Google's "confidential" mode for Gmail and Google Docs provides no real confidentiality, but could provide an excuse for monopolistic practices.

15 years ago the US organized campaigns for electoral defeat of the rulers of Serbia, Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Was it, is it, wrong for a foreign power to intervene in an election that way?

Milošević in Serbia was a genocidal nationalist, and Lukashenko in Belarus was and is a tyrannical absolutist. I think such rulers invite foreign nonviolent intervention. Shevardnadze was an important politician in the Soviet Union, and probably no respecter of human rights as president of Georgia. I don't know much about Kuchma.

The campaigns did not steal the election, but they were a form of outside interference nonetheless, comparable in a very general way to what Russia did in the US in 2016. But there are differences. The Russian intervention was in support of a candidate whose party obtained "victory" by rigging the election.

I think a functioning democracy is entitled to stop such outside interference in its elections.

The US government provides low-cost flood insurance even to homes that flood over and over.

We need to start pushing to move the owners to high ground.

US citizens: call on Congress to save the Endangered Species Act.

If you sign, please spread the word!

US citizens: call on Congress to release the bully's tax returns.

If you sign, please spread the word!