On the prospects of the Kurds in Syria, given the ascendant power of despotic Erdoğan in Turkey.

I do not have an ethnic prejudice for Arabs, for Kurds, or for Turks. Nor particularly against any of those ethnic groups. What wins my support for Rojava is that (from what I have read) it welcomes all those groups and endorses equal rights for them, recognizing human rights including religious freedom.

By contrast, the best you can say for Erdoğan is that he had carried out less persecution and less repression than Assad. He even started a civil war against the Kurds of Turkey so as to rerun an election and get more votes.

Could HTS take the step forward to recognize human rights as Rojava does? Perhaps then the two could form a united Syria that would deserve full support.

It would be a stretch, but we can hope for it.

The UK government is too timid to legislate to block the muskrat from buying the next UK election for right-wing extremists.

The ministers believe that the measures they were considering could backfire (because they could be bypassed). Well, look for stronger measures.

I suggest making it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to participate in transferring money (your own or from someone else) or equivalent into UK political campaigning, except when it comes from UK citizens who reside in the UK, and the total amount coming from each one of them under a certain limit.

To de-fang antisocial media platforms, the UK should prohibit platforms from operating recommendation engines.

Both of these measures have the virtue that they block systems of influence that are available only to the rich, without explicit explicit political bias.

Australia was gong to require airlines to compensate passengers whose flights are cancelled.

The airlines want this burden to fall on passengers, who are not as wealthy as an airline.

Having a flight cancelled is usually not much of a problem for me, as long as I get on another flight by the next day. Perhaps a good compromise would be to require compensation in the cases when the cancellation causes some concrete significant loss. For instance, if the delay makes it a waste for that passenger to make the trip, and person prefers to cancel it entirely, that passenger should get their money back.

Ex-rep Matt Gaetz was found to have violated many rules of the House of Representatives.

He clearly did not expect to be held accountable for that. So I wonder whether it a normal for congresscritters to do that.

US citizens: call on Vanguard CEO to meet with front line climate campaigners affected by Vanguard's "investments" in fossil fuels.