Fossil fuel extraction and refining emits lots of toxic local pollution.

They can even harm plants in the vicinity with their loud pumps that drive birds away.

The people who live near them are the disprivileged people who lose the competition for better places.

The best way to correct this injustice is by ending the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. We need to do that anyway. Then we need to clean up the closed facilities.

US citizens: call on Congress to End the War on Yemen.

The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.

If you call, please spread the word!

The US has a higher death rate, for people under 85 years old, than European countries. If the US had had a typical European death rate, 400,000 Americans under 85 would have survived past 2017.

Curiously, about 100,000 more Americans over 85 would have died in 2017 with a European death rate. However, each death of an younger person typically means more years of life lost than the death of an oldster.

This problem started to appear after 2000, and has been getting worse since then.

Biden has ordered US troops out of Afghanistan by September. I am very impressed by his courage.

After several attempts to "stabilize" Afghanistan, we know that we do not know any way to do that. To "stabilize Afghanistan first" means, in practice, "keep the war going forever."

It is silly to insist that the US has a responsibility to "fix" Afghanistan, because no one knows how.

If this means that the Taliban win the war, that will be a setback for human rights in Afghanistan — especially for women, but also for men. But keeping that country forever at war is not a better outcome.

Here's what Senator Sanders said about this decision.

In the first years after the US invasion, it looked like Afghanistan would be peaceful and better off. I hoped for a lasting improvement in women's rights there. I have long thought that Dubya's decision to attack Iraq played a part in spoiling that peace. Of course, I can only speculate about what would have happened otherwise.

Cops admit that they use minor driving infractions, such as an air freshener attached to the rear view mirror, as excuses to stop and search a car based on vague and groundless suspicion.

If we take the idea of rights seriously, we should not allow the supposed enforcers of laws to set them at nought.

Of course, there is another risk to justice that occurs whenever cops search a car: that they may "find" something that wasn't there before the search. Can we develop a way to end this risk?