| Time |
Event |
| 12:24a |
Republican austerity plan unveiled, USA
Republicans
propose to prohibit states
from subsidizing school lunch.
[ironic truth]
They believe this wastes money which could be better spent on making billionaires richer.
[/ironic truth]
|
| 12:25a |
Parks, sidewalks vs homeless camps, FL
DeMentis has obtained
a
law in Florida prohibiting sleeping in parks and on sidewalks. It is part of the
Republican campaign of persecuting the homeless.
|
| 12:25a |
River-to-sea chanting arrest, UK
The UK government is blatantly disrespecting freedom of speech as it
arrests someone
for singing a song
that calls for eliminating Israel.
I don't agree with the political position of that song, but people have a right to sing it.
|
| 12:25a |
Labour as despicable as Starmer, UK
*Labour has become a
hostile
environment for anyone believing in the very policies Starmer relied upon to secure the
leadership.*
|
| 12:25a |
UK Earl, his boarding school devastating
A student in an English boarding school describes the persistent
cruelty that crushed the
humanity out of the students.
Students at such schools included elite children, and many became political or business leaders,
and the cruelty they are taught manifested itself in many government policies.
|
| 10:24p |
Thugs convicted on torturing black men
Several white Mississippi thugs have been convicted of torturing two blacks,
apparently out of sheer hatred and are receiving long prison
sentences. One has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.)
I join in disgust for the thugs who committed this crime, the whites
referred to as "white" in that article. But the article does not
suggest reserving that lower-case form for torturers and other violent
bigots. On the contrary, it practices simple race-based bigotry, similar in its root to
the bigotry that underlay the thugs' crime of torture.
I do not make a false equivalence here. Symbolic verbal bigotry is
far less as an evil than physical torture. Torture is correctly
punished as a crime, while verbal bigotry, in itself, is punished only
by our expressions of disapproval. But said verbal bigotry and that
particular act of torture are both instances of bigotry, and bigotry
is always wrong. We should reproach minor symbolic bigotry as well as
extreme violent bigotry.
Normally I will not link to articles that practice this symbolic
bigotry, but I make exceptions for some articles because I consider
them important -- and I label them like this.
|
| 10:24p |
Bat houses
Bats are important parts of ecosystems; some farms are setting up bat houses
so as to get the benefit of their presence.
|
| 10:24p |
US advocating for Gaza ceasefire
The US now advocates a UN Security Council resolution to call for an
"immediate ceasefire in Gaza" and release by HAMAS of its remaining
hostages.
It was clear that Biden was moving in this direction for several
months with small steps. I am sure he had pressing political reasons
to do it that way. Nevertheless, given the thousands of civilians
being killed, the US had an obligation to reach this point much sooner.
Both of those ought to happen, but suppose HAMAS refuses to release
the remaining hostages -- what then? Israel has an obligation to
protect the civilian population, hostages or no hostages; the
resolution needs to reinforce that obligation too, or it could fail
entirely.
|
| 10:24p |
Texas immigration law blocked
The Texas law that authorizes the state to arrest and prosecute people
given a mere suspicion that they are unauthorized immigrants has been
blocked by a federal appeals court.
We depend on the Supreme Court to block state laws that tie federal
law in knots, but right-wing judges can't be trusted with that
responsibility.
|
| 10:24p |
|
| 10:24p |
|
| 10:24p |
Misleading over sustainability
*The Dutch airline KLM has misled customers with vague environmental
claims and painted “an overly rosy picture” of its sustainable aviation
fuel, a court has found.*
I saw a partly similar instance of subtle greenwashing recently: an
airline company ad on a wall in Boston asserted that the gas generated
by a collection of trash could power one flight per day. (Presuming,
I suppose, that some planes' engines are converted to operate on
methane.) It might be true -- I can't insist that it is false -- but
it would make hardly any difference to the harm global heating is doing.
|
| 10:24p |
Planet roaster meeting
Oil-company executives and their loyal servants held a meeting at
which they declared that reducing fossil fuel use was a "fantasy", and
that we should give up on it.
Their statements appear to claim that the task is intrinsically hard,
but in fact the difficulty is created by them. The part they don't
say is that the main obstacle to achieving that goal is all the money
they spend opposing it. They spend it on misleading the public and
they spend it on the support of politicians.
If the public is "unwilling to pay for a world with less carbon
pollution," it is because they don't grasp the scope of the disaster
the current path is leading to, from fires, floods, medical problems
and failures of agriculture. By denying this, the planet roasters
lead the public to suppose that they have a painless option.
|
| 10:24p |
|
| 10:24p |
Bank lies
Banks have a clever (but unsupported) theory to claim that their
sneaky extra profits can't be reduced. It asserts that these
extra profits are irresistible, and any laws again one scheme
will lead banks to replace it with another.
The article presents boast theoretical arguments and empirical facts to
reject that theory. What is really happening is that banks are trying
to intimidate the public by saying, "You can't beat us, so give up."
But we can beat any sort of gouging if we elect politicians who really work
for us and really want to beat them.
|
| 10:24p |
|
| 10:24p |
School meeting gun bill vetoed
The Republican governor of Wyoming vetoed a bill passed by the
Republican-dominated legislature that would have
permitted carrying
concealed guns in public schools in public meetings.
It's good that at least some Republicans are not total extremists.
|
| 10:24p |
|