We need a strategy — and we need one now.

Sadly, it’s no surprise to see Washington on its back foot against the Chinese Communist Party. Where American officials struggle to think beyond the latest news cycle, leaders in Beijing think in centuries-long historical epochs. 

His Plane Crashed in the Amazon. Then Came the Hard Part.

To calculate the real dislikes on a video, we tabulate only increases to the dislikes, and ignore decreases. On normal YouTube videos (e.g., on PewDiePie’s videos), the official YouTube stats and our real stats completely agree. On many White House videos, there is a huge discrepancy between official dislikes and our calculated real dislikes.

Yellow Journalism Turns Blue. Ron Johnson is under attack from a press that’s abandoned honesty and fairness.

Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport

Climate of ‘fear’ prevents experts from questioning the handling of the pandemic

H&M erased from Apple Maps, other platforms in China amid boycott

After choosing “privately insured” in the online mask instead of “statutory insurance”, she was offered an earlier vaccination appointment. We followed up on this information to find out whether privately insured people are preferred when making appointments. It quickly became clear: It probably has nothing to do with the insurance status. It was simply a coincidence whether you could get an appointment online yesterday for April 12th, or a month later, for May 15th, in the same vaccination center.

The decline in church membership is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference

How then should we conceptualize software freedom?

Which brings me to the reason experts should be more reluctant to lie to the public: They aren’t experts on the topic of when to lie.

Misdemeanor Prosecution

China’s government passes Hong Kong “patriot” election law

By comparison, the federal retail pharmacy program reported March 11 it had administered nearly 1 million dose s over a single day. Over the course of the next four days, the program’s pharmacies administered more than 5 million more doses, according to the federal vaccination data obtained by POLITICO.

Amazon’s Twitter Army Was Handpicked for “Great Sense of Humor,” Leaked Document Reveals

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

Congressional Candidate Laura Loomer Banned From Payment Processing Company Stripe

Live on national television, Diana Church calmly explained to the Prime Minister that her son’s doctor had asked to see him in a week’s time, and yet the clinic had refused to take any appointments more than forty-eight hours in advance. Otherwise, physicians would lose out on bonuses.

Apple’s cooperation with authoritarian governments

Meet the Russiagate Prober Who Couldn’t Verify Anything in the Steele Dossier Yet Said Nothing for Years

Obama Transportation Secretary Hid Foreign Cash Loan

Eye-Opening Photos and Video Taken Inside Illegal Click Farms

Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it?

The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers

Vaccine distribution and political contributions

Dahua and Hikvision Co-Author Racial And Ethnic PRC Police Standards

The exorbitant tax privilege

Why the World Needs a Software Bill Of Materials Now

For 250 years of American history, politicians have held the peacetime budget deficit in check because of fears of either inflation or higher interest rates (or perhaps a loss of confidence in the gold standard.) What would happen if they begin to sniff out that the actual risk is not inflation or much higher interest rates next year, rather the risk is higher taxes in 20 years, after they’ve safely retired? How would they respond to this information?

But the net effect recalls the old joke about the firing squad that stands in a circle.

Major flaws found in machine learning for COVID-19 diagnosis

Data and Models

Court says Northern Virginia restaurant defying mask mandate can remain open

Disease and demographic development: the legacy of the plague

Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2020 Preliminary Data

How a Personal-Photo Curator Separates the Is-This-a-Rash Selfies from the Keepers

National U.S. publications and TV networks cover Covid news much more negatively than foreign media, scientific journals or regional media within the U.S.

TSMC: how a Taiwanese chipmaker became a linchpin of the global economy

Fauci said, “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent … Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here …. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

Dr. Fauci has said that we don’t have good data on natural immunity. That is largely because his own National Institutes of Health has done little to answer this and other important clinical questions. The NIH and CDC, which together receive more than $40 billion a year from taxpayers, should have focused on answering the most basic Covid-19 clinical questions that affect Americans. If we say we’re going to follow the science, then we need to be willing to consider all the data.

How a container ship blocked the Suez canal – visual guide

20 Minute Neighborhoods.

On Apple’s Privacy Practices

US Mortality Monitoring – Deaths, Excess, Z-Scores, State Map

The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez

The decision to block an “expert” level cyberattack has caused controversy inside Google after it emerged that the hackers in question were working for a US ally.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo got special treatment from New York, confirming worst suspicions about media elites

Much of the press no longer has a com­mit­ment to truth, fair­ness or hon­esty. Its com­mit­ment is to De­mo­c­ra­tic power.

Annie’s Mac and Cheese is based in the Bay Area, but Annie is not. Here’s her story.

Hollywood Executive Reveals How China’s Politics Have Shaped Movie Industry

Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden

Biden falsely claims the new Georgia law ‘ends voting hours early

William Grimes:

Benjamin Yount:

There are new numbers to go along with claims that online classes are leaving school kids in Wisconsin behind.

Milwaukee Public Schools on Wednesday said just over 30% of high school students failed the fall semester.

Data from Milwaukee schools showed 30.3% of MPS high schoolers failed last fall, compared to 18.8% in the fall of 2019.

The difference, besides the huge increase, is that Milwaukee Public Schools were online only in the fall of 2020.

The revelation comes as Milwaukee schools prepare to welcome some students back to class next month. MPS’ board this week approved a return to in-person classes for kids in elementary school and junior high. MPS will bring high school seniors back, but freshmen, sophomores, and juniors will continue to learn from home.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Fort Meade:

The National Security Agency published a cybersecurity product, “Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model,” on Thursday. This product shows how deploying Zero Trust security principles can better position cybersecurity professionals to secure enterprise networks and sensitive data. To provide NSA’s customers with a foundational understanding of Zero Trust, this product discusses its benefits along with potential challenges, and makes recommendations for implementing Zero Trust within their networks.

The Zero Trust model eliminates trust in any one element, node, or service by assuming that a breach is inevitable or has already occurred. The data-centric security model constantly limits access while also looking for anomalous or malicious activity.

Adopting the Zero Trust mindset and leveraging Zero Trust principles will enable systems administrators to control how users, processes, and devices engage with data. These principles can prevent the abuse of compromised user credentials, remote exploitation, or insider threats, and even mitigate effects of supply chain malicious activity.

Jon Marcus:

 A Yale-educated evolutionary biologist and a member of the faculty at Catholic, liberal arts-focused Sacred Heart University, Geffrey Stopper also oversees one of its newest courses: Advanced Craft Beverage Brewing.

Sacred Heart is launching career-focused programs like this to give its students vocational credentials that can speed them into their first jobs while expanding the university’s market to older adults who are hoping to get new ones.

After all, there are 115 breweries in Connecticut, according to the Connecticut Brewers Guild, employing about 6,000 people. But there are no other formal training programs in the state to cover such things as brewery management and brewing theory.

“You need to know how enzymes work and how acids work and apply equations to what you’re doing,” Stopper said of the program, standing on a catwalk overlooking fermentation tanks and repurposed wine and whiskey barrels filled with beer in the cavernous warehouse of Two Roads Brewery, where the course is taught.

We were all told contact tracing is a proven strategy for containing pandemics. Now, @JulieZauzmer reports that DC’s contact tracing program may have been exacerbating it.

Gun Sales Rise In Past Year, Especially Among Women And African Americans

Liberals and Conservatives Are Both Totally Wrong about Platform Immunity

Tuna’s Last Stand

In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.

It’s human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist

The executive says the indictment highlights the “vilification” of anyone “who takes a stance against unwarranted surveillance.”

The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption and Tell Congress About All the Encrypted Phones It’s Already Hacking Into

Daily Telegraph plans to link journalists’ pay with article popularity

What South Dakota Can Teach America

Under Closson’s leadership, the paper garnered national attention for a 2019 editorial apologizing to student activists who criticized its efforts to report the news.

These are powerful tools, and we ought to be cautious in their application.

The instruction to change the program came on the telephone from the Chinese regime’s international radio arm, China Radio International (CRI), not more than 48 hours before the Chinese prime minister’s arrival. Later, they sent over a prepared footage about China’s history and the greatness of Sino-Hungarian relations, which Klasszik Radio had to broadcast at the appropriate time.

How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

Facebook’s long-awaited content ‘supreme court’ has arrived. It’s a clever sham

They paid a secret group of writers to make newsletter authorship seem lucrative

The latter point, of course, is exactly what has happened. The EU halt has increased vaccine hesitancy rather than alleviating it.

D.C. Circuit Judge Silberman just released a truly wild dissent calling on the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, claiming NYT and WaPo are “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” and accusing “big tech” of censoring conservatives.

A Pioneer of Digital Design Looks Back on a Defining Era

In other words, everything that marketing communication people are doing should be analyzed through a hard-nosed assessment of real world consumer behavior, not the rosy lens of traditional brand and marketing thinking.

Linda Xie:

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a group organized around a mission that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain.

One of the main benefits of a DAO is that they are more transparent than traditional companies since all actions and funding in the DAO are viewable by anyone. This significantly reduces the risk of corruption and censorship. Publicly traded companies must provide independently audited financial statements, but shareholders only get to see the financial health of the organization at a snapshot in time. Since a DAO’s balance sheet exists on a public blockchain, it is completely transparent at all times, down to every single transaction.

DAOs typically are more globally accessible and have lower barriers to entry than companies. Given the transparency and lower barriers to entry, there will likely be lower switching costs for DAO members who don’t agree with the rules and actions. DAOs sharing a similar mission might need to compete for members and are incentivized to be as transparent as possible and not extract too much rent from the group so that they are able to attract top members. DAOs might also need to quickly evolve to meet the members’ needs.