I’m a few days ahead of the news cycle on this one, but this might be the most predictable story of the year.

If you’re not sure what’s going on, let me tell you. Today, Wisconsin held an election (on the ballot were candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination as well as candidates for Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court), despite the fact that voting involves large crowds of people in close proximity and touching the same items, at a time when the CDC is urging citizens to do the exact opposite. Note that most poll workers are old, and therefore at greater risk of serious illness if they were to become infected with COVID-19. Additionally, many polling places in Wisconsin were closed due to the Coronavirus, forcing hoards of Wisconsinites to wait in hourslong lines at the few polling places that remained open (for example, Milwaukee had five polling locations open, while they were supposed to have had 180). It is a dangerous convergence of poor decisions, human vulnerabilities, and unyielding circumstances; or as Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes called it, a shit show.

The Governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, tried to postpone the election until June to give the pandemic time to subside a bit, but the Republican-held Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled his executive action unconstitutional. Efforts to pivot from in-person voting to vote-by-mail were also unsuccessful, halted by Republicans who feared that more people voting would result in them losing more races (if that’s the position your party is in, it may be time to reevaluate your platform). Voter suppression is alive and well. For more details on the Wisconsin Republicans’ motivation for suppressing voter turnout in this election, check out this article from The New York Times.

Forcing Americans to chose between their health and voting is an insult to Democracy, and the unpatriotic Republicans who put Wisconsinites in that predicament should be ashamed.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 6

UPDATED: 7/30/20, 15:50

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Well, it didn’t take long for another round of headlines to pop up exposing Zoom for a host of newly discovered privacy and security problems. Indeed, the closer you look, the worse they appear: these new issues were discovered so quickly once people started looking into Zoom that it leads one to believe that their leadership is not only unconcerned with actually making their platform private and secure, but that they’re either too stupid or too apathetic to even hide the evidence when they cut corners.

The most recent news:

• The Washington Post reported yesterday that Zoom calls are susceptible to eavesdropping by virtually anyone in the Internet, having verified that they were able to spy on business meetings, school children during classes, personal therapy sessions, and others types of calls.

• The Citizen Lab reported yesterday that some Zoom calls were being routed through servers located in China, and so were the encryption keys for those calls. This is a problem because the Chinese government is operating a surveillance state, and could force Zoom to hand over any data stored within Chinese borders, encryption keys included. So not only does Zoom itself have the ability to snoop on your calls, but so does the Chinese government. They claimed this was an accident spurred by increased strain on domestic servers that resulted in calls being handed off to overflow servers in China. Okay.

• Additionally, The Citizen Lab uncovered that Zoom was actually using a significantly weaker type of encryption than they told users, opting for AES-128 encryption instead of AES-256 encryption they advertised.

• Before you blindly trust Zoom’s Chinese CEO Eric Yuan, note that The Citizen Lab also reported that Zoom has over 700 employees in China and operates three subsidiary companies there. But it was totally an accident that they tossed the Chinese government their encryption keyring. Sure.

Just what you like to hear when you’re relying on Zoom to connect with others in the age of social distancing. Again, if your organization uses Zoom, I implore you to pressure them to find an alternative.

Wisely, some organizations, including the New York City Department of Education, are now banning the use of Zoom. Hopefully other institutions will follow their lead.

The CDC is now changing course and recommending that Americans use face masks while in public to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

It never made much sense to me that our government would tell citizens NOT to use face masks as a measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19: it just isn’t logical to think that wearing a mask wouldn’t be at least slightly more effective than not wearing a mask. We may never get a clear answer for why they told us not to wear masks, but at this point, one thing is clear: they have utterly failed us.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 5

Yes, face masks look kinda funny, and yes, it feels a bit uncomfortable, but the virus is still spreading at an alarming rate in the United States (special thanks to the Trump administration for their superb handling of this issue before it could become a full blown crisis 🙄) and wearing a mask WILL help protect you. If you can get your hands on N95 masks, those are the most effective, but standard surgical masks work too, and even homemade cloth masks can go a long way towards preventing you from catching COVID-19. In addition to being a physical barrier against aerosols and small liquid particles that can carry the virus, masks also serve as a physical reminder not to touch your face while you’re in public, so it does double duty to protect you.

If you’re going out in public, wear a mask and maintain at least six feet of space between yourself and others. Clean the groceries and other items you’re bringing into your home. When you do have to go out and buy things, at least try to support your local businesses. And for god’s sake, wash your hands often.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Christopher Weaver, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

All lab tests have some margin of error, measured in terms of sensitivity— the percent of positive cases a test accurately detects—and specificity, the percent of negative cases it accurately detects. […]

[Experts estimate] that the sensitivity of the tests is in the neighborhood of 70%, meaning nearly one in three positive patients walks away with a reassuring negative result.

It doesn’t take an epidemiologist to see why 30% of COVID-19 positive patients being told it’s safe for them to return to business as normal is a huge problem. On top of that, NPR reports that experts believe up to 25% of COVID-19 positive patients could be asymptomatic but still infectious.

One of the [pieces of] information that we have pretty much confirmed now is that a significant number of individuals that are infected actually remain asymptomatic. That may be as many as 25%.

These statistics are alarming by themselves, but combined… absolutely harrowing. As of today, the United States has 275,586 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 7,087 Americans have died from it.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 4



Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Until this month, the official FDA guidelines for who should be deferred when trying to donate blood instructed healthcare providers to defer any man who had had sexual contact with another man in the past 12 months (in the healthcare industry, the acronym “MSM“ is used as shorthand for “men who have sex with men”).

The FDA has now changed the MSM deferral from 12 months to 3 months in an effort to increase the supply of blood during the COVID-19 pandemic. Is this a positive change? Yes. But it feels as if this change only coming about because a few powerful, bigoted people realized that this pandemic is really leaving them up the creek without a paddle. They need help (to save lives, but also to save their reputations), so they’re turning to a group they had illogically deferred in bad faith.

Of course, men who have sex with men have always been able to lie and donate blood anyway, but that isn’t the point. The point is that these guidelines are archaic, discriminatory, scientifically unfounded, and stigmatizing, and simply reducing the timeline that determines who should be deferred doesn’t make it better when the underlying reason for the deferral remains the same.

If you are a same sex attracted man (whether you identify as gay, bisexual, or otherwise), I encourage you not to donate blood as a matter of principle — regardless of whether you’ve had sex in the last three months, the past year, the past hour, or ever in your life — until these absurd guidelines are completely done away with. If the people making these rules want our help, they should have to earn it.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

I don't write articles on subjects where I feel like I wouldn’t truly be adding something to the conversation, and this is a case where I considered not writing this piece. It has already been covered more thoroughly than I am capable of doing here, but I felt it was still worthwhile to reiterate what others have exposed and warn the public of the dangers Zoom presents.

Most people didn’t know too much about Zoom before the pandemic started and hoards of people were suddenly tasked with finding a way to perform their jobs from home. Now, Zoom is a household name, and millions of people are being herded into their user base like swine into a slaughterhouse. Personally, I’ve never used Zoom: I rarely have the need to video conference with more than one person, and in instances where I have needed to, Group FaceTime was more than sufficient. Based on Zoom’s reputation and their habit of completely abusing their users, I would never use their services, and in fact, I think they’re such a malignant company that I’m taking the time to warn CopyrightBro readers.

Last summer, news broke that quickly turned into a scandal, when it was revealed that Zoom was flagrantly abusing users’ trust by having their app automatically reinstall itself after it had been deleted by the user, and then go on to start a Zoom call (with the webcam and microphone enabled) to any website that knew this “feature” existed and wanted to take advantage of it. This was the instance that made me distrust Zoom, and again, this was nearly a year ago.

Now, even more evidence has come out illustrating just how low user security and privacy rank on Zoom’s list of priorities.

• Last week, Motherboard reported that Zoom was using software development kits (SDKs) created by Facebook that sends Zoom users’ personal data to Facebook, regardless of whether those Zoom users also had Facebook accounts. They have since removed this SDK, but the fact that it was used in the first place is cause for concern.

• A few days later, The Intercept reported that Zoom was flat out lying about how Zoom meetings are encrypted and trying to pass it off as a marketing miscommunication. As John Gruber notes on Daring Fireball, the phrase "end-to-end encryption” is not open to interpretation. What Zoom was actually using is called transport encryption, and it is not as secure. Lying about how secure your platform is will certainly lead to trouble for users. It’s unethical and gross to use false claims of strong encryption for marketing.

• Yesterday, Motherboard reported another issue that allowed Zoom users’ personal email addresses and photos to be leaked to complete strangers.

This is a staggering list of major privacy and security concerns for one company to deal with in a year, much less in a week. If your organization is asking you to use Zoom, you should forcefully object and tell them that you don’t agree with their privacy policy (which is a joke). If video conferencing is a must for you, suggest an alternative like Group FaceTime (check out this list from The Verge for some more options). If you absolutely cannot refuse to use Zoom, follow John Gruber’s advice and only use it on an iOS device, where Apple’s sandboxing will protect you more than any other platform is capable of doing. If you don’t use an Apple device, here’s another reason to consider switching.

#deletefacebook

UPDATED: 04/02/20, 13:00

This is certainly an exciting announcement.

I’ve long thought this deal would make a lot of sense for a few reasons: Dark Sky is an excellent utility that’s truly loved among its users, they are very respectful of user privacy, and Apple’s weather app is certainly due for a few new features.

I can’t wait to see what Apple has in mind for Dark Sky in the future. Hopefully it’ll be a full implementation into iOS like what they did with their acquisition of Workflow, rather than just a behind the scenes ownership change like what happened with their acquisition of Shazam.

Tom Porter, writing for Business Insider:

President Donald Trump spent the early phase of the coronavirus outbreak in the US downplaying its likely impact

This is, of course, despite having received multiple reports from our intelligence agencies indicating that COVID-19 could become a disastrous pandemic if not handled properly.

In a press conference on Sunday, Trump sought to set new parameters for what would constitute a successful handling of the virus, saying that 100,000 or fewer deaths in the US would constitute a "very good job."

About a month ago, on February 26, he predicted that in a matter of days the total number of coronavirus cases in the US would be "close to zero." Instead, the US now has the most confirmed cases of any nation.

When you suck at your own game, just change the rules. As of today, more people have died from COVID-19 than the attacks on 9/11.

Unfortunately, the only game Trump really cares about is the rating game.

“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2020

Hitherto unseen levels of sociopathic narcissism, folks. Are we great again, yet?

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 3

UPDATED: 04/03/20, 22:25

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Our friends at TwelveSouth have recently provided us with a review unit of their HiRise Wireless inductive charging phone stand, which we’ve carefully reviewed! If you’re in the market for an inductive charging solution and are considering this offering from TwelveSouth, read on.

First things first, a few comments on design and build quality. The build quality is solid, with the base and stand made of a sturdy metal that has a nice weight to it and doesn’t move when you place a device on it. The design of the charger is really nifty because the surface that actually charged the phone detaches from the stand for situations where you want to lay a device flat instead of propping it up. This also makes it much more portable, but instances where you might want a portable inductive charger seem few and far between: on their website, they show someone using the charging pad disconnected from the stand and plugged into a MacBook, but while the charging pad is more portable than the whole stand, this isn’t actually a great use case for it because it still has to have a wired connection to your laptop for power, and it’s less convenient than just charging your phone with a cable when considering overall bulk and the inability to move the phone from the pad (as opposed to the relative freedom of movement afforded by a cable).

The charger itself is not the fastest, though. It’s alright as far as inductive chargers go, but it doesn’t seem to be leading the pack and it’s certainly quite a bit slower than most wired chargers these days. Still, if you’re using it to charge your phone overnight, this could be a good bedside option since it also props your device up for a better view of alarms, notifications, etc. That said, if you’re often finding yourself in a pinch and just needing to quickly charge up a bit, this is not the best option for that.

Overall, this is a nice product, but it’s just not quite practical enough to justify the price of $79.99 (or even the current sale price of $59.99) for most people. Unless you’re looking for an overnight charger and you have a very specific bedside aesthetic that requires that charger to match a very modern, leather and metal style with a black and gunmetal color palette, you can probably find something a bit cheaper.

Side note: if you have an iPhone 11 Pro, the camera system on the back is just large enough to slightly overlap with the edge of the charging pad and prevent the phone from sitting perfectly horizontal on the base of the charger. This will be a nonissue for most people, but for a select few like myself, it’s maddening.

Monica Black, writing for The Sewanee Review:

But the reality is that sometimes what matters—and what really moves the wheels of history, as Mussolini might have put it—is what you can make out of the facts. Sometimes myths are much more compelling than humble, modest truths. In that sense, it did not matter much whether the Reichstag fire was set by a young communist who opposed the Nazis, or if that’s merely what they said happened. What mattered was the chain of events that flowed from the fire, and what the Nazis made of those events. What mattered was how the facts were interpreted and put to work.

By the way, just yesterday, one of our illustrious Tennessee state senators, Frank Niceley—who in 2013 addressed the Southern National Congress, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says is an offshoot of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South—posted this question to Twitter: “isn’t it a #Fact that #COVID-19 originated in #China?”

Dr. Black is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Tennessee, and she also happened to be my thesis advisor. Additionally, I had the pleasure of taking her course “Medicine in The Third Reich”, during which I was consistently delighted by her thought provoking lectures which always provided a historical lens useful to interpret the present, and were somehow always intriguingly relevant to current events while following an established syllabus.

Her remarks here are also very thought provoking, and we would do well to heed the warning: in times of uncertainty and crisis, we need to be questioning the “facts”, but we also need to be paying attention to how certain facts may be deployed to bolster agendas.

Sure, the coronavirus started in China. That is a fact. But does this fact help us slow its spread, stabilize the economy, or help the sick recover? No. Is it consistent with Donald Trump’s (and his pals’) nationalistic tendency to deflect blame for the United States’s shortcomings by painting them as foreign threats? Certainly. If you’d like an example, look no farther than the wall Trump promised (and failed) to build as a silver bullet measure to solve our broken immigration system and bring back “stolen” jobs.

Kevin Stankiewicz, reporting for CNBC:

Painter, who has previously been critical of Trump, said he felt the decision to label the “critically important health advisory” as being Trump’s guidelines was “unwise.”

“Half the Country likes him; half the Country does not. But disease knows no party. Don’t we want all Americans to read the message that is mailed to them at substantial cost to the government?” said Painter, who added he felt the postcard was meant to serve Trump’s bid for reelection. 

White House Spokesman Judd Deere rejected the notion that the postcard was at all political. 

“The President has said he has no higher priority than the health and safety of the American people,” Deere wrote in an email. “It’s ridiculous to suggest that in the middle of a global pandemic the White House’s efforts to get critical information to the American people to slow the spread of COVID-19 is somehow political.”

I definitely perceived this as politically charged when I got it in the mail. In fact, I actually thought it was so on brand with Trump’s usual narcissism that I actually flipped it over to find the part where it said “Paid For By Donald J. Trump For President” or “Paid For By The Republican National Committee”, but alas, these mailers were sent out on the taxpayers’ dime.

The branding turned me off pretty much immediately, so I didn’t actually read what it said about the virus itself. So well done, White House: half the people you sent this to won’t read it because they’re immediately turned off by the glorification of Trump, and the other half probably can’t read anyway.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 2



Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Dave Sanders, reporting for The New York Times:

In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths — more cases than China, Italy or any other country

Hard to see how anyone could believe that this has NOTHING to do with Trump’s mismanagement of the of the outbreak.

Let’s not forget that our intelligence agencies were warning Trump about the coronavirus a few months ago, and he chose not to act.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 1

Ps. If you don’t like the idea of a $1,200 stimulus check going out to American citizens because you think it’s socialist, nobody is going to force you to cash your check. The ball is in your court, “patriots”.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Governments are considering tracking citizens locations as a way to monitor the spread of coronavirus and enforce quarantines and lockdowns.

My thoughts are as follows: fuck that. This will be the new Patriot Act. The world is quickly becoming an episode of Black Mirror.

Israel is doing it. Fuck them.

The Israeli government has approved emergency measures for its security agencies to track the mobile-phone data of people with suspected coronavirus.

The new powers will be used to enforce quarantine and warn those who may have come into contact with infected people.

Absolutely atrocious. If Israel ever had a brain, they’ve lost it.

Unfortunately, the United States isn’t very far behind. Terrifyingly enough, this is an idea I’ve heard reverberating a bit in recent days, both on a podcast I usually enjoy (Crooked Media’s Pod Save America*) as well as a blog I stumbled across. I never expected to see the day where American government leaders would be calling for a mass surveillance system, much less American citizens themselves asking for it.

If the U.S. government allows this to happen, then fuck them, too. I‘ll stop carrying a phone before I just go along with something like this, pandemic or not. This is deeply un-American.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

— Benjamin Franklin

And oh yeah, of course, Facebook is involved in this, so #deletefacebook

UPDATED: 04/09/20, 17:12

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

A few days ago, former Republican Congressman Aaron Schock made a blog post confirming long held suspicious about his sexuality. He had a lot of critics who raised some fair points about his past stances and actions, but he was also the target a lot of unfair personal attacks on Twitter.

Aaron Schock is, like everyone else, a flawed person. Was it wrong for him to oppose gay marriage and other gay rights issues? Yes. Is it surprising that he would do so? Not at all. He acknowledges his misguided past positions while also offering a pill difficult for the left to swallow; a reminder that just a few years ago, they also weren’t terribly “woke” when it came to marriage equality.

No one gets to choose when we learn our lives’ big lessons. Mine have been no different. In 2008, as a Republican running in a conservative district, I took the same position on gay marriage held by my party’s nominee, John McCain. That position against marriage equality, though, was also then held by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as well.  

That fact doesn’t make my then position any less wrong, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that it was leaders of both parties who for so long wrongly understood what it was to defend the right to marry.

His story is exemplary of the fear felt by many young men who remain closeted, and it demonstrates that while some people receive warm reception upon coming out, many do not. His personal journey was one hugely shaped by overbearing religion and regressive politics, and it shows just how difficult it is for young men to come out in environments where they’re raised to treat same sex attracted people as defective or morally deficient.

To characterize some of these conversations with my family in general,  it’s fair to say it has not been a case of instant acceptance and understanding.  What I had to share was unwelcome news to every single person in my family, out of the blue in some cases, and was met with sadness, disappointment, and unsympathetic citations to Scripture. 

He is representative of a type of same sex attracted person who experiences even more intolerance than most, because not only was he rejected by many conservative and evangelical people close to him, but he is also actively being rejected by the political left who claims to be open and tolerant of everyone despite their background (except, it seems, when they don’t subscribe entirely to their political platform), and who have explicitly demonstrated in Schock’s case that they clearly aren’t above trying to out someone they believe to be closeted when it is politically expedient for them:

I was a single guy, and people would comment on how I dressed, and about my preoccupation with physical fitness. Untruthful stories were written. Even years into my time in Washington, I was still naïve enough to wonder why the news media would run with an utterly false story about me and a show I’d never even heard of, and still haven’t seen, Downton Abbey. 

It took me a while to figure out that it was really just the media’s own way in which they got to say THAT about me in print…to tie me to a stereotype. In fact, if you want to learn  something about the “woke” media, Google my name and consider how  prominently that fabricated lie, still without even a single source to back it up, will feature in stories about me by people who otherwise call themselves journalists. It was another way, albeit more sophisticated, to be teased about being gay. A dog whistle.

Towards the end of the post, he again acknowledges his prior missteps, and also advocates for the right of gay men to maintain their own individual thoughts and belief systems, rather than adopting the one society tells them they’re supposed to take up upon coming out. If there’s one thing in this post that I hope gay men will take away from it, it’s this: that being gay doesn’t exclude you from being able to form your own set of opinions and beliefs.

The truth is that if I were in Congress today, I would support LGBTQ rights in every way I could.   I realize that some of my political positions run very much counter to the mainstream of the LGBTQ movement, and I respect them for those differences.   I hope people will allow for me the same.

To that end, I hope that others can respect that for me being gay has not required stepping into some entirely new belief system, disconnected from every other facet of my life’s experiences. I haven’t overcome one kind of repression for another.

Chauncey Alcoron, writing for CNN Business:

Starbucks (SBUX)on Wednesday announced it is temporarily suspending the use of personal cups and tumblers at its stores around the world to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.

This is unnecessary (it borders on fear mongering), and it’s another instance where Starbucks’s insincere commitment to the environment is demonstrated by a lack of emphasis on their reusable cup program.

UPDATE: 7/30/20, 16:55:

Well, this didn’t age gracefully at all. Still, I maintain that Starbucks was never serious about their reusable cup program.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Elizabeth Warren announced today that she is ending her campaign for the presidency. After Buttigieg dropped out, Warren became my top pick. I felt like she was the last truly good candidate with a shot at the nomination, but her performance on Super Tuesday did not yield results that would allow her to practically remain in the race.

I really liked some of Warren’s policies, and felt like she was an incredible alternative to Bernie Sanders. She had similar ideas but she was remarkably more relatable, and she ran a much more respectable campaign. A lot of people are assuming that Warren’s supporters will flock to Bernie’s campaign now, but given how poorly they were treated by Bernie Stans online, I wouldn’t count on that. Similar policies likely won’t be enough to make up for completely opposite approaches to how you should treat people with whom you have slight disagreements; Warren’s team was warm, engaging, and welcoming, while Bernie’s was militant, aggressive, and off putting.

At this point, we’re down to a decision between a rock and a hard place, and we have a collection of selfish democrats to thank. Fortunately, Tulsi Gabbard has not caved to the pressure, but her path to the White House seems nearly impossible, despite the fact that she’s garnering impressive support from moderate republicans and independents who are feeling let down by Trump. She’s a hell of a lot better than Biden or Sanders, so at this point, CopyrightBro is endorsing Tulsi Gabbard.

To my dismay, Pete Buttigieg surprised supporters on Sunday by announcing that he was ending his campaign for the presidency. Pete’s exit was surprising given that he won the Iowa caucuses and was seen as one of the strongest moderate candidates in the field who enjoyed notable support from independents and moderate republicans.

I personally supported Pete’s campaign, and hoped to see him win the nomination. Unfortunately, he was robbed of the attention usually paid to the winner of that contest due to the absolute fumble by the Iowa Democratic Party in reporting the results, and this cost him a lot of name recognition which could’ve carried him to more impressive delegate hauls in Nevada and South Carolina, where his performance was less than impressive due to his lack of support among black and latino voters, who seemed more comfortable supporting candidates with more name recognition, like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. I found it peculiar that Pete decided to drop out when he did, even given his shallow support in Nevada and South Carolina, he still seemed as well positioned as any other candidate to do well on Super Tuesday. He had lasting momentum, something Klobuchar, Biden, and Bloomberg did not. I’m curious if Pete decided to take one for the team in hopes of being offered a VP spot, if his campaign lacked funding to remain competitive, or if unseen actors influenced his decision through some sort of bribery or coercion.

Pete was the internet’s favorite candidate to pick on, with relentless attacks being lobbed (primarily by Bernie Sanders’ supporters) attacking him for a myriad of non-issues. I could spend weeks debunking all their bogus criticisms, but instead I’d like to address just one. It was a common trope that Pete “wasn't gay enough” to be the first gay president. This is an absolutely appalling argument, especially from people who claim to be progressive and woke. If Pete’s sexuality is relevant to his capability to successfully execute the responsibilties of the president, then saying he’s “not gay enough” is just making it okay for people to say that he’s “too gay”. Those who made this criticism were clearly projecting their own shortcomings; a lot of gays can’t relate to someone who is comfortable enough with themselves to the degree that they’re able to allow their sexuality not to be the orienting aspect of their entire personality, and therefore those people perceived Pete’s lack of reliance upon his sexuality as something that makes him disingenuous. Shame on them, and how dare they now remark on the historical nature of a campaign they tried to sabotage with bush league personal criticisms.

As someone pointed out, Pete could run in every election between now and 2060 before reaching Bernie’s age, so a Buttigieg presidency is certainly not off the table yet.

This is the most discouraging and disappointing Super Tuesday of my life, and it may very well hold that title for decades time to come. The democratic field started off very crowded, but there truly were good options. Now, the democratic establishment has finally moved to narrow the field, a task completed with remarkable haste. In the course of a weekend, three moderate candidates dropped from the race to clear the way for Joe Biden to challenge Bernie Sanders for the nomination, while Mike Bloomberg looms in the wings as a wild card. At this point, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard are the only candidates remaining who are worth endorsing. Despite numerous, well funded attempts, neither of these women have allowed the establishment to force them out of the race. While Gabbard is a great candidate she’s unlikely to attain viability in any state. In the wake of Pete Buttigieg’s exit from the race, CopyrightBro is proud to endorse Elizabeth Warren. We strongly encourage readers to vote for Liz and donate to her campaign.

Aside from Warren, the Democratic Party has three viable options, all of whom are straight white men who are either 77 or 78 years old. They consist of:

1. Joe Biden, a career politician who’s waning mental faculties hardly permit him to formulate a coherent sentence, and who has a well documented history of touching and sniffing young girls inappropriately.

2. Bernie Sanders, a self proclaimed socialist whose militant followers are fascistic in their unwavering support and willingness to attack anyone who presents a dissenting opinion.

3. Mike Bloomberg, a billionaire with a track record of imposing blatantly racist policies who admitted on live TV during the most recent debate that he had “bought” congressional seats, and clearly thinks he can buy the presidency just as easily.

The stakes of this election are high, not only for democrats, but for everybody. The Democrats have a massive responsibility as the only political machine capable of saving ALL of America from Donald Trump and delivering a new vision for our country, and it’s a responsibility they’re almost entirely disregarding.

Elizabeth Warren is the best option we have to defeat Donald Trump and replace him with someone who won’t either tear the country apart or take us back to the politics of Y2K. So, special thanks to the Democratic Party for scrubbing the field to get rid of anyone whom they don’t have a long history of control over, but also thanks to the narrow-minded Bernie stans who have worked tirelessly to ensure that their demagogue has his fair chance to shred the good will of the American people, too. So again, thanks, Democrats, for all but wasting this opportunity.

Why though? What added utility does it offer? What problem does it solve? How does it improve upon the experience? These phones have fundamentally bad designs; not because of how they look (though that doesn't help many of them), but because of how they work.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold was a complete disaster. The new Motorola Razr seems pretty poorly built as well. The Samsung Galaxy Flip Z looks like a GameBoy and can’t really be used while it’s closed, and they’re marketing it as having “foldable glass”, which is clearly a lie.

Not only do these phones not offer a measurably better experience, by all indications, they’re garbage. Even the ones that seem well built break and fall apart, often in a very short amount of time.

I think we’ll eventually see foldable devices that feel like they’re truly more useful than non-foldable ones, but so far nobody knows what the use case is for a phone with a folding display. As of right now, all of these phones have a gimmicky feel to me. They’re strangely reminiscent of the phone I had in seventh grade, the Motorola Krave, which was a touchscreen flip phone with a completely transparent flip. Sure, phones like this look cool and they seem to be pushing the envelope of what technology can do in the present, but their blockbuster features arguably make them less useful. At least the Motorola Krave had decent build quality.

Check out this great piece on Mark Zuckerberg by Steven Levy, writing for WIRED.

In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them. But a few revealing pages survived.

Much of Levy’s piece was informed by what Zuckerberg wrote in those journals, as well as interviews with Zuckerberg himself and other Facebook executives. The pattern of corporate irresponsibility and depravity we’ve seen from Facebook recently has been there since the very beginning.

What distinguished Facebook from other social networks was the assumed privacy provided by its gated setup [when Facebook was only available to college students]. Open Reg[istration] would throw open those gates to the masses. But would people then no longer see Facebook as a safe space? In designing Open Reg, he posted one final question to himself.

“What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?” He seemed at least as concerned about the perception of privacy as with privacy itself.

”What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?” Incredible.

Using Facebook needs to feel like you're using a futuristic government-style interface to access a database full of information linked to every person. The user needs to be able to look at information at any depth … The user experience needs to feel “full.” That is, when you click on a person in a governmental database, there is always information about them.

A government-esque catalog of every person in the world. Charming. But not everyone would sign up for Facebook, so this wasn’t achievable. Not to fear, Zuckerberg had a plan.

He took three pages to lay out a vision for something he called “Dark Profiles.” These would be Facebook pages for people who, whether by omission or intention, had not signed up for Facebook. […]

Zuckerberg was aware that allowing the creation of profiles for people who had no desire to be on Facebook might stir up privacy concerns. He spent some time pondering how this could avoid being “creepy.” Maybe, he mused, dark accounts might not be included in search engines.

Shadow profiles are not a joke, they’ve been a part of Facebook’s plan from the very early days.

There will be a tipping point for Facebook. One after another, the curtains are being pulled back and what we’re finding is that the people behind Facebook have always been immeasurably negligent and downright disrespectful of their users. Hopefully, stories like this will move public opinion against Facebook sooner than later, and embolden people to delete their profiles.

#deletefacebook