Prince Bone Saw is so important the US thinks that it can't afford sanctions against him.

But Salafi Arabia is one among many regimes that regularly get away with murder. Partly because making sanctions effective is harder that it might appear. If the US wants sanctions to exert positive influence rather than only look tough or cause mass suffering, it needs to be very clever about them.

Rep Caliban: Democrats *need to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they will lose control of Congress.*

New York City is about to introduce municipal rental scooters that will track whoever uses them.

Don't be distracted by the side issue of rules for access to this tracking data. Whatever rules New York City adopts, the FBI won't be required to heed them. It will be empowered to collect the whole data base at will — once a month, or once a minute.

Making systems respect privacy means designing them not to collect sensitive data (such as locations) about people without a specific justification validated by a court.

I would not use these scooters unless I could use them anonymously. Likewise, I would not use Uber unless I could use them anonymously.

A thousand covidiots were joyfully infecting each other in Boulder, Colorado, when cops tried to make them stop.

I don't know whether the cops acted like thugs -- one can never presume they did not -- but some of the covidiots did.

The location outdoors would have tended to interfere with transmitting virus, but with no masks and no distancing, they could have done it anyway.

At 1.5C of global heating, only .4C more than now, fatal weather will start to occur fairly often in topical areas.