US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to call for elimination of three items in the Freedom to Vote Act that would further disadvantage parties other than Democrat and Republican.

• Eliminating the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, which Green presidential candidates have used for presidential primary matching funds
• Permitting party committees to contribute $10,000 (up from the current $5,000) to House candidates (including House candidates who qualify for matching funds)
• Qualifying for Congressional matching funds will require  at least 1,000 contributors and $50,000 in contributions of $200 or less. 

The current plans to mine metal nodules from the sea bottom would destroy the habitat for many deep-sea species, and it would take untold ages for that habitat to regenerate.

I can see possible solutions for some of the problems. Instead of using robots that roll on the bottom and suck nodules off with pipes, maybe the robots could float a little above the bottom and pick off some nodules with hands, then put them into pipes whose openings are kept a couple of meters off the bottom. This might do much less damage. (That would have to be tested.)

For the animals that live on nodules, it might work to send down hollowed-out shells of nodules, each with two holes so it will fill with water once in the ocean. With some care in design and production, they could serve the same animals.

This would raise the cost of mining the nodules, but the world economy can afford it. Protecting so much wildlife will be worth the cost.

*Glasgow climate summit at risk of failure, U.N. chief warns.*

The Pegasus spyware facilitates injustice on the part of repressive or corrupt governments. It is used against dissidents and investigative journalists. We would be better off if it did not exist.

Would prohibiting the sale of that program make the problem go away? Not necessarily. Users both authorized and unauthorized might continue using it.

Pegasus exploits a problem inherent in the nature of Android and iOS: they are nonfree software, so users cannot do anything to strengthen the system. Instead, they are helplessly dependent on Google or Apple.

Thousands of Americans have died from conspiracy ideation. Here are descriptions of two of them.

I will not claim there are no conspiracies, because politics is full of them. For instance, politicians in the same party often make plans about achieving political goals; they do not deny this, because that is what a party is supposed to do. Many other conspiracies take the form of, "You will stick something in that 500-page bill to give us hundreds of millions, and in return we will give you a 500,000-a-year salary after you leave office." That kind of conspiracy is not a crime, but it ought to be.

The horrible mistake of conspiracy ideation is not that it alleges conspiracies, but that it sets ridiculously low standards of evidence for them. Most alleged conspiracies are absurd. If you don't try hard to separate the few valid allegations from the thousands of bogus ones, you will believe mostly nonsense. And since it is often hard to get to the bottom of the matter, there are many cases where you will not be able to be certain.

On the other hand, the internet of today is full of alleged conspiracies that are total bullshit, baked fresh every day. So the first step in rejecting them is to see which sources are careless with the truth, and stop listening to them. Big Lie Republicans and QAnonentities are not worth taking seriously, except as dangerous lunatics.

Studying the details of their bullshit is a mistake, unless you need that to take action againt them. That will waste your time and can't do any good.