| Time |
Event |
| 12:17a |
Poverty is deadly
*The
fourth leading cause of death
in the US? Cumulative poverty.* Cumulative poverty means having spent years of your life being poor.
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| 12:17a |
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| 12:17a |
Voter-ID law denies very many
In Britain,
at least 14,000
people were denied the right to vote by the Tories' new voter-ID law.
They tended to be from demographic groups one might expect not to vote
for Tories.
The actual number denied the right to vote could be in the hundreds of
thousands, as many who did not vote said it was because of the voter ID.
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| 12:17a |
Ecosystem tipping-point mastery
* Amazon rainforest and [1/5 of] other ecosystems
could collapse "very soon",
researchers warn.*
Perhaps even in a few decades.
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| 12:17a |
Economic V physical health
Greenpeace says to
reject the planet roasters'
false choice between "the economy" and our health.
An additional level of falsehood is that when they say "the economy"
they mean rich people's wealth — not particularly helpful for us.
For non-rich people to have better lives, we must reject the
rich people's trickle-down deals.
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| 12:17a |
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| 12:17a |
Student debt load
Millions of Americans have student debt that, barring a miracle, they
can't possibly ever pay off.
Biden paused loan payments, but his surrender to Republican blackmail includes restarting payments.
Many Americans are too poor ever to pay.
Republicans want to dump additional debt on them to cancel out the benefit
they received from the pause in payments.
The miracle of plutocracy's media influence is visible in the fact that
the millions of victims of this don't all vote for progressives.
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| 12:17a |
Extinction policies review
*The Biden administration … proposed revisions to Trump-era
regulations that severely weakened protections for our nation's most imperiled animals and plants,
keeping in place some of the most
significant rollbacks
to the Endangered Species Act in the law's 50-year history.*
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| 12:17a |
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| 12:17a |
LA ghetto polluter charged
In Watts, a ghetto in Los Angeles, there is a high school, and near it
a metal recycling plant which emits a high level of pollution,
including
brain-stunting lead.
That plant has now been charged with felonies for endangering the students.
As a side issue, I criticize the article for referring to high school
students as "children" — they'd have to be prodigies to be in high
school that young. Of course, that has no effect on the issue of emitting dangerous pollution.
|
| 12:17a |
Aggressor-pays system
Ukraine calls for setting up a system whereby the assets of a country that launches
a war of conquest
will be seized and used to fix the damage.
It is fair to take Russia's assets, and those of Putin's cronies, and
put them into rebuilding Ukraine. Let's do it. But we should not
suppose that other dictators who in the future start wars of conquest
will be vulnerable to the same tactic. Once they have seen this
response to Putin, they will take care not to store their assets in
countries that might not be on their side in a war.
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| 12:17a |
(Satire) Billionaires team-up as rescuers
(satire) *Coast Guard Sends
Another Submersible Full
Of Billionaires After The First One.*
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| 3:48a |
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| 3:48a |
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| 3:48a |
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| 3:48a |
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| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
London thug convicted for spraying man with pepper spray
A London thug has been convicted for spraying a kind of pepper spray at
a man who was climbing down a drain pipe on a tall building.
By doing so the thug endangered the man's life. Fortunately for him,
he did not actually fall.
The thug suspected the man of having committed robbery. It would have
been reasonable for the thugs to have arrested him when he got down,
but not to risk killing him. |
| 9:48a |
Snoop TV
For "smart", read "snoop". It is now advertised as a feature
that a "smart TV" watches you. Sky expects customers to pay extra
to be able to use the video themselves.
If I could pay extra to make sure nobody could watch me through it,
that wouldn't convince me to tolerate that device in my house.
(After all, it runs nonfree software and talks to the internet.)
But it would eliminate one of my objections to it. |
| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
Leaded gas in car racing
Some car racing in the US still uses leaded gas.
Researchers have found that it does significant harm to children
growing up near those race tracks. |
| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
Eradicating invasive predators and pests in Australian desert
Establishing fenced enclosures in the Australian desert, and
eradicating invasive predators and pests, enables native species
to grow again.
I support protecting the precolonization ecosystems this way. I
question, though, whether it is correct to call this "rewilding". The
indigenous people have been managing these ecosystems for 40,000
years, so "wild" is not an accurate term to describe what they were
during that time. |
| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
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| 9:48a |
Madison Square Garden using facial recognition
Madison Square Garden is using facial recognition on everyone who
enters, to keep out the lawyers representing plaintiffs that are suing
it.
Laws to restrict use of facial recognition on the public should make sure
to prevent this. |
| 9:48a |
China demanded Poland censor art exhibition
China has demanded Poland censor an art exhibition which condemns
actions by China and Chairman Xi.
China carries out many parallel efforts to silence criticism and
critics in other countries. It uses its economic power to pressure
governments to help. We cannot take for granted that Poland will
stand up to this pressure. |
| 9:48a |
Mining company threatened reporters for meeting with indigenous protesters
The mining company Adani threatened reporters who visited its coal
mine site with legal action for meeting with indigenous protesters
protesting on the site, and demanded that they not publish any photos
they took there.
Companies that try to bully reporters should be shut down by the state.
This particular company is participating in mass murder.
Pollution from coal mines already kills thousands. Global heating disaster
will kill at least hundreds of millions, perhaps billions.
My main criticism of the Australian government is that it allows new coal mines
to be opened. How much coal mine profit is your life worth? |
| 9:48a |
Accused "hijackers" on cargo ship
Accused "hijackers" on a cargo ship headed for Italy were simply
refugees trying to get to Europe,
say the prosecutors who were supposed to put them on trial as "pirates". |
| 9:48a |
Picasso tried to cancel Françoise Gilot's career
When artist Françoise Gilot broke up with Pablo Picasso, he went to
great lengths to cancel her artistic career.
In France, her career never escaped the damage that he did.
Picasso famously made many paintings of his wives and lovers. I
wonder if that was a way of marking them as his possessions.
Picasso's arrogant treatment of women does not cancel his artistic
genius; equally, his artistic genius does not cancel his arrogant
treatment of women. They are two parts of reality, each as real as
the other. |
| 9:48a |
Urgent: Republican plan to cut Social Security and Medicare
US citizens: call on Democrats in Congress to refuse to lend legitimacy
to the Republican's plan for a commission to cut Social Security and
Medicare. |
| 10:17a |
Death Star bill passes, TX
Texas has
passed a law to nullify all local regulations
covering broad
areas including working conditions, farming, and banking.
In particular, this will eliminate the regulations in some cities
requiring employers to give construction workers occasional breaks to
drink water, to protect them from death from the extreme heat.
Republicans are determined
to ensure that hard labor is no safer in one Texas town than in another. |
| 10:17a |
Putin forces infighting
Prigozhin seems to claim to be launching some sort of coup or civil war
in Russia,
but at the same time saying
it is not a coup.
He says that there was
no rational reason
for Putin to attack Ukraine.
Any or all of what he claims about events could be bogus. He may be
trying to seize power from Putin. Or it may be a stunt, planned with
Putin. I can't come up with a rational explanation of it. But it
seems unlikely to me that there will be room for both of them in Russia after this.
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| 10:17a |
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| 10:17a |
Climate Change Committee stark, UK
*The government should halt all new roads unless there are exceptional
circumstances, the [UK] government's
climate advisers are likely to say
next week.*
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| 10:17a |
Ocean heating sudden
*The sudden
warming of Britain’s seas
will tear through ocean life like a wildfire.*
This is going to happen around the world. Some marine species will be
able to move — others will not. The result will be chaos. And then
ocean acidification will wipe out entire classes, even phyla.
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| 10:17a |
Malaysia seeks the joker
*Malaysia to ask Interpol for help to
track down comedian
over MH370 joke.*
Many governments repress political dissidents, usually by falsifying
nonpolitical charges against them. For instance, India does this.
So does Malaysia.
However, overtly attacking foreign comedians is an extreme form of
censorship.
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