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Stay safe on the zombie internet

Earlier this year, digital news organization The Wrap published a story reporting that cybersecurity firm CHEQ had declared up to 76% of Twitter’s traffic during the Super Bowl was bots. We won’t get into the details here — that’s by far the most important bit and you can find the rest easily enough — but it’s a critical detail that flew somewhat under the radar. In the last 30-odd years, the internet has cemented itself: in our workplace, in our culture and in our downtime. If you’re above a certain age, you likely remember the early internet as a wide-open frontier, ...

All veterans deserve respect and their well-earned benefits — including the transgender ones

We are aghast at the lack of respect with which a subset of veterans are being treated at the hands of the U.S. Air Force, as reported by the Associated Press and published in Friday’s edition of The Express on page A2. To spare you the searching, here’s the lede for that story: “The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits.” Folks, despite what a vocal subsection of our Facebook commenters choose to believe, we ...

Attracting, retaining public defenders is a mighty, but absolutely crucial challenge

Last month, a work stoppage by lawyers in Massachusetts who represent indigent defendants forced judges to dismiss cases against hundreds of people who had been accused of crimes, including violent offenses, because they lacked legal representation. This isn’t just a problem in Massachusetts: in Centre County, a group of local bar advocates have warned that a growing shortage of lawyers willing to accept court-appointed cases is similarly threatening the integrity of the local criminal justice system. While it may seem counterintuitive to release criminal defendants before their ...

What’s the point of taxes?

America has a tax problem. Well, several. But there’s a particularly big one. Have you read the column by Georgia Garvey directly to the right? Or, for those reading online, it is also publishing on Saturday, July 29, and the headline for it is “Drinking hemlock, eating in the shade and following dumb rules.” If you haven’t, we recommend it — it directly pertains to this Our View. We’ll wait. Welcome back! Assuming you went and read that, anyway. If you’re just still here because you already read it, awesome. We’ll keep going on. We see Garvey’s opinion ...

Floods in region a warning: get prepared for disaster, or suffer consequences

Heavy rains — and the attending floods — have been in the news for some time now. Nationally, of course, there’s been the devastating, and lethal, floods in Texas, which we have printed substantial Associated Press coverage about. Within our local region, however, there have also been several significant rainfall events which have threatened (or caused) flash flooding — and, in some cases, evacuations. Consider the torrential rains in eastern Lycoming County and Sullivan County from Sunday into Monday. Our sister paper, the Williamsport Sun-Gazette, had coverage of this ...

Gaslighting doesn’t exist — you’re just crazy

Our government lies to us. Sometimes bluntly, sometimes through fine print, sometimes under the guise of national security and sometimes just to avoid accountability. This isn’t new. Governments around the world have lied to their citizens for as long as governments have existed — and it’s a subject extensively documented in academic research, if you feel like getting depressed. Helen Norton, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado Boulder, has written about this throughout her career. In her paper, “The Government’s Lies and the Constitution,” ...