From the You Should Have Known Better Department; Emily Baker-White, writing in BuzzFeed, notes that TikTok “US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China.”  No surprise at all there, kinda like the crypto crashes.  An excerpt:

“I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.

Many of these access attempts have supposedly been from a team assigned to check security, but there is not yet any such absolute block to Chinese data access. Be careful out there…

It’s most unsettling to me how many Americans seem that they would be happier living in Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, and are intent on driving the bus in that direction.  See the latest Texas Republican Party’s platform and resolutions, here.  For a selection of some of the more egregious examples, [popup_anything id=”2255″]

Some positive information, this from David Leonhardt’s NYT Morning Newsletter of June 9.  An excerpt:

“…Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.”

and

“The successful part of the story is the rapid increase in vaccination among Black and Latino Americans since last year. Today, the vaccination rate for both groups is slightly higher than it is for white Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s surveys.”

Gosh, it seems that getting vaccinated against Covid may save lives…

As I had noted in a previous post, Kim Stanley Robinson does a superb job of rendering climate change’s near future earth in his novel The Ministry for the Future.  The harrowing first chapter I mentioned back then foreshadowed this year’s heat wave in India. And now Bill Gates has joined Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, and Bill McKibben in recommending the novel.  I urge you to give it a read.

Donald McNeil writes a nice piece in Medium discussing the recent Monkeypox outbreak, including his views on an appropriate level of concern (his is a bit more than mine).  But definitely worth reading..

Tom Friedman, writing in the NY Times, I think has it right when he argues that the US ought to be more circumspect when speaking publicly about the war in Ukraine.  An excerpt:

“Our goal began simple and should stay simple: Help Ukrainians fight as long as they have the will and help them negotiate when they feel the time is right — so they can restore their sovereignty and we can reaffirm the principle that no country can just devour the country next door. Freelance beyond that and we invite trouble.”

Absent the draft in a wartime footing, I can’t imagine the Supreme Court would ever consider forcing men to choose an option with 10-15 times the mortality risk to them of another option (as is the case in term pregnancy versus legal elective abortion). Yikes.  And to these eyes, Alito’s logic seems extremely flawed, e.g.:

“And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

Um, what does he think having half the states outlawing abortion and half allowing it is likely to do to deepening national division, with a resultant crazy quilt of varying laws and some states already wanting to criminalize anyone merely assisting someone seeking an abortion?

It is odd to me that his arguments totally ignore the fact that in survey after survey, an overwhelming majority of Americans favor allowing at least some form of legal pregnancy termination.

Even Bret Stevens acknowledges “You may reason, justices, that by joining Justice Alito’s opinion, you will merely be changing the terms on which abortion issues get decided in the United States. In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on….A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.”

Gotta love the fact that Mitch McConnell said the person responsible for the leak should face criminal charges, but would not vote to impeach DJT, who willfully and clearly attempted to subvert the results of a legitimately held presidential election and supported an insurrection.

This was an interesting and hopeful description of a biodegradable material with some intrinsic antibacterial activity that in tests outperformed the typical plastic fruit boxes used to package strawberries. It’s composed of a mesh of nanoscale fibers made from zein (from corn gluten meal) and other bio-polymers that can be extracted from food waste.  Cool stuff!  Now if only they can bring it to market – anything to help reduce the burden of environmental plastic is a plus.  It was a cooperative effort from Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, with a brief description here from the Chan School, and academic paper describing the work here.

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American April 6 post:

“During the Civil War, when faced with a mounting debt in their fight to protect the government, the Republicans invented the U.S. income tax in order, as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) said, to make sure that tax burdens would “be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them.” Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) agreed, saying: “It would be manifestly unjust to allow the large money operators and wealthy merchants, whose incomes might reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, to escape from their due proportion of the burden.””

contrast that with:

“On February 26, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) gave a speech in which he said “We survived the war of 1812, Civil War, World War I and World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War,” but “[t]oday, we face the greatest danger we have ever faced: The militant left-wing in our country has become the enemy within.” He claimed: “The woke Left now controls the Democrat Party. The entire federal government, the news media, academia, big tech, Hollywood, most corporate boardrooms, and now even some of our top military leaders… They want to end the American experiment. They want to replace freedom with control.””

Someone please stop the insanity.

Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California writes: “The illegality of the plan was obvious…Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the vice president to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election.”   I’m happy to see someone from the judicial branch finally state the obvious.  See the story in the NYT.