Baltimore thugs arrested legal and medical volunteers at a protest.

The US has had a series of systems for oppressing blacks: slavery, segregation laws, and now repression by thugs leading to mass imprisonment.

The victims don't have to be limited to blacks. Rather, when economic pressure is the motive force, it catches whatever groups are easiest to catch. That often tends to be the groups that are already in a weak position, perhaps because of lingering effects of an earlier system of oppression.

To the extent that bigotry is practiced (consciously or not) by thugs, the target group must be one they can recognize. But that doesn't mean it has to be a racial group. It can be the poor, if they can be recognized as a group by how they dress and where they are found.

The Tories' gradual privatization of the NHS is taking a big leap as companies will be invited to provide "services" directly to patients.

As usual, the Tories deny that they are privatizing and destroying the NHS. They hope that some will be foolish enough to believe this claim and fail to resist.

Jane Goodall: apes could be wiped out by global heating. They can't adapt to very different environments.

Humans can't be wiped out by global heating; we are good at adapting to many different environments.

What might get wiped out is technological civilization based on global trade. That is rather fragile. I expect a few hundred million humans could survive with low tech agriculture and fishing, once 6 to 9 billion have died.

Heating won't make solar power stop working, and won't make computers stop working. But the wars it stimulates can destroy the globalize manufacturing system, so that solar cells and computers can't be replaced when they break.

Europe will require all cars to be equipped with cell phones that automatically call to report an accident.

The feature is a good one; what will be its price in privacy? If the phone is on all the time, and ready to make a call, it will be tracked all the time.

This could be prevented by turning the phone on only when it needs to call. But will they do that?