Thai protesters used large inflatable rubber ducks as shields against water with a tinge of dissolved tear gas.

Alexander Hamilton was deeply involved in slavery.

Climate scientists say old global heating forecasts were too conservative; 1.5C of heating may be under a decade away, and the target of "net zero" greenhouse emissions by 2050 is insufficient.

I predicted this would happen, but not by trying to do climate modeling. I have no knowledge of how to do that, so I don't try. That is a job for climate scientists.

However, I know that scientists have not figured out all the pertinent relationships that ought to be in climate models, and that global heating is sure to have effects as yet unpredicted. It follows that, as things move further away from the old normal, changes are likely to cause more changes. When scientists don't know how change in A will affect B, they tend to try a linear relationship as a first approximation, and that works for small changes, but as they get bigger the linearity can break down.

So if we want to save civilization, we must plan for worse than the models predict. We must do more, and sooner, than the models say is needed.

I've explained before why "net zero" opens a pitfall: putting faith in risky offset schemes. Systems that remove CO2 from the air as they run are real contributions to reducing net emissions (but their cost must be compared with direct reductions in emissions); however, systems that one hopes will remove CO2 many years down the road (such as tree planting) are not reliable. We need to plant a lot of trees, to keep forests going, but we should not count their absorbed CO2 until they have absorbed it.

When scientists warn that 4C of warming is incompatible with an organized global community, it means that farming won't work very well and the remaining people will be fighting over what food and fresh water are available. We need to make sure things don't get that bad.

The conspirators that planned to murder Governor Whitmer are accused of planning another scheme: to seize the state capitol building and murder officials there.

Automated monitoring of accessibility of many web sites from places around the world provides a way to measure censorship in many countries, daily. It shows that censorship is increasing in most of the world.

I suggest that part of the root cause of the increase in censorship is the misguided acceptance of the idea that sharing copies is "piracy" and the tendency of governments to facilitate DRM rather than making it a felony.

Censorship by governments makes some web sites inaccessible to people in some countries. At the same time, nonfree JavaScript code on some websites makes them inaccessible to the Free World. The former denies freedom directly to people in those countries. The latter invites everyone to sacrifice freedom to read them.