A Pakistani thug has been charged with the brutal murder of Muhammad Waqas, who had been charged with blasphemy and then acquitted.

In Pakistan, it is not unusual for fanatics to murder people who have been charged with blasphemy, or their lawyers, or anyone who stands in the way of executing them.

Progressives tell Biden not to put water privatization into the infrastructure deal.

Privatizing any service is harmful unless it results in a competitive market with many competitors.

Several US states are using algorithms to apportion home care budgets for the disabled. This has given more help to some, and less to others. Some patients can't get out of bed without the help they no longer get; some have died.

In theory, an algorithm can do the job better than humans. The salesmen will lead you to imagine that the algorithm performs as well as you could imagine. In practice, it can easily do a bad job. In this case, some factors were explicitly not considered. Very likely there are other important factors that that human decision-makers used to recognize on their own.

If the state doesn't have the source code of the program, it should not use the program. But the problems described in the article can happen with a free program, because they result from the absence of any non-problematical solution.

The underlying problem is that the algorithm has to divide up funds that are insufficient to start with. The algorithm tries to spread the insufficiency equally. Is that the best thing to do?

Which is worse: to permanently give each disabled person half the help perse needs, or to permanently abandon a randomly-chosen half of them? The answer is not obvious to me.

California Governor Newsom overstated work that the state had done on preventing future wildfire damage.

I don't know how effective it is to remove some potential fuel from a forest. On that I will defer to experts. This method can't get out of control and become dangerous (a controlled burn has that danger), but it must be a lot more labor-intensive.

Effective action to reduce fire danger requires a tremendous amount of work and money, because it has to be done over the whole region affected by drought. And it has to be done over and over, forever.

Switching to renewable energy and curbing the emissions that cause the drought will be far more efficient in the long term.

*After Britney Spears testimony, lawmakers push changes to conservatorship laws.*