| Time |
Event |
| 12:18p |
Gang activity, El Salvador
*El Salvador crackdown breaks the gangs — at
huge cost
to human rights.*
|
| 12:18p |
Journalistic repression, Bangladesh
*Bangladesh shuts down
main opposition newspaper.*
The world has been suffering from a rash of repression in the past few
years.
|
| 12:18p |
|
| 12:18p |
Antisemitism about Lehman Brothers
A play about the history and
failure of the Lehman Brothers bank
harps on their Jewish religion in a way that fuels antisemitism.
The fundamental falsehood which introduces the antisemitism into this
story is the idea that grasping for money and disregarding the harm you
do is specifically a Jewish practice. If we look around today, we
find many billionaires who crush large numbers of people to get more
money. In the US, a fraction are Jews, but most are Christians.
For a while in medieval Europe, bankers were mainly Jews — simply
because Christian churches called it a sin to led money at interest.
European rulers wanted bankers, and with Christians self-excluded,
only Jews could take up the trade. But churches dropped that rule a
few hundred years ago. The association between banking and Jews is a
thing of the past.
|
| 12:18p |
TV and literature, monitizing stunts
The endless round of
sequels, offshoots, remakes
and "modernizations"
is a system for magecorporations to keep on extracting money with old
"properties" whose authors died many years ago.
|
| 12:18p |
Ohio toxic train wreck, blame
The vinyl chloride spill from Norfolk Southern's preventable train
wreck is part of the consequences of our massive
use of plastic.
Its costs — in lives and hundreds of millions of dollars -- are part
of the cost of plastic, which the plastic manufacturers don't have to pay.
Instead, we all pay.
|
| 12:18p |
|
| 12:18p |
Surveillance as desperation
Someone's sweetheart was killed by robbers while driving a gig taxi.
To prevent such things from happening again, perse calls for imposing
surveillance on millions of customers,
in case one might be a thief.
Of course we would like to stop these robberies, but massive
surveillance is itself a bigger injustice.
|
| 12:18p |
Inflation and class division
Wage increases account for 18% of Australia's inflation. Increases in
business profits
account for 69% of it.
In Australia as in the US and Britain, the central bank is run by
neoliberals who refuse to recognize these facts.
|
| 12:18p |
Public funding justice
*Moderna's "Deadly" Profits Show Public Funding
Must Have Strings Attached.*
The US used to attach strings to research funding -- all discoveries
made by university research done with government funding had to be
made available for the government to use as it saw fit. This was
eliminated by the Bayh-Dole bill, which sought to convince universities
to be aggressive about licensing whatever they can get control over.
That's why nowadays writing software for a university is usually
almost as bad as working writing software for a company.
|
| 12:18p |
Official censorship, coverups
India had an opposition politician arrested for "insulting the prime
minister" (Modi). The "insult" was
a quip that suggested
that Modi and
the coal magnate Gautam Adani were somehow the same person.
Prosecuting people for insulting officials is an attack on human
rights, whether in India, in France, or any other country. Modi, je
te vois!
|
| 12:18p |
Israeli schemes, US ambassador
*Former US
ambassador accuses Israel
of "creeping annexation" of the
West Bank.*
Plus breaking a former agreement with the US.
More
about this.
|
| 12:18p |
Mass extinction, a study
An ecosystem can collapse abruptly when the last species fulfilling
some crucial role disappears from it. This is
likely to happen
in
many places during this century.
|
| 12:18p |
Public funds abuse, Moderna
The US government accepted
a lump sum payment
from Moderna for use
of US-government-funded technology.
That's a tiny fraction of Moderna's
increased price for the Covid-19 vaccine.
For the government to accept this was dereliction of duty. The US
government had the duty to make Moderna
allow vaccine production
world-wide,
and it didn't try.
|
| 12:18p |
|
| 12:18p |
|
| 12:18p |
|
| 12:48p |
Caste system digs comedians
Indian Dalits are becoming successful in India as
comedians in the teeth
of caste prejudice.
I watched a few minutes of Manaal Patil's show on invidio.us (a proxy
for Youtube, which I cannot access directly because it requires users
to run nonfree software). He made me laugh. I would have watched the
rest but I have to work.
|
| 12:48p |
TV and literature, monetizing stunts
The endless round of
sequels, offshoots, remakes
and "modernizations"
is a system for magecorporations to keep on extracting money with old
"properties" whose authors died many years ago.
|