| Time |
Event |
| 10:02a |
Price-gouging corporations
Robert Reich: *The Democrats have a powerful campaign issue:
price-gouging corporations.*
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| 10:02a |
Title 42 replaced with harsher policy
Biden has replaced Title 42, the policy of sending asylum seekers directly
back to Mexico, with a harsher policy.
The new policy makes them automatically ineligible for asylum
for 5 years, simply for trying to reach US territory to apply
for asylum. |
| 10:02a |
Sanctuary city against law criminalizing being trans
Kansas City, Missouri, declared Itself a sanctuary city regarding
state laws that criminalize being trans.
City officials are told to spend effectively no time on enforcing
such laws. |
| 10:02a |
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| 10:02a |
US fossil fuel development
Biden broke a commitment that the US would stop financing fossil fuel
development in other countries.
It is silly to claim that Indonesia will refine fuel in the expanded
Balikpapan refinery instead of refining fuel elsewhere and importing
the results. The owners of the other refineries will try to sell
their output somewhere else. |
| 10:02a |
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| 10:02a |
Speech given in Greenlandic
A member of the Danish parliament that represents Greenland gave a
speech in Parliament in Greenlandic, which no one else there
understood. Then she refused to tell the rest of parliament what the
speech meant.
To speak to a body of people in a language almost none of them
understand is disrespectful. When they ask you to repeat your point
in their language, which you do speak, it indicates they do wish to
pay attention to your point. To refuse them only vents contempt.
If you pretend that asking you what you said represents an attempt to
gag you, that is perverse and unjust.
The other parliamentarians might respond, "While you speak to us in a
language we can't understand, we may as well use the time to catch up
on documents we are supposed to read." |
| 10:02a |
Portuguese euthanasia law
The new Portuguese euthanasia law seems to have the same flaw as most
such laws.
It is limited to people whose illness is terminal, which means their
suffering is sure to end in a matter of months anyway. If your
suffering could continue for years, this law refuses to help you.
What perversity!
It also excludes foreigners. |
| 10:02a |
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| 10:02a |
Petrochemical "sustainability council"
Petrochemical industry in Louisiana have set up a "sustainability council"
to help sustain their business model.
They increase profits by skimping on the safety of people living in the
region. |
| 10:02a |
Screen addicted children
*Worried Your Child is Already a Screen Addict? There’s Hope!!!*
The "pervasive design" addictive features that the article naively
attributes to "screens" are implemented by software: partly in the
operating system and partly in some apps. They can be designed to do
nasty things because they are non-free software:
their code is controlled by some "owner", in this case a powerful
company, rather than by the users. If they were free programs, the
user community could reprogram them so as to be less addictive.
We must free ourselves from the idea that giant companies have the "right"
to require users' connection to their "services" to go through software
under their control. We should have the right to use our free software
to do that. |
| 10:02a |
Chat control censorship
Legal advice received by the European Commission suggests that the
"chat control" censorship plan is illegal.
The plan assumes that an encrypted communication service _includes_
nonfree software to run on your machine to send and receive messages.
That implies that the service can make that software snoop on your
communications before it encrypts them.
That design, where the service imposes specific software on users,
is fundamentally unjust and insecure, precisely because the service
imposes nonfree software on users and users can never rationally trust
such software.
In effect, the "chat control" plan demonstrates that we were right. A
service that makes users run nonfree software to talk with it is
inherently insecure and untrustworthy. |
| 10:02a |
Love of paradoxes
Some people love paradoxes and seek opportunities to claim that they
are the whole of reality. For instance, it turns out that color
perception is partially socially constructed. One writer leaps from
that to the claim that color perceptions are arbitrary mental constructs
which have nothing to do with reality.
Plenty of aspects of human perception, thought, and behavior are
partially socially constructed, but that doesn't mean they are arbitrary
or that they are not constrained by reality. |
| 10:02a |
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| 10:02a |
Urgent: Raise the debt ceiling
US citizens: if your congresscritter is a Republican phone per
and call on per to sign a discharge petition for a bill to
raise the debt ceiling and not do anything else.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word! |
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