*AOC says no one should be ‘tossed out of public discourse’ for accusing Israel of genocide.*

I disagree with that accusation — I've explained the difference between genocide and a series of atrocities — but I agree completely with AOC's point.

As long as we tolerate people in public discourse despite their advocating the horrible things that Republicans espouse (or, should we say, "rape"?) nowadays, it is absurd to condemn a person totally for a disagreement over the level of condemnation Israel deserves for killing 25,000 Palestinian civilians.

California is proposing an interesting approach towards antisocial media platforms.

It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)

However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!

If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.

Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.

AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.

The EU has delayed a rule requiring each farm to set aside 4% of its usable farmland for protection of wildlife and the soil.

It is safe to delay this, but in the long term such protection is absolutely necessary to avoid disaster. I suggest phasing it in, perhaps introducing the rule by increments of 0.5% each year. After 8 years of that, it will reach 4%, but by going slowly it will give markets time to adjust.

A seabed mining company is using NAFTA to prevent Mexico from protecting seabed ecosystems in the Gulf of California. NAFTA is a business-supremacy treaty and it contains an ISDS clause.

Businesses can use those against any government. I call them "I Sue Democratic States" clauses because democratic states sometimes heed popular demand to make regulations to stop business operations from doing massive damage. This damage can be enormous -- it can include global heating disaster, which may result in the collapse of civilization -- so preventing it justifies war.

One of the few good things that the wrecker did as president, one of the few cases in which he did what he said he would do, was replacing NAFTA with a new version, which ISTR eliminated the ISDS clause. I wonder, didn't that treaty eliminate this case? If not, why not?

Could a further revision of NAFTA succeed in abolishing all the existing cases under that one treaty?

*[Tory] ministers plan to push cash-strapped English councils to sell assets.*

The Tories cuts in support for local government now turn out to be part of a two-part dooH niboR scheme. First, cut the aid to local governments to the point that they can't do anything for the non-rich, not even parks and public libraries, not even the most essential (which they must do anyway). Then, compel them to make up the shortfall by selling public buildings and land in a hurry, for less than their market value, which is in effect a hand-out to the rich.

The two parts add up to dooH niboR as a whole: take from the poor, and give to the rich.