US citizens: tell Democratic holdouts to endorse increasing Social Security.

US citizens: call on Congress to repeal the U SAP AT RIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act, which authorized the government's collection of much of the dossiers that companies accumulate.

US citizens: oppose "fast track" for the TPP.

Government-led reductions in salt levels in foods, in the UK, appears responsible for a 40% drop in deaths from strokes and likewise from heart attacks.

The idea that one should think of oneself as a "personal brand" directs people's thinking away from the collective action they really need.

I see two problems in that idea:

• It encourages artificiality and insincerity. No one is exactly like anyone else, but each aspect of a person probably resembles that aspect of many other persons. If you decide to change just so that you will stand out in a crowd, that is artificial and insincere.
• Workers are mostly interchangeable as regards working as a sales clerk, an assembly worker, a nurse, or a teacher. Two sales clerks may have different personalities, interests and appearances, so that as persons they are not very similar, but those differences are irrelevant to getting hired.

  Workers in the past realized that they were interchangeable for their employers. Rather than trying, each one, to stand out from the rest of the workforce, they built unions to require employers to respect the rights of all their workers.

  If you try to confront the work situation alone, treating other workers as your competition, you're aiming for a kind of success that at best a small fraction of workers can achieve.

But I never did anything with that as a goal. I didn't choose any of these traits to be different from others. Each of my unusual traits, I have either because I found it fun, or because I found it useful, or because I resented and resisted a demand to change it, or because changing it would have involved an insupportable indignity, or because I have tried to change it but have not entirely succeeded (yet).

Be true to yourself, and be true to society as a whole.