Freedom of panorama has been saved in Europe.

Some large UK charities make a practice of phoning people aggressively to press for donations.

Charities should not use businesses to do their fundraising. Those businesses tend to pay their employees badly as well as to be pushy with the public. But it endangers the charity, too: it can warp the organization's attitudes, make it think of donors as money sources, not as people who support a cause. Thus, I think no charity should ever outsource the requesting of donations.

The US has spent 3 billion dollars promoting "charter schools" (private replacements for public schools), with little benefit. Often these schools close in a few years.

Charter schools do not in general provide a superior education, as they were supposedly going to do.

I suspect Congress's real motive for funding them is a lobby connected with businesses that profit from them.

A California study was unable to estimate the danger of pollution from fracking because, for half the chemicals frackers use, they can't find any data about their toxicity or biodegradability.

In effect, fracking is a massive experiment with the public as the test subjects.

The purpose of the experiment is to advance climate mayhem. Due to the pervasive methane leaks, fracking makes a big contribution to global heating.

If our government were in the hands of statesmen, instead of flunkies, we would ban fracking, thus designating those natural gas reserves as part of the 80% of fossil fuels that must be left in the ground.

Many countries are suffering from debt crises.

The current international system, designed to make states repay loans no matter what the cost to the people, creates a moral hazard: lenders are too ready to lend money, even for dictators to steal, because they assume there is no way the state can get rid of the debt.

Haiti was crushed for a century by a debt imposed by France in exchange for recognizing Haiti's independence.