A large protest, mostly peaceful but with some violence, shut down a talk by Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley. The troll responded with a vague threat to cut off federal funding for the university.

I am in favor of protesting that extremist, but against using violence to stop a speech.

The most significant point here is that the troll has stated support for Yiannopoulos personally. He and his associates can no longer deny their ties to his extremism.

The troll's proposed ambassador to the EU dares to recogize that the Euro is responsible for Greece's suffering.

This is one of the troll's few good sides: refusing to abide by the established neoliberal globalization consensus.

Some Republicans now propose an increasing carbon tax to replace specific federal regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I'm in favor of this — but in order to achieve the goal, the tax will have to be big enough to affect most spending decisions. 15 years ago, mostly painless measures could have saved the ecosphere. Now we need to act quickly.

Giving workers the right to refuse some imposition is of little benefit to desperate workers who can't afford to refuse anything. And increasingly that's what workers' life is like.

What we need, therefore, are employment rules that put all workers in the position where they can afford to refuse impositions, or where they must at least be paid for their impositions.

If Guber had to pay drivers for all the time they are on call, for instance, they would have the means to be on call less of the time.

The Washington DC thugs violently attacked a protest, and threaten protesters and reporters with ten years' imprisonment.

The state is now collecting protesters' data from Apple and Facebook. (To cloud your mind, those companies like to say that your data is "in the cloud". In fact, it is in their servers.)

It seems that thugs have already looked through the accounts of some of the protesters, through their own phones.

In Russia, people who criticize the state are threatened with exile, seizure of all their property, as well as false charges.

The US isn't as bad as Russia yet, but it is heading in that direction.