Countries where the US is perpetuating an endless civil war now face war together with Covid-19.

Thug departments are fond of harping on minor wrongdoing, claiming that this will discourage all crime. (There is no evidence it works.) But when they commit nonfatal wrongdoing, such as minor false accusations, they want us to disregard them.

I think that cops, because of their special powers and privileges, should be held to an especially strict standard.

The principal terrorist threat in the US today is from right-wing extremists.

The study does not count terrorism by the president, such as sabotaging the response to Covid-19, but that dwarfs casualties of the September 2001 terrorist attacks and I think it should be counted as a terrorist attack.

I agree that we should not further attack human rights in the name of "anti-terrorism". The PAT RIOT act authorizes too much surveillance and it needs to be weakened. Most of the right-wing terrorism is not susceptible to being prevented. But we could cut back on the spread of right-wing extremist recruiting with suitable changes in Facebook's algorithms for what postings to propagate.

US citizens: call on advertisers to stop advertising in Facebook, as pressure for it to remove hatred.

Bunnie Huang reports on the stand-alone contact tracing device, the TraceTogether Token, in a pre-release version.

I respect Bunnie highly; if he says something respects privacy, I suppose it does.

One issue the report does not discuss: the device is meant to be used for months — does it delete information about past contacts after a few weeks pass? Older contacts should not be relevant to Covid-19, so there is no justification for reporting them.

Bunnie explains why using mobile phones for contact tracing gratuitously puts privacy in danger. In brief, it's because carrying a mobile phone gratuitously puts privacy in danger, and running an app gratuitously puts privacy in additional danger.