliminating the
conditions that crushed Greece immediately, will postpone the crushing
of Italy and Spain, but not for very long.
I can't put Maduro and the bully
on a linear scale to judge which is
worse, but it is clear that if the
bully succeeds in realizing his
ambitions of absolute power he would be far worse.
*Moving towards a Medicare for All healthcare system will not just
stem the financial losses that hospitals are now experiencing, but
will ensure that we are
prioritizing
care and equity in our healthcare system.*
The article mentions a web site for reporting on Covid-19's spread in
Kashmir, which has chosen "open source". I have a hunch that they are
not apolitical, as the term "open source" encourages people to be, but
that they don't know how the free software movement is different from
open source.
USAA, a bank and insurance company for members and veterans of the US
military, has
reversed
course on seizing government aid payments for debt.
However, the US government has still done nothing to prevent this
practice.
Mnuchin and the bully
value the rich and powerful, while dehumanising
everyone else. The idea of agreeing to aid human beings, then
diverting the aid to banks and rich creditors, must have them laughing
at the suffering they cause.
Since Covid-19 reached the West Bank, attacks by Israeli fanatics
against Palestinians have
almost
doubled.
Their slow but steady taking of Palestinians' lands is
speeding
up.
Some right-wing Israeli fanatics fought against imposed quarantine,
left their quarantine site, then found three Arabs having a picnic.
They threw stones at the Arabs, then
burned
their cars.
The fanatics will be prosecuted for trashing the bus that was taking
them to quarantine. Burning Palestinians' cars is perhaps not
considered worth prosecuting.
The US renamed its War Department as the "Department of Defense," but
in substance it is still the Department of War. Looking at the real
threats that the US faces,
what
would a real Department of Defense do?
Neoliberalism is the economistic ideology that goes with plutocracy.
It denies that there is a place in society for any relationships
except the market. Neoliberalism inflicts suffering globally, all the
time, and hollows out society's resilience so that medical and
political harm can easily spread. And when it intersects with acute
plagues, such as Covid-19, the combination produce special, acute
harm.
But there is a worse alternative:
China's
authoritarian capitalism. China's system is not dysfunctional; it
doesn't tie the state in knots. When that state wants to
put
a million people in prison, it lies even more shamelessly than the
bullshitter does, and entirely silences dissenting voices.
The ACLU position's on contact tracing by phones identifies some
valid issues.
However, it misses
other
valid issues. Whatever privacy protections
this one app offers are at best one watertight wall on one side of a
leaking ship. The phones themselves allow location tracking in many
ways. And you can't trust any nonfree program to do only what its
developer says it does.
Now more than ever we must defend the right to pay cash — but
insisting on paying cash. Covid-19 will not last forever,
but rights lost tend to be lost forever.
Decades of systematic right-wing attack on scientific experts and
government action have spread a
bias
to reject them. Neither of them
is immune to corruption, but the right-wing alternative is corrupt at
the root. How can we get back to a way of thinking that has room
for something other than corruption?
In the US some poor people are ground up between the gears of
a response to Covid-19
that
doesn't think of them. In Mexico and Guatemala,
that is happening to masses of people.
The US is slowly building up the capacity for protective gear,
testing, and contact tracing, but is nowhere near the level necessary
to eliminate Covid-19 here.
The
numskull wants to reopen business anyway,
and never mind getting ready.
A Koch-funded protest group is being organized to protest
to
demand that.
I am glad to see that some Americans are ready to protest despite the
danger, which they do reduce by applying the usual measures. Too bad
they are not doing it for a sensible cause, such as reducing
surveillance by business and government, or pushing for more
production of the things that are necessary to reopen business safely.
We know how to prevent a repeat of that disaster, but the oil
companies would rather take the risk; they figure that the public will
suffer most of the costs of the next disaster, just as it suffered
most of the costs of the last one.
The biggest disaster ever, for a free and ethical internet,
is the current pressure on everyone to rush to do things on line.
When people talk about "being online", that as become an abbreviation
for "carelessly
running any nonfree app someone tells you to use."
However, if you don't want to be subjugated and kicked around online
you must take the opposite approach: rejecting software unless we can
determine it is free/libre, and that it doesn't send any data beyond
what we want it to send.
You can support internet freedom simply by saying no to organizations'
online portals, saying, that code does harm to the users. I hope you
will redo this code, but in the mean time I can do this activity only
by phone or email."
I've been doing that, with airlines and medical clinics, for some time
now.
The conman's supporters are eager for the end of the world and they
expect
him to make it happen. They regard anyone who disagrees with them
as an enemy to be spit on with contempt.
Here's
an article that defends the importance of digital privacy,
but starts by giving up on many fronts. It lauds online dis-services
and their nonfree client software, and won't go further than to
plead to avoid even more change in the same bad direction.
I'm not interested in whatever secondary benefits those dis-services
might offer. I don't want to be distracted from making sure I don't
have contact with them.
"Progressive solutionism", like "punitive solutionism", to use
Morozov's terminology, both presuppose tracking people and having a
system "manage" them. I'd say they are two ends of a spectrum
Once the system is operating, it can easily be adjusted along that
spectrum.
Whatever forms of repression and centralized power we accept today
will continue to hurt people for a lot longer than Covid-19 does.
Over a year ago, Foxconn said it would build a big factory in
Wisconsin in exchange for a subsidy. The factory plan keeps changing,
and shrinking, but so far
nothing
seems to be happening.
Amazingly, Foxconn may actually be denied the subsidy for not carrying out
the plan.
A suffering US restaurant chain owner applied for a loan whose purpose
is to allow him to rehire laid-off workers, then
complains that it is
"inflexible" because it requires him to rehire the laid-off workers.
Billionaires' income is mainly generated by their wealth, so no matter
how the tax amounts are determined, we can understand the effect on
their wealth by measuring them as a fraction of that wealth. For US
billionaires today,
that
fraction is 1/5 of what it was in the 1980s.
How the tax amounts are determined does make a difference. If it is
calculated on wealth, it can exceed the billionaire's income,
resulting in a welcome decrease in the billionaire's wealth.
Globalization is the triumph of efficiency over resilience, and profit
over people. If we learn the lesson, we will strengthen resilience,
and that means pruning the globalization.
"DNA vaccines" could amount to genetic engineering, since the genes
they carry get incorporated into the genome of the animal (which may
be a human) that
gets vaccinated.
A DNA vaccine is not necessarily bad or unjust, but it has the
potential to be so. So they need to be studied carefully, not rushed
into use. It is therefore a matter of concern that some of the
vaccines being developed against Covid-19 are DNA vaccines.
Covid-19 is interfering with the scheduled refueling and repair of
nuclear power plants.
They
may have to shut down.
Or they could keep operating with increased risk of a nuclear accident.
Operators have imperfect information about what is going on inside of
a nuclear reactor. Under the influence of hot, corrosive fluids, pieces
of metal can break and move. This makes it
even
harder to understand what is going wrong and what to do about it.
Canada (like the US) moved mountains to produce equipment for World War II.
Why accept a shortage of ventilators, or any product,
necessary to put an
end to Covid-19?
With our governments in thrall to billionaires, one is compelled to
suspect that the billionaires have a plan to profit by not making enough.
This could make it harder to crank those oil companies down to zero,
because they won't need to go looking for funding.
However, it could also reinvigorate the boycott of JPMorgan Chase,
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup — a boycott which started
ten years ago to punish them for causing the recession.
I've read that the safety of the frequencies used by 5G wireless has
not been established. It should have been thoroughly tested before
the decision to adopt those frequencies, but the uncertainty does not
constitute evidence for the claim that it is dangerous.
The known dangers of 5G wireless are the same as the dangers of 4G and
3G: every portable phone helps the phone network track the users'
movements (except the Librem phone when its radio is switched off),
and every portable phone can be remotely converted into a listening
device (except the Librem phone).
Perhaps it is a good idea to offer them a compromise, but that
compromise must be accepted by the public, not imposed by the
airlines. The broader voucher program proposed in the article could
be a good solution, but giving putting these customers at the head of
the companies' creditor lists could also be part of the solution.
That way, the customers might not get all they are owed, but at least
the stockholders will be the first ones to lose.
The article says how nasty the program's behavior, and the company's
behavior, are.
But even before we get to the nastiness of the surveillance, and the
painfulness of the hoops (such as to stare at the screen and never
look away), even installing the program violates your freedom.
It is surely not free software,
so just by running on your computer
it
denies your freedom,
and (I expect) it requires an equally unjust operating system
in order to install it.
(I tried to check those things, but the company's web site would
not let me connect.)
I see two ways to avoid this in justice.
Invite the school to set up its own computer for you to take
the exam on. I'd go along with using the school's computer
to talk with the school, and it would only be for the exam.
ask to take the exam when it can be given live.
Your stand will have more power if you join together with other
students as a group to refuse.
A bookstore owner writes about how her bookstore has continued to
operate…as
a surveillance system.
She presents this as a story of triumph over adversity, disregarding
the implications of imposing surveillance on all purchases. For me,
this outcome is perverse and alarming. Paying for a book with a
credit card tracks people and what they read. So does shipping it to
the customer.
I won't give a store any information that could identify me, and
especially not a bookstore. So until there is a store that lets me
enter, browse, pay cash, and take the book away, I won't buy a book
from a bookstore. If bookstores "survive" by converting themselves
into collectors of data, all of which is available to the FBI without
a warrant under
the
law Biden helped write,
they will become part of the problem.
Can we count on them to let people pay cash again some day?
A judge ruled that one of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline's
environmental review was
not
properly done. Construction across water has been put
on
hold.
Under ordinary circumstances I would refuse to carry any such thing;
no need to bother investigating the details.
Nowadays, due to the epidemic, I feel an obligation to cooperate with
contact tracing. But that does not mean I would accept anything
whatsoever under the rubric of contact tracing, regardless of what
else it really does.
And that goes double in Australia, due to its law that authorizes the
state to order the developers of any product or service to secretly
sabotage it.
The criticism in the article exaggerates, which is a shame since it is
mostly valid. This would give laid-off former full-time workers
something: it would pay part of the cost of continuing the
coverage that they most of them received from their employers. Which
is usually a lousy plan with high deductible and high copay.
Compared with a national medical system, it is a little better than
nothing.
Meanwhile, the US government is giving big airlines billions,
plus loans.
This discussion ends prematurely with an invalid conclusion: to
deprive everyone and call it "fairness". There is some number of
people who can use the park while staying sufficiently apart from each
other. Since that is not dangerous, society should set up a system of
rationing for slots to use the park.
The system should not commit incidental injustices through a bad
choice of mechanisms. For instance, it should not require using
non-libre software, and if authorities verify that park users have
slots, that should not identify those users who do have slots.
The arguments for individual disobedience are much weaker against this
helpful system than against a wasteful extreme of complete denial.
The US could get rid of this problem in general by changing its patent
laws and adopting a national medical system,
also known as Medicare for All.
The company could have done this before, but thought it could get away
with gouging. Perhaps Eli Lily made this change hoping to preserve its
power to gouge by eliminating one of the arguments used to push for
eliminating that power.
I will join my name to them. Biden would have to work hard to
demonstrate sincerity in commitment to these programs, but if he does,
I will support him.
The acute problem of unemployment for those workers doesn't alter the
long term disaster that the production of last year was leading to.
We need to move towards a real solution, not a stopgap that makes
things worse. A real solution saves the workers and their families
from an early death, this year and in future years. It ends the
wasteful excesses of production.
I think that a real solution requires either a big drop in the birth
rate, or some miracle.
I agree — except that it seems wrong to give any state "help" to
giant investment companies. Their stockholders often claim that they
deserve their high profits because they are risking high losses, yet
whenever it looks like such a loss is going to occur, they plead "it's
not our fault, so save us from this loss."
By the same logic, every time they get a big gain, it's not their
credit, so they should hand it over to the public treasury.
Meanwhile, the hospitals that are still open are overwhelmed with
patients, but they have no extra funds to hire the doctors and nurses
that have lost their jobs. A national medical system could give them
new assignments where they are needed.
The Coral Sea, in the ocean beyond the Great Barrier Reef,
is suffering
extreme coral bleaching.
Those reefs are too far offshore to be affected by fertilizer runoff
and tourism. This is due to heat alone.
Given the world's low state of preparedness, there may be little that
hospitals or governments can do to give medical personnel better
protection quickly.
US doctors and other medical personnel don't have masks to protect themselves
from Covid-19, and hospitals fire them if they talk about this. They are
asking people to
join in making masks for them.
*Top doctor sparks anger
by
telling NHS staff not to waste PPE.*
His point, which in principle seems valid, is that precisely because
they don't have enough of the most effective protective equipment,
they should take care to use what they have in the most effective way
— the way that gets the most net protection.
The world needs a massive program to help the poor and save the
environment so civilization can continue. The enormous government
spending already being carried out in many countries
may puncture the
claims that "there is no money for this."
Big oil companies that have spilled lots of toxic chemicals in the US
have got a big gift from the conman, non-enforcement of the laws against this,
and
now want another big gift.
I can't believe that the desire to reduce military spending by $40
million dollars is a sincere motive. In general, plutocratists seek
to increase spending on the military-industrial complex. I wonder
what the real motive could be.
I don't think anyone "deserves" to have Covid-19, or any other
disease. I don't think anyone "deserves" to die. We all die, but
death is always an unjust fate.
However, since Johnson courted infection as a callous, dishonest
political stunt, he is morally responsible the consequences, including
getting infected himself, and the thousands of others who will catch
Covid-19 as a result of his "leadership", some of whom will die of it.
And that was only one of his many acts of contempt for truth and
justice.
Perhaps he deserves to be punished for these acts, but not punished
with death. The death penalty is an injustice and should never be
inflicted on anyone. What Johnson deserves is for Britons to tell him
they won't give him another chance to endanger people, then take away
his political power. But this will not happen if they erase their
memories of his wrongs.
When Britons voted for Johnson and other Tories, they brought bad
government and its consequent suffering on themselves (and other
Britons too). But that does not mean they deserve bad government and
its consequent suffering. Nobody deserves that. What they deserve is
to (1) change their minds and (2) undo their bad decision.
The fashion industry is a manipulative waste of people's money and the
world's natural resources, so we are better off without it. However,
those people and other people without jobs must not be reduced to
penury. We need a real welfare system that provides everyone with a
decent life.
He may be better off catching Covid-19 and dying than living
to spend his life being tortured by the US. However, the affect
on freedom of the press will be the same disaster either way.
To truly rescue them would require forgiving those debts, or lending
them again at very low interest. Stiglitz proposes something along those lines.
However, I expect the plutocrats of the world to see in this crisis an
opportunity for disaster capitalism — to buy all the valuable assets,
including farmland, to convert the governments of those countries into
debt collectors, and to treat the inhabitants, for all time, like
unauthorized immigrants from nowhere.
They test hardly any of the coughing prisoners, then count everyone
not tested as not infected. Anyone who makes, or believes, that
argument must be looking for an excuse to falsify the facts.
But stopping prisoners from consulting their lawyers is far worse,
as it prejudices their cases in many ways that the article explains.
Republicans are profiting from it, too, using it as an excuse to
prevent protests, almost eliminate opposition campaigning and
fund-raising, and hamper voting.
This makes it especially important to get some people we know to use
free software to talk with us, and soon. Make sure that the place
they retreat to from future anxiety has room for free software.
I think the best chance of influencing policies after the election
is the chance that Sanders may win. Biden gives us no chance of ending
plutocracy,
because he never wanted to do that.
As for the idea that people should "unite" behind Biden, if he wanted my
support he should have stood for progressive policies.
I won't mock him with the name "Bogus" now that he is very sick dying,
but recall that his last great act of denialism was to deny that
Covid-19 was a big danger. He denied this with actions as well as
words, and he probably would not be sick now if he had not done so.
The Daily Beast speculates that this was meant to distract
non-supporters from his bad decisions. I think it was meant to
distract his supporters from them also.
The article describes how this exacerbates the effects of Covid-19,
citing blacks as an example. However, racism has some special
consequences that go beyond the problems of being poor.
Ordinary local thugshave
not let up on shooting people, and the immigration thugs have not
let up on arresting people for deportation (aside from the fraction
that will die in immigration prison).
(satire) "The free market works best with some healthy competition, so
by
increasing
the number of U.S. states to 68, we can hopefully double the cost
of ventilators," said the conman.
They call it NSIS, which perhaps stands for (Almost) No Swine
Inspection System. It demonstrates plutocratists' ideological
opposition to anything that regulates business for the public good.
The only way people should trust such a system is if all the software
is free and various community organizations maintain versions that
they check for respect for privacy.
One aspect of the system is an advance for privacy: the use of
analprints to recognize people is far superior to the more commonly
fingerprint and face recognition. You don't leave an analprint
behind every time you sit down, and your ass can't be identified from
its analprint as you walk on a sidewalk or a lobby.
They have done worse than that, and they are still doing it.
Cancelling the measures to prepare for any future epidemic was certain
to kill people some day. But their relentless efforts to force the
world into global heating disaster are
certain
to kill hundreds of millions (at least).
*Misinformation Hampered Ebola Response. The Same Thing Could Happen
With Coronavirus.* Indeed, right-wing nuts (including the president)
are
already
promoting this.
The job of the US Trade Representative is corrupt at the root. It
consists of promoting business-supremacy treaties, twisting arms to
impose them on countries, to help companies dominate people and turn
democracy into a sham. This has been the case for decades, probably
at least 40 years.
If the US Trade Representative told me that 2 + 2 = 4, I would get out
my computer to check.
*Coptalk
is defined by what at first seem to be paradoxes. On the one hand, it
is saturated with anodyne, technical language — the exhaustive
precision demanded by official reports and internal reviews. On the
other, it is fundamentally evasive. This might seem contradictory, but
in fact reveals a kind of systematic cunning …*
This cunning addresses the problem of how to kill and then frame
someone and make it sound like just another day's work.
Colorado has
published
objective criteria for deciding who is to get treatment for
Covid-19 when there is a shortage of supplies.
I think these criteria are wise, except for the preference given to
those who are pregnant over those who are not. That preference was
standard in the past, and it derived from the idea that making more
humans was an important contribution to society.
Now that population growth is a big danger, that assumption should be
discarded.
The bully's
men have added artificial obstacles to the recently passed
law offering paid sick leave, which will have the effect of excluding
many workers who
were supposed to have this benefit.
The conman cheated contractors he hired to work on his buildings.
Why wouldn't he cheat workers too?
The way to fix this is to take them out of the circuit, with Medicare
for All. The other proposed "solutions" are designed to leave a big
role for the business that gouge patients. Unless their proponents
have made a big mistake, you can be sure their proposals will gouge.
I am concerned that urging people to think about "safety" will have the
effect of encouraging people to cede their freedom to reduce physical risk.
So I suggest we explicitly distance ourselves from that way of thinking.
What keeping "safe" means to me
is protecting both your
health and your freedom.
We need the government to operate food banks: to buy food to
distribute in them, and send national guard to run them. And make enough
face masks for them.
Remember when the government of China concealed the danger of the (not
yet really understood) Covid-19? Now the US government is doing it,
removing the captain of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt
claiming that he did not try hard enough to conceal
the spread of the
virus on that ship.
Just the day before the strike, Amazon ordered him to stay home in
"quarantine" for 14 days.
Was the strike announced in advance? I expect it was. If so, I think
this quarantine was arranged by Amazon's as an excuse to keep its
leader away on the day of the strike.
US citizens: call
on Instacart to give workers supplies for
self-protection, and paid sick leave.
Even if the company treated its workers well, I would refuse to use
it for the protection of my privacy, because it can't be
used anonymously. And I expect it requires clients to
run nonfree JavaScript code, which
for
my freedom's sake I refuse to do.
Covid-19 will be licked in a year or two, and greenhouse gas emissions
will rise again (the plutocrats intend to make sure they do), so the
bigger (but slower) danger of climate disaster will still be waiting
for us.
Yielding to a wave of criticism, Republicans dropped the new
requirement only for those who receive Social Security pensions.
They must hope that this will divide the opposition, so they could get
away with shafting the other affected people: military veterans, and
those whose income is small enough to qualify for the existing income
assistance.
Why deny this aid to the poorest? Those politicians' overriding goal
is to transfer money to the rich, so they take advantage of any
opportunity,
I do not submit my tax returns on line because it requires nonfree
software. I use xournal to write my data on the PDF form, and print
that. As I have no printer, I will visit a copying store to do the
printing.
I do this because keeping safe means protecting our freedom as well as
our health.
Environmental damage allowed now by the EPA will make people more
vulnerable to Covid-19 now, and continue harming people and nature
for years after Covid-19 has ceased to preoccupy us.
This will be a milestone victory, if it endures, but we cannot take it
as final yet. I expect the big digital quasi-monopolies will arrange
to try to reverse this decision.
Too bad we could not bring Aaron Swartz back to life if the decision
stands.
But it does mention that the US government pushed to reduce the number
of hospital beds because it expected that the business-based US
medical system would seek excuses to keep all hospital beds full.
Yielding to a wave of criticism, Republicans dropped the new
requirement only for those who receive Social Security
pensions. They must hope that this will divide the opposition, so
they could get away with shafting the other affected people: military
veterans, and those whose income is small enough to qualify for the
existing income assistance.
Why deny this aid to the poorest? Those politicians' overriding goal
is to transfer money to the rich, so they take advantage of any
opportunity,
I do not submit my tax returns on line because it requires nonfree
software. I use xournal to write my data on the PDF form, and print
that. As I have no printer, I will visit a copying store to do the
printing.
I do this because keeping safe means protecting our freedom as well as
our health.
The US Strategic National Stockpile's web site said its purpose
included providing medical supplies to states and local governments.
Kushner mistakenly said this was not true, so the government
removed
those words from the web site.
The mainstream media don't dare to say "Orwellian", but that's what it is.
This is how the Soviet Union approached its own history.
(satire) *… the governors of several Southern states confirmed
Thursday they have exempted religious services from their
shelter-in-place orders, arguing that
Covid-19
is a good Christian virus that wouldn’t dare to spread during
church.*
A nonfree program is ipso facto untrustworthy: its developer controls
what it does. It is always the case that the developer may have
already used that control in ways that hurt the users.
In the case of Zoom, this is not a mere possibility. The developer
has done a
lousy
job.
This is in addition to denying freedom to the users by making the
program nonfree.
The fastest way to develop treatments or vaccines for Covid-19 would
be through
international
cooperation. However, mainstream politicians and mainstream media
ignore this and stick to the plutocratist line.
It is unfortunate that the author of that generally admirable article
fell into the confusion that the term
"intellectual
property" always tends to spread.
Amazon is demonstrating the cruelty to workers which is its usual
attitude. That is one of the
many reasons I urge everyone to refuse to
buy from (or through) Amazon. I never do that.
Owen Jones: The Labour Party's new leader, Keir Starmer,
continues
Corbyn's policies, and progressives should defend him against the
followers of Tony B'liar.
US citizens: phone the White House at 202-456-1414, and demand
allowing veterans, and people receiving Supplemental Security Income
(disabled, or working but poor), to get their $1200 CARES act benefit
checks without having to file a gratuitous tax return.
(satire)
*"We allocated hundreds of million dollars in state funding
… to begin construction on thousands of estates, country
houses … to ensure that each and every wealthy New Yorker
can ride out the pandemic in safety and comfort," said New York
governor Andrew Cuomo.*
New York City has enough vacant hotel rooms for all its homeless people,
but instead of housing them there,
it
sends thugs to roust them.
The shelters are now dangerous places to stay.
(satire)
*[The numskull] kicked off
his plan to tackle the medical supply shortage Tuesday by awarding
ExxonMobil an exclusive contract to drill for ventilators in the
arctic.*
This seems to be an instance of the right-wing extremists' general
attack on truth and rationality. They can cite any irrelevant fact as
a reason for any decision, and thumb their noses at anyone who points
out the irrationality.
I expect this will kill millions of people by accelerating climate disaster,
but that will take a couple of decades to become visible, and today's
high officials won't be in office by then. Their successors will try to evade
the blame by lying about the facts.
I think that countries should agree that each will maintain production
facilities that can be ramped up when needed, for a wide variety of
medical needs.
Florida's governor wants to stop the cruise ships Zaandam and
Rotterdam from docking, saying that since they are "foreigners"
they
should all get sick and die.
That's right-wing extremists for you — they never miss an opportunity
to demonize the scapegoats-du-jour and inflict cruelty on them.
Exiled Pakistani journalist Sajid Hussain, operating from asylum in Sweden,
seems
to have been disappeared weeks ago. Thugs of Pakistan's government are suspected.
The US government is lending Boeing 17 billion dollars at a special
low interest rate that amounts to a gift of hundreds of millions.
Does
this make sense?
Employers are hurrying to replace many of the workers now staying
home, with robots —
if
we let them.
I refuse absolutely to use robot sales registers in stores. Once I
went to a supermarket in the evening and found no way to pay except a
robot, so I put my purchases down and left. But I do more than that.
I generally shout to the people near the robot sales registers,
"If you use these machines you are putting other Americans out of work.
Join me and insist on going to the human sales agents. We don't have
to let them replace humans with robots!"
How about joining me an doing likewise? It build awareness of the
need for social solidarity.
What is needed, rather, is to protect workers and small businesses
from the effects of the temporary shutdown. Most big businesses have
plenty of reserves; they don't need help.
SS7 is the protocol for communication between phone companies.
It has been known for many years that the lack of security in SS7 allows
anyone (if willing to commit a crime) to spoof being another phone system
and get data about the activity and movements of any phone line.
At least one teenager has died, apparently from
Covid-19, because an "urgent care" clinic refused to treat him.
He was one of the 8% of Americans who have no medical insurance.
KUOW public radio will no longer transmit the bullshitter's daily
propaganda speeches about Covid-19. The station says
they are likely
to spread misinformation.
Bravo!
Whenever the bullshitter starts speaking in any program you are
watching or listening to, I suggest you switch it off and do something
else.
If his utterances contain, by chance, any valid information, you will
find it elsewhere — you can't trust it if it comes from him.
Whatever he says about what he will do, he will probably change
anyway.
Arguing with his words is ineffective for convincing his supporters.
So don't waste your attention on them — switch off.
Telling a broadcaster that you switch off when he comes on might do
some good.
People who enter Taiwan are subject to a strict quarantine, tracked by
their Stalin's Dream devices (portable phones). If the device ever
does not respond (such as, out of power),
enforcers go after you
immediately.
The strict quarantine may be necessary, but the specific method of
enforcement is intolerable. I wonder what they would say to a person
who has no Stalin's Dream device and refuses to have one.
The tracking of my movements would not matter if I were forbidden to
leave the apartment. It would only show I did not leave. But it is
also a listening device, and I would protect myself from that one way
or another.
What worries me most is how I would get food. I buy things only
anonymously. I do not give my name or address and I pay only cash.
Under those quarantine rules, I might not be able to buy any food.
14 days without eating would not kill me, but it would be extremely
unpleasant — enough to convince me to do as Paul Huang did, and stay
away.
For me personally, that is all theoretical. Travel for speaking is
not feasible if entering a country requires a 14-day quarantine,
regardless of the details of how it is enforced. But the issues of
freedom posed by the enforcement affect everyone, not just me.
Condoms are used to prevent disease; they should be considered
essential products and their factories should not be closed. Surely
they can take steps to protect employees from catching anything at
work.
Today I received a postcard saying, on the front, "President Trump's
Coronavirus Guidelines for America." I laughed. Surely nobody but
his fanatical supporters
would
trust advice because it carries his name.
It is also a mistake to reject advice because it carries his name.
Someone checked, and the advice on that postcard is basically the same
advice you'd get from WHO. It has no resemblance to the bullshitter's
own views.
The thing to do with advice published under the bullshitter's name is
not even look at it. That way you won't be in danger of being
influenced by it in any manner. There are plenty of better places to get
advice from.
A friend suggested that putting his name on advice is electioneering.
To ensure it remains available for emergencies, it had better regulate
the use of that water to avoid permitting extra growth that would require
drawing water from it all the time.
Kaiser Permanente denied a patient hydroxychloroquine which she needed
to treat lupus, saying it was reserving the drug for future sufferers
of Covid-19. There is no scientific evidence that hydroxychloroquine
is good for treating Covid-19,
only
speculations boosted by the bullshitter.
Adding insult to injury, the company thanked her for the "sacrifice"
it was forcing on her.
I have no information on whether it is true that she can safely go
without it for a month. I hope it is true.
As one protester said, officials that trample human rights and
democracy is more dangerous than Covid-19. And that applies even more
strongly to greedy nihilists such as the bully.
If Israel wants to use phone location data to check who might have
passed Covid-19 to whom, it should set up a firm institutional
structure to ensure that data obtained for this purpose
cannot be used for any other purposes.
Members of the House of Representatives have asked the State
Department for detailed information on how Israel uses weapons
procured from the US, including whether they are used for actions,
such as demolishing Palestinians' homes,
which
violate the conditions US law places on those weapons sales.
India tells people to stay indoors and starve, and one state says
people will be shot dead if they don't. Meanwhile, foreign visitors
are being evicted because hotels are closing or they use up their
funds. Will
they be shot dead for this?
Australia is offering help to the Australians who face eviction or starvation.
Maybe some other countries do, too.
Does the government offer some other way out to starving Indians, one
not described in the article?
There may be some cases in which this is justified and necessary, but
many companies will jump for the opportunity to dump toxins. They
will kill people; they can even cause Covid-19 to kill more people.
And there is no limit on it, and no requirement to look for the least
dangerous alternative.
The "national security" apparatus sucks down lots of money, year after
year, with
little opposition.
It does not make Americans secure; on the contrary, it puts our
freedom in danger and persecutes the heroes that try to tell us about it.
"COVID-19 emergency spending bill: $250 billion for direct payments to
Americans, $250 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $4 trillion
to bail out corporations. Seems like the balance is off a bit."
Why is it so hard for countries to get their debts forgiven? Because
many big lenders lure governments into borrowing too much. Often
these governments are run by dictators who intend to pocket most of
that money and keep it in tax havens where it cannot be tracked to
them. The dictator figures that when
perse someday face overthrow and
flee, perse
will still have that money and will have a cushy life.
It is totally unfair to make the people of that country keep paying
that debt. However, the lenders and their submissive world powers
insist that no country ever be allowed an exemption. If it were
possible to be exempt, they say, every country would demand an
exemption. The profitable business of lending to dictators, and
flogging the people pay those debts decades after the dictator is
dead, would come to an end.
Would you consider that a bad outcome?
Occasionally democratic governments also borrow too much. In an
otherwise perfect world, maybe it would be unfair if they did not have
to pay those debts.
But our world is far too aligned overall with the rich over the poor,
which is a giant unfairness. Perhaps the unfairness of borrowing from
the rich and under some circumstances not repaying the debt would be a
morally legitimate compensation to reduce the giant unfairness.
I think it would be good if funds that lend to countries had to
consider the question, "Is this money going to national development
that will make the country more able to pay back the loan without
oppressing everyone? Or is it going to something corrupt or
unsustainable and we will not get paid back?"
This might make it harder for dictators to gain and keep power.
The UK is going to give self-employed people (except high-income ones)
80%
of their normal income.
However, waiting until June could put some of them on the street.
Economic imperialism is no better when it comes from China than when
it comes from the US. It may indeed be worse, because the US has a
public opinion one can try to influence, while the Chinese state has
prohibited and obstructed the existence of public opinion.
Doctors
disagree about carrying "social distancing" to extremes.
It is always the case, for any kind of risk, that there are bigger
risks and smaller ones. A rational plan to reduce the total risk to
some target level involves trying hard to avoid the bigger risks,
while accepting occasional smaller risks. The lower the target level,
the more you'll reject risks of any given size, but it will always be
rational for you to accept small risks occasionally.
To put it another way, if you choose to ride in a car or bus, you're
accepting some small amount of collision risk. It is not rational to
take, for Covid-19 risk, the attitude that "any risk whatsoever is too
much", while ignoring small risks of collision.
The murderer's ministers gave Gilead, a particularly greedy Pharma
company, a
7-year
monopoly over selling remdesivir, the one known medicine that has
a good chance of saving people who have a severe case of Covid-19.
Gilead's business model is to procure such monopolies in order to
extort high prices from wealthy Americans who would otherwise die.
The non-wealthy Americans can't afford those prices do then die.
Would someone like to prepare to start selling banners and bumper
stickers that say,
Trump and Gilead "Sciences"
murdered my relative
If remdesivir does succeed as a treatment for Covid-19, there will
be plenty of customers.
*The middle class are about to discover the
cruelty
of Britain's benefits system.* It will drive them into penury, as
it has done to so many disabled Britons.
I refuse to buy anything from or through
Amazon. I always pay cash and only cash.
I tried to get take-out food for the first time since the shutdown. I
called two restaurants near my home. One seemed to be not operating
at all. The other was operating but would take only credit card
payments. Since I refuse to buy any goods with a card, I changed my
mind and did not order.
*Covid-19 economic rescue plans
must
be green, say environmentalists*
Covid-19 may kill one or two percent of the world's population. If
you think that is the ultimate horror, you may underestimate what
climate mayhem
could do. It may kill half of humanity or even more.
It could destroy civilization. Some think it might make humanity
extinct.
We must not treat climate mayhem
as the smaller danger just because
the worst part of it is a few decades away.
* Rightwing governments have denied the problem [of Covid-19] and been
slow
to act. With coronavirus and the climate, this costs lives.*
China is an interesting special case. It is repressive, like a
right-wing government, but unlike them the real rulers are not
businesses that hide their power over the state; rather, they are the
officials of the Communist Party and don't hide the fact that they
control the state. China's response started with the typical denial
of repressive governments, then flipped to an all-out effort which
turned out to be quite effective, though it has surely been used for a
permanent increase in control.
US citizens: call
on Gilead Sciences to commit now to license its
COVID-19 drug, if approved, to all qualified producers, in exchange
for a modest royalty.
Chinese expat Yang Hengjun, now an Australian citizen, is expected to
be charged with espionage in China. He has been jailed more than a
year, finishing with three months of solitary confinement,
and not
allowed to see a lawyer.
*Leading scientists also said the Covid-19 outbreak was a "clear warning
shot", given that far more deadly diseases existed in wildlife, and
that today’s civilisation was "playing with fire". They said it was
almost always human behaviour
that
caused diseases to spill over into humans.*
US citizens:
call
on world leaders not to use Covid-19 as an opportunity to deny
basic rights.
You will almost surely live to see Covid-19 be eliminated, but if you
surrender any freedoms now without a fight, except in a carefully
limited way, you miss those freedoms for the rest of your life.
*"Temporary" powers in an emergency have a habit of becoming
permanent. In these circumstances, paranoia appears more a necessity
than a delusion.*
*Yet it remains true that technology is not destiny. Politics counts
for more than algorithms. Just as tyrannical governments, from Hungary
to China, are using the pandemic to impose more controls, so
democratic societies
will
need to show a liberal response to the virus.*
It is legitimate, and admirable, to conduct stings by making
recordings of meetings in which groups propose corrupt practices.
However, right-wingers don't always limit themselves to that.
Prince's infiltrators rummaged around in the office files
and secretly recorded the others in the office. They did not find
real corruption.
They also don't limit themselves to the truth. If they don't find
corruption, they may fabricate some. ACORN used to help poor people
and members of disprivileged groups register to vote. Right-wingers
ran a sting against ACORN. They found no real corruption, but
released
misleadingly edited videos that falsely suggested corruption.
Boston and other cities are cutting train and bus service and
presenting this as some sort of safety measure. This is announced as
a measure to reduce contagion, and we are asked to take for granted
that it does so. Perhaps it is a sacrifice that is supposed to cure
by magic.
If the aim is to reduce the amount of travel, making travel more
risky is a perverse way to do it.
If the number of riders falls very far, it could happen that
some bus or train trips are useless and wasteful. If there are
typically one or two passengers in each bus on a certain line at a
certain hour, perhaps it is a harmless efficiency to cut the number of
bus trips then and there in half, and have three or four riders in
each bus. But this should not be carried too far.
I have not been on a subway train since a week ago, and I don't know
how many riders there are nowadays on Boston trains at various times.
I don't know whether Boston currently has the problem reported from
London. But the MBTA should know, roughly. I do think the MBTA
should explain just how this measure is supposed to help protect
passengers, and the facts about how it is working out.
BlackRock hopes to reduce the demand to tax it properly on the
billions of dollars it makes, so it is
offering
a mere $50 million to various community needs.
It's not just increases in state repression and surveillance that
threaten us. Pressure to surrender to nonfree software and its
constant companion, surveillance, are a threat too — whether it
is for work, for school, for purchasing, for leisure, for chatting,
for political organizing, for whatever, it is unjust.
In resisting this, it helps to draw a clear line and refuse ever to
cross it. If you say, "I don't like the idea of using
Zoom/WhatsApp/Amazon/Google for this," people will argue back, "If you
can do it for that, why refuse to do it for this?" By contrast, if
you say, "I'd like to join you in this, but I do not use
Zoom/WhatsApp/Amazon/Google — it is an injustice," people will
find it hard to argue with your stance.
That doesn't mean you will always convince people to adopt your views.
They may say, "We're going to use Zoom/WhatsApp/Amazon/Google; if you
want to participate, that is the only way." How you respond to that
will show what you're made of.
I think the article means "minors" when it says "children". The point
is just as valid for adolescents as it is for children, but I don't
want to appear to endorse that distortion of terminology.
On the matter of substance, I have to question the limitation of this
campaign to those who are jailed with relatives. Are the lives of
people who are jailed without relatives are less important?
This should go beyond shallow protection by including deep protection.
By "shallow protection" I mean structuring banks so they are less
likely to fail as a result of climate mayhem. By "deep protection" I
mean stopping them from funding any fossil fuel development, which
includes step-by-step programmed divestment from fossil fuels
companies and activities.
This is an example of dooH niboR.
In the US, classes correlate with
races, so every dooH niboR
policy is going to effect racial bias also.
That applies here, but the dooH niboR
element is why this is unfair.
More basically, resisting the damage done by
global heating cannot
hold out for more than a few decades if we keep building up global
heating.
I think it also has a provision to cut employer contributions to
Social Security, which was
reported
in this article a few days ago. This would enable Republicans to
say, perhaps next year, "Social Security is running out of money; we
have to cut benefits."
I might be able to imagine making a sacrifice to sustain an economic
system that supported all Americans well — as happens for
example in Scandinavia. The US economy is designed to keep the rich
working most Americans into the ground. This is an economy that
makes most people sacrifice to
serve the rich. Why make any sacrifice for that?
Patients were going to die in Brescia, Italy, because of a shortage of
oxygen valves for mechanical ventilators. The manufacturer,
Intersurgical, demanded $11,000 for each one, and couldn't deliver
them right away. It refused to provide the plans either. So a local
device manufacturer
figured
out plans and a local fablab made them with a 3D printer.
Fracassi's design, made by the fablab, fixed the problem for one city,
but the shortage of oxygen valves surely affects other parts of Italy,
and will soon spread around the world. Out of fear, perhaps tinged
with undue respect for the unjust "rights" of the manufacturer,
Fracassi insists he will not take the next step which would enable the
world to fix this problem globally: releasing the plans he has
developed.
The real hero will be whoever releases working plans to make these
oxygen valves — perhaps anonymously — so that there can be
ventilators for all who need them.
By testing every person in the hotspot town of Vò, and quarantining
everyone found to be infected with Covid-19 including those who were
asymptomatic, Italy
put
an end to the spread of the disease there.
Lots of countries could apply this method, given only enough testing
capacity.
The power to test people and quarantine them seems legitimate to me,
in the emergency situation that exists. I agree with Corbyn that the
law must be reevaluated frequently.
However, banning protests "for our safety" is extremely dangerous.
The climate crisis threatens to leave countries (even rich ones) too
desperate to be able to continue these protection efforts. A world
recession might also cut into the world demand for the totally
ineffective "medicine" of rhino horn.
Although the Democratic Party machine has lost this battle,
I expect it has succeeded in protecting several other right-wing
Democrats that could have been replaced. Americans will replace
them sooner or later, but with the climate emergency, we haven't
got all the time in the world.
Poor people in India live several people to a room, have to carry
water home so they can't often wash their hands. A day when they stay
home from work, they don't get much food. They
can't
do much to stop transmission of Covid-19.
Moreover, they are so much in danger of diseases that are more likely
to be fatal that they can't give Covid-19 priority. The worst effect
of Covid-19 might be the shortage of doctors to treat those other
diseases.
The underlying cause of this situation in India is the combination of
concentration of wealth and overpopulation.
Many nasty practices that shouldn't have existed ever are being
relaxed now because, in the context of an epidemic,
their
nasty effects are revealed as intolerable — and because the
justifications for them were weak or nonexistent in the first place.
Alas, new rigid excesses are being imposed, including "Absolutely
never meet a friend in person," and new unjust practices, such as "Do
your studying, meeting and paying through nonfree software and digital
dis-services that will track you."
The former will presumably disappear easily when the epidemic is over,
but getting rid of the latter will require a fight. Therefore I
continue refusing to use web sites that demand nonfree JS code, and
not having a portable phone to track me with.
The article says that the state wants to punish anyone who goes
outside even if perse
has had no sign of or contact with Covid-19.
I've heard a report that Italy is tracking people through their phones
so as to make the repression total.
There is no need to repress people that strictly. Occasional meetings
of a few people who probably don't have Covid-19 will have little
effect to spread it.
A New York City uniformed thug
was caught on video planting marijuana
in someone's car, to frame him. When the state failed to imprison him
for the act of bearing false witness, he
did
it again and was caught again.
Until we put those thugs
away for years, they will continue exploiting
their immunity to put honest citizens in prison arbitrarily.
US citizens: call
on Congress to refuse the demand to suspend habeas corpus. Doing
so would allow thugs to arrest people and jail them for
any length of time.
US citizens: call
on Senator McConnell to stop interfering with who
will have the job of investigating the alleged corruption of
Elaine Chao, Saboteur
of Transportation, who is (as it happens) his wife.
Paying to access an article these days generally requires running
nonfree Javascript code, and tracks who reads the article. I consider
each of those an injustice, and I won't stand for either of them.
Therefore, if an article is thoroughly paywalled, I do without seeing
it.
US citizens: 51 Republican senators voted against offering paid sick
leave to additional American workers. If any of them is your senator,
phone
per office now and rebuke per.
US citizens: call
on Louisiana Governor Edwards to implement a rent
freeze and a moratorium on layoffs, evictions and water shut-offs in
the state of Louisiana.
I urge you to pass the proposed moratorium on use of face recognition
in Massachusetts government activities.
This is only a first step. Systematic use of face recognition technology,
and the systems that can do so, should be very strictly regulated.
The operations of Clearview AI should be illegal regardless of what
sort of entity carries them out, whether it be public or private.
US citizens: call your congresscritter at (202) 224-3121 and call for
strong action to protect Americans from the effects of the epidemic.
Please support these proposed actions:
Guaranteed paid sick leave for ALL employees
Extended Medicaid
Immediate one-time payments of $1,500 to every adult and $500 to every
child
Suspension of the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule that
enables federal officials to deny green cards to immigrants who use
social safety net programs
It would be interesting for Americans to organize to demand that their
medical insurance companies say how much money they gave to that
lobbying group in 2019.
The US
will
face a big recession unless the US government starts giving money
to non-rich people to make up for the decrease.
The best way to do this is with spending that will have other social
benefits — spending on jobs that make an improvement. For
instance, the Green New Deal.
One corrective is needed in regard to increases in productivity: they
result in increased production each year, but who gets the benefit of
that increase is a political question.
The
rich try to keep it for themselves, and workers get it only if
they fight for it and win.
Pelosi
tricked
the House of Representatives to vote for a reduction in the new
paid sick leave provision by calling the change "technical", implying
there was no significant alteration.
Decades ago, the developed world was creating many additional
well-paid jobs, so there was more mobility upward than downward.
Nowadays, neither one is true.
Thus, to make a large number of people better off in the developed
world requires massively deconcentrating wealth (for instance, more
support for the poor, a Green New Deal, and Medicare for All) or
massively eliminating waste (such as, a Green New Deal, and Medicare
for All).
The Boston subways and buses are running on a reduced schedule,
supposedly to encourage "social distancing". I can't follow the logic
of that. Running fewer buses or trains will mean more people ride
together in each one. The effect of that will be exactly the opposite
of what they claim is the goal.
If you can figure out what sense they think this move has, please tell
me by email.
Pelosi's version of emergency aid for Americans dealing with Covid-19
gives
paid sick leave to a fraction of American workers.
It omits gig workers; more surprisingly, it omits employees of
companies with over 500 employees. I would not describe a company
with 600 or 1000 employees as "big". Even some Republican senators
say it is insufficient.
It appears they are omitted because she negotiated with Treasury
Secretary Mnuchin, who is a toady for big (and not-quite-big)
business. I think it would have made more sense to include them
and dare Republicans to reject it.
To assure everyone in the US can wash per hands frequently, the US must
end imposed water-shutoffs and restore water to everyone
whose service has
been shut off.
That it is even necessary to discuss this demonstrates how cruelty to
the poor is ingrained in the US economic system. More fundamentally,
with a just minimum wage and a just welfare system, nobody would get
that poor.
(satire)
*Pfizer announced Monday they
were pouring all their resources into developing a new hyper-depressant
pill to help Americans ease the transition into self-quarantining.*
The root of this problem is that the US has neglected central planning
to make sure there would be enough such machines if someday there were
an epidemic.
In addition, the profit-seeking US medical system tries to cut costs
even as it jerks up prices, so it tries to lower the system's capacity
to the point where it can just barely get by in normal times. It
plans to treat only those who can pay,
and
has no slack for emergencies.
Covid-19 demonstrates even more strongly than usual the need to
replace this system with a national single-payer medical system.
Thugs
seem to have gone further and encouraged the pogrom, which was launched
by a BJP official.
I expect Hindu thugs
in India have the same range of attitudes towards
Muslims that German thugs in 1934 had towards Jews. This means,
shifted further towards hatred and violence compared with the range of
attitudes that white thugs in the US have towards blacks.
Requiring nonfree software, often with DRM.
Warning: this may be Javascript code; to check for it,
use LibreJS.
Identifying people.
Imposing an antisocial contract ("terms of service").
Experience suggests that all of those streams are oppressive,
but I'd like to know if any of them is not.
If you try one and find it to be oppressive, I hope you will not go
ahead with installing that nonfree software, entering your personal
data, or agreeing to the terms. Get a copy of some music which does
not oppress those who listen to it, and listen to that instead.
It would be useful to inform the organization's personnel of your
objections to its computing practices. Keep in mind that they have
probably never thought about these issues, never even heard the idea
that there might be something wrong with the usual practices that they
imitated or were taught by some "expert". So be prepared to explain,
and not in an angry tone.
For streaming, the program they should be using is called IceCast.
The article says no one can be sure, and I suppose in general that is
true. My point is that it depends on the circumstances in each
country. Some countries are in a position to act quickly and
thoroughly; they have come close to extinguishing the epidemic. Other
countries can't do this.
Covid-19
could
wipe out the theater. And all restaurants, all art galleries, and
all artists. Also all bands, all symphonies, all concert halls and
all music cafes.
Unfortunately, it won't make much difference in most countries, as
the virus is already spreading in them. Most of Africa won't have
the medical capacity to keep the epidemic's spread in check.
I don't think this qualifies as a disaster, though some will surely
miss it. I mention it as an example of the wide variety of things
that will be lost.
The idiot is ensuring that it will be a deep one. I wonder if he will
use Covid-19 as an excuse to cancel the 2020 election and convert
himself into a tyrant.
US citizens: call your senators at (202) 930-8115 and urge them to
let
PAT RIOT Act surveillance systems expire. Say that if the
government wants to get information about people from data bases, it
should get warrant to investigate specific people and then get data
only about them.
Although Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, was convicted of the bombing
of Pan Am 103 over Scotland in 1988, others claimed that Iran was
responsible. Khomeini was still ruler of Iran, and sought to attack
the US.
The economic effects of the Covid-19 epidemic
will
put millions in California at risk of homelessness, including many
old people who could not find new work. Those who end up living on
the street are likely to catch the virus, and could die of it.
If this is accurate, it is murderous lunacy. If and when a vaccine is
developed, it must be available to the whole world.
The report that the German government is countering with "financial
incentives" so that the vaccine will "stay in" Germany, if true,
indicates similar disrespect for that principle. Also, if offering
money is the most Germany can do to prevent that scheme, it shows
plutocratic legal corruption. It should not be necessary for Germany
to offer money to resist that scheme. Germany should have the power
to order such things.
If you want to contribute, don't go through Go Fund Me — it requires
running nonfree software. Instead, insist on getting an address to
mail a personal check or a money order.
However, paying that fine means that the government wins. I'd rather
contribute to a fund to buy groceries for Manning. Is there one?
Republican leaders today do not generally worry about embarrassing
disclosures. They figure that their cloud of disinformation will
prevent all adverse consequences. Whatever they are hiding, it must
be much worse than usual.
Perhaps they are trying to maximize billionaires' opportunity
to practice disaster capitalism,
a.k.a.
the "shock doctrine".
Perhaps they are trying to create, rather than avoid,
an
election crisis.
Republicans have stolen several presidential elections recently,
and some elections for lower offices as well.
I would not put it past them to plan to make the epidemic worse.
Their previous budget cuts
have
undermined programs that would have helped respond to it.
Recall how Hurricane Katrina showed that
Dubya had undermined FEMA, with
disastrous results.
In a month they will start dying, and would be able to recognize the
statements their leaders have made so far as lies. But by then they
will have been told to believe that those statements were never made
at all.
That would work fine for the first ones to need sick days.
But those who need sick days once once the pool is used up
will really be in a hole — the Hole Foods hole.
*Maryland man fatally shot by [thugs]
while
asleep in his bedroom.*
They shot from outside the house without informing anyone inside
they had come. Then they claimed he had "confronted" them —
presumably awake. Lies like this are standard practice for thugs
who have killed someone.
Intimidating women into leaving discussions is an injustice and a
major social problem. However, it does not constitute violence.
Calling it "violence" is an exaggeration, which invites solutions
that carry a danger of repression.
I suggest looking for fixes that change the servers' algorithms so
that they are difficult for trolls and bullies to exploit. This might
be easier if the servers were not making money from targeting
advertising.
This mostly admirable article causes a gratuitous spot of confusion by
using the overbroad term "intellectual property".
Use of that term spreads confusion because it generalizes about
several unrelated laws, which have so little in common that lumping
them together impedes clear thinking about any one of them. The term
leads people to adopt shallow, simplistic positions such as
"intellectual property is good" or "intellectual property is bad."
In any real issue, it is always better to name the specific law that
relates to the issue — in this case, patent law. That way it is
easier to study the dimensions of that issue, based on the actual
requirements and effects of whichever law is involved.
The article does not mention coming
global heating disaster, but
younger voters realize it is likely to make them die young, while
older voters expect (perhaps rationally) not to face great personal
suffering from it during their expected lifetimes.
The two are quite similar. In the latter, guards forcibly keep
someone away from everyone else. In the former, they compel someone
to avoid everyone else.
There is another version, shunning, in which someone is compelled to
avoid everyone else because they reject per. I think that traumatizes
people too.
The article says that people can withstand quarantine better if they
understand clearly the reasons for the quarantine system and when it
will end.
In particular, figures about number of cases are not even significant
to an order of magnitude at this point — the measurement system
is basically broken.
Phone your congresscritter and senators to push for a bill that would
help non-rich Americans cope with Covid-19. The bill would do these
things:
Federally mandated paid sick leave for caretakers and ill people, to
stop the spread of this virus by allowing sick people to stay home and
avoid infecting others;
Free coronavirus testing that will allow people to know if they've
been infected and health agencies to track the spread of the
virus;
Emergency food aid for low-income pregnant women, young children,
senior citizens, and food banks that may become overwhelmed as more
people are temporarily out of work and
Unemployment funding for workers laid off or furloughed because of the
coronavirus pandemic.
Taiwan is not applying that surveillance to repress masses of people.
It remains a democracy. However, we have no way of knowing that it is
not using that system against whistleblowers and a few dissidents.
I suggests phoning your congresscritter's office and asking, "Did Rep
XYZ vote to extend the government's power to track massive numbers of
phone calls?" If the answer is yes, you could express your opinion of
that vote.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
British Columbia reduced drunk driving deaths by 50% by
focusing
on prevention rather than punishment. The province can take away
the drivers' licenses and even their cars, rather than putting them in
jail.
Under the new system, the fines and the loss of the right to drive can
render a person destitute. On the other hand, alcohol addiction can
also do that.
Chelsea Manning has been
released
from jail. The court ruled that there was "no need" for her
testimony.
Surely that did not change last week. The "need" must have ceased
weeks or months ago. I hope she will tell us soon why she attempted
suicide this week rather than waiting a day to see if the court would
release her.
She is still saddled with a huge debt that would be difficult for her
to ever pay. If she could get enough money to pay it, the idea of
working to pay a fine must be bitter. If it were me, I'd be inclined
to shun wages and live by barter, just to avoid ever paying any of the
fine.
The article assumes that on-line courses are fine if only you have
high-speed internet available. It pays no attention to the injustice
of requiring students to run nonfree programs — which Harvard
does. If I were one of the students, the only way I could see the
course lectures would be if I could look on with another student.
I admire an activist friend who tried to take a Harvard edX course,
but refuses to use imposed nonfree social networking software, so he
automatically failed the course.
This theory has no evidence behind it, but people who want to believe
it will believe it anyway.
China is not culpable for the start of the epidemic, but the practice
of catching and selling live wild animals as food is risky, and China
is wise to be putting an end to that practice.
Robert Reich: the conman's plan to "help the economy" with tax
subsidies for banks and wall street
will
not help Americans cope with the effects of Covid-19. The
government should instead spend that money, on sick leave, medical
care, and cash subsidies for everyone.
People who have other medical problems may die because the medical
personnel have no time to treat everyone.
This demonstrates the error of prioritizing efficient operation in
normal time by tuning medical capacity to the normal level of demand.
A system such as the British NHS, which is operating over capacity
even in normal times due to Tory budget cuts, is starting from
a position of being overwhelmed.
The current dispute between Iran and the US is entirely the fault of
the US (specifically, the saboteur in chief). The US ought to
apologize, and help Iran, in exchange for its agreement once again to
the non-nuclear deal which was succeeding in stopping Iran from
refining nuclear fuel.
There is no fundamental reason for the US and Iran to be enemies. The
Iranian regime represses Iranians on religious and political grounds,
but nowhere near as much as Salafi Arabia does.
The joy of the Democratic Party establishment, and its tools in the
mainstream media, at Biden's recent victories show what we are up
against as we try to correct America's giant problems.
But we cannot
give up.
I have no reason to think that the election was dishonest, overall.
More Democratic voters have voted for Biden. I can't argue with those
votes. But that doesn't compel me to vote for Biden. I do not vote
for right-wing plutocratists merely because others have done so.
The book Losing Reality describes social systems that deny some
aspects of reality, replacing it with obligatory falsehoods.
The
bullshitter's following is one example.
Indeed, why should it ask that question about any necessary medical
care? Especially since Medicare for All will cost less than America's
current lousy medical system.
AT&T lobbied for the conman's tax cuts for the rich by suggesting it
would hire more workers and increase wages. Instead it continues
to cut jobs, and
has cut back on investment in its operations.
US prisons do not have adequate plans
to
protect prisoners from Covid-19.
Once one prisoner in the prison gets sick, it is likely to spread to
many other prisoners (and guards).
This is a good thing to do, provided the attempt isn't futile —
provided that the newly planted seagrass won't immediately be killed.
But even if this gets off to a good start, people must not count their
meadows as carbon offsets before they are fully grown.
It appears that the right-wing extremist Liga party, in power in
Lombardia, leaked the Lombardia quarantine plan so as to provoke chaos
which it could then blame it on the government.
His support comes from cynical businesses that don't mind paying bribes
if they won't be prosecuted, and from plutocrats think funneling money
to the rich is the purpose of the state.
I am shocked by the use of the word "murder". Does the prosecution
accuse that the officers knowingly attacked a civilian air vessel? I
have never seen that accusation seriously made, and even assuming they
would kill noncombattants without hesitation, I can't imagine what
could have motivated them to do so in that instance.
I have seen claims that there was evidence that the plane was shot
down by machine-gun fire (by another plane). It could be fake. In
any case, I hope it is submitted to this trial so that the question of
its validity can be settled.
I've seen this happen, though I had no name to call it. When I was a
child, around age 10 to 12, I heard my father do this to his wife in
the evenings when I was in bed. I felt so sorry for her, and helpless
because I had no way to protect her.
At least, that's what the government reports. I am willing to trust
the Taiwanese government to be honest about this, but there could be more
cases that it does not know about.
When a rich person grabs a bigger share of the world's wealth,
perse
may break some laws, expecting to be immune from punishment. The
conman undertakes to support rich people generally whether they are
breaking laws or not. This report shows us one of the methods used to
do so.
In principle, using this to find burglars is legitimate, if it is done in
a legitimate way. (Not secretly, for instance.) But we can easily imagine
using it to identify and persecute protesters — which is exactly what
right-wing US politicians are making every effort to do.
A US appeals court ruled that a protester who suggested other
nonviolent protesters protest in an illegal way can therefore be sued
for the subsequent violent action of one of those other protesters.
If the Supreme Court allows this to stand,
Americans could be
bankrupted for protesting.
Chinese dissident Xu Zhiyong is being held incommunicado in solitary,
and is likely eventually to be imprisoned for many years, simply for
saying that
Xi was "clueless" about Covid-19.
The bully
hasn't yet grabbed enough power to do this to Americans, but he
and his supporters are working on it.
*The profiteers warn ominously that such reforms as Medicare for All or
a public option for health insurance would take away people’s "choice"
and our "control" over health care.*
This is understandable, but it also makes it especially crucial that the
university allow students to do this with free software.
Until now, it seems that students had the option of attending classes.
With that option cancelled, they may face the choice of running nonfree
software, or flunking out.
If I were a student, I'd drop out rather than yield to that. But
schools should not impose on students the need for such sacrifice.
Aside from that, virtual "school" over the internet is known to be
inferior in quality to real school. If this continues, students won't
continue paying for quality which they don't get.
*Dubai ruler organised kidnapping of his children,
UK
court rules.*
This was considered in a case which he filed against his runaway wife,
except that it emerged she was no longer his wife since he has
divorced her and not informed her.
I wonder how Latifa was able to send her account to the court or the
public.
British couples who took a ferry from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, and were
observed to have sat near someone with Covid-19, have been
quarantined with absurd and gratuitous strictness. One couple was
forced to stay in two separate rooms and are forbidden to see each
other. Another was allowed to stay together,
but both have been
ordered to wear masks and not touch each other.
Why not leave it to the couple to decide if they want to keep apart to
avoid transmitting the disease between the two?
Texas Republicans are trying to stop blacks from voting
by closing polling sites in areas which have many blacks.
Blacks stayed up for hours after the polls closed,
waiting in line
to vote.
To try to stop some of your fellow citizens from voting displays total
contempt for your country. That's typical among Republicans today.
Tropical forests are showing signs of converting into releasing
greenhouse gases
instead
of absorbing them.
Scientists predicted this change, but did not expect it so soon.
Senator Warren has dropped out of the Democratic presidential
nomination race, without stating a preference between Sanders and
Biden. If she is to support the policies she has proposed,
she needs
to endorse Sanders.
The EPA is broadening its policy of ignoring scientific evidence
from
studies that respect patients' privacy.
(In effect, the Environmental Poisoning Agency now rejects all
legitimate scientific studies that involve human subjects.)
An Israeli soldier shot a Palestinian teenager in the head with a
rubber-coated steel bullet at a short distance. When people from his village tried to
bring him to a hospital,
the
soldiers blocked the car for 25 minutes.
Both of those actions are common practice for Israeli occupation
soldiers. I don't believe that either one happens accidentally.
I hope that this suicide attempt does not interfere with her chance of
being freed by the hearing that was going to happen on Friday. And
that it isn't used an excuse to keep her in brainwashing conditions.
Over 1/3 of the Americans with student debt have stopped making
payments —
some
legally, some not.
You can see this as an aspect of the system which makes it less rigid
and harsh. You can see it as a debt strike. I think it is a mixture
of both. It is definitely an improvement — but millions of Americans
with student debt and low income are still stuck with payments.
Independent voters can vote in a primary, but the mail-in ballots
they were sent don't include the presidential race. To do so, they
have to jump through complex hoops that the state does not tell them
about. In effect, it is a dark pattern to obstruct voting for certain
voters.
This is likely to mean that the superdelegates will choose the
nominee, and I suppose they will choose Biden. That would mean no
hope of electing a president that would try to correct America's
devastating problems, including plutocratic rule, people dying for
inability to pay for medical care, and
global heating disaster.
The only way we can ever get the Democratic Party to stop foisting
right-wing candidates such as Biden on us is to show it can't presume
we will vote for them.
It is heartening to see that just throwing money at a US election
can't win it. Apparently one needs to use the money with more subtlety
and expertise.
Bloomberg has the same age as Sanders. Remember how that age was
taken up by the pundits and presented as a possible drawback of
Sanders? Strange that they don't say the same thing about Bloomberg
now. I suspect that this "concern" about Sanders was artificially
generated.
Europe's planet roaster lobbyists have a revolving door with the
European Union bureaucracy, and they are using it
to make sure
they can squeeze out every last eurocent,
before civilization collapses
and they can't make (or spend) any more.
It is good to give more support to parents — that can reduce their
stress, which is likely to hurt their children. Not having having a
superfluity of resources to care for children leads to parents that
are under great stress and can't do it well. And that
often leads to
lasting problems for the children.
But if parents use that support to have additional children, that will
put them back into difficult lives and cancel out the benefit.
The article proposes that Senator Warren may be planning to help the
plutocrats do that. If she does that, I will never vote for her for
senator again. But it is only a suspicion, and I hope it is not true.
*Physicians for Human Rights: the Persistent Psychological Effects
of
Family Separation.*
The US border thugs
never stopped taking advantage of excuses to separate
children (and teenagers) from their parents when they ask for asylum.
"[The report] found pervasive symptoms
and behaviors consistent with trauma; most met diagnostic criteria for
at least one mental health condition, such as post-traumatic stress
disorder, major depressive disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder
consistent with, and likely linked to, the trauma of family separation."
Outdoor air pollution cuts life expectancy by 2.9 years, on the
world-wide average. The pollution that humans cause, and thus could
potentially avoid,
is
responsible for 1.7 years of that.
While these universities are only a tiny part of US society, and nowhere
near as dangerous as government agencies that can arrest people and even
deport them, success in the domain of universities would be a first
victory that could build the movement.
The US is not the only country which arbitrarily labels organizations
as "terrorist" — and which tends to call nonviolent protest groups
"terrorists". Vietnam has sentenced Chau Van Kham to 12 years in prison
for
supporting a group that advocates democracy in Vietnam.
Americans are being charged thousands of dollars for coronavirus
testing and related procedures — even those performed in mandatory
quarantine, where
they have no choice about the procedures.
Representative Sanders fought to make medicines developed by
government-funded research available for a reasonable price.
Senator
Biden blocked the plan.
Murray watched the judge listen to lawyers' arguments why Assange
should be allowed to sit with them, so that he could confer with them
about what to say; then she read out a decision she had written in
advance.
Murray believes she wants to drive him to suicide. Or she is paving
the way to murder him and say it was suicide.
It will also help prevent extinction of our civilization, but we have no
Endangered Civilization Act to protect us. We needs a conspicuously threatened
species to keep our habitat habitable.
Ironically, even the oligarchs are in danger from their own contempt
for the rest of us. They imagine that they will buy for themselves
"the world's best medical care" that they have put beyond the reach of
most Americans — and usually they can. But not in this.
Dictator Xi's cult extends its suppression of the truth to all areas
of life that might concern him. Although the doctor that first
reported Covid-19 has posthumously been declared a hero (once dead, he
could no longer say anything embarrassing),
others
have since been jailed for showing the truth.
Threats of violence against civil war reenactors said that they came
from "Antifa", and led to much criticism of Antifa's absurdly extreme
position. Turns out this was a false-flag attack,
intended to hurt
the reenactors and Antifa.
The prosecutors in the Assange hearing are arguing that the extradition limits
in the UK-US extradition treaty do not actually limit extradition
— that the subsequent extradition law makes the treaty irrelevant.
Craig Murray, who as an ambassador has participated the process of
passing laws to implement treaties, explains why this is backwards.
The law's purpose
is
to implement what the treaty says.
One cause of this is the world's increasing urbanization.
China has made a giant effort to build new cities.
The US has hardly tried to address the problem.
I am disappointed with this, too. Sure, she would like to win — but
this is compromising part of what used to be her principles.
A heated competition tends to have that influence on people who are
falling behind. "I'll make a little moral concession, and then I will
win, and I will do a lot of good." But if that one concession to
wrongdoing doesn't enable you to take the lead — or if the opponent
makes the same moral concession — you will be back in the same
situation.
Ending the war would be a very good thing. It would not make the
conman/truth-hater an acceptable president, because preserving
democracy in the US is more important than ending this war.
Obama could have done this if he had had the will to do it. Indeed,
Dubya could have made a similar deal in the summer of 2001. The
Taliban were talking about the idea, but
Dubya gave Afghanistan low
priority at the time.
Because the app is nonfree, it is no surprise that its "security" is a
joke. But even if the app itself had no security holes, the phone it runs on
does have them. Taking votes by computer is nuts, and letting people
vote on their own computers is stun-nuts.
Craig Murray reports on the dispute about whether the crime Assange is
accused of is a "political offense" under the extradition treaty,
and
whether the treaty matters at all.
Murray, as a former ambassador of the UK, knows more about how
treaties and laws interact than the judge and prosecuting attorney
know.
There is no law against this — though there ought to be — but it is
no less corrupt for all that. It demonstrates that he would be hardly
any improvement over the current corruptor.
Most of the Democratic Party's "superdelegates", those who will vote at the
convention but are not selected by voters, seem to want to block Sanders
from running at any cost —
even
the destruction of the Democratic Party.
In the late 1990s I noticed that NPR journalists frequently attacked
President Clinton from the right. My dismay developed into
disapproval and I stopped listening to NPR news.
I suggest sending a message of appreciation. Here is what I sent.
From: Richard Stallman
To: chancellor@ucla.edu
cc: media@stratcomm.ucla.edu
cc: rms
bcc: lia@fightforthefuture.org
Subject: Thank you for no face recognition
bcc: rms-outgoing@gnu.org
Reply-To: rms@gnu.org
--text follows this line--
I am very gratified to read that UCLA decided not to use face
recognition technology.
It is not illegal to deploy systematic face recognition, but it ought
to be, since it is the foundation for repression. All organizations
have the responsibility to help prevent face recognition from becoming
widespread.
See https://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html
for why that level of surveillance is incompatible with democracy.
Also https://stallman.org/articles/real-privacy-laws.html.
How do people become billionaires? Not by investment in the usual sense.
They do it by preparing to capture a windfall before someone else does.
To
capture the windfall does not mean earning it.
What is said in Assange's hearing, Assange cannot hear, because he is kept in
a glass box. He has to get a summary from his lawyers — but not very
often, as they are forbidden to speak with him in the court.
US citizens: call
on Congress to pass the MORE Act, which would
legalize marijuana.
The page displays in an ugly way in IceCat — it looks better in lynx.
Both browsers allow you to sign this without running nonfree
JavaScript code; in IceCat you should enable LibreJS to make sure
that code does not run.
People should not draw the simplistic conclusion that marine protected
areas are a bad idea. Stricter protection on reefs, along with
allowing some additional area for fishing for tuna, might correct the
problem.
I suppose he was going to say that he bought their offices for them
rather than that he bought them. After all, slavery is still illegal
in the US, and so is bribery — unless it is indirect and disguised.
That was four years ago. It would be entirely in character for the
conman to make such a deal, but I can't remember whether we had
evidence showing he had done so. I would like to see what the Times
says to support that claim. It is somewhat closer to truthful than
the conman is, but it often presents half-truths, as cited in many
political notes.
It is extremely difficult for a public figure (in particular, any
candidate for office) to win a libel lawsuit in the US. Since the suit
a New York State matter, the conman hasn't got much influence to pervert
justice with. Maybe he plans to drop the suit after the election.
(satire)
*the American Psychiatric Association announced Thursday the
supplemental addition of “Obsessive Categorization of Mental
Conditions” to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual Of Mental Disorders.*
British MP Debbie Abrahams leads a parliamentary group concerned with
occupied Kashmir. She went to India bearing a valid visa and India
without
warning said her visa was cancelled.
This is typical behavior of authoritarian truth-denying governments;
compare with
Israel
and
the
US.
Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day 2. The judge is
so hostile towards Assange that when his lawyer, joined by the
prosecutor, call on her to ask the prison officials not to persecute him
(so he would be able to participate properly in his case), when they
both said this was normal practice and that prison officials usually
followed judges'
advice, she
said she had never heard of such a thing.
At the end, she announced that UK law authorized extradition for political
offenses. Shame on the UK, if that is true.
The gangs were urged on by an official of the Hindu-extremist BJP,
which is the ruling party. I suspect it organized the gangs, too, to
win more votes in the Delhi election. Bigotry against Muslims is its
platform. Prime Minister Modi got his initial political boost from
presiding over a
pogrom
in the state of Gujarat, where he was a state official.
What those organizations can't stand is that Sanders takes the
two-state solution seriously and is willing to press for it. They
present themselves as representing all American Jews, but most of them
agree rather with Sanders.
I disagree partially. It is a mistake to talk about four parties;
really there are only three. There are still some "moderate"
Republicans (though they are even further from what most Americans
stand for than the "moderate" Democrats) who disagree with the
bullshitter, but hardly any dare to stand against the extremist
Republican Party.
The US had real moral leadership during World War II and the Cold War.
In some places and times its behavior was consistent with its stated
principles, especially in Europe and Japan, even as in other parts of
the world the US supported colonial empires or economic elites.
Meanwhile, the US contended against horrible enemies. Communist
Russia and China committed massive crimes. Imagine if the
bully could
have anyone in the US imprisoned or shot, as a whim, and nobody dared
to hint at disobedience; that's what Stalin's rule was like. In
China, Mao's delusional "Great Leap Forward" caused an artificial
famine that killed millions. There too, no one dared criticize.
The imprisonment of a million Uighurs for brainwashing is a sample
of what Mao's rule was like.
These were not merely a low standard of comparison against which US
looked better than it was. They were real enemies on a global scale.
In today's United States, the good aspects have faded while the bad ones
have increased. But we know that the way forward is with Sanders
and his political revolution.
When our land was great before,
We taxed the rich a whole lot more.
*To connect the enclaves that make up Kedumim, [illegal Israeli
colonists] seized control of a central road serving Palestinians
and
blocked their access to it.*
Black students in some countries' public schools often face punishment
because of the shape and form of their hair, which doesn't easily comply
with
the rules designed based on white students.
We will see whether the Democratic Party is so obedient to plutocrats
(including Bloomberg) that it will destroy itself at their command in
order to block Sanders.
To do this to a person who has never shown any tendency to violence,
and who is hardly able to access weapons, is sheer political theater
as well as sabotage of his defense.
Whatever we do to those prisoners, it has some chance of reducing terrorism
and some chance of inciting more terrorism. No perfect solution is known.
It is foolish to presume that "tougher equals better."
Half a million people in Britain live in buildings with flammable
"cladding" insulation, and they face the threat of enormous bills to
replace it —
bills
they cannot ever pay.
3/4 of Americans
support
the Equal Rights Amendment.
3/4 of Americans also believe the Constitution already requires
equal rights for men and women. I wonder how the two questions, and
their answers, relate. Did the pollsters inform people about the
current situation before asking whether they support the amendment?
The US mainstream media have thrown a series of fabrications and
exaggerations at Sanders, but now that we have actual election
results, we
can see they are not true.
US mainstream media's coverage of Sanders is not just subtly wrong.
It is thoroughly and persistently
disconnected
from reality.
One crucial difference which he disregarded is that Sanders is doing
well in a peaceful, democratic election, whereas France in 1940 was
defeated by a military invasion.
Many MSNBC commentators
are
also smearing Sanders.
Supposedly this was for "security reasons", and that might be true in
an ironic way. If he had seen the poor people's improvised houses,
who knows what he might have done? Bomb the whole city?
Bloomberg News killed Michael Forsythe's article about intimate
financial dealings of relatives of Chinese party officials, because it
didn't want to jeopardize its sales in China. Then it fired him, and
demanded repayment of money provided for him to move to Hong Kong
unless both he and his wife signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Then
it threatened to sue them if she didn't.
She, Leta Hong Fincher, now reports on those events. Bloomberg News
seems to demand others bow meekly to its threats just as it bows
to China's threats.
New exhaust scrubbers now required for ships keep toxic pollutants out
of the air by
sending them into the ocean instead.
This is not necessarily better.
Some have envisioned the complete extinction of humanity. I think
that is unlikely. People survived with low tech in harsh environments
before, and could do so again, albeit in small numbers (most of
humanity would be killed by such a transition).
That's the power oligarchs enjoy. In the same way, Bill Gates's money
ensured that hardly anyone in the field of education would criticize
his plans to
restructure public schools in the US.
Always paying cash (as I do) can save you lots of money
by helping you
decide not to buy.
It is important to learn to appreciate that, each you consider buying.
And that's not to mention the most important thing it can give you:
privacy!
Bolivia's court says Evo Morales cannot run for senator in Bolivia
because
he is not a resident there.
What a sick excuse! (He has taken refuge in exile since the coup in
November, only 3 months ago.)
The bill passed the house despite them, but when a "Democrat" is as
Republican as that, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee should
not support per.
His plans have the usual faults — too late, and too little
(net-zero emissions sounds nice but offsetting
tends
to be self-delusion). Nonetheless, this is a big step forward.
Too bad it is over 2 years to the next election there.
Ironically, there really is a conspiracy in the US to abuse and
torture children (plus a larger number of teenagers), operating at
locations that are inaccessible. It is a right-wing conspiracy,
created by the bully
and operated by the US Department of Hatred and
Suffering (DHS). Its victims are imprisoned immigrants.
Methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction seems to be
25%-40%
more than previously thought. This implies that cuts in
extraction will make an even bigger and faster difference. Let's get
cracking!
FFII contends that the departure of Britain from the EU has
invalidated the "unitary patent" agreement, and this
offers
a chance to kill it permanently.
There is
no
time to wait for more data before taking action to prevent the
insect apocalypse. The danger is desperately urgent.
When you need to stop the train before it runs off the broken bridge,
you can't afford to spend a minute calculating precisely how hard to
push the brakes.
The US has
blocked
Eyal Weizman from visiting Miami to open an exhibit about his
work. He leads Forensic Architecture, which investigates human rights
violations world-wide.
The border thugs said that a computer program suggested he was a
security threat. However, it was the humans who decided to heed that
suggestion. They demand a list of all citizens of Syria, Iran, Iraq,
Yemen or Somalia that he has met, and invite him to volunteer names of
everyone else he knows who might perhaps be somehow suspect. In
effect, "conduct a fishing expedition on yourself."
In the course of investigating human rights violations he has talked
with witnesses from those countries, people of various political
affiliations. To turn him into a US spy on all of them could benefit
the US government, both by getting more information for its giant data
bases, and by getting a lever with which to ruin his career at any
time. It could use that lever to stop him from investigating human
rights violations committed by the US.
He was wise to this danger, and refused to give the information.
In the past, being caught doing this would have chastened the US. The
bullshitter will boast of having damaged two birds (human rights
investigation, and justice) with one lie.
Some require the firmware to be signed with a particular key.
In those, to alter the firmware maliciously requires the aid
(willing or unwilling) of the manufacturer. Still not secure.
Real security requires that the device not allow modification of the
firmware through the connectors for normal use of the device.
The UK plans to push hard
to
end immigration of low-wage workers.
We will find out if it really achieves a increase of standards of
living and of productivity.
Scandinavian countries have a different approach: tax the rich more
and spend more on helping people. That method visibly does work.
*Buttigieg and Centrist Dems Want a Military Response to Climate Change.
That’s
Dangerous.*
They want to enhance the military's capacity to fend off refugees and
flood waters. That won't enable the United States of 2060 to survive
as a free and stable country.
*Greenpeace Finds Labels on Plastic Products "Mislead the Public and Harm
America's Recycling Systems"*.
Many plastic objects that are labeled for recycling
cannot
really be recycled in the US today.
"Neglected" tropical diseases have harmed hundreds of millions of
people. We are on the verge of eradicating some of them, but if we
don't push on and reach that point,
they
will spread again.
To be ready to treat so many sick people is not easy. Are other
countries stockpiling what they will need? In the US, Republicans
tend to neglect such preparations because they don't care about
non-rich people. The bully cares even less than usual.
*Researchers find a western-style diet can impair brain function.
After a week on a high fat, high added sugar diet,
volunteers scored
worse on memory tests.*
Jan Karski infiltrated the guards of a Nazi murder camp, and since he
was not a prisoner, he found it easy enough to leave to report on the
murder methods. Later, in the US, he reported this to officials, who
did not believe what he told them. He recounted this is in his book,
Story of a Secret State.
The Afghan government's soldiers say the reason they are fighting is
for the pay. They
can't find other work.
Meanwhile, the Taliban soldiers are fighting mainly because the US
side has killed their relatives. That is not a deep commitment, but
it is stronger than a salary. No wonder the Taliban keep gaining.
But this suggests that if the US stops fighting them, in a few years
they will not be motivated to fight the US any more.
After the US-supported coup in Honduras in 2009, the country has
suffered two more attacks against the constitutional order,
both with
US support of course.
Any bad law can be policy-laundered this way, and a trade deal with the
US under any plausible president but Sanders or Warren will surely do
great harm.
The sad thing is that Bogus Johnson has a pattern of contempt for
everything that gets in his way. He does not care about Assange, one
way or the other; he is negotiating a deal with the conman, so I
expect him to offer Assange in exchange for some of what he does want.
Personal medical data is a special case, among data bases of personal
data, because
there
is a pressing reason to collect it and a pressing reason to look for patterns in it.
Perhaps the data can be made safe through a
system where no company or researcher can have a copy of the data, or
unlimited access to it; rather, they have to submit queries to be
vetted.
There is a danger that Russian crackers will break the security and
alter the results. But I am more worried about that the voting
machine companies or election authorities will alter the results.
They can do this without cracking the security — they simply
step around it.
If you have a child this year, that's what per 30th birthday could be like.
Per 40th would be even worse. Unless you want to do that to someone you love,
don't have one!
Each birth avoided will make it a little less bad.
Globalization of manufacturing is also a danger for society, because
it eliminates redundancy. If only one company knows how to make an
XYZ, it is easy for one local disaster to eliminate all the capacity
and knowledge of how to make them. This is happening just as we are
doing things that will make lots of local disasters.
(satire) *Michael
Bloomberg’s presidential campaign hired thousands of canvassers Friday
to stop black men on the street and force them to hear his campaign
pitch.*
This rehabilitation before prosecution is unusual, but US prisons used
to provide rehabilitation programs for the convicted. That was
eliminated in the 80s when US politicians found they could win
elections by promising to be "tough". That is also how the US ended
up with the world's highest percentage of population in prison.
Senators
to Barr: "The shocking action taken by you or your senior
staff to seek special protections for Mr. Stone make a mockery of
your responsibilities to seek equal justice under the law."
But Barr has done this more than once: he has a habit of subjecting
political cases to special review of the prosecutors' actions,
looking
for excuses to intervene.
Prosecutors in the US have been known to break the law so as to make
trials unfair. It might be a wise policy to give every trial
a special review to see if prosecutors violated the defendant's rights
— if that were done fairly.
However, special preference for cronies of the conman is not justice.
The prosecutors in the Stone case
resigned
in protest.
Bizarrely, Barr claims that the conman is undermining his authority
by
tweeting about this. I cannot believe that Barr really wishes to be independent of the conman,
or that he is so.
The Senate
passed
the resolution to deauthorize fighting Iran. However, this is
apparently a joint resolution (which requires presidential approval or
else a 2/3 supermajority) rather than a
concurrent
resolution. Why did the Senate choose to do this in a form that
won't have legal effect?
Since fishing was not banned in areas beyond the visible oil slick,
that underwater oil could have got into fish which humans then ate.
I wonder if
the
dispersants that BP poured on the oil, which make the oil mix more
with water, played a role in causing that. This response was
criticized at the time.
They could have addressed the ostensible problem by providing proper
toilets instead. But if the real goal was to treat homeless people
with contempt, that would not have sufficed.
As for squatting, if people suffer from homelessness and a house is
uninhabited, I think they should take it.
Delta Airlines announced
a plan to become "carbon-neutral".
The plan involves ten years of spending. It is not clear whether
it includes a specific target to complete the work in ten years.
The biggest weakness in the plan is that it depends on
offsetting the emissions, and these offsetting plans are likely to
have full effect only over ensuing decades —
if
they work at all.
(satire)
*the Nevada State Democratic Party announced Friday
that it had addressed election security concerns by upgrading to a new
system of electronic voters.*
Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, explains how the legal
process against him was rigged from the start
and
violated legal norms over and over.
Why he is concerned about this case:
The case falls into my mandate in three different ways: First, Assange
published proof of systematic torture. But instead of those responsible
for the torture, it is Assange who is being persecuted. Second, he
himself has been ill-treated to the point that he is now exhibiting
symptoms of psychological torture. And third, he is to be extradited to
a country that holds people like him in prison conditions that Amnesty
International has described as torture. In summary: Julian Assange
uncovered torture, has been tortured himself and could be tortured to
death in the United States. And a case like that isn’t supposed to be
part of my area of responsibility?
Melzer also explains how the legal procedures against Assange in
Sweden and the UK were run corruptly all along, violating all norms
of justice.
He also explains painstakingly how the Swedish state fabricated
charges against Assange, twisting what the two women actually said.
Rather than pursuing "justice" for them — supposed "justice" which
they did not want — the Swedish state only used them as an excuse
for bullshit.
Nepal's embassy could give them new passports and fly them back to
Nepal. But since Nepal is so poor, maybe cannot afford the flights.
Is there a chance or organizing ship they will take them to India,
perhaps once a month? They might have to wait a few weeks on the ship,
but it would be better than being stuck in Kuwait as a slave.
The world powers could make these Gulf countries change their
policies, if they got together.
In a few decades, the problem may solve itself — those countries
probably won't exist any more, due to
global heating and sea-level
rise. If we can stop them from exporting oil and causing global
heating, those countries may stop hiring foreign workers.
It is one of many issues where the EU works for the interests of
European businesses even to the detriment of Europeans' (and others')
life, health, or freedom.
The idea of “hate the game, not the player” is sometimes valid when
the game is one that people play for recreation — because they can
play some other game instead.
However, the idea is inapplicable when they treat our political system
as their game and exploit people through it. Those who take advantage
of a bad political system to exploit people are always personally
culpable, even if the system is too.
The comparison with the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign illustrates
a common paradigm: business change the system in a way that tends to create
a problem, then tells the millions they deal with that compensating for
that tendency is their responsibility.
Bloomberg is keeping his actual views out of the limelight, apparently
so voters won't notice their disagreements with him. The mainstream
media are helping. But he
has
shown his repressive views.
Obama also hid his views behind the vague slogans of "hope" and
"change". I did not expect much of either from him.
I reject the assumption that monogamy is morally imperative. I refuse
to use the words "cheating" and "unfaithful" to describe sex, or
romantic love, in conflict with monogamy. I think people should be
monogamous if they wish, and not if they don't. When I love a woman,
I do not ask her to be monogamous, because I do not think of her as my
possession. I simply wish for her to join me in keeping our love
going well.
The article refers an the end to the violence in Tom and Jerry
cartoons. Americans a few decades ago began to question whether it
was a good thing to enjoy that violence. I read that point, and it
made me aware of the pain that the violence depicted would cause in
reality. I began to identify with the character suffering the
violence. I am grateful to those who wrote about this.
But it must not be a crime to show violence in cartoons.
In effect, the UK has evolved something comparable to the explicit
"checks and balances" of the US Constitution, and Bogus wants to
weaken it so he can do whatever he wishes.
In 1960, the UK framed Stephen Ward so he couldn't say that a minister
had lied to Parliament. The trial was "a charade,
presided
over by a judge committed to a conviction." It was characterized
by "manipulation of the trial by the lord chief justice."
The UK has not got any more honest. It is now doing something
comparable to Julian Assange.
UK thugs set up face recognition cameras
looking
at the door of a shopping center. They put up signs saying "you
are not legally required to go through this area", but that does you
no good if you need to go there to shop.
They made a statement about what they would do with the videos, but
did they promise not to save the videos and do other things with them
later?
*EU accused of climate crisis hypocrisy after
backing
32 gas projects.* The amount spent will be over 30 billion dollars
that should be spent on defending the climate rather than destroying
it.
Amazing respect for justice: a woman facing possible deportation from
the UK won a decision that she would not be deported, at least not
immediately. But the prison guards tried to force her onto a plane.
She resisted this illegal action by fighting back.
A
court has ruled that this was legitimate self-defense.
*A Canadian Energy Company
Bought
an Oregon Sheriff’s Unit.*
It wasn't officially a purchase, but in effect that's what it was.
The unit's purpose was to fight pipeline protesters, and its funds
came from a fossil fuel company.
It will also enable babies to feel less stress, which will help them
grow up healthier.
The climate crisis will give them too much stress, all too soon, which
is part of why people should avoid having babies nowadays. But starting
the stress when they are newborns is not a humane way of making this point.
On one side, bigger storms start from the higher sea level. On the
other, Spain is becoming more arid and needs more water from the river
for irrigation.
Why didn't he? He may have judged that the bullshitter's fanatical
supporters can't be swayed by mere mainstream media, or that the
bullshitter is a master of stirring them up into hatred.
In any case, we have to deal with what he is actually doing.
You can't go far wrong by voting against the candidate supported
by lots of expensive TV ads.
Medicare for All, with its plan to negotiate an overall quantity price
for drugs (as most European countries do), would eliminate this problem
once and for all.
If your main way of meeting and getting to know people you could hope
to find love with is at work, and you're forbidden to have a
relationship with them, you may have no way at all.
The UK is systematically deporting to Jamaica people who have lived in
Britain since they were children —
in
some cases, since they were born.
People who grow up in a country deserve citizenship there, and it is unjust
to exile citizens even if they commit crimes. That applies to the UK
and
the US.
(satire)
*Jared Kushner held a press conference Wednesday to
make assurances that the administration’s Israel plan would relocate
all Palestinians to a generous swath of the Mediterranean Sea.*
People with more wealth and/or privilege will move to places that
are safer from global heating effects.
I forecast that this will be temporary. Once
global heating cuts into
food production, while population growth leads to more demand for food,
increasing numbers will be trapped in hunger. And if wars disrupt
the globalized manufacturing system, technology will crash.
There are millions of people who imagine surviving this on their own.
That is a pipedream. You can't stockpile a lifetime's worth of food
and computers, Even solar cells need to be replaced eventually. In a
Mad Max world, only a tiny fraction will survive even 20 years. You
are not likely to be one of them.
The only way we can all survive — or at least most people — is to do
it together. We have to avoid the situation that will cause climate
apartheid.
Referring to writers and artists as
"content-producers",
as the article does,
is a reflection of this change. Please join me in refusing to
describe works of art or authorship as "content".
Chinese live under the total surveillance of a totalitarian state.
The new face recognition systems can recognize people even wearing
masks. And the systems
automatically
judge everything people do.
In the special emergency of the coronavirus epidemic, I might consider
tracking justified as an emergency measure. It could, potentially,
save thousands of lives, maybe even millions. I would pay the price
of being surveilled to achieve that — if it were used only to prevent
the spread of the epidemic, and would be removed when the disease is
eradicated.
But once a country gets people used to surveillance, it won't stop
surveiling people, and mission-creep is sure to follow.
I think that the right-wing extremists are far more dangerous in the
US than Islamists. There are other parts of the world where Islamist
terrorists are a substantial threat, but they don't have much power here.
Can anyone tell me whether this is a case of channeling into bigotry
the anger provoked by the all-suffocating power of business over every
area of life? That is a foolish response, as the right-wing
extremists won't give the non-rich anything but a scapegoat to look
down at, but people do it.
Don't let it paralyze you. If that starts to happen, join and work
for an organization that works to curb
global heating — the
Sanders campaign, a Green Party, the Sunrise Movement, Extinction
Rebellion.
There are many other systemic injustices that afflict humanity, and
working to end any of them will help you feel better about your life.
User-subjugating software is one of them; would you like to
>help the GNU Project?
Immigration thugs tried to arrest someone in NYC and
did
not say they were official thugs. The victim tried to fight them
off, and a relative helped. They shot the relative, fortunately not
fatally.
There is a long history of prosecution of people who tried to defend
themselves from unknown assailants, who later turn out to be official
state thugs
but did not reveal that at the time. Many of the people
were convicted of various crimes for these acts of self-defense.
Another
record
high 65F in Antarctica should make us reflect on the coming
submergence of New York, Miami, New Orleans, Shanghai, Tokyo, London,
Amsterdam, Hamburg, and so many other great cities, after the ice
melts.
Global heating
is gradually making things worse. We can see these
people as the start of a wave of central-American climate refugees.
It is not just food that they need. They also need birth control,
sterilization and abortion. Desperately supporting an increasing
population where food production is falling is as futile as
desperately preserving coastal housing as the sea level rises. It
will inevitably fail, and cause suffering as described in the article.
Humanity must reduce the burden it puts on the Earth!
Varoufakis: *The EU's green deal is a
colossal
exercise in greenwashing.* It proposes to spend a fair pile of
money, but that money was already in the plans. The real increases
proposed add up to little.
A UK government inspection bureau has investigated 69 suicides
possibly caused by cutting off welfare benefits in recent years, but
suggests that
there
may be far more such cases.
If influencers are influencing you, you have been suckered. But you
don't have to allow this to continue. You can change your habits so
that influencers no longer impinge on you.
Professor Sussman thinks it also hampered them from learning to do
activities as a group. He reports that clubs and community
activities of many kinds are dying.
A pro-occupation campaign group
is
running ads claiming that Sanders is unelectable
—
the same old would-be self-fulfilling prophesy that is money can
make believable. It doesn't try to argue openly in favor of the
occupation of Palestine because Democrats have ceased to support that
position.
I don't call it a "pro-Israel" group because defending Israel's
existence (as do I, as does Sanders) is not the same thing as
defending the occupation of Palestine. The latter is the real
bone of contention.
China suppressed his warning because it was unpleasant news. If China
had not been so repressive, the epidemic might have been stopped at
the outset, or perhaps only delayed.
Chinese repression shares the responsibility for all the
problems caused by the disease, and the Chinese people (on whom
the suffering is now chiefly falling) are aware of this.
Australia's planet-roaster government said it would put limits on
greenhouse emissions from big mining and industry companies, but in practice
the limits do not limit them —
companies
get them increased as they wish.
I don't think I would want to use cash to pay $10,000 or more,
However, limits like this tend to start high and get pushed much lower.
Some countries have limits of a few hundred dollars.
*The principal producer of chlorpyrifos has decided to stop making it.
It has
been linked to brain damage in children.*
However, the Environmental Poisoning Agency has made sure agribusiness will be
able to obtain chlorpyrifos elsewhere.
The former Environmental Protection Agency did not stand up to
business fully or often enough, but it did some good.
I recommend calling it "global heating", and its consequences "climate
mayhem" or "the climate crisis." "Climate change" was introduced on
orders of the Dubya administration in the aim of downplaying its
importance.
The UK deportation authority gave immigration prisoners cell phones to
talk with their lawyers, but they can't get a usable signal in the prison
so
cannot make plans with their lawyers.
The best way for students to resist this is not by hacking the system,
but by confronting it. "No, I won't install your app — nonfree
apps cannot be trusted." Better, "No, I won't carry a smartphone
— the nonfree operating system cannot be trusted." Or do as I
do: "No, I won't carry a portable phone — they track people's
movements and can listen all the time."
Best of all, organize a group of students to make such a statement
together.
When you do that, don't be belligerent in tone. Chances are it never
occurred to the staff that surveiling people was an injury to their
rights. You must be firm, so don't add anger to that.
Be proud that you are standing up for freedom. Even if you lose,
you can be proud of trying.
The US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is supposed to verify
the honesty of the audits that big accounting companies do on
publicly-traded corporations. One accounting company, KPMG,
corrupted
the PCAOB through the "revolving door", even hiring away its
employees and telling one of them to regard his new salary as a bribe
for telling KPMG which of its audits would be investigated.
The exception to "stop feeling guilty" is for activities that make
profligate use of fossil fuels. For instance, to have a private jet,
a large boat, a mansion, or a child, are things you can and should
avoid.
The same advice applies to the campaign against nonfree software.
People often write to me asking me to forgive them for using some
nonfree software. But I don't ask them to apologize for this; I ask
them to support campaigns against nonfree software, such as the GNU
Project.
I can understand how the "offer" to wash your windows can be annoying.
These people often rush to start washing before you can say no, then
they manipulate you into paying them out of a feeling of undeserved
obligation, or to get the soap off your windshield. It is bad
behavior, indeed.
But does it qualify as a "terrorist threat"? What an absurd
exaggeration! Do they deserve to be shot for this? Obviously not.
That thug
should be prosecuted, because firing is not enough to stop
those menaces to society.
What children need most, to learn anything or everything well, is
curiosity.
It is also a vital requisite for doing well on grades and tests. But
schools systematically squash their curiosity in the name of
maintaining order.
I conjecture that teaching a class takes more work for the teacher if
the teacher encourages curiosity by answering the children's
questions. I further conjecture that the extra work increases with
the number of children in the class. Perhaps this is part of the
reason why smaller classes are better: because they make it easier for
the teacher to answer questions for all the children and avoid
squashing their curiosity.
Getting to know people in your neighborhood,
building community
trust, makes your children safer than hovering over them, while
giving them a chance to learn and explore.
The comparison with smallpox-infested blankets (which the US
government gave to some indigenous groups during the 1800s) is
misguided, since those two wrongs are wrong in different ways. The
blankets were intended to, and likely to, kill only people in the
targeted groups. Burning more oil, no matter who does it, is likely
to kill more people all around the world. The one was a sneaky,
treacherous act of war; the other a contribution to global suicide.
When my father spanked me, he terrified and humiliated me. It only
happened a few times, but each time it drove me permanently further
away from him. I am sure it is better for families to avoid such
anger.
At the same time, I am sure that if I were a parent I would arrive at
situations where I was at my wits' end and saw no way to carry out my
responsibilities without spanking. I don't understand how some
parents do it.
The UK responded to a small terrorist attack (three people wounded)
with
drastic
proposals, such as a life sentence for terrorists.
The recent terrorist attacks in the UK add up to a tiny amount of
violence compared with all the violence in the UK now. Even if these
measures reduced the violence (and we don't know), that would make a
very small difference in safety.
It is self-defeating to respond to this with disproportionate symbolic
"toughness". What is needed is to search for an effective way to
deradicalize.
(The history of the US includes all three, but not all at the same time.
Violent exploitation of the working class wasn't a very big factor
until after the Civil War. Before then, most Americans lived on farms.)
The most interesting part of article is the part about Joseph Roth
and what to do after vicious inhumanity has taken over your country
and civilization has been defeated.
The impeachment standard they propose does have one benefit: it would
permit impeaching Kavanaugh for attempted rape in the past. But I
think that this would not outweigh the permanent damage caused by
debasing impeachment as Republicans generally debase things.
This tax would discourage people from eating meat — which is a good idea,
for the sake of health. If the tax on beef is especially high, it would also
discourage raising cattle, which makes sense because they generate methane.
However, it makes sense also to tax the cultivation of plants that are
grown specifically to feed to animals farmed for meat.
A few weeks ago, the US deportation
thugs
interrogated quite a few Iranians
entering the US from Canada, including students with US visas to study,
and did not let them return. The
thugs said this was coincidence.
An internal memo says
it
was a written plan.
No matter how much people may care about distant matters such as the
survival civilization, that must not be allowed to interfere with
maintaining order today.
The Tories introduced a system of blindly insisting that disabled
people are fit to work, and
cutting
their welfare benefits until they can prove otherwise. Errol
Graham was too disabled to do this, so he starved in his cold
apartment as they prepared to evict him.
Each disabled person who dies this way means more funds
to give to the rich.
Most people
feel
false to themselves after buying some impress-with-your-wealth
luxury product. The exceptions are people who feel highly entitled.
If I had bought such a product, I would feel mad at myself for having
been manipulated into wasting my money on appearance rather than
anything I really wanted.
This would be a step towards what is needed, and if anyone can
pressure the extreme denialist governments to make this pledge, it
would be an advance, It has two big flaws: (1) 2050 is too late, and
(2) "carbon-neutral" is an invitation for self-delusion. Are those
trees you are planting really going to survive in the climate of 2030
the climate of 2040?
Are
they even going to survive this year?
There are judges, thugs
and politicians that facilitate and encourage
rape, and they deserve the song's accusation. But that accusation can
be aimed at any man. The song stirs up general hatred of men just as
the bully's
rhetoric stirs up general hatred of women. It is a form
of three-minute hate.
This may be justified for a national emergency that could potentially kill
millions of people in China. But China won't get rid of all the new
surveillance and control when the epidemic ends. Like
the
Olympic games
(which a city can choose not to have), this epidemic can leave freedom
permanently debilitated.
This was basically the Palestinian Authority's last recourse,
to be used only in case of total desperation. The PA has also
stopped helping Israel against violent Palestinian factions.
The new policy claims that advanced technology will protect
civilians from these mines — but it would take years to determine
whether the mines reliably deactivate as they were supposed to.
Civilians would find this out the hard way.
People are calling this a "cover-up." If only it were merely that.
The conman's basic strategy is overt contempt for the law, and the
checks and balances that are supposed to defend democracy.
The US government is not much more democratic than Maduro's, and it's
just barely legitimate enough to justify rejecting a coup.
The practice of labeling dissidents as "terrorists" is found in many
countries, including
the
US and
the
UK. Salafi Arabia's "justice" is more violent and arbitrary
in general, and especially where dissidents are concerned.
Collin Clabaugh moved in with his grandparents after his parents died.
But the homeowner's association says they are not allowed to let him
live there, and
demanded
they kick him out.
I think states should pass laws guaranteeing people certain rights
that override all homeowners' associations. Not only the right to
have dependents live with them, but also the right to post a sign
supporting a position regarding an election or political issue.
*By denying witnesses, Republicans made clear
even
a smoking gun would not be enough.* That was blatant contempt for
the truth, the constitution, and their country.
Allowing oil demand to continue to grow could create the need for a
sudden change later, which
could
cause an avoidable economic crisis. This will look small compared
with the climate crisis itself, but suppose it is as bad as the
recession of 2009. Crises give plutocrats the opportunity to take
wealth away from every else. They did that
after
2009.
Perhaps they are planning to cause this mini-crisis in order to profit
from it.
This may not be as wrong as it seems. There is evidence that
glyphosate is not carcinogenic by itself, but
becomes
carcinogenic when combined with other ingredients of Roundup.
If that proves true, it might be valid to rule that glyphosate is not
carcinogenic, and rule separately that Roundup is carcinogenic.
But I don't think the EPA is going to do the second half of that.
The mutilator has deployed a "low-yield" nuclear weapon
on
a Trident missile on a submarine.
This threatens to lower the political and moral threshold against
starting nuclear war.
I suspect it is also a stunt. It doesn't make practical sense
to put such small warheads on an expensive Trident missile.
However, even if the Senate passes this too, the mutilator can veto it.
This is treated like an ordinary bill.
That seems nonsensical to me. Since the AUMF is Congressional permission
for the president to make war, Congress should be able to withdraw
that permission on its own; it should not require the president's
approval.
Does anyone understand why it isn't treated that way?
121,000 immigrants in one year, as occurred in 2017, is not a real
burden. At that rate, the population of Italy would double in 500
years. But if we don't curb global heating, in a few decades it could
become a million per year, or ten million.
Unless a city has a lot of vacant land, there is no way to build more
housing units except to demolish some buildings and replace them with
bigger buildings. However, the law can put requirements about how
this is done — for instance, the requirement to include at least as
many low-income units as were demolished. The law could even assure
the old tenants of returning at the same rents they paid before.
But there needs to be more housing space.
With the support of a judge prepared to twist any law, and an army of
its own lawyers, Chevron has
crushed
the life of Steven Donziger, who won the lawsuit against Chevron
for pollution in Ecuador. Next step, to put him in prison.
For decades, Big Pharma has used the US government to push broader and
longer patents on the rest of the world. Now the conman and Modi are
about
to kill the Indian generic drug industry which supplies many poor
countries.
The error starts in the article's first line: "The whole point of
modern surveillance is to treat people differently," referring
specifically to commerce. That is only one of the points of modern
surveillance: repression of dissidents, whistleblowers and journalists
is another. The article's reasoning simply doesn't address that.
Face recognition is especially dangerous for this because it is
especially hard to avoid. It is not hard to leave a portable phones
(if you have one) home one day, and pay cash for travel and food that
day. But it is very hard to avoid face recognition and license plate
recognition. Therefore, those two types of surveillance pose a
special danger to political freedom.
The Australian government may not mind if the US spies on Australians.
Indeed, reports are that the US government spies on Australians and
gives the data to the Australian government so that it can bypass the
legal protections of Australian law (and vice versa). Still it seems
foolish to build in vulnerability like that.
I predict that Modi's supporters will praise the shooter try to get
charges against him dropped, just as Israel's right-wing extremists
lionize the fanatic that assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in 1995.
Sweden's power to do this is limited, but it could give this more
priority and the Chinese market less. The EU could require foreign
manufacturers to hand over the circuit diagrams and source code for
security analysis.
The bully
contributed to this through his abandonment of the Syrian
Kurds, and will have difficulty recruiting their help again.
Meanwhile, Iraqis consider the US an invader and want its troops out.
Shall we describe this as "Make America Hated Again"?
He is an expert at manipulating people through bullying. I wonder if
his goal is to make sure that PISSI,
like a comic-book supervillain,
never really dies and therefore is always available for use as a
villain.
*In the topsy-turvy world of
Israel's
High Court, international law is nothing more than a disguise to
delegitimize the state and its settlements.*
The court equated condemnation of Israel's policies with
"delegitimization of Israel". Then the overbroad definition of
antisemitism
(the
same one used to demonize the UK Labour Party) equates that to
"antisemitism". Thus demonstrating how to relabel criticism of
occupation policies as "antisemitism" in two easy leaps.
One species, the cobble skink, survives only in a zoo. There is no
longer any place it can live in he wild.
Such conservation efforts could go on for centuries, provided society
continues to maintain the interest, the wealth, and the organization
to carry it out. But those are likely to disappear as the crunch gets
harder. In 50 years, will society still be able to carry out such
efforts in he midst
of calamities
such as starvation, fire, and migration war?
If it were only a matter of justice for Bezos, we could call this
crack poetic justice for Alexa. Morally there is little difference
between inserting spyware in a product after sale and building it in
before sale.
But Bezos is not the only person whose rights matter, and Salafi
Arabia's doing wrong to Bezos will not protect the public from
the wrongs Amazon does.
I am in favor of encouraging women to go unveiled if they wish.
However, I worry that requiring them to unveil in order to vote could
have the harmful effect of discouraging them from voting.
Decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand
has
protected prostitutes from violence from all sides.
This makes it safer to continue doing sex work. Paradoxically, it
has also removed an obstacle that hampered moving out of sex work.
The organized sex workers have overcame efforts to criminalize their
clients.
The BJP is a Hinduismist party (Hinduismists are to Hinduism as
Islamists are to Islam). Caste prejudice
is
deeply rooted in Hinduism
so Hinduismists cannot help perpetuating caste prejudice.
(satire)
*Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated Monday that the United
States has overwhelming and undeniable evidence to support going to war
with whoever.*
The first part of the solution is free software — we users can make sure
it doesn't spy on us. But that addresses only the programs we run on our
own programmable computers. To go beyond that, we need
laws to prohibit
systems from collecting people's personal data.
Don't fall for foolish substitutes that wouldn't fix the problem, such
as the idea that "you should own your own data". People would
sell the use of that data for a pittance, if they don't see a path towards
truly changing the surveillance society.
Creating a drug company with other motives aside from profit is a good
thing to do. Its competition could hold back other companies from
gouging. However, there is a danger that the other companies could
get out of that business or merge. That could lead to even less
competition.
I hope the founders have taken very firm measures to prevent this
company from being co-opted later and turned into a monopolistic
super-gouger.
It's not only Chinese businesses that do this sort of thing. Not long
ago, Senator Warren spoke to a group of black voters and met with a
protest organized (though they didn't publicly say so) by an
organization that
campaigns
for charter schools.
I suspect that organization is funded somehow by businesses that
extract money from charter schools.
For burying the issue of gender bias, the expression is "You must be a
feminist." Meanwhile, the supporters of plutocracy say you are
"trying to start a class war" if you talk about their War for Poverty.
The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has enabled
the willows, aspens, eagles, songbirds, beavers, foxes and badgers to
recover. The
elk, deer and coyotes are now kept in check.
*Over 200,000 Iraqis protested against the U.S. military presence in
their country on Friday,
demanding
American forces leave.*
The US forces should leave. They are not doing Iraqis any good, now.
Having betrayed the Syrian Kurds, they cannot be very effective
against PISSI.
The Iraqi Army could not face PISSI in 2014, but maybe
it has learned how to do so.
They say that each system will have a specific list of suspects' faces
to look for. However, today's face recognition systems are
inaccurate. If a suspect in the list is black, the system is likely
to trigger on other blacks who resemble the suspect. The
thugs will
stop them and identify them, and determine that they are not that
suspect. This does not imply they will be allowed to proceed down
the street. They could be searched, arrested, whatever.
In effect, these systems can provide an excuse to stop large numbers
of people "for cause".
It doesn't go all the way to China, but it takes a big step in that
direction.
The article talks about "standards" that require this. I am curious
where those standards come from. If from government, is it the US
government, some state governments, some cities, what?
We must reject any attempt to claim that someone has no right to write
about a certain subject. However, if the book repeats stereotypes,
that is a valid criticism of it. And it is entirely legitimate to
criticize publishers and demand that they publish and promote the
writing of Hispanics that live near the US-Mexico border.
Please don't buy this (or any) book from Amazon.
For your freedom's sake, always pay cash for books, and without
identifying yourself. And never accept commercial e-books
that impose DRM,
surveillance, or an antisocial contract that forbids sharing copies.
I've long had the feeling that focusing on how many women are
executives of large companies is a distraction from the issues that
affect the lives of millions of non-rich women for whom a steady
9-to-5 job would be a dream.
A Monsanto scientist was aware of this as far back as 2002.
I conclude that all pesticide should be sold with full disclosure of
chemicals included. If the manufacturers complain about not having
trade secrets, the proper reply is "Tough! People's lives are at
stake."
It is true that rejecting cash discriminates against poor people who don’t
have a bank account or a credit card. If you are not poor, that problem
may not affect you —
but
your privacy is not safe.
Why would they do this? To serve business, or course — but which and
how? I suppose builders would spend less and profit more, but I am
surprised that the increased profit would pay for the sort of lobbying
needed to win this.
(satire)
"As you address members
of this deliberative body, please bear in mind that nothing you say or
do will have any effect on the completely predetermined outcome of
these proceedings," said Chief Justice Roberts to the senators.
The EPA's new Dirty Water Rule aims to give some lucky Americans once
again the
chance to see a river catch fire.
However, the most common result will be toxic drinking water.
(satire)
*In response to ongoing complaints of unexpected outages and
subpar customer service response times, cable provider Comcast debuted
a new bundle deal Thursday that includes 24/7 live-in technical
support.*
The bill under consideration would affect section 215, which allows
the FBI to collect almost any data base of personal data with
"national security letters". The FISA court admitted that it was
unable to exercise effective control over the FBI's use of these
powers. I think section 215 should be eliminated entirely.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.
With a 4C rise in global temperature, I don't think anyone will have
attention to spare for making or drinking wine. They will be too busy
trying to find a little butter to put on their insufficient bread.
Whether we agree with his position or not (I don't know enough about
Pakistan's constitution to have an opinion), we should defend his
right to advocate that position.
The cheater's
deal with China will allow China-grown chicken meat to be
sold in the US without labeling, and with no inspection
except China's
untrustworthy inspection. Disease is sure to come with them.
Increased poverty and the danger of becoming homeless inspire people
to the short-term thinking
whereby
they protest against plans to
reduce subsidies for fossil fuels.
Ironically, right-wing planet-roaster governments use this to win
support from the poor. Once elected, what they give those supporters
is even deeper poverty.
In other words, electing Sanders is the way to curb
global heating soon.
Waste brine from frack wells in some places carries a
very high load
of radium. If it gets into dust (particulates) in the air, people can
breath it in and develop cancer from its radioactivity many years later.
The desperate search for new sources to release more atmospheric CO2
is bringing us to frack and ruin.
Warning! What if they do "reinvent every industry" in the next 10 years?
Change qua change is not necessarily bad. But if this "reinvention"
is done under a plutocratic regime, the plutocrats will make this an
opportunity to give business more power to get away with mistreating
customers, and more "flexibility" to tie workers' lives in knots.
The
specific change that Diamandis yearns for would create a surveillance dystopia.
People will say it is "impossible" to live
without participating in those dis-services, but the first condition
of participation will be "consenting" to be tracked. Further
conditions will control many aspects of people's lives -- for
instance, requiring them to buy from particular allied companies, use
certain products, not use certain other products, do exercise on command,
or allow video and audio recording inside their homes.
Increased pressure on young people, the big gap between the good jobs
and the bad one, leads many of them to gladly focus everything on
training for a job. Some of the benefit that college used to bring
about disappears. Studying at home through proprietary software using
rented textbooks, with little contact with other students let alone
teachers, will eliminate another piece of it.
Forest ash washing into rivers in Australia are
killing
fish. In some places they have killed all the fish.
Scientists say it could take decades for the river to recover, but
that projected recovery is not guaranteed. In a decade or two, there
is likely to be another such fire every few years, so the rivers
will always be full of ash.
Or perhaps the minerals lost in the ash will stunt regrowth of forests
entirely. Maybe there won't be enough plant life to produce much ash.
I can imagine that that poem was rather insulting in tone.
The point is that freedom of expression includes the freedom
to offend people, even insult people. We must not gag people
merely because we disagree with or resent what they say.
Lev Parnas said that his efforts to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden were
explicitly
known to the conman — the two discussed them on the phone.
Barr, Bolton and Giuliani also knew.
The idea of a bystander effect was launched by reporting in the New
York Times of the murder of Kitty Genovese.
Wikipedia
says that the New York Times admitted in 2016 that the original story
was fabricated — the reporter did not find evidence of a
bystander effect after all.
Bruce Schneier: 5G mobile networks are
so
pervasively insecure that it hardly matters who built the hardware
— people and countries are screwed anyway.
The directors made out handsomely from this. Perhaps laws should be
changed so that directors cannot do that in the future -- but
unscrupulous rich people wouldn't want those laws. Do you think
Tories would ever pass such laws?
This technology can in principle respect privacy, but that doesn't
guarantee it will respect privacy. It could transmit data just
so that a company gets personal data. How can we make sure it doesn't?
If it has no form of communication, and no facility for the manufacturer
to change the code or examine the data, that blocks the attempt.
If the software in the device is free, users can make sure it is honest.
The hypocrisy and dishonesty of a "moderate" Republican senator
has a good
chance of preventing her reelection. Overcoming the damage she
has done will be more difficult, and I suppose
she will be paid well for her service.
He could have been lying when he said this. His supporters could have
made it up. But it also may be true. Indeed, maybe the senators
asked him to do it.
"People's lives depend on biodiversity in ways that are not always
apparent or appreciated. Human health ultimately depends
on ecosystem services: the availability of fresh water, fuel, food
sources."
This is not exactly parallel to the US case against Julian Assange
(since the information he published was leaked), but they are mostly parallel,
and they
pose similar threats to freedom of the press.
I don't think Clinton has an obligation to endorse a candidate simply
for having the Democratic nomination. But why does she not want to
endorse Sanders? I conjecture it is because he is progressive — and
she is not. We saw in 2016 that she was a dyed-in-the-wool
corporatist.
Former Clinton supporters ask, *Why is Clinton amplifying destructive
myths about Sanders and his supporters
just
weeks before the primaries begin?*
I conjecture the same answer for this question too.
Psychologist and torturer James Mitchell testified about his torture
for the CIA, saying he was so determined to ensure that the US used
the best possible torture that
he
felt obligated to carry it out himself.
The doctrine of "qualified immunity" assures that when
thugs commit mayhem
in a way that no court has ever ruled on, no court will ever rule on it
and they will always get away with it.
If convicted, she could be put on the sex offender's list. As this
shows, people can be put on the sex offender's list for things that
are not very wrong. Some
didn't
actually do anything to anyone.
For Republicans, corrupting the census is one more method of voter
suppression. They know that it will reduce the representation of areas
where people that face discrimination live.
The Australian government backdated the penalty so that her last two
children, born in Syria, will not be Australian citizens either. They
are, apparently, stateless.
China's birth rate
continues to fall.
This will be inconvenient in
the next few decades, then tremendously beneficial in the long term
for China's land, water and air, and may enable the smaller number of
Chinese to escape with less damage through a smaller global disaster.
Indigenous Australians propose to use their traditional fire management
technique — small controlled burns —
to
prevent large fires. The problem is that global heating effects make that harder to do.
Before English colonization, the aboriginals kept forests much thinner
using fire. It was easy to walk through the forests in those days,
with spaces between trees and little
underbrush.
The mainstream media are big corporations owned by giant corporations.
Naturally they support the policies that serve giant corporations,
on the issues that those care about.
However, I am not taken with the child's idea that "objects have
rights"; it seems to be an instance of the childish mistake of
personifying everything.
Objects cannot have rights because they are unable to exercise any
rights. To do that requires feelings, wishes, preferences, and a way
to express them. If we can ever make objects which have those
faculties, such as are familiar in science fiction, they might deserve
to be considered persons — but they don't exist now.
This is an instance of a gratuitous conceptual rigidity, according to
which the only way to conclude that a non-person ought to be protected
somehow is to say it has rights. Thus, we can't simply protect a
river from pollution, we would have to say the river "has rights."
Experience shows that laws against polluting rivers will do the job,
given political will to uphold them. Absent that will, defining that
protection as "rights of rivers" won't help much; governments that
don't value justice often allow the rights of human beings to be
trampled.
The article mentions secondary ways this could be used to oppress and
mistreat people, by stalkers and foreign governments. It tiptoes
around the biggest threats: that companies and your own government
could do this.
(satire)
*"This new evidence proves beyond a doubt that
Bernie Sanders strongly wants to lead a nation that has repeatedly
enabled, supported, and encouraged misogyny …"
(satire)
*Stephen Miller Hurt At Being Passed Over For Job Stalking Female
Ambassador.*
This is an example of the general conclusion that
"inappropriate"
describes a judgment call, so we must not use that as grounds to
punish or restrict anyone.
In my view, in order for a trade treaty to avoid being a
business-supremacy treaty,
it would need to avoid helping companies become larger and develop
more political power.
Society should make sure every child gets the education and other
requisites to realize per potential. Denying this to anyone is not
only unfair, it's a waste.
Virginia's new Democratic legislature voted to ratify the Equal Rights
Amendment, but it is not effective because the deadline passed in
1982. The process will have to start over again in Congress, and
that
will require taking control of the Senate.
It would be harmful to ban sugar — just as it is harmful to ban
other recreational drugs — but it could be helpful to change
social systems to reduce the social pressure to use them.
This will surely reduce property damage and deaths from future fires.
It may also make containing those fires a little easier, as
fire-fighting will not be complicated by the wish to save houses where
there are no houses.
However, over the decades as the fires get ever worse, that won't make
a noticeable difference. Short-term improvements are good, but we must
not let them steal the show from what we need for the long term:
to
curb global heating.
Aside from the question of whether US economic warfare against Iran is
necessary, or makes any sense, it clearly makes no sense to stop
parents in Iran from paying their children's school in the US.
The bully
has introduced hatred into the issue, and officials seem
to think that anyone that hurts or rejects some Iranian is good.
When the article says "free", it means "gratis" — zero price.
The gratis digital filing options offered by companies almost surely
require the user to run a nonfree program.
(Can anyone check the facts for me?). In addition, they require
trusting the company with your personal data.
A gratis digital filing option from the IRS won't require trusting a
company with personal data, but no other improvement is assured.
The IRS would be able to release it as free/libre software, but we
can't expect that to happen by itself. More likely it will release
that software in the unjust way most software is released. A nonfree
program is
equally unjust
whether it comes from a company or a
government agency.
We will need to urge, perhaps pressure, the IRS to respect taxpayers'
computing freedom by releasing free/libre tax-filing software.
There is no reason to allow companies to buy large numbers of houses,
and no reason to allow a company to conceal who its owners are. In
particular, there is no reason to allow a company with concealed
owners to buy real estate at all.
A constant effort may succeed in protecting the honeybee population, but
no one is trying to protect all the wild insects that get exposed to the
same pesticides.
The danger may not be limited to insects. If neonicotinoids can cause
birth defects in deer, we cannot rule out a priori that they might do
so in humans. And since these compounds last for many years, we may
be accumulating more of them every year.
The UK sentences Islamist extremists to longer prison terms than
right-wing extremists, for similar crimes.
Three times as long,
on the average.
The UK does not fully recognize freedom of speech, and some of the
crimes in question involve posting extremist opinions and nothing
more. I condemn those opinions, but imprisoning people for their
opinions is dangerous too.
It is important to shut down the coal-burning plants, but the idea
that electric utilities should not have to pay any part
of the cost of this change seems unfair to me. If it is a matter
of supporting the poorer eastern regions of Germany, the support
should go to those regions and their people, not to electric utilities.
It looks like nothing will convince Australian PM Scott Morrison to
stop trying to convert Australia and the rest of the world to ashes.
How can Australia
bypass
his power and protect itself?
Hunter Biden's testimony, whatever he may say, will be irrelevant to
the question of the conman's guilt or innocence. Biden may have done
something corrupt in Ukraine — it would not surprise me — but the
conman did not seem to have evidence of this. If he had evidence that
Biden had committed some crime, he had many legitimate ways available
to act on that. The military aid shakedown was private political
manipulation, not a legitimate channel of law enforcement.
More precisely, corporations with over a certain minimum percentage
of foreign stockholders are not allowed to do that.
Really, all corporations should be barred from political spending.
Corporations are not beings; they have no feelings or wishes.
They are not entitled to human rights.
*Backtracking in light of recent polls that indicate public
dismay over his handling of Iran, President Trump announced Wednesday
he was moving forward with
a plan to reverse the killing
of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.*
The article calls this a "power grab" but I don't see how he
personally could gain any power from this. Although I am not inclined
to trust Putin, this seems to be a plan to make sure that his
successors as president don't have the same power he has had.
Unusual heat in a large area of the Pacific Ocean seems to have killed
around a million seabirds in 2015. They died because of
a shortage of
the small fish they eat, one of many consequences of heat in the ocean.
It is unconstitutional for the US government to prioritize someone for
deportation because of dislike for per political statements and activities.
Activist Jean Montrevil
is
suing for the right to return from Haiti.
Teaching and leading the public to choose pain starting now to avoid
death and disaster later is not easy, but the first step is having the
courage to try.
Now they attack a strange straw man by saying that the amount of
wildfire can't be related to a specific greenhouse gas reduction
policy. That may be true but it isn't pertinent to anything.
To criticize climate defenders as "extremists" shows the conceptual
error in using "extreme" to define "dangerous". Not all extremists
are dangerous, only those who lean towards violence when there is no
justification for violence. When plutocrats have maneuvered almost
everyone into disregarding the harm that plutocrats are doing, the few
who try to oppose that are by definition "extremists" -- but that
doesn't make them a menace to society. Quite the contrary.
Iran's failed denial of having accidentally shot down an airliner has
reminded Iranians of
their
criticism of the regime — from which they had been
temporarily distracted by the bully's rash act.
The wisest thing for the US to do is avoid any hint of meddling.
Iranians will not welcome advice from the US about a domestic matter.
If the bully
had any concern for the interests of the US, he would
heed advice to do that.
The regime's best hope is that the
bully will commit another rash act
that will unify Iranians again.
Puerto Rico, which has still not recovered from the hurricane which
struck over a year ago, was recently hit by damaging earthquakes.
The US government
is
holding back money to support repairs.
In the UK it appears that participatory local government
strengthened
and protected the vote for the Labour Party. I wonder if it might
have a similar effect, in support for
progressive politicians at the national level, in the US.
UK thugs
put Extinction Rebellion on a list of terrorist ideologies
to be repressed by schools. When this became public,
the thugs said it
was a mistake.
This illustrates the danger of repression inherent in that system for controlling
ideologies.
I think he is right about this. Both sides engaged in the escalation
of violence which created the situation in which the airliner was shot
down. I don't think either side intended that outcome, but playing
with fire made deadly accidents more likely.
I am very disappointed with this. They are the only two progressive
candidates for the Democratic nomination. If they tear each other
down, they will benefit plutocratist candidates. They should end
their dispute forthwith.
Do not, as my party did, underestimate the evil, desperate nature of
evil desperate people. Do not come to this fight believing that the
Trump team views any action, including outright criminality, as off
limits. [The 2020 election] is a battle that decides whether they have
an unlimited runway to create a dynastic kleptocracy based on an
authoritarian personality cult that makes North Korea look like Sweden,
or whether the immune system of the Republic kicks in and purges them
from the body public …
There is no bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits … He is
surrounded by cowards with frightening and tremendous skills …
The proposal does not include curbing
global heating, but it depends
on doing that. Without that, preventing a mass extinction is
hopeless. In addition, without curbing
global heating, technological
society is likely to take such a big hit that it will no longer have
the capacity to do the things proposed in this plan.
It is not easy to see the list of events
in
the organizing site
without running nonfree JavaScript. I found a way: first, click the
EVENTS button, then move the mouse onto the list of events and a
scroll bar appears with which I believe you can see the whole list.
If you click on the word MARCH or ACTION in an event, you may get a
page with some additional information. But in some cases, not enough.
The crucial information to participate is where and when. Some of the
events do not say precisely where, at least not in that page.
Perhaps you can see it if you run some nonfree JavaScript code, but
doing that is bad for your freedom.
If you can get in contact any event organizers and suggest adding the
missing information directly in the event's own page, that would help
some people find the event and participate.
Recordings show that the deportation
thugs falsely accused visiting
foreign students of seeking to enroll in their fraudulent university
so
as to cheat immigration requirements.
The students wanted to enroll in a real university, take real classes,
and fulfill the requirements. Only the deportation
thugs wanted them
to cheat.
This was highlighted by the fact that some Ring employees who were
authorized to look at the videos used that access for personal motives
and were fired. There will always be employees who do this, and with
Ring the uniformed thugs
often can do it too, which is far more dangerous.
Facebook gives video-publishing media sites exaggerated view counts
to attract them to move from YouTube. Some of them borrow money to invest
to profit from this increased popularity,
and
they go bankrupt.
Another drawback is that if you refuse to be a zucker, the site becomes
inaccessible to you when it is on Facebook.
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by
monkeys." "I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd." One message
referred to "the very very few of us on the program who are interested
only in truth."
Globalization has decoupled US companies from Americans. The success
of the former means little for the latter. The "success" of the
bullshitter's deal with Russia
is
entirely for the former.
The blanket practice was cancelled, but they didn't really stop.
Rather, they came up with various excuses to separate some minors from
their parents, and
still
do this quite often.
Online shopping has cost
thousands
of jobs in the UK this year. It also costs heavily in tax revenue,
and attacks privacy (which depends on anonymity). It would make sense
to penalize online shopping.
Comparing this violent mob to a "powder keg" is fundamentally wrong.
It exempts them from responsibility from the violence they are
planning to cause. (Powder kegs do not pack themselves with gunpowder.)
The consequence is to presume, for the Democrats, a moral onus not to
irritate the mob — in effect, to obey its orders.
A better analogy for this mob is a gang of terrorists with powerful
suicide belts. I think we had better take their guns away.
Right-wing extremists used this approach in Oregon and intimidated
the state government. Virginia must find the way to overcome the
scheme. It must not let a violent faction impose its will by
force.
She now doubts whether it is right and proper to get pregnant again.
If the fires next summer in Australia are not as big as this summer,
don't let that fool you. As long as temperatures keep increasing,
worse fires are inevitable. But ever-increasing temperatures
may not be inevitable yet.
The article argues that it is beneficial in the US to go to college.
That may be true for most people, but there is a substantial risk of a
bad outcome.
The article reports that college graduates earn a lot more, on the
average. On the average, they can pay back their loans. But I
suspect that a considerable fraction of graduates make much less than
the average and can't pay back their loans. Especially those whose
college degrees did not aim narrowly at a particular profession. And
then there are all the people that didn't graduate from college, don't
get the higher incomes, but do get the enormous debts.
And this doesn't take account of the graduates that do get higher
incomes because they are doing evil things such as working on nonfree
software products or on internet dis-services. They may avoid being trapped
in debt, but their lives have been harmed anyway.
This bespeaks the need for changes in the law that will get those
housing units put into use. As a last resort, the city should be
empowered to lodge people in those units without asking the owner's
permission. However, other milder measures should suffice to
achieve the job.
The bullshitter's effort has not worked with most Americans. Most
Americans believe that the assassination of Soleimani made America
less safe. Almost 2/3 believe it made war more likely. Likewise, a
majority say that
the
bully's actions towards Iran were reckless.
However, the minority that supports the bully are surely jumping
up and down and longing to see more blood flow.
Rumor has it that Iran is developing a tiny drone equipped with a
cigarette lighter, which they will use to target the bullshitter's
pants while he is not wearing them.
Since the claim is based on secret intelligence material, I have no
way to judge its validity, but there is
some
other evidence that missiles destroyed the airliner.
Morally the question is not crucial, if it was a mistake. A mistake
is not a crime.
The largest national group of passengers in that airliner were
Iranian. If indeed Iranian soldiers destroyed the plane by mistake,
there is no call for other countries to harass Iran about it. Rather,
I pity whoever made the mistake (or whoever Iran blames for the
mistake).
I was surprised that he suggests that the downing of an airliner by
the USS Vincennes was intentional. I find that theory implausible.
Would Reagan have ordered a crime that would arouse hostility to the
US, and gain nothing? I don't think so. It requires being worse than
merely unscrupulous.
This calls for a heavy tax on housing units that are not anyone's
primary residence. This may be blocked in California by the
tax-limiting initiative adopted in the 1980s.
The bully's officials presented a "briefing" about the "imminent
threat" that supposedly required and justified assassinated General
Soleimani, but when senators started asking probing questions,
the
officials walked out.
I just wish the author had not called this the "age of Trump". The
conman wasn't the leader in creating today's inequality and poverty.
What he did do was escalate the
attack
on the idea of seeking to know and state the truth. But he
doesn't deserve to have us affix his name to the whole practice or to
the age as a whole.
The US government has been claiming for 12 years that Iran was chiefly
responsible for arming Iraqis to fight the US army, with
no
evidence for it.
Iran has backed the Shi'ite militias in Iraq, but they were not the
Iraqis that fought the US army. On the contrary,
those
who did so were Sunnis. They regarded Iran and its Shi'ite
militias as the enemy.
What I said in 2003: invading a country to remove a dictator is
justified if (1) we are sure the people of that country want this sort
of help, and (2) we can be confident the new government will be better
than the existing one. I also said that
I
didn't believe either condition was true in Iraq.
Science fiction has imagined tiny killer drones that can be programmed
to seek and kill any particular person and can be employed by anyone
willing to commit murder. If this happens in the future, we will be
able to thank Dubya, Obama and the bully.
UMass Amherst Removed a Professor
for
Showing a Downfall Hitler Parody Video made by a student. Most
of the students laughed. Later, most of them protested the decision
to remove her.
I think Professor Lowry would have done better by being less contrite.
Climate emergency
is
a bigger danger than nuclear war. Nuclear war could happen; climate
disaster is inevitable unless we go to great lengths to avoid it.
I am gratified that someone else is using the term "Pyrocene", which
is one of the names I recommended for this epoch. However, I now
believe that nothing less than "Obscene" does justice to it.
I'd be even more gratified if people started taking sufficient actions
to prevent this from getting worse.
Holding them liable for the damage of
global heating could be useful
in a world with the political will to shut them down, but it does not
guarantee a good outcome by itself. It is not a substitute for the
political will to curb global heating.
It would be just and right to make the various businesses that are
responsible for global heating
pay the cost of the damages. But I
think the damages will amount to more than the worth of those
companies. The effect of holding them 100% liable would be to seize
the companies. That would leave their shareholders with nothing —
which is arguably more than they deserve — and effectively
nationalize the companies.
That won't guarantee that the companies change their actions. The
government would have the power to order nationalized companies to
change; but that would take firm political will. The government might
be tempted to keep running the companies for short-term profit instead
of shutting down the fossil fuel operations, or to sell off their
assets to other private companies that would operate them. In the
short term, those actions would be advantageous — and fatal only in
the long term.
The dearth of insects will harm the many animals that eat them, and
this will impact plants too.
Scientists recognize that human overpopulation and overconsumption
are among the roots of this developing disaster. It is very important
to have fewer children, or none.
But this is a long-term issue; the other recommended actions can
have much faster effects.
In Massachusetts and some other states, the deportation thug
department is now required to present ground for keeping immigrants in
jail until
their immigration cases are heard.
*Transformation is recognizing the facts:
Australia
is a climate vandal,
led by wreckers. We are [105]ranked the worst of 57 countries on
climate policy.*
The politicians who have for decades opposed efforts to avoid climate
disaster are arsonists and murderers, because their years of work are
directly responsible for these fires.
Maduro reportedly had thugs
keep opposition members of the national
assembly out as the assembly elected its leader for this year.
Instead of Juan Guaidó,
it
elected a supporter of Maduro.
I agree that this by itself would not attract people to take buses.
That would require an increase in frequency and bus lines.
Combining that with gratis use of buses would be a big improvement.
For society as a whole, it could pay for itself in reduced car traffic,
and reduced car pollution. It would require more subsidy to the MBTA,
but surely that can be solved one way or another.
The United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions on
Monday called for an
impartial
probe into the legality of the U.S.
assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.
This demonstrates the tyranny and injustice of arbitrarily labeling an
organization as "terrorist". The US ought not to sink to such
arbitrariness. It should require a trial to do this.
Progress on making a range of foods using bacteria could eliminate
most farms in a few decades.
This
could avoid several sorts of
medical and environmental disasters and permit rewilding of much of the
Earth.
However, patenting this technology could lead to
economic disaster.
[Reference updated on 2025-05-09 because the
old
link was broken.]
Coastal land in Bangladesh
is
now frequently flooded. Farmers have
found clever ways to adapt — but in a few decades, when their land
has become sea, there will be no way to adapt to that.
However, to state practical advice may not be feasible. How long
would it take you formulate and then say the words to express the
advice that writer had in mind? I couldn't do it fast enough for it
to do any good.
When it is urgent, for an immediate physical action, perhaps "Look all
around!" might be a good first thing to say.
Interest rates are so low that businesses are borrowing to pay
dividends on their stock, rather than investing. If interest rates
ever rise, such that they can't pay their enormous debts,
it could
cause a collapse.
The assassination of General Soleimani brought hundreds of thousands
of Iranians to hold rallies of support for him,
and
hostility to the US.
This should not surprise anyone. Many Iranians criticize government
policies and want more freedom, but they will not stand for other
countries to attack their country. The idea that the US might give
them freedom, as it says it has done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and Bolivia, does not appeal.
Maybe he did that because he was scared of being framed. Maybe he was
afraid of being caught with something illegal. If so, it surely was
not a capital offense.
And that is not to mention the species that lived in small areas of
the forest and had not yet been discovered by science.
Conservation of endangered species is mostly a matter of preserving
their habitat. When most of the habitat burns, it takes many years to
make any more.
The bullshitter does not expect to stumble — he expects to manage the
process and adjust the frequency of the dog's wagging each week — but
stumbling is always a possibility in a fight.
I don't clearly understand the text that describes what the resolution
would require, but I have the impression it depends on more honesty
and good will than the bullshitter generally exhibits.
*Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna Friday night unveiled new
legislation that would bar any Pentagon funding for "military force
in or against Iran"
without
congressional approval.*
This seems more solid as a method for preventing war.
Alas, the world today has no Churchill and no Roosevelt — no
leader preparing strategically to convert that tactical defeat into
overall victory against humanity's worst enemy ever. We know what has
to be done, but every powerful country is controlled by the enemy.
Climate scientist Joëlle Gergis fears that the great Australian fires
indicate a tipping point towards inescapable disaster. *Failing to
adequately plan for the known threat of climate change in a country
like Australia should now be considered to be an act of treason.*
Prohibiting alcohol was oppressive and boosted organized crime, just
as prohibition of other drugs is today. As a cure, it is worse than
the disease. But use of more than a little alcohol is still a big
problem. Prohibition is not the answer, but I am in favor of
exploring ways to eliminate the social pressures to drink to excess.
The lunatic in chief used a drone to assassinate an Iranian general,
Qassem Suleimani, who was visiting Iraq. That is an
overt
act of war against Iran, and Iraq too for that matter.
Iran may not need to move a muscle. Recently masses of Iraqis were
protesting against the officials that are friendly with Iran. That
was working against Iran's interests in the region, in a way that
could have strengthened US interests there at no cost to the US.
What the lunatic just did could reverse that dynamic. Suleimani's
death could strengthen the resolve of Iranians and Iraqis that oppose
the US and are allied with Iran.
How did it happen that neoliberal trickle-down came to dominate the
academic field of economics? I suspect that some rich people donated
to economics departments and used their influence to get them filled
with that ideology.
It is important to stop sexual harassment, but surely that does not
require the extreme of prudery. We need to recognize that sometimes a
romance is not harassment.
I presume Tesla's engineers are working hard to design a system that
will never do this. I've seen reports that this is fundamentally
difficult.
But even if they succeed, Tesla's servers could remotely command a car
to crash off a cliff.
Why would they do that? I don't think the staff of Tesla would send
such a command, but they might not know about it. Various
governments, or criminal gangs, might be able to crack their system,
or use the law to demand access, so they could do this.
This fire season is a timely warning. The fires have not killed many
humans, not so far; humans with high tech are very good at helping
each other escape. It won't be so easy to escape the effects a few
decades from now, when it gets much worse.
The teachers in five primary schools in London made a careful effort to
avoid personally transmitting gender-linked rules and expectations to
the students. It
was very effective.
The 1946 Disney film, Song of the South, was recognized as a paean to
plantations and slavery even while it was being made.
It still spreads
apology for slavery.
This will be much easier if we work hard to reduce the human birth
rate. The human population is predicted to peak 9 or 10 billion, but
I expect a big increase in deaths to set in during this century as we
rush towards ecocide. The human population will decrease — sooner
than predicted — in a gruesomely painful way. We can avoid those
deaths with a strong effort to reduce births first. This would also
make space (physical and economic) for those billion people to move
to.
The bully's
demonization of a US government employee for internally
reporting the shakedown of Ukraine has made many government employees
afraid to report corruption. I expect that was an intended result.
Anonymity and other protections for internal whistleblowers are always
needed, because agencies — like companies —
tend
to punish whistleblowers.
This system, called the "Indian Ocean dipole", makes Australian seas
hotter and East African seas colder, or vice versa. Cold seas around
Australia make for drought, and then fire.
Scientists expect such problems to happen in the Atlantic and Pacific
as global heating continues.
An armed security team
stopped
a shooter in a church, making one instance where two "good guys"
with guns were able to do that.
It is not easy in such a situation to hit the attackers and not
bystanders. It requires special training to do that reliably. I have
no objection to allowing churches to authorize security teams, if the
teams are trained enough to do it safely. But this has little effect
on the issue of gun control.
The article describes some of the many system faults that occurred at
the start of the year 2000 (the last year of the second millennium AD).
These were the fraction that were overlooked by the world-wide effort
to find and correct all such problems.
South Dakota yielded to an ACLU lawsuit and
agreed
not to enforce its protest-is-rioting law,
which was intended to protect the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline
from the inconvenience of nonviolent protests.
*Women in medicine are not given the respect they deserve,
from their male
colleagues or patients.* It happens over and over, in every kind of interaction with anyone.
*How Much Does It Cost to
Read
a [gratis] Book on a [gratis] Tablet?* The prison-industrial complex
is gouging prisoners for using tablets
that oppress them with DRM.
It is well known that the best thing to help prisoners avoid crime once
they are released is to encourage them to participate in their community.
What nonfree software does is cut people off from their communities, and
Digital
Restrictions Management makes it even worse.
I am sure the ratio is similar in the US. "Terrorism" is exotic and
sensational, and on rare occasions has many victims, so people see it
as bigger than it really is. By contrast, violence tends to be
covered up and downplayed.
Elif Shafak: Surrendering to rage can be a pleasure, but
not
a wise one.
"Anger…is addictive. It must be diluted and counterbalanced
with more powerful, positive feelings: empathy, compassion, kindness,
sisterhood and love."
I conjecture that Putin wishes to be seen by Russians as heroically
strong, so he is trying to promote admiration for Stalin, then
identify himself with Stalin. He therefore seeks to bury the fact
that Stalin joined Hitler in the conquest of Poland, hiding it under a
pile of distracting bullshit.
*This was the decade
America’s
self-serving myths fell apart.* Myths such as that the US
political and economic system was good for Americans, and was the only
model people of other countries could want to adopt.
Feeling that your life is doomed and useless, and that your activities
serve only to distract yourself from that, is inherently depressing.
When you start to take action that has a chance to make the situation
better, that naturally reduces the depression.
By contrast, her father's self-described attitude is an example of the
narrow focus that puts humanity and the ecosphere in danger. Will
she, some day, lead him to rise above that?
Global heating
affects the water of the ocean. Too high a temperature
is
killing
the kelp forests of Tasmania's coast. This could cause extinction
of the species that shelter in the kelp. That includes many species
that grow much larger, but which start out as small larvae that
shelter in the kelp.
There is no shallow sea region between Tasmania and Antarctica —
no natural place where the kelp could move to. I wonder if it is
possible to make underwater platforms that kelp could grow on. This
would protect the kelp and the other species that depend on it.
They would have to be held up by flotation, as the sea bottom is too
deep for them to rest on. They would therefore circulate around
Antarctica. Perhaps they could use solar power to maintain a stable
latitude.
These might be economically valuable by acting as nurseries for fish
that people would catch. Can anyone tell me whether kelp sustains any
commercial fisheries? Can anyone tell me how to reach people that
might consider this idea?
I don't know whether he was guilty of those charges, but it is clear
that, for the Swedish state, pursuing those charges was simply a way
to help the US get its dirty hands on Assange. If the prosecutors had
really been concerned about justice in that matter, they could have
got Assange to go to Sweden years ago,
simply
by promising Ecuador not to extradite him to the US.
*Fossil fuel production on track for double the safe climate limit.
"We're in a deep hole over the climate crisis and
we need to stop
digging," warn experts.*
How long a time period should we consider? I argue for an answer for
that. In principle we should consider the really long term; but we
cannot make concrete plans for 10,000 years from now.
I think we can use this heuristic: if high-tech civilization with
human rights can survive to reach 2070 with the greenhouse gas level
going down, it should be in a position to cope after that. We must
aim to make sure we reach that level of success.
We need to preserve human rights, or we face a China-like world
forever after.
Beyond that, we should preserve as much of what is good in today's
world as we can. But that has to be secondary to avoiding disaster,
because there will be no way to protect anything through a
full-blown climate disaster.
Those outside the camps are subject to total tracking and control.
Uighurs outside China say they can no longer reach their parents or
their children, nor find out where those are.
Ironically, China's wealth has bought the support of governments
that claim to defend Muslims.
I disagree with the claim made by an interviewee that imprisonment in
Guantanamo is nothing compared with imprisonment in those
concentration camps. The two have a lot in common.
The article reports about Chinese people who defend the oppression and
totalitarian control of Uighurs to be "patriotic" Chinese. This
reminds me of the Americans who defend US wars to be "patriotic"
Americans. Just as Americans are inclined to assume their superiority
to other nations, so are Chinese, who have long called other peoples
"barbarians".
Both peoples need to learn to resist that misguided idea of
"patriotism". A true patriot wants per country to deserve
respect, not extort it through bullying.
It sounds great in theory — supposing that it achieves the intended
results. But I wonder what they are giving those companies today to
achieve the hoped-for improvement years from now. And what they will
do if the improvement achieved is less then hoped.
We should not allow water-guzzling crops to be grown in arid areas.
That practice represents a competition to be the first to grab the
last of a resource being drained. For society as a whole, that is
imprudent, so society as a whole should stop it.
(satire)
"Father Christmas is dead. No US personnel were lost in the
operation, while a large number of Christmas’s elves and reindeer
were killed with him," is how the
bully announced an intervention
against socialist distribution of toys.
Farmers that have experienced John Deere's
subjugatory
tractor software should
not make the same mistake again. Instead of jumping into dependence
on another nonfree program, they should develop free software for mapping
their pastures, and not save their data unencrypted in a cloudy server.
US labor, housing and business policies have made it impossible for
most working Americans to buy a home, and compel them to live many to
a house, if they are not on the street.
Changing these policies
can fix that.
This is no coincidence: the right-wing christianitist ideology that
bans abortion generally treats women as inferior, and it is
inclined to tell poor people that their poverty is a
divine
punishment which they deserve.
Discussing right to repair as a matter of costs is missing the most
important part of the issue: our control over technology. Apple computers
today don't permit replacing the nonfree software. If someone gave me one, my
quandary would be whether it is less wrong to sell it to a would-be user or
give it away for recycling. To keep it and use it would not be an option.
Thus, a driverless car controlled by a reinforcement learning system
could be mis-trained to make it drive off the side of the road (which
could be a cliff edge) when it sees a particular object on the other
side of the road.
Each note starts with a date and a brief topic in parentheses. That
text is also a link to that note.
For instance, if the note
starts with "20 July 2003 (Iraq)" then you can link to it with
"https://www.stallman.org/notes/may-aug-03.html#20 July 2003 (Iraq)".
