Soot and ozone pollution in India are cutting crop yields — in some areas, by as much as 50%.

No, We Don't Need a Law Against Catcalling.

I have not yet seen the Hollaback video. It is not easy for me to see any video from YouTube, since I won't connect to that site from my own computer. I am looking for a chance to see it, because I want to see the range of actions in question. Do they include physical attacks? Threats? Intimidation? Insults? Pressure? Invitations? Praise? Silent gaze?

I want to find out what sorts of things women typically experience on the street, and also where this movement draws the line in its criticism.

To make insults a crime is injustice; calling the insults "harassment" does not excuse banning them. However, insults may deserve a rebuke.

Not everything that someone takes offense at is wrong. A woman once rebuked me, as we were riding on BART, for looking at her. I responded that people moving about in public must expect to be looked at. Nobody has a right to order people in a public place to avert their eyes. When I got off, a few stops later, I told her, "I'm leaving, so you can now proceed to your destination unobserved." (By me, at least.)

In the US: join a protest against the FCC's plan for phony net neutrality.

(Sorry that I don't know a site to point to.)

Commercial attackware is being sold to many governments, few of which can be trusted not to use it to violate human rights.

I think it is legitimate to use such methods in cases where planting a listening device would be allowed — when ordered specifically by a judge. The hard part is to make the thugs accountable and keep these orders very specific.

US courts are chipping away at accountability for many kinds of illegal searches.

Richard Branson's Space Tourism Shows What Today's Obscene Inequality Looks Like. And also the way being a consumer dulls the mind.

I am strongly in favor of space exploration and eventually space settlement. I don't see anything inherently wrong with space tourism, either, if people were going to visit a place of some interest — but that won't be possible in the near future.