| Time |
Event |
| 7:33p |
Democrat ads for extremist republicans
*Democratic ads boosted extremists in Republican primaries. Was that
wise?*
It was a very risky bet. For such a bet to be wise, you need to be
very sure of the dynamics of the situation. I don't think any
political group can validly be that confident. |
| 7:33p |
New Zealand poverty
Poor children wore body cameras in New Zealand to contribute to a picture
of what life in poverty is like.
A study like this can have good results, but we need to take steps
to prevent poor people from being lured, tricked or forced to contribute
to massive surveillance. |
| 7:33p |
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| 7:33p |
Private jets
*It's time to ban private jets — or at least tax them to the ground.*
I favor taxing them heavily, because sufficient tax should make them
insignificant as a contribution to global heating, and we can use the
money. Prohibiting private jets as tax deductions would also help greatly. |
| 7:33p |
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| 7:33p |
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| 7:33p |
Increasing taxes and cutting support
Republicans have been increasing income taxes and cutting support for
working people for 40 years, but they are not satisfied, so they are
proposing extreme ideas for how to do even worse. Ron Johnson
proposes to make Social Security and Medicare payments a year-by-year
decision.
People like Ron Johnson and Rick Scott deserve to be sentenced to live
on $100 a week, and forbidden to receive gifts except through begging
from strangers. |
| 7:33p |
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| 7:33p |
Campaign to limit facial recognition stalled
The campaign to limit use of facial recognition has stalled, and some
regulations are being reversed, or expiring.
What makes facial recognition so dangerous is its capacity to track
everyone's movements. The only legitimate cases for using it are
in systems that cannot be used to track everyone's movements.
To use it for "lead generation" is exactly the danger. |
| 7:33p |
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| 7:33p |
Recapturing Kherson
Military challenges Ukraine faces in recapturing Kherson.
I believe it is possible. The Putin forces soldiers have no reason to
fight to the death, if Ukraine shows they will be safe if they
surrender. |
| 7:33p |
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| 7:33p |
Forgiving wrongs
Some people can forgive great wrongs; others simply can't. It's not a matter of choice.
This suggests to me that society's treatment of criminals should not
be based on whether their specific victims can forgive the crimes.
Society needs to pardon the criminals eventually, if that helps make
society whole, even if the victims can't. |
| 7:33p |
Richard Glossip
61 Oklahoma legislators called on the state to reinvestigate whether
Richard Glossip is really guilty. They believe there is no evidence
that he committed the murder he is scheduled to be executed for. |
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| 7:33p |
Democrats lose effort to cap insulin at $35
*Democrats lose effort to cap insulin at $35 for most Americans before passage
of Senate reconciliation bill.* |
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| 7:33p |
New business-supremacy treaty
Activists in 13 countries that propose to negotiate a new
business-supremacy treaty warn that it may become another iteration of
the Trance Pacific Partnership,
also known as the Pacific Partnership Trance.
The new treaty has a name, IPEF, and a likely bad result
because of which countries are involved. |
| 7:33p |
Texas prosecution threats
Texas threatens to prosecute any Texas organization that funds travel
out of Texas for an abortion, and to sue any individual who provides
such funds.
This is terrorism. Fanatical right-with Christian Taliban terrorism. |
| 7:47p |
Fake news about leftist Kenyan politician
* Special [UK Foreign Office] unit spread fake news about leftist
[Kenyan] politician, Oginga Odinga, seen as threat to British
interests in 1960s.* |
| 9:33p |
At least 68 migrants arrived in NYC over the weekend on buses sent by Texas Gov. Abbott
Texas governor Abbott is having state officials force border-crossers
onto buses to New York City,
even though they wanted to go elsewhere.
It would be a kindness to offer them rides to New York City, if they
had the choice to decline the offer without being punished.
Misrepresenting this mistreatment as such a kindness is a big lie,
a typical Republican act. |
| 9:33p |
China drills show Beijing is developing the ability to strangle Taiwan, experts say
China's missile interdiction of seas near Taiwan was such a large exercise
that it was
probably planned for months.
Pelosi's visit was a convenient excuse, an opportunity to put the blame
on her.
The great danger is that it shows that China can cut off Taiwan's
maritime trade just by firing missiles. To prevent that requires some
way of making it cost China more than it costs Taiwan. |
| 9:33p |
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| 9:33p |
The coach of a college football team has been forced to resign
The coach of a college football team has been forced to resign after
he started reading aloud the text on a distracted student's iBad, and
in the
process recited some taboo word.
The word is so taboo that CNN dares not say what it was — and indeed,
it hardly matters which taboo word it was. I presume it was a slur of
some sort.
The ethical issue here is whether to treat such slurs as insults,
wrong to use as insults because that unjustifiably nasty, or treat
them as taboos. Do people deserve punishment for inadvertently
breaching taboos?
The coach believes that even though the words he spoke were not his
words, his violation of the taboo was such a grave sin that he
deserves to be shunned and lose his job for quoting them carelessly.
By doing that, he lets down other future people condemned for
violating taboos. If he had to resign, he should have done so
without admitting guilt.
If you step on a flagstone that has a taboo word inscribed on it,
should you be shunned? How about if you are photographed near a sign
(in a non-English-speaking country perhaps) which has a taboo word on
it? Should you be fired for that? Is "what people might think" more
important than what really happened?
Using slurs to insult someone is nasty and wrong. But we ought to
know better than to punish people for violating taboos. To do so
indicates a lack of moral reflection. |
| 9:48p |
What does the US-China row mean for climate change?
China is going all out to intimidate US support for Taiwan, even "breaking off" discussions on curbing
global heating.
Not that China was cooperating very much anyway: it continues to build new coal-fired generating plants, and its target for (the weak goal of) "net zero"
is 2060.
China has recently experienced disastrous floods and faces the danger of fatal weather in the
North China Plain.
China's rulers are arrogant but not crazy. The only thing that can convince them to try hard to decarbonize is awareness of what will happen if they don't.
The US is also doing far too little to decarbonize, though the
just-passed climate, welfare and tax law is a step forward. |
| 10:32p |
Nebraska teen and her mother charged for aborting and burying fetus
*Nebraska teen and her mother charged for
aborting and burying fetus.*
Some of the charges are about doing things with a "dead body". It is
absurd to consider a fetus a dead body, but antiabortionists push for
anything that classifies a fetus as a human being for any specific
purpose in any specific circumstance, regarding that as a step closer
to classifying abortion as murder.
Roe v Wade did not legalize abortion after 6 months except with
certain specific grounds. I wonder if any of those grounds applied
here — and also why she did not have an abortion earlier. |
| 10:32p |
The Other Victims of US Burns Pits Were the Iraqi and Afghan People
The US military uses a highly polluting method (burn pits) to dispose
of most kinds of
inconvenient waste in deployment bases.
It causes avoidable injury to US solders, and also to the local
civilians. But it's cheap for the Pentagon, supposing it doesn't bear
the cost of treating those injuries. Now it will have to pay to treat
the US veterans, but not the local civilians.
Don't forget about the diseases caused to both US soldiers and local civilians
by
Depleted Uranium. |
| 10:32p |
No, The Market Won't Sort It Out
Worshipers of the Invisible Hand have seriously proposed that people
should become corporations and sell shares in
themselves to raise
funds to invest in their education.
That's effectively a way of selling a fraction of yourself into
slavery. A few may become successful, while many become controlled by
their shareholders. The rich who own the shares will dominate the
decisions about the laws to regulate this system.
The book, The Unincorporated Man by Kollin and Kollin, describes a
future world in which this has happened. The people in that world are
used to the system and defend it, but at the end we see that forces
everyone to be partly owned by whoever buys stock in them.
Please do not get it from
Amazon! |
| 10:32p |
Police racial bias played role in UK Covid fines regime, says report
Investigation finds probable racism in how British thugs applied the rules
for
fines for violating Covid rules.
They were supposed to apply their discretion to make fines a last resort;
now ever, they were much quicker to fine black.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important.
That article is one of the exceptions. |
| 10:32p |
Billionaires are funding a massive treasure hunt in Greenland as ice vanishes
As Greenland's ice melts and exposes some areas of land, people
are
prospecting for rare metals.
There are no established ecosystems on those areas, but mining can
spread pollution in many ways. It could pollute the land so that
plants can't grow there; it can pollute the nearby seas. |
| 10:32p |
Brazilians fear return to dictatorship as ‘deranged’ Bolsonaro trails in polls
*Brazilians fear return to dictatorship as
"deranged" Bolsonaro trails in
polls.*
Like the wrecker in the US, Bolsonaro has talked about refusing to
hand
over power peacefully.
People fear he will try to organize mobs on Brazil's
independence day to overthrow democracy, perhaps arranging a false flag
attack on them as an excuse. |
