Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

The House of Representatives voted today to ban TikTok in the US— unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it to a company not based in China. After advancing on an unusually unanimous vote in committee the bill won wide bipartisan support from the full House. It was approved 352-65. To become law the bill needs approval by the Senate and then a signature from President Biden— who said today he will sign it.

I'm not sure how I feel about this "ban" on TikTok. (I quote "ban" because it does provide the alternative for ByteDance to sell it to a company not based in China... but that's essentially still a ban IMO.) As much as it's popular in some corners of the Internet to sneer at TikTok, the app does have 170 million users in the US. That's literally half the country. And it's actually more than 50% of the addressable market as the population figure of 340 million counts people of all ages. As much as the service is maligned for being popular with kids, including kids who arguably are too young to participate in social media, you've got to figure there really aren't that many kids under, say, age 6 on the app.

I'm not sure how I feel about this bill because I see arguments both pro and con. That said, I think there are way more cons than pros on this legislation.

The first con against the bill is that 170 million figure. It's frankly hard to believe that Congress would vote so overwhelming against something that's clearly so popular in the US.

The second con is the sense that there's a cultural, generational, and possibly even ethnic divide here. TikTok's most active users skew young. Congress skews old. This smacks very much of a "Darn kids these days!" argument from the dinosaurs stumbling around the edge of the tar pit in Congress. And it seems very much a reactionary, anti-modern culture thing that would come from Republicans... especially as TikTok's biggest users are also less white in addition to being less old than the general population. Yet Democrats also widely supported the bill— 50 Dems and 15 Republicans voted against it— and President Biden said he'll sign it. Also, Trump was for it until he was against it. Though his argument now is that a ban will benefit Facebook, which he's labeled an Enemy of the People... even more so than the free press, apparently.

The one argument on the pro side is that because ByteDance is a Chinese company the Chinese government can compel them to give it any of the very rich data it collects on its users and their browsing habits. That argument does kind of smack of Sinophobia— another con— except that it's literally true. And except that the degree of data they can collect is literally the same as every other social media platform can collect. (The EFF, for example, says Congress should ban every company from doing that much data collection, not just one company in China.) So even this one pro argument is a very weak one.

Finally there's the con argument that this law is unlikely to survive court challenge. A US court struck down a similar state law in Montana late last year. That case is still being appealed, but the ban seems unlikely to win given the higher courts have never let stand a sweeping ban on digital communications.

Oops, it happened again. Another week, another mass shooting. (Actually these happen more than once a day in the US; it's just they only make the news once a week or so because we're sadly so accustomed to them.) It was another school shooting, too. On Thursday a troubled student at Perry High School north of Des Moines, Iowa, walked in with a gun and killed a sixth grader and injured 7 other people including the principal before turning his gun on himself. Example news coverage: NBC News article & video, 5 Jan 2024.

The shooting occurred while many GOP candidates seeking the 2024 presidential nomination are in Iowa ahead of the state's first-in-nation caucus later this month. Sadly these leaders had nothing meaningful to say about the tragedy. Folks such as Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy offered their "thoughts", as they always do, but when it came to political solutions all they could offer was that we have a "mental health" problem in this country.

The problem with conservatives blaming gun violence on "mental health" is twofold. One, these same conservatives routinely block laws relating to mental health and guns, whether it be (a) funding for mental health care or (b) restrictions on possession of guns by the mentally ill. Two, as many people pointed out when House Speaker Mike Johnson said the problem is "the human heart" after a church shooting a few months ago, humans in every country in the world have hearts but only in the US among first-world countries do we have such an outrageous death toll by gun violence. Since 2020 gun violence has been the leading cause of death among kids in the US. It's not the hearts, it's the guns, stupid.

Donald Trump was even more direct about the GOP's intransigence against doing anything meaningful about gun violence. People "have to get over it," he said at a rally in Iowa Friday. Example news coverage: Rolling Stone, 5 Jan 2024.

Oops, it happened again. Another nut with easy access to military style weapons walked into a business, school, or house of worship and shot people indiscriminately. A shooter in Lewiston, Maine entered a bowling alley and a bar and killed 18 people and wounded at least 13 more on Wednesday night. Police quickly identified a local man as the suspect, but 36 hours later he is still at large. Residents across Maine have been under shelter-in-place orders and many schools are closed for a second day as heavily armed authorities continue their manhunt.

Meanwhile our politicians remain ideologically deadlocked. "The problem is the human heart. It's not guns, it's not the weapons," new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told the media. (Yes, the House managed to elect a new Speaker after 3 weeks of Republican caused chaos. Blog coming on that soon.)

Here's the problem with that "It's not guns, it's people" argument.... Every nation on earth has people with hearts. Yet the US is alone in having a civilian mass shooting practically every day. What's the difference between the US and every other developed nation— all of whom have 100% humans with hearts? It's the guns, stupid.

Israel has begun its counterattack against Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip. It follows Hamas's shocking raids on Oct 7 which killed over 1,000 people (figure updated with latest estimates), most of whom were civilians deliberately targeted at a music festival and in their own homes. Unfortunately for Israel, this war is a no-win proposition.

First, not striking back at Hamas is not an option. The Oct. 7 attack was big enough, brazen enough, and barbaric enough that it cannot go unanswered. Moreover, the scope of attack revealed that Hamas has built considerable terrorist war-fighting capability in the Gaza Strip. They have several thousand trained fighters, ample munitions, sophisticated leadership and operational expertise, and training grounds. Israel cannot simply leave this hostile military within its borders untouched.

Clearly Israel must act, militarily. The problem, then, is what degree of success can it achieve by striking back. And that's where it seems there's no reasonable definition of a "win" they can achieve. Consider:

1. Those thousands of terrorist fighters are not going wear uniforms or guard terrorist bases. They will melt in with the general population. (That's a core fact of terrorism and asymmetric warfare.) Likely many of them were among the first refugees to flee south when Israel warned that it would invade the northern part of the Gaza Strip.


2. The invasion is hugely damaging to civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israel cut off power and supplies to the Gaza Strip two weeks ago. That's part of isolating and disempowering the terrorists... but it's also created a humanitarian crisis with 1,000,000+ civilian victims.


3. In addition to the general problem of civilian harm when fighting a war in a densely occupied area, Israel must deal with the fact Hamas hides its war materiel in civilian infrastructure. Past strikes have reveals that guns are stored in hospitals, bombs are kept in schools, and officers meet to make war plans in occupied residential buildings. Thus neutralizing Hamas's war-making capability will mean these places are targets. That not only makes the humanitarian impact worse but will play terribly in the news.

Sadly Israel will find its loses international support the longer it pursues this war.

On Saturday Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, launched significant attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets. They fired hundreds if not thousands of rockets while soldiers attacked several military bases. In the initial round of the attack more than 100 900 Israelis were killed, hundreds more wounded, and many over 100 hostages were taken— both military personnel and civilians mostly civilians, whom Hamas deliberately slaughtered. As fighting continued Saturday and into its second day on Sunday, Israel declared war.

One of the first questions people ask is, "What started this war?" Well, there are different answers one could give to that depending on whether one looks back 2 years, 20 years, 75 years (specifically to 1948), or 1,000 years. Oddly Hamas itself gave an answer that looked back a mere few days: Israelis had defiled the very holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. That's what news headlines on Saturday morning repeated.

Let me continue, for the moment, with the argument that the attacks were in response to damaging a holy site. That prompts two questions: 1) You expect me to believe that? An attack of this magnitude clearly was months in the planning. There's no way it was cooked up in two days in response. 2) How was the holy site defiled? A bit of digging beneath the headlines on Saturday morning revealed this ruse for what it is. The defilement was that a few Israelis prayed in the temple. Obviously they were being provocative by doing that but all they did was pray. Though that's obviously not the true cause of Hamas's acts of war on Israel, just think about whether any reasonable person would want to support the side that presents as its justification for war, "Someone prayed to the wrong god, so we killed over 100 900 people and took hostages."

Now, anyone who wasn't proverbially born yesterday, or at least anyone who can grasp that history goes back more than about a week, will spot that Hamas's attack occurred on nearly the 50th anniversary (50 years plus 1 day) of the Yom Kippur War. Likely that's what Hamas was aligning the timing of its attack to.

As for why now, one could look merely at the worsening Israeli-Palestine situation over the past several years and assume things simply came to a head. The increasingly hardline political rule in Israel under PM Netanyahu has made things tough for Palestinians. But there are also significant things afoot outside the borders of Israel and Palestine that affect the situation.

In recent years some Arab countries have normalized political (and economic) relations with Israel. Following the Abraham Accords in 2020-2021, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan normalized ties with Israel. Lately Saudi Arabia has been moving to do the same. If the Middle Eastern economic powerhouse— and custodian of several of Islam's holiest sites— Saudi Arabia were to officially eschew "Death to Israel" as its foreign policy, it would remove a lot of fuel from the fire of supporting Palestinian militants. It could even start a domino effect that brings many other Arab nations toward peace with Israel. The smart money is on Hamas attacking now to derail these moves toward peace.

Edited to add:This geopolitical view also explains Iran's alleged involvement. Hamas's multi-pronged attack indicates a near certainty of external funding and organizational support. Iran has long been involved in propping up Hamas, along with other anti-Israel/anti-secular-rule terror groups. Iran also benefits from derailing rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Iran's economy is failing due to a combination of its own corruption and the weight of US sanctions. It would be further left behind if its rival, Saudi Arabia, were to see an economic boost from trading with Israel.

Update 2: Casualty counts from Hamas's initial attack increased in the following days. It's not assessed that their initial attack killed over 900 Israelis, many of them civilians. Hamas deliberately targeted civilians at parties and homes, busting through doors and slaughtering everyone inside. Over 100 hostages were taken, many of them also civilians.

For weeks now I've seen scattered articles in my newsfeed about how Covid cases are on the rise. What's happening? Well, it's hard to tell because so much of the tracking infrastructure we (the US) built up in 2020 and 2021 has been dismantled. And it's not just in the states run by governors and legislatures who mock and dismiss Covid out of hand as a political hoax. Even responsible states, NGOs, and our federal government have accepted Covid as just another part of the background radiation of life. The case counting websites I used to check, sponsored by reputable organizations, are gone. Health organizations are reduced to reading the proverbial tea leaves now... which includes reading literal poop trails, as analyzing the virus content in sewage is sadly one of the better barometers we have left.

Tracking the spread of the virus in this new reality is tough. News articles call attention to outbreaks— a school system in one city here, a hospital in another city over there, a waste treatment plant somewhere else. We've devolved from comprehensive statistics to, basically, anecdotes.

In a world where anecdotes are all we seem to have anymore it's hard to tell how concerned I should be. My own anecdote, based on the people around me, is that there's nothing to worry about. I'm not sick. My partner's not sick. Very few, if any, of our friends have gotten Covid or Covid-like symptoms in the past two months. Of course, we're all on the responsible end of the spectrum. I haven't bothered talking much with relatives or colleagues who refused to get vaccinated. Though last I heard most of them were on their second or third round of having Covid, anyway, so at least they've built up some antibodies the hard way.

The surge we may or may not be having right now is caused by a new strain that has a name. Actually it has multiple names. I've seen it designated EG-5 and Eris; those are the same. I've also seen references to BA.2.86, a subvariant of Omicron, and XBB; these are apparently not the same. The plethora of names being tossed around in anecdotal news articles makes it even harder to determine whether I should start taking additional precautions.

Maybe I should give up like virtually everybody else and simply accept Covid as part of the background radiation of life.

Yesterday a federal grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump for illegal efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. In "The Big Lie", as it came to be known, Trump spent months making baseless claims of election fraud which helped incite the mob that attacked the US Capitol building on January 6 to try to stop lawful certification of the November election results. The charges laid out in the 45 page indictment are:

1. Conspiracy to Defraud the United States
2. Conspiracy to Obstruct and Official Proceeding
3. Obstruction of, and Attempt to Obstruct, an Official Proceeding
4. Conspiracy Against Rights

Example coverage: CNN article, 1 Aug 2023; full text of indictment, annotated, at CNN, 1 Aug 2023.

Charges for Co-Conspirators Coming?

One thing that's interesting about this indictment is that it describes six unnamed co-conspirators. They're not charged in this indictment but it seems likely they will be in the near future. And while their names are not given, the descriptions of their actions make it pretty clear that they include Trump's lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell.

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Since I wrote about NATO and international politics yesterday with Sweden's bid to join NATO moving forward, a few months after Finland's bid to join moved forward, it's been in the news that Ukraine is pressing its case again to join NATO. During the NATO summit in Vilnius this week world leaders have paid lots of lip service to supporting Ukraine's defense. Some, like the US, have already put action behind their words with billions of dollars of material support, while other nations have talked big but then found bureaucratic excuses not to follow through. When it comes to NATO membership, all the talk remains positive— but as a future thing, not now. Why later?

Well, under the principle that you can't insure a burning building, NATO is a mutual-defense alliance, and Ukraine is currently in an active state of war with Russia. To admit Ukraine to NATO now would be to commit all 31 of the current NATO members to a military conflict with Russia. That sure seems unwise, doesn't it?

The thing is, maybe not. Imagine what Russia would do if suddenly 31 other countries, with significant armies and massive economies, said, "Hey, you want a piece of Ukraine? You've got to come through all of us." They would stop the war. ...Well, if they were rational, and concerned with self preservation, they would stop. Like when Khrushchev backed off during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. But it took real guts on Kennedy's part to force that confrontation. It's not clear than any NATO member country today has such guts. So instead we'll wait until Russia is finishing wrecking as much of Ukraine as it can, and then consider admitting whatever's left. If anything is left.

Yesterday former president Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court in Miami on changes of mishandling secret documents, obstruction of justice, and false statements. The arraignment follows the unsealing of the 38-count indictment on Friday. One of Trump's long-time personal aides, Walt Nauta, was also charged as a co-defendant. Both men pleaded not guilty.

News coverage of the events leading up to the arraignment, and Trump's statements since, has been vast. It's basically the biggest story in the new, frequently pushing out news about the current president. I've avoided writing much about it in my blog, though. That's not because I'm not following the events, don't care, or don't have strong opinions.... I am following the news, on a daily basis. I do care, strongly. And I do have strong opinions. But the legality of Trump's actions and the politics around it are not what I want my blog to be about. Thus right now I'm just jotting down a few facts. I may come back around to the topic to share opinions later.

This just in! A jury in Manhattan this afternoon found former president and 2024 candidate Donald Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a department store fitting room in the 1990s. The jury awarded Carroll damages of $5 million.

I am surprised by this verdict. Just last night I remarked to my spouse, after the case had gone to the jury for deliberation earlier in the day, that I thought there wasn't enough evidence to prove the allegations. Carroll testified that it happened, and a few friends testified that she told them about it years ago, but there was no hard evidence of an assault.

Now, this is a civil law trial, not a criminal case. The standard of proof is lower. Plaintiffs only need to show that allegations are supported by “a preponderance of the evidence”. Perhaps I'm mis-intepreting what preponderance means, legally, but I'm not sure it wasn't met.

Trump didn't help himself in this trial. In a videotaped deposition he defended his "Grab 'em by the pussy" comments in the infamous Access Hollywood tape from several years ago. At the time he minimized his statements as "locker room talk". He repeated that characterization on social media within the past week. But here's the thing: the phrase "locker room talk" describes idle boasting that is exaggerated or untrue. When challenged about that quote in the deposition, Trump defended it. "Historically that's true," he said, reaffirming that in his worldview powerful men have the prerogative of being able to have their way with any woman— "unfortunately or fortunately."

Perhaps more crucially, Trump undermined one of his own lines of defense in the deposition. "She's not even my type," Trump has said numerous times, broadly implying that she's too fat, or old, or unattractive for him to even consider touching sexually. Yet when the plaintiff's attorney showed Trump a picture of him standing next to Carroll at a public even years ago, Trump misidentified Carroll as Marla Maples, one of his ex-wives. "That's my wife," Trump said matter-of-factly in the videotape. One can easily conclude that if Carroll looked enough like Trump's ex-wife for him to confuse them in a press photograph, she is the type he found physically attractive.