Spain's new law forbids sites that link to snippets of news articles unless the sites pay the publishers. The response, Google will omit Spanish news articles.

The stated motive is to direct more income to the publishers. My solution for this problem is to allow publishers to charge a little anonymous digital cash for viewing an article. This would also make it possible to eliminate the advertising and the surveillance of most web sites.

Unless the law has some exception that has not been mentioned, I think these political notes would be illegal if stallman.org were in Spain. Fortunately, it is not.

However, the EU seems to be considering imposing a similar law — whose justification is the bogus term "intellectual property". Use of that term always tends to be harmful.

Coal extraction appears to be headed for a new record. Just the thing to destroy civilization.

Many products contain endocrine disruptors that can cause various human illnesses. A rough estimate suggests they cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage annually.

Affirmative action can help all of us avoid unconscious racism.

European countries have been fined at least 4 billion dollars under treaties that subject governments to foreign corporations.

Other cases, not yet resolved, demand over 35 billion dollars in "compensation" to foreign corporate overlords — and that's only half the cases that are in process.

All such treaties are antidemocratic; we must fight until we eliminate every last one.