Andrew Yang's proposes a universal basic income as a substitute for various existing welfare benefits, and he doesn't intend to curb the political power of business.

His proposed policy for limiting surveillance is similar to the GDPR, and inadequate in the same ways.

It seems to be designed for a world in which a person entrusts specific information to a service so it can do specific jobs with that data, the data comes directly from per, and the service labels it explicitly as from per. A world in which there is plenty of competition among services, and no one ever feels compelled to use a specific service which perse knows will misuse that data.

And it ignores what the US government might do with that data after using the PAT RIOT act to collect the whole database.

Third Mexican Journalist Killed in a Week Amid Record Murder Rate.

Bogus Johnson is tossing out pledges to spend money to correct little pieces of Tory budget cuts. Sometimes a new pledge is just part of a larger previous pledge.

The UK media are using the same bad approach that the US media use with the bullshitter: taking his promises seriously. The proper response any time Johnson says he will do some good thing is, "If he really does this, we will take it seriously."

Students from Hong Kong protested in an Australian university. Some Chinese people (perhaps students, perhaps not) physically attacked them and surveilled them; some protesters later received threats, clearly organized by China.

Many Chinese studying abroad remain so connected to the state-controlled Chinese systems of state control that they do not question the propaganda. I think the university should impose requirements on Chinese students that they reduce their involvement in those systems, so that they are not dominated by them. It should be a requirement for educational purposes to expose themselves to other ways of thinking.

A few months ago I met some Chinese students in MIT CSAIL and urged them to take advantage of being in the US to read extensively the things that China does not want them to know. I specifically recommended the book, Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng, which describes surviving the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s.

Trolls attacked MP Rosena Allin-Khan for trying to convince Israel to let Gazan parents of sick children getting medical care in Israel to visit their children.

MP Allin-Khan describes the abuse as "antisemitic", but what I see in the examples quoted is condemnation of Israel rather than anti-semitism as such. I agree, however, that these examples were unjustified exaggeration. Her attempts to convince Israel to loosen some of the restrictions of the occupation is not support for the occupation.

It is one thing to say that a small step is not a full solution to a problem. It is another to say that the small step is bad. We should make sure campaigns for small steps don't distract us from advocating a full solution, but that doesn't require condemning them.