Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, facing possible extradition to the US, got support from protesters at the court house. One of the protesters said he was paid to appear and had been told it was for a music video.

It's not only Chinese businesses that do this sort of thing. Not long ago, Senator Warren spoke to a group of black voters and met with a protest organized (though they didn't publicly say so) by an organization that campaigns for charter schools. I suspect that organization is funded somehow by businesses that extract money from charter schools.

*Sick of Big Pharma’s pricing, health insurers pledge $55M for cheap generics.*

Creating a drug company with other motives aside from profit is a good thing to do. Its competition could hold back other companies from gouging. However, there is a danger that the other companies could get out of that business or merge. That could lead to even less competition.

I hope the founders have taken very firm measures to prevent this company from being co-opted later and turned into a monopolistic super-gouger.

Byung-Chul Han contended in 2018 that the digital surveillance society seduces people into building their own panopticon.

If you want to buy his book, or any book, make sure you cannot be identified as the purchaser. And don't accept an e-book if it tramples your freedom.

In a reversal of what 19th-century socialists believed, surveillance capitalists sells citizens the rope to tie themselves up in.

In 2019, Shoshana Zuboff described the system of surveillance capitalism. She explained how this new system of tyranny functions and how it developed.

But what do we do about this?

The first part of the solution is free software — we users can make sure it doesn't spy on us. But that addresses only the programs we run on our own programmable computers. To go beyond that, we need laws to prohibit systems from collecting people's personal data.

Don't fall for foolish substitutes that wouldn't fix the problem, such as the idea that "you should own your own data". People would sell the use of that data for a pittance, if they don't see a path towards truly changing the surveillance society.

*"Like a Kleptocracy": Investigation Details How [Republican] Lawmakers Cashed In on [the conman's] Tax Cuts.*

(satire) *Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated Monday that the United States has overwhelming and undeniable evidence to support going to war with whoever.*