Bogus Johnson gave the UK the next worst thing to a no-deal exit from the EU.

I warned that the only way to get good results from leaving the EU was to put Corbyn in charge.

US citizens: call on Congress to stop providing military weapons to US thug departments.

To sign without running nonfree JavaScript code from the web site, use the Salsalabs workaround.

Elsevier is corrupting "open science" in Europe by worming its way into operating the systems to monitor scientific publication.

That is in addition to publishing pay-walled journals, which should not exist at all.

Civilian government workers in Burma are striking against the military takeover.

Vandana Shiva argues for treating "everything we need" as a commons.

I think that goes too far -- it is, in effect, Communism, and we have not seen that come out well.

In societies where each family can do its own gathering, or its own gardening, there is no need to make food part of an economy. But we are far away from that now. It is not feasible for everyone to grow food, not in India and even less so in the US. No one farm will grow all the foodstuffs that people eat nowadays, not even in India. There must be a system to handle growing food, processing food (do you want bread, flour, or just whole grains of wheat) and providing it to those who don't grow it. If it doesn't work by rationing, it needs to be a market.

A market is based on rules, and there are many choices for society to make in those rules. The big economic issues, the causes of hunger and penury, have to do with the rules of the market for food. Through the 1970s the US used to have many family farms, and governments made sure its policies enabled them to stay in business. Reagan suckered farmers into accepting loans they could not pay back, and this caused a big leap in consolidation. His deregulation and his weakening of anti-monopoly laws allowed mega-businesses to dominate and eventually buy most of the remaining family farms, while mistreating the eating public too.

Likewise for water. In a city, you can't get water from your own well. There needs to be a system to handle it. What should the system's rules be? How should it charge for water -- and how do we make sure poor people water to drink and to wash? Those are crucial political questions today, with poor families' water being disconnected just as they are told they need to wash their hands frequently. But "dig your own well" is not a solution.

An aquifer should be a common -- but successful commons need rules about who gets to take how much.