Our picksKyle Rittenhouse & the Sheepdog Mentality | In a Robot War, Kill the Humans | AI to Solve the Rare Earths Problem?, and more

Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality(Graeme Wood, The Atlantic)
Rittenhouse appears to live in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men, and where he is a warrior.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement (Michael German, Brennan Center)
The government’s response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient.

In a Robot War, Kill the Humans (Zak Kallenborn, Defense One)
Even if advances in robotics mean fewer humans on the battlefield, the fight will increasingly focus on those that remain.

Facebook Banned Violent Militia Groups. We Still Found Plenty of Them on Its Platform. (Shirin Ghaffary, Vox)
The company removed at least four of these groups and pages after Recode flagged them for posts about shooting BLM protesters.

The Coronavirus Immunity Riddle (Dr. John Lee, Spectator)
Our bodies’ defenses work in ways we still don’t understand.

U.S. Government Exposes North Korean Government ATM Cashout Hacking Campaign (Shannon Vavra, Cyberscoop)
The U.S. government called out North Korea on Wednesday over a government-led hacking campaign that has been focused on stealing cash from ATMs around the world.
The operation, run out of the North Korean government’s Reconnaissance General Bureau — through a hacking group the U.S. government refers to as Hidden Cobra — poses a “significant threat to financial institutions,” the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and U.S. Treasury said in a joint release.

Can AI Solve the Rare Earths Problem? Chinese and U.S. Researchers Think So (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
A research effort funded by China and the U.S. could speed up the discovery of new materials to use in electronics.

If Trump and Biden Agree There Shouldn’t Be a Nuclear Waste Site at Yucca Mountain, Can’t We All? (David Klaus, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Believe it or not, there is an issue on which Donald Trump and Joe Biden agree: Both have announced their opposition to building an underground repository to permanently store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. With the presidential candidates on record, it is time for everyone else to accept that Yucca Mountain is finally off the table, and for the United States to begin to seriously consider realistic alternatives for safely managing the more than 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel currently sitting at 72 operating and shut-down commercial nuclear reactor sites across the country.
US policy regarding spent fuel disposal has been hung up for decades on whether to build a repository at Yucca Mountain. The site has been controversial since 1987, when Congress designated it as the future home for high-level radioactive waste – provided, of course, that it meets all technical requirements and is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Thirty-plus years and more than $15 billion later, all technical work to assess the site’s suitability has stopped and the licensing review is dead in the water. The US Congress has refused to appropriate funds to the project for years. And because the government has not met its commitment to begin accepting waste for disposal in 1998, it is forced to pay utilities more than $600 million every year to store their spent fuel on site. Moreover, the most realistic approach for managing the tons of spent fuel—an interim storage facility—is held hostage to progress on Yucca Mountain. Current law requires that the NRC issue a license for Yucca Mountain before a consolidated interim storage could begin to accept spent fuel.
The sooner everyone agrees to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain, the sooner the United States can move forward on consolidated storage for the next 40 to 50 years, since this is likely the amount of time it will take to bring a long-term repository into operation. This will give the government time to find a new site using a consent-based process.