| Time |
Event |
| 6:17a |
How weapons firms influence the Ukraine debate
Almost all the US "think tanks" that comment on questions involving
actual or possible war receive a lot of funds from
military contractors
including arms manufacturers.
Their unstated motto seems to be, "Think `tanks'."
We should not allow arms companies to have so much influence on how we
use arms. There is an advantage in giving Ukraine plentiful arms; if
they did not cost anything, why not give it a thousand tanks, a
thousand fighter planes and a million missiles? But they do have a
cost, and we need to consider the trade-offs.
What the invasion of Ukraine shows Americans is that the US needs to
be prepared to greatly increase production of arms and supplies if the
US is involved in a major war. The system we have is adequate only for
the kind of war that the government starts quietly, the kind that
makes the news only when things don't go according to plan.
|
| 6:17a |
Labour mayors say party undemocratic for blocking Driscoll
More about Jamie Driscoll, the Corbyn supporter that Starmer blocked
from running again for mayor of the (newly expanded)
Newcastle region.
|
| 6:17a |
English pubs forced to close after owners demand full rent
Billionaire landlords are forcing English pubs to close by requiring
them to pay 100% of the rent that they were allowed to
put off during
the Covid crisis.
|
| 6:17a |
Traffic cop sues city over ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ cards
The New York City thug department operates a corrupt system of traffic
enforcement, where friends and relatives of thugs get "courtesy cards"
and thugs on traffic duty are told not to give tickets to those people
no matter what they do.
One cop, who has a sense of integrity and may qualify to be called
a police officer, rejected this system of corruption and gave
tickets to privileged people just as he would to anyone else.
He was punished for this and now s suing to put an end to the system.
He points out that one of the effects of this corruption is systemic
racism.
|
| 7:17a |
UK thugs falsely convicted 6 men of a bombing in Birmingham
UK thugs falsely convicted 6 men of a bombing in Birmingham,
they fiercely defended that decision against all the
evidence showing
it was false.
*According to Irish cabinet papers from 1989, the British
Home Office had indicated that its main concerns about the
potential overturning of convictions were "to avoid giving scandal” and
“the credibility problems for police evidence in court hearings."*
Such determination never to admit that verdicts can be
wrong occurs
in the US too.
|
| 8:33a |
|
| 8:33a |
Unregulated AI doomsday scenarios
Recommendation engines that spread disinformation can be thought of as
humanity's
first major encounter with AI.
Humanity is losing.
It is pertinent that these AIs are not autonomous; they do not have
agency. They do not have emotions or goals of their own. They work
under the control of very rich groups of people and those groups
decide the goals they work for.
The plutocrats that mostly rule the US have a simple plan for what to
do with people who can't ever find a job that can keep one alive:
neglect them and let the consequences of poverty do away with most of
them.
|
| 8:33a |
Climate risk to tourism, Med
Global heating will ruin the Mediterranean region
as a destination to
visit in the summer,
long before the current shore areas have been
inundated due to sea-level rise.
Important cities (and archeological sites) will be inundated
along with the beaches.
|
| 8:33a |
Community heals racist vandalism, UK
300 volunteers
joined in repairing a statue
of a black woman at the beach which was vandalized with spray paint.
|
| 8:33a |
|
| 8:48a |
Urgent: Support proposed emission standards for cars
US citizens:
call on the EPA
to make its new emission standards for cars quite strict.
|
| 9:32a |
Another deadly health-risk found in FL sargassum
People cleaning Atlantic Florida beaches risk infection with a
deadly
strain of Vibrio bacteria.
It arrives on clumps of dead seaweed, and
people catch it from that, but it colonizes plastic in the ocean and
people catch it from that too.
|
| 9:32a |
Ethnic disparity study, UK
Various minority groups in England and Wales got a
disproportionate
fractions of the fines
for breaking Covid-19 lockdown rules.
This study strongly suggests that many thugs acted based on bias, but
it cannot conclusively prove that, because it does not control for
other variables — such as the actions of people who were fined.
For instance, the study found that poor people got a high proportion
of the fines. Was this because they had to travel by walking and been
seen by thugs, while wealthier people went by car? That would be
systemic bias rather than individual prejudice.
Contrast this with the Massachusetts courts' study that showed blacks
tended to get bigger sentences than whites
for comparable crimes in comparable circumstances.
By controlling for the other things that can vary between groups, it
pretty much proved that bias was at work in the legal system itself.
That showed that the legal system is inescapably to blame for the injustice.
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