The report urges election officials to use machines relying on voter-marked paper ballots and pair those with “statistically rigorous post-election audits” to verify the outcome of elections reflects the will of voters. The authors also warn that supply chain issues “continue to pose significant security risks,” including cases where machines include hardware components of foreign origin, or where election administrators deploy foreign-based software, cloud, or other remote services. The report lands as officials in several states are working to upgrade election equipment, and as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. debate federal election security legislation and funding. //

Ultimately, the report notes flaws that have been acknowledged for years.

“As disturbing as this outcome is, we note that it is at this point an unsurprising result,” the authors conclude. “However, it is notable—and especially disappointing—that many of the specific vulnerabilities reported over a decade earlier…are still present in these systems today.”

NASA Uses Powerful Supercomputers and AI to Map Earth’s Trees, Discovers Billions of Trees in West African Drylands //

Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Build a Unicorn army. Betray your friends. Unicorns are your friends now.

A thorough marketing campaign for the use of low-quality masks has convinced millions of people that masks will reduce COVID-19 spread, but do they really?

Trans activists keep bullying businesses into removing content through fear tactics rather than by countering the message with their own better one. //

A movement that can marginalize and silence viewpoints it finds threatening is not a victimized group. More to the point, what Strangio is effectively arguing here is that the personal identities of all transgender people cease to exist when directly observed without a lens of gender-affirmative theory.

In “Irreversible Damage,” Shrier speaks with transgender people, their families, both conservatives and progressives, and medical professionals, and comes away with a clear understanding of what gender dysphoria is and what it is not. For a movement that struggles to define itself and its wants, this book is a positive development.

In Douglass’s abiding vision, America was the proper home for black Americans, their only realistic alternative, and also the locus of their highest ideals. //

Mark Twain copied a friend’s remark into his notebook: “I am not an American; I am the American.” To be the American, the exemplary or representative American, is a claim very few Americans could plausibly make. Twain could. Benjamin Franklin could and did. Abraham Lincoln could but didn’t, although admirers made the claim for him. Surely some number of others could, too. But among all Americans past or present, no one could make such a claim more compellingly than Frederick Douglass.

Like his country, Douglass rose from a low beginning to a great height. Like his country again, he won his freedom in a revolutionary struggle, by his own virtue, and against great odds, and he matured into an exemplar of universal liberty, admired the world over. Also like his country, Douglass the individual was divided by race.

Unlike America, Douglass could hardly think of himself as “conceived in liberty.” But even in this respect — especially in this respect — he represents a larger American promise. The son of a white slaveholder and a black slave, Douglass became, along with Lincoln, post-Founding America’s most important exponent of the natural-rights argument summarized in the Declaration of Independence. Pursuant to the same principles, he became America’s most prominent representative of the aspiration toward racial integration, reconciliation, and uplift.

One must emphasize: he became that. It didn’t come naturally to him. To become the great apostle of those aspirations, Douglass had to overcome a sentiment about and among black Americans that is recurrently present in U.S. history, powerful in his day and again in ours — the feeling or conviction that to be black is to bear an identity antagonistic to American identity. //

Douglass was a strong believer in the power of speech. This was a man who almost literally talked his way from the bottom to near the top of American society. But he didn’t think speech was all-powerful, and he didn’t think that the fostering of a healthy sense of American identity was merely a matter of persuading people, white or black, to believe in American principles.

To cultivate a genuine sense of American identity requires more than agreement with its principles. It requires a sense of belonging and affection. It requires a love of America as one’s own. On this point and others, Douglass was a good American disciple of John Locke.

In Locke’s well-known reasoning, we own our own labor, and we own what we make. This can apply, however, not only to material property but also to political and patriotic affiliation. What Douglass wanted to teach his fellow citizens, his black fellow citizens, in particular, was that we can build America, and in building or rebuilding it, we can make it our own.

We can improve it by our labor, he argued, culturally and morally no less than materially. To do this, we need first to improve ourselves. We need to cultivate what he called the “staying qualities,” fostering a faith in ourselves and our country. This is why hopefulness is a moral imperative, for Douglass, and why a spirit of alienation is so dangerous. //

We live in a time when many Americans have forgotten our principles, or never learned them, or learned to revile them; when many young people, young men especially, grow up in the belief that they have no grounds for hope for their future and no reason to identify with their country; when many of our educational institutions have become purveyors of alienation and disintegration, teaching that America is an evil, hateful society and that speech to the contrary must be vilified and suppressed.

At such a time, as we search for models of understanding and inspiration, it is a vital imperative for us to recover the moral and political vision of Douglass. In the long history of African-American political thought, there is no more forceful proponent of the cause of integration, and there is no more insightful analyst of the varieties and dangers of national and racial disintegration.

“No people can prosper,” Douglass reiterated late in life, “unless they have a home, or the hope of a home” — and “to have a home,” one “must have a country.” America, in Douglass’s abiding vision, was black Americans’s proper home, their only realistic alternative, and the locus of their highest ideals.

By its white and black citizens together, America must be cherished and perfected as a genuine home for all, not merely by the accident and force of necessity but as an object of rational and sentimental identification. For Douglass as for Lincoln, their common country was, through it all, the last best hope of earth.