How to have a conversation instead of talking at someone else.

PISSI, as a state, has been defeated, but there is no celebration in the US. That's because Islamism is a useful right-wing boogeyman, replacing the previous boogeyman of Communism.

After food prices rose, partly due to extreme weather that destroyed crops, the US changed its farming laws to subsidize production instead of non-production. Now the US is dumping cheap food around the world. That is good for some of the world's poor, since they can afford food, but bad for those who are farmers.

With a large harvest, farmers suffer from low prices. With a small harvest, prices go up and poor people go hungry. A good economic system for farming would need to avoid both problems. Meanwhile, we are using up topsoil around the world so a good economic system for farming needs to protect the soil. I fear that putting marginal land into agricultural use seems likely to damage it.

In the medium term, a few decades, agriculture faces many threats.

We will need a tax on meat to discourage people from eating so much of it.

The Department of Injustice plans to carry on the Senate investigation of Planned Parenthood, which found that the accusations were spurious.

Harvard says it can't afford to subscribe to the paywalled journals any more, and urges its faculty to resign from their editorial boards.

Sad to say, professional organizations as journal publishers are little different from the commercial publishers. Consider, for instance, the American Chemical Society which is trying to force ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub.