What exactly is the problem with TikTok?

In a rare display of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force ByteDance, the owner of the social media app TikTok, to either sell it to a US buyer or face tough restrictions on its ability to operate in the US.

The vote was a landslide, with 352 Congress members voting in favor and only 65 against. The bill, which was fast-tracked to a vote after being unanimously approved by a committee last week, gives China-based ByteDance 165 days to divest from TikTok. If it did not, app stores including the Apple App store and Google Play would be legally barred from hosting TikTok or providing web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.
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The vote in the House represents the most concrete threat to TikTok in an ongoing political battle over allegations the China-based company could collect sensitive user data and politically censor content. TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government.

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How committed are so-called ‘Never Trumpers’ to not vote for him?

There can be no doubt that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is an awful person and that there are people who once voted for him who are quite disgusted now. The real question is how many such people there are and whether they will eventually end up voting for him anyway, will vote for Biden, will not vote at all, or will vote for a third party candidate.

The conventional wisdom is that those who have voted for SSAT in the past, especially in 2020 when no reasonable person could have had any doubt about how awful he was, had drunk so much of the Kool-Aid that they would go back to him. Jordan Klepper’s interviews with some supporters of Nikki Haley seem to support that gloomy view. There were those who spoke of SSAT in the harshest possible terms, even calling him an existential threat to democracy. But when Klepper pushed them to state what they would do if finally faced with the choice of voting for Joe Biden or SSAT, they hemmed and hawed before finally saying that they would vote for SSAT. So much for these people being ‘never Trumpers’.

The cognitive dissonance is strong in these people.
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The power of metadata and the photo puzzle

I am not a very tech savvy person and so am constantly being surprised by what modern technology can do. Take for example, the current kerfuffle over the doctored photo released by the British royal family. I am amazed at what could be gleaned from the photo.

David McCoy, the imaging manager at the Guardian, said: “The first step in analysing this image is reading through the file’s embedded metadata to determine the photographic settings of the base camera image. In this case, we can see that a Canon 50mm f1.2 lens was used for this initial image, set to an aperture of f3.2, which will give moderately shallow depth of field.

That is pretty impressive, to me at least, but the article goes on to describe all the other things that were inferred.

The whole thing is a minor puzzle. I am not sure why the photo needed to be doctored at all and why, given their resources, they could not have hired a professional to do a better job that would not have aroused suspicions in the first place.

Michael Kosta of The Daily Show joked that he knew at once, even without any forensic analyses, that the photo had been doctored because you can never get three children to all smile at the same time for a photo.

Israel blockade of Gaza challenged

Joe Biden has long been one of the staunchest supporters of Israel and has even called himself a Zionist. He has been a steadfast supporter of that country’s governments, refusing to condemn them even when they did the most appalling things. So it was no surprise when he rushed to Israel following the October 7th attacks by Hamas and embraced prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although Netanyahu had shown his disdain for Barack Obama when he was president and Biden was vice-president and Netanyahu even accepted an invitation to speak to Congress, bypassing the Obama White House. Netanyahu’s preference for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and Republicans is not hard to discern.

Biden’s seeming unqualified support for Israel has angered many progressives in the US and infuriated many Arab Americans who see him as condoning the ongoing slaughter of Gazans by the Israeli military machine. The US has been increasingly isolated on the world stage as leaders of many countries and the United Nations have condemned the Israeli policy of essentially starving the entire population of Gaza, numbering about two million people, by refusing to allow in relief trucks to bring in adequate amounts of food, water, energy, and medical supplies. Israel controls ground access to the Gaza strip and has long imposed a blockade to prevent access even by sea. The situation is so bad that the few relief trucks that Israel allows in have been besieged by starving people and Israeli troops have opened fire on them, reportedly killing over a hundred.
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Jon Stewart on who the ‘real’ Americans are

He discusses something that has also long irritated me, and that is the claims by GOP politicians that ‘real’ Americans are those that live in the middle parts of the country in rural areas, as if the vast majority who live in cities and the coastal areas count for less.

This is part of a more general pattern. GOP politicians seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to sneer at big cities and the diverse array of people who live in them as somehow being less worthy, while reacting with outrage if any Democratic politician even slightly disparages rural white America.

Why do people choose to sit outdoors in the freezing cold?

I was horrified to read this story about some football fans who had fingers and toes amputated because they got frostbite while watching an NFL playoff game in Kansas City in the bitter cold.

Research Medical Center didn’t provide exact numbers but said in a statement that it treated dozens of people who had experienced frostbite during an 11-day cold snap in January. Twelve of those people – including some who were at the 13 January game – had to undergo amputations involving mostly fingers and toes. And the hospital said more surgeries are expected over the next two to four weeks as “injuries evolve”.
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The temperature for the Dolphins-Chiefs wildcard playoff game was minus-4F (minus-20C), and wind gusts made for a windchill of minus-27F (minus-33C). That shattered the record for the coldest game in Arrowhead Stadium history, which had been 1F (minus-17C), set in a 1983 game against Denver and matched in 2016 against Tennessee.
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The GOP gets crazier and crazier

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the GOP is on a slippery slope when it comes to some issues, where in pandering to their base by accepting certain premises like that life begins at conception, they found themselves quickly dragged to the logical end point that embryos produced in the IVF process are children and thus cannot be destroyed. Now they fond themselves struggling to extricate themselves from the mess they put themselves into without disavowing the ‘life begins at conception’ premise because doing so would infuriate their base.

But that is not the only slippery slope that the GOP find itself on. It is as if the floodgates of oil have opened on the slopes and there is no way to halt the descent.
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Katie Britt gets brutally roasted on SNL

Katie Britt has now essentially confirmed that the story that she told in her response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was misleading in all the key details, as was exposed by journalist Jonathan Katz, though in typical MAGA fashion, still claims that it is ‘true’ in some unspecified sense.

Actor Scarlett Johansson did a brutally funny takedown of Britt on Saturday Night Live, capturing all her manic, hyper-dramatized mood swings.

SOTU GOP responder accused of lying

Alabama senator Katie Britt, who delivered the widely panned response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, has been accused by a journalist of flat-out lying about a harrowing story she told about a woman recounting to her how she had been raped multiple times by multiple men when she was twelve years old. Britt implied that it was caused by Biden’s border policies.

But journalist Jonathan Katz says that she is lying, that the woman said that it happened to her in Mexico between 2004 and 2008.
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