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Event |
| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
Promotion of plastic recycling
The idea of recycling most plastic that is discarded has been promoted
for decades by plastic manufacturers to convince us to ignore waste
plastic that winds up in rivers, soil, and the ocean.
The next step in this campaign is to cite "advanced recycling",
which is still hypothetical.
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| 4:04a |
Collapse of Earth's ecosystems
Mass extinctions come from collapse of Earth's ecosystems and
geological systems. They shift into a new configuration in which most
species don't fit, and the result is global disaster.
The accelerated heating and local disasters we have recently seen
suggest we are coming closer to such a global disaster. Enormous
systems, including the Arctic sea ice, the circulation of the Southern
Ocean, and rainfall in the Amazon Forest, are showing large changes.
Earth's governments, most of them in thrall to selfish billionaires,
have been nearly useless for trying to save Earth's life.
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
Australian law invalidated
An Australian court has invalidated the law that authorized a minister
to cancel the citizenship of people convicted of terrorism.
A free country can punish people for crimes, but exile should never be
used as a punishment.
The right-wing law previously invalidated, that allowed cancellation
of citizenship for a dual citizen based purely on suspicion, was even
more unjust than this one. It was unacceptable in two different ways:
punishment using exile, and punishment without proving a crime.
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
DeMentis' claims on "Students for Justice in Palestine"
DeMentis claims that chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine
have "linked themselves to HAMAS" and therefore are promoting terrorism.
He said that this justifies prohibiting them.
If they have indeed done so, that conclusion could follow.
They might also be committing a crime by supporting HAMAS.
But do they really do that?
The quotations from Students for Justice in Palestine seem to be
ambiguously on the borderline. The group called HAMAS's terrorist
acts "part of the resistance", which asserts legitimacy for them.
That is a moral reason to refuse to support that group.
But the information in this article does not show the group as saying
it is is "part of HAMAS".
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
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| 4:04a |
Outsourcing loses again
Outsourcing loses again! Air Canada outsources wheelchair services,
at least in Las Vegas, so it told a disabled passenger he had to drag himself
off the plane without one.
Fortunately his wife knew how to carry his legs while he used his arms.
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| 4:04a |
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| 12:33p |
Satire: Gazan targets: medical personnel
(satire) *Israel Warns Gaza
Still Harboring
Hundreds Of Doctors.*
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| 12:33p |
Israel–Gaza crisis
Robert Reich
refutes several simplistic, foolish and very wrong things
people have said to him about the fighting in Gaza.
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| 12:33p |
Too much war info?
Advice on how to
protect yourself
from the damaging influence of images of war and injury.
The suggestions in the article seem good to me, but my basic advice is
to view articles about the war in Gaza as text only, using a
non-graphical browser. That way you can block all video and images of the violence.
The text is sufficient for finding out what has happened, and it won't
hammer your psyche as images would.
Please don't speak of "consuming" news.
Here's why not. |
| 12:33p |
The UN on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
War crimes that HAMAS and Israel seem to have committed,
according to the UN.
HAMAS, as a terrorist organization, makes no effort to disguise
its war crimes as anything but war crimes. That makes it easy
to be certain that that's what they are.
Israel presents supposed excuses which surely can't be valid, but the
UN won't state the conclusion as a certainty without an investigation.
UNRWA, which provides humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees in Gaza
and the West Bank, says that a cease fire is essential to save the
civilians there, who are all in danger from
the siege
imposed by Israel.
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| 12:33p |
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| 12:33p |
Counter-terrorism: UN- vs govt-strategy
*Australia’s new UN counter-terror chief fears
world repeating ‘same
mistakes’
of the past in Israel-Gaza conflict: … [namely, trying
to] counter terrorism with military might.*
This is more wisdom than we expect to find in
government responses to terrorism.
The usual mistakes come out of political pressure, the
demand to "strike the enemy" even if it is counterproductive to do so.
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| 12:33p |
Gaza war pause wanted
Arguing that Gaza's civilians urgently need
a cessation of fighting,
regardless of what it is called and how it is described.
The difference between a "cease fire" and a "humanitarian pause (in
fighting)" may not be the deep gulf that it appears.
Presumably a "cease fire" is intended to be permanent while a "pause"
is not. But there have been dozens of ceasefires between Israel and
HAMAS in Gaza, and each one did end. HAMAS broke some of them, and
Israel broke others. Conversely, a cease fire which wasn't explicitly
designated as permanent could nonetheless be extended, as the article
points out.
I do not mean to say that the difference is nothing at all. If a
"pause" is agreed to last for a week (say), the sides would probably
resume fighting after that week. By contrast, a cease fire with no
scheduled end might last for months — many of them did in the past.
So the details of a truce do matter, but not in an all-or-nothing way.
The crucial point is that in practice there is no way Israel could
eliminate HAMAS from Gaza, except by eliminating Palestinians from
Gaza — and that would be an enormous war crime that nothing could
excuse. Israel cannot achieve the "victory" it says it is aiming for.
As for HAMAS's war crimes on Oct 7,
they were based on surprise. It lacks the power to commit more crimes
now. Therefore, Israel has no opportunity to prevent further HAMAS
war crimes by fighting HAMAS now. It can kill some HAMAS fighters for
revenge, but only by killing far more Palestinian civilians. The
sooner Israel stops its bombardment and siege, the less its war crimes will be.
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