| Time |
Event |
| 8:51a |
Interference review
Federal prosecutors report on Putin's interference in the 2016 US
presidential election.
They did not find grounds to charge the corrupter with a crime.
I expect that some exist, but that is not proof.
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| 8:51a |
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| 8:51a |
Courts reporter
Microsoft's bullshit generator read many articles associating Martin Bernklau
with criminal accusations, and output that he was a wanted criminal who had
escaped
from a mental hospital.
Bernklau's actual association was that he was a crime journalist and
had written those articles. But you can't expect bullshit generators
to understand that distinction — to do so requires intelligence, which
is what they totally lack.
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| 8:51a |
Food waste
*Force companies to report their food waste, say
leading UK retailers.*
I am surprised that retailers are in favor of this, but it seems
like a wise policy to me.
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| 8:51a |
Voter rolls
US Department of Justice sues Alabama for
purging people from voter rolls.*
*Officials say purge violates "quiet period provision" prohibiting name
removals 90 days before federal election.*
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| 8:51a |
Drug pollution
Rural rivers and creeks can have high levels of various medicines that
people flush down the toilet in places
whose sewage runs to them.
Since the drugs include antibiotics, this breeds antibiotic resistance.
People swimming in rivers and lakes can catch resistant infections.
But it is worse than that: bacteria pass genes around in various ways,
so the resistance gene can end up far away in a different species.
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| 8:51a |
Palestinian worker pay
Israel is accused of depriving Palestinian workers of pay
they are owed for work they have
already done in Israel.
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| 8:51a |
University funding crisis
*Gifts to politicians are all about buying influence,*
but
Starmer persists in denying that.
*Declaring potential conflicts of interest does not eradicate them as
conflicts of interest. For example, studies done on the efficacy of
psychiatric medications and many influential medical papers list the
benefits the authors received; it is not unusual to see whole pages
devoted to their financial connections to pharmaceutical firms. That
must cast some doubt on the validity of the studies.*
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| 8:51a |
Fossil fuel
Awareness of the approaching danger of climate mayhem is causing
anxiety and despair among young adults in the UK, who see that the
planet roasters have barricaded every door through which to prevent
disaster
they profit from increasing.
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| 8:51a |
Journalists illegal crossing
The Putin regime is prosecuting reporters for "illegal immigration"
for going with Ukrainian forces into the Kursk
region to cover the war.
Ironically, this is the only way reporters can cover news in Russia
without submitting to Putinite censorship.
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| 8:51a |
Energy efficiency
*Green roofs and solar chimneys are here — experts say it’s
time to use them.*
Governments in the US and elsewhere must take the lead here, to change
building codes so as to press for new buildings to use various
technologies that have been found to work. We also need funds to
retrofit millions of old buildings.
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| 8:51a |
Hacking Kia
KIA cars were built with a back door so that the company's server
can locate them and take control of them.
The car's owner had access to these controls through the KIA server.
That in itself is not objectionable. However, that KIA itself
has such control is Orwellian, and ought to be illegal.
The icing on the Orwellian cake is that the server had a security
fault which allowed absolutely anyone to
activate those controls
for any KIA car.
Many people will be outraged at that security bug, but that was
presumably an accident. The fact that KIA had such control over
cars after selling them to customers is what outrages me, and that
must have been intentional on KIA's part.
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| 8:51a |
Toxins from food packaging
*More than 3,600 chemicals approved for food contact in packaging,
kitchenware or food processing equipment
have been found in humans.*
Some of them are already suspected of being damaging.
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| 8:51a |
Israeli PM
It is impossible to negotiate with Netanyahu, because he does not
negotiate in good faith. When he agrees to a deal in private,
he then
rejects it in public.
The US should punish him for this by cutting off important kinds of
military support to Israel until it negotiates a cease fire for Lebanon
and Gaza, and accepts it, and carries it out. Or until Netanyahu
is no longer in charge there.
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| 8:51a |
Land incursion
If Israel attacks Hezbollah on the ground, it is likely to have
trouble seizing all the
territory it seeks to occupy.
Hezbollah succeeded in resisting Israel's invasion in 2006, and is
likely to have even better fortifications now.
In Gaza, Israeli units can occupy any piece of ground but can't wipe
out HAMAS in its tunnels. Hezbollah's tunnels are designed for
fighting from, not only for hiding in, so Israel can't expect to
have control of the surface as it does in Gaza.
I think this threat represents Netanyahu's scheme to stay in power by
unceasing escalation.
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Trump’s Health-Care Plan
The wrecking crew want to deregulate medical insurance so that most
Americans who are sick
won't be able to afford it.
It is a mistake to think of medical care as "insurance" since that
implies that each subscriber pays the amount perse is predicted
probably to need spent on per. What we need is a national medical
system that will be funded by taxing those with lots of money.
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| 8:51a |
Trump on Ukraine
The bully said that Ukraine should have surrendered immediately and
let Putin
seize part of Ukraine.
This is more evidence that the bully is a
supporter of Putin.
If he seizes the US presidency, he may make the US an ally of Putin,
or a vassal of Putin.
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| 8:51a |
Gender discrimination
Several countries are suing Afghanistan in the International Court of
Justice for
discrimination against women.
The case would seem to be so strong that the court must surely find
against Afghanistan. But the Taliban will surely not obey any
judgment, so why hold hearings to prove the obvious? It seems that
the aim is to discourage other countries from recognizing the Taliban
government.
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| 8:51a |
Life without Aadhaar
A surveillance resister in India describes the gratuitous and
purposeless ways in which Indians are pressured to submit to the
national ID system Aadhar, and
clever ways people are resisting.
His persistence in refusing to use Aadhar is inspiring, and he does
win some victories.
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| 8:51a |
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| 8:51a |
Conference vote
Delegates at Britain's Labour Party congress voted to call on the
party to reverse what did in Parliament — cutting poor people's
winter
home heating subsidy.
Subsidizing fossil fuel use is, in general, a bad policy. But when
it's a subsidy for poor people and is needed for them to stay alive
and well, cutting it is dangerous and heartless. The safe way to
reduce this subsidy is through helping the poor in other ways, not
through harming them.
One way is to invest in insulating their homes so that they don't need
as much artificial heating. Starmer keeps talking about "investment",
so invest here.
The other way I know of is to increase welfare payments for the poor
as a substitute for subsidizing their heating costs.
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| 8:51a |
Assault on press freedom
Al Jazeeera: *By storming our Al Jazeera offices in Ramallah, Israel
has stepped up its
assault on press freedom.*
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| 8:51a |
Harris economic agenda
Harris has stated economic policies that focus on helping Americans
become and
remain middle class.
I am in favor of these plans, but I would put more emphasis on helping
the poor, the people who have to survive on the lowest paid jobs or
who are unable to work. To pay for this, we should tax the rich —
not only to reverse the grab by rich they got so rich at the expense
of everyone else, but to reduce the power that they get from their wealth.
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| 8:51a |
Social media bill
California has legislated to make antisocial
media less addictive.
The law forbids (1) showing the user posts chronologically rather
than choosing them for manipulative purposes and (2) sending notifications
during the usual sleep and work hours.
These limits on sites could be a big help for reducing the harmful
effects of those sites' behavior, but the law has the flaw of limiting
these protections to users that are children. This causes two
problems:
Applying different rules for children may lead to requiring some
sort of age verification for adults. The means to prove a user's age
are likely to prove per identity as well, and that is unjust. They
may also require the user to run nonfree software, and may exclude
those who cannot get official government identification, both of which
are unjust.
To protect only children from addiction schemes leaves the mission
unfinished. All users, including teenagers and adults, are vulnerable
to artificial addictiveness, which helps push disinformation that can
threaten elections and social cohesion as well as individuals.
Applying these rules to all users would protect society better and
avoid unjust restrictions.
The problems that the law aims to prevent did not occur by
happenstance. The tech companies impose them on the user by requiring
per to run nonfree client-side software to access the platform.
If
that software were free/libre,
as by rights it
ought to be,
users could enable these protections for themselves by choosing a suitably
modified version of the client-side software.
For instance, they could run modified versions which (1) reorder the
posts to be shown or discard some of them, according to rules the user
could select, and/or (2) block or delay notifications in certain
periods of the day. Some users who know how to program would make
these and release them, and all users would then be able to use them.
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| 8:51a |
British activist
* [Egyptian dissident] Alaa Abd el-Fattah is due to complete five-year
sentence over social media post but family
fear further charges.*
His relatives ask the British government to press Egypt to release him.
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Orchestrated killing
*Pakistan says police orchestrated killing of doctor [Shah Nawaz]
accused of blasphemy.*
This practice, which repeats frequently, shows how Pakistan is dominated
by brutal, drooling religious fanaticism. This is of of the reasons to refuse
to visit Pakistan, and
why I have never gone there.
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| 8:51a |
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| 8:51a |
UN antimicrobial resistance
The world's countries pledged to reduce the death rate due to
antibiotic
resistance by 10% by 2030.
there is a simple way to slow the increase in antibiotic resistance:
simply end the mass use of
antibiotics in livestock.
What makes this difficult to do in practice is that massive use of antibiotics in
livestock is what makes factory farms profitable, so their owners
lobby hard against it.
Will this pledge help overcome the lobbying?
Most people in wealthy countries endanger their health by eating too
much meat. Discouraging that practice could help slow the increase
in antibiotic resistance, but that
too faces a powerful lobby.
To achieve more than that will require advances in medicine.
But in order for them to do the good we would hope for, we must
keep them safe from patents. If the US government
subsidizes the research, it could keep
them un-patented in the US.
Could it prevent US companies from patenting them in other countries?
Maybe that requires in world patent treaties — which
ought to be made anyway.
That research is a very important project to subsidize. Secondary to
[pol note]
curbing global heating,
because if climate disaster destroys civilization I expect humanity
will completely lose 20th century technology including antibiotics.
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| 8:51a |
Anti-monuments
*Mexico’s ‘anti-monuments’ force country to remember its [tens of
thousands of people who are]
missing.*
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| 8:51a |
Mayor Adams
NYC's night-mayor Adams has been indicted for taking bribes and
foreign
campaign contributions.
Here is more of
suspicions about him.
This reminds me of what Pseudolus said about being insensitive to
physical pain. "I am going to crack down on crime … Not my
own!"
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