Law for Sale: Senators that voted for Keystone XL got an average of 1/4 million from oil companies.

Climate scientist Alan Robock believes that intelligence agencies are concerned that geoengineering might be used as a weapon, and he is concerned too.

However, no such technology is ready for the short term for any purpose.

Many UK working people haven't got the cash to buy a refrigerator, so they rent one and end up paying 3 times as much.

Some children there don't get enough food and their growth is stunted by malnutrition.

The competitive pressure on today's college students, due to the lack of jobs, has driven a large fraction to use concentration-enhancing drugs.

The drugs are not unfair to students who are poor, since they are cheap. They put those with a bad reaction to the drugs are at a disadvantage, but I don't see that that is worse than the advantages and disadvantages we get from all sorts of other variations.

The issues I think do matter are (1) possible long term harmful medical effects, and (2) changing what people learn from college.

One person quoted in the article said that college is a "cognitive enhancement", but that is misleading: it suggests that the intended result of a college education is only a matter of concentrating better. The idea used to be that college would teach people a deeper understanding of what they think about.

In the UK, the influence of Christianity is decreasing and many young Britons are becoming Atheists.

I rejoice in this, but I regard it as dangerous that the phenomenon does not include Muslims. We need to find a way to reach them with the secularist message. Otherwise, millions of Britons who drifted into a vague secularism might be vulnerable.