If the UK leaves the EU, Scotland is likely to secede from the UK and rejoin the EU.

Ironically, both the Scottish nationalist movement and the movement to take the UK out of the EU are similar false revolts. People who had been dumped on by the rich elites signed up for a rebellion aimed at something else.

The FBI stretches the unjust PAT RIOT Act, and small companies often don't know how to resist. Meanwhile, bills in Congress threaten to give the FBI more power.

Researchers have broken a watermarking code for e-books. Here's the developers' statement.

Watermarking used as a scheme to stop people from sharing is wrong because its goal is wrong. Sharing is good, and ought to be legal. However, the scheme presupposes another injustice: making people identify themselves to buy a copy. To defend my privacy, I refuse to identify myself to a bookseller. I pay cash and only cash.

The US already has a law that could be used to stop domestic abusers from buying or keeping guns. We have failed to enforce it.

The prime responsibility of the state is to plan and manage, but plutocratic states refuse to face the responsibility.

Australians have privately organized a mass battery purchase to advance home battery technology. The state should have done this. In fact, I proposed such a thing in a legislative hearing in Massachusetts a year ago. Ten years ago, states were doing the same sort of thing for solar power cells.

The neoliberal ideology is both an excuse for this refusal and a way of covering up contrary actions. Every market is regulated; a market can't exist without some regulations or other. The market mechanism could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if regulated with a carbon tax. If the state instead subsidizes fossil fuels, then it's managing society so as to run off the carbon cliff; but it can pretend that "the invisible hand is doing this -- we are only watching."

Neoliberal ideology is also an excuse to cut taxes to the point where all spending projects are impossible, again denying responsibility for the policies that are adopted.