Society

Americans: watch your backs. Last week, Forbes released a bombshell report that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, the popular video recording and meme app, was planning to monitor and track the physical location of Americans. It’s not the first time there have been national security and human rights questions swirling around ByteDance, the China-based technology company that owns all of TikTok’s offshore data and could easily be leveraged by the Chinese government. Forbes would not specifically say which Americans ByteDance was targeting, but it would not be too farfetched to assume they would be influential figures in media and politics — the same folks China tracked during Hong Kong’s volatile freedom and democracy protests.

“The bird is freed,” tweeted Elon Musk last Thursday, when he acquired full ownership of Twitter. The day before, he strode into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a white ceramic wash basin to impart the message that his new ownership should “sink in.” Musk has repeatedly signaled his intention to liberalize the platform by relaxing its limits on free expression. Since taking over, he's stated that Twitter protocols and account bans will remain in place pending review by an internal, ideologically diverse “content moderation council.

Whether on British television news panels or late-night TV in America, it is hard to get away from talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Even the president of the United States has weighed in on AI, introducing an "AI Bill of Rights." The popular thing is to amplify the current media narrative — that AI will render millions jobless. It will eventually become more powerful than humans and destroy its creators. Just Google “AI doomsday” and then run and hide under the covers. I will be the first to admit that all technology has a dark side. Email came with spam and scammers; mobile phones came with robocalls and endless tracking by companies like Facebook. Artificial intelligence, too, will be used for nefarious purposes.

When the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York in September, climate-watchers may have noticed a pesky, pigtailed vacuum. Greta Thunberg, who spent the summer of 2019 stalking the East Coast after taking a prince of Monaco’s yacht across the Atlantic, reached her zenith that September — the last time this body met in person — at the Climate Action Summit where she delivered her creepy, memed-into-oblivion “how dare you” speech. But the chilling little entity straight out of Kubrick was notably absent at this year’s assembly, at a time when the Biden administration is pushing climate hysteria more fervently than ever.

Following his suspension from Twitter in the wake of January 6, the question of where Donald Trump would take his tweets was a matter of much public debate. At the time, his options were limited. The obvious choice was Parler, which had experienced rapid growth in response to Twitter’s censorship. Yet after Amazon pulled its web hosting services over concerns about “hate speech,” the company fast imploded. The only other possibility was Gab, though its reputation as a cesspool of racist bile meant it likely would have been a PR disaster that even Trump would have struggled to weather. Seemingly out of ideas, Trump started an online blog, although that project was short-lived. His only other prospect was to launch a new platform at which he would be the star attraction.

America is about to spend $126.9 billion on renewable energy thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. When this is added to the already existing production tax credits, the total is $240 billion. Greens everywhere are rejoicing. Paul Krugman took to the New York Times to wonder if the Democrats had just saved the world from climate change. And why not? America has seen emissions drop to 4.8 trillion tons a year since 2000. That’s a one-trillion ton decrease. In fact, since America has embarked on building out wind and solar, the country has returned to 1949 levels of emissions. But are renewables really to thank? After all, wind and solar only accounted for about 12 percent of our electricity supply in 2021.

Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it offline. Delete it. Make it go away. What's the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It exists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the cancellation of people, for which Twitter has become uniquely known, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you'd think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or, more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology.

After love rat Adam Levine and wife Behati Prinsloo were pictured smiling on a beach were released, it seems that all is well after his cheating scandal erupted two weeks ago. The forty-three-year-old Maroon 5 singer denied cheating on his pregnant wife, after model Sumner Stroh claimed that they had a year-long affair in a TikTok video. Following her admission, two other women came out with messages purportedly from Levine. But could his conduct be down to science? An August study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal seems to think so. The authors concluded that infidelity may be contagious. That’s right, hanging out with sleazebags could make you one too.

Cockburn has been unlucky in love of late. He’s married. Third time’s the charm, as they say. But for the generations below, the dating world throws up a number of quandaries. In the post-#MeToo era, you can’t meet at work anymore. Bars and clubs took a big hit with Covid. That’s why so many younguns depend on app-based dating these days. But on Bumble and Hinge (Cockburn’s not well known enough for Raya yet), progressive virtue-signaling is apparently all-too-common. “Swipe left if you’re a Republican” and slogans about “dismantling the patriarchy,” “defunding the police” and “BLM/ACAB” plague the profiles of many users. What are the alternatives if you’re on the right? Cockburn always thought “church.

A new study released this month reveals that prolonged social isolation may be worse for your health than regularly smoking cigarettes. The research paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Aging, found that psychological factors can deeply impact the aging process. Subjects who reported suffering from a poor mental state, such as being depressed, unhappy, or lonely, were biologically 1.65 years older than their peers. Comparatively, being a current smoker was found to only add 1.25 years to a subject's biological age. "The detrimental impact of low psychological well-being is of the same magnitude as serious diseases and smoking," the study's authors conclude. The results are timely considering the impact of the Covid-19 lockdowns on the social lives of Americans.

Never did I think the day would come when I would be writing about West Virginia coal miners and Lululemon’s “Hotty Hot pants” in the same article. What truly strange times we live in. Last week, I traveled down to wild and wonderful West Virginia for the Bluefield Coal & Mining Show, “A Show for Mining: Past, Present, and Future.” It was a cloudless day in early fall, with crisp air, manly Southern gentlemen with the most charming drawls, huge, impressive, American-made machinery, and free beer everywhere. “Almost heaven” indeed!

Hailed as America’s first comprehensive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. The UNFCCC’s objective was to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” a threshold that the convention left undefined. In 1992, the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 356.54 parts per million by volume (ppmv).

Actor Shia LaBeouf is known for being pretty…let’s call it outlandish. The “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page is hefty. He comes off in interviews as intense, impulsive, and potentially explosive (he once reportedly made a fan cry because she asked for his autograph). He’s being sued by his ex-girlfriend over abuse allegations and just welcomed a child with his on-again-off-again wife. Then there’s his full-torso tattoo. Now, LaBeouf is back in the headlines, but for once it isn’t for anything “scandalous” (despite what Slate might claim).

For many, the upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 (after a botched attempt earlier this week) undoubtedly seems the start of a new and exciting era in space exploration. Not only is the US finally planning to return to the Moon — this time to build a permanent outpost on the lunar surface — but in just a few months Elon Musk’s SpaceX will be sending its gigantic Starship, theoretically capable of carrying 100 astronauts, into Earth orbit. “Space is sexy again,” as astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter recently put it. “After the excitement of the initial Apollo missions dwindled into a subject only discussed by ultra-nerds, and the cool factor of the Space Shuttle gave way to the realization that it didn’t really do much, people generally lost interest in space.