I live in the south, and though many people here don’t realize it yet, we’re about to get slammed with a wave of COVID-19 infections. In conversations with family members, friends, and coworkers, a frustrating trend has popped up where, even after being presented with valid data or charts showing the increases in COVID-19 cases in the south, they still seem largely unbothered. When you ask why this is, you typically get one of two responses.

The first retort that comes up from people here in the south who aren’t taking the pandemic seriously is that they think hospitals are greatly exaggerating the number of cases they have in an effort to acquire three to four times more money from insurance companies. This piece from USA Today explains some of the details behind that. While it would be possible for a hospital to exaggerate their numbers and receive more money, the amount of the increase in funding is far less significant than fearmongers would have you believe. Additionally, the piece seems to indicate that only Medicare is subject to these possible manipulations, not private insurers. Regardless of these finer details, allow me to pose two questions.

1. Many people claim to know nurses and other hospital staff who provide them with “insider knowledge” of this alleged insurance fraud. But how could one trust the word of such a source, if that source is a person who regularly sees such fraudulent and immoral activities transpiring and doesn’t have the integrity to speak out publicly or report them?

2. If the rise in COVID-19 cases is primarily attributable to dishonest hospital staff, why are states in the sun belt experiencing such an explosion of cases while other areas of the country are not? Do the people who live there suffer from a lack of morals that allows them to be comfortable with their complicity (a lack of morals which, if based on areas with more reported COVID-19 cases, doesn’t seem to affect the northeast or the west coast)? Or is it more likely that the demonstrably less defensive responses of the states with the most severe increases (Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, etc.) simply led to an increase in new infections in the region?

Another rebuttal they’ll offer to support their dismissal of the gravity of the pandemic is the high number of people who experience mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It’s true that many people who have COVID-19 won’t know it. However, we may not be looking for symptoms in the right places: from the start, we’ve compared sickness caused by the coronavirus to the flu. We looked for respiratory symptoms, but we didn’t necesarily spend a lot of time looking at what other dots we could connect. It’s possible that we missed some things, and new evidence suggets as much. Just this week, we learned that in addition to the serious respiratory symptoms many COVID-19 patients are experiencing, they’re also experiencing serious neurological symptoms. From an opinion piece in The New York Times by Melinda Wenner Moyer:

Earlier this month, French researchers reported that 84 percent of Covid patients who had been admitted to the I.C.U. experienced neurological problems, and that 33 percent continued to act confused and disoriented when they were discharged.

According to Dr. Mady Hornig, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the possibility that neurological issues “will persist and create disability, or difficulties, for individuals downstream is really looking more and more likely.”

Note that the French President is a very liberal man, and it wouldn’t make any sense for the “fake news media” (which presumably exists in France) would drum up false conspiracies about COVID-19 to make their President look worse.

If you’re in the south and you still don’t believe this is a big deal, you may not be thinking rationally. Maybe you’re stuck under the spell of Trump’s demagoguery, forced to deny the validity of anything that could cast him in a negative light. Or, maybe you have COVID-19, and it’s affecting your cognitive abilities. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to take a hard look at the data that supports your arguments and question its legitimacy (assuming you have any data to point to).

If you’re in the south and you’re capable of rational thought, check out these charts. They’re frightening but they’re informative, and it’s important for everyone to understand the weight of the threat we face. This is not a left versus right issue. Like it or not, how you react to this will affect others, and how others react will affect you.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

From the opinion of the court in the case of LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR SAINTS PETER AND PAUL HOME v. PENNSYLVANIA ET AL.:

For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother.

Mmmmmm, I bet they have.

“[T]hey commit to constantly living out a witness that proclaims the unique, inviolable dignity of every person, particularly those whom others regard as weak or worthless.” […] But for the past seven years, they—like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision—have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.

The oppression of Christians is unending. Listen, The Little Sisters of The Poor Saints Peter and Paul just really believe in raw dogging it while taking absolutely no precautions and having no backup plan, alright? And they want their employees to enjoy the benefits of bareback gut beating that doesn’t account for its consequences, too. What’s so wrong with that?

In all seriousness, devout conservative Christians, riddle me this: is it worse for someone to have premarital sex with a condom/birth control, or is it worse for someone to have premarital sex without a condom/birth control and subsequently get an abortion? You can’t be pro-life and anti-contraceptive (at least, not if you have even the most basic understanding of cause and effect and human biology). Just because you decided to give up a fulfilling sex life doesn’t mean you have the right to strip others of the same privilege. Sex is a natural part of the human experience, not something to repress or shame; it’s puritanical and archaic that Christian institutions still get off on trying to deny that basic fact and prevent others from expressing their sexuality healthily in the year of our lord 2020.

UPDATED: 7/10/20, 10:09

These charts are startling. The south is heading into a peak similar to the one New York experienced, and we are woefully unprepared for it.

Those charts are interactive over on 91-DIVOC.com, so if you head to their site, you can touch any point to see the specific data behind it. The data itself is from Johns Hopkins University and the WHO, so you can trust it (unless you’re a complete COVID denier or someone who thinks it’s caused by 5G towers/was started in a lab/etc.).

While it’s true that COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as we first thought, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still extremely bad for a ton of people. While a lot of people who get the virus will be asymptomatic, they can still spread it to others. There’s no way to know whether you’ll be someone who experiences the symptoms of not, and it’s selfish to decide that “it’s worth the risk”. People who do experience symptoms get seriously sick, and are appearing to suffering long term problems ranging from difficulty breathing because of scar tissue in their lungs to permanent loss of smell. And that’s not to mention the fact that people are dying. Nearly 130,000 Americans have died: that’s more than the number of American soldiers and civilians who died in World War One.

If you’re in the south, please, do all you can to keep yourself and those around you safe. Here is a list of some of the most important things we all need to do in order to keep this from really getting out of hand.

• Make a concerted effort to stay home more and avoid crowds.

• If you need to go somewhere, try to use a drive-thrus or use curbside pickup at stores. Also, remember to sanitize items you bring into your home. Spritzing groceries with hydrogen peroxide is a great way to get germs, including coronavirus, off of your items (which plenty of other people likely touched).

• If you must go into a public place where you’ll be around people you don’t know, please wear a mask. It isn’t difficult, and it’s not that uncomfortable. Find a cool mask and get excited about wearing it; they don’t have to be boring and ugly to be effective.

• Use lots of hand sanitizer and wash your hands with soap frequently.

• Don’t hoard toilet paper. Or anything else, for that matter.

• Reach out to your representatives and let them know that you expect them to do what’s necessary to keep us safe, from enforcing social distancing and implementing mask requirements, to ensuring that the pandemic unemployment benefits (which end this month) get extended so that people employed in nonessential industries can stay out of work without living in poverty.

Finally, to those who say that this pandemic presents us with a choice between letting a bunch of people get sick and saving our economy, listen up. That line of thinking is being fed to you. It is a false choice. There’s no reason we can’t do both, and in fact, stopping the pandemic definitively will be the best way to get the economy back up and running like normal. Doing a half assed job like we did the past few months is only going to prolong the pain from a belly up economy with 11% unemployment (a number which is about to jump back up). Even if businesses are open, they aren’t going to be successful if people don’t go to them because they’re scared of contracting a deadly virus. It isn’t hard to understand.

Also, Donald Trump still thinks the pandemic is going to “disappear”, so make of that what you will. Plenty of other countries have figured this out, why hasn’t ours?

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 17

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

UPDATED: 7/9/20, 19:09

If you’d asked me a few days ago to produce a list of my ten most despised senators, it would’ve included the likes of Richard Burr, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz (’ll freely acknowledge the pattern here: they’re all members of the same group, senators who make bad faith arguments to defend the status quo).

Yesterday, three of them teamed up to give me yet another reason to hate them, and this time, it wasn’t over their support for racist, homophobic, xenophobic policies, but rather a technology issue.

A little bit of important context: the FBI and Apple got into a big showdown several years ago. The FBI asked Apple to unlock an iPhone that had belonged to the San Bernardino mass shooter, and Apple refused. They said no because iPhones use such a strong form of encryption that the only way technically possible for Apple to have unlocked it would have required them to write an altered version of iOS that they could put on this phone to bypass the passcode. Because that altered version of iOS could then be installed on any iPhone, it would have effectively created a backdoor into EVERY iPhone (Apple CEO Tim Cook described this hypothetical, altered version of iOS as “the software equivalent of cancer”). Apple was right to refuse the FBI’s request to create that altered version of iOS, and after several months, the FBI backed down.

Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham proposed legislation that would outlaw what’s know as “end-to-end” encryption. End-to-end encryption is used by Apple to encrypt iMessages, FaceTime calls, and other important data, but it’s also used by just about every other company and industry on planet earth. It’s used to protect sensitive financial information, patient health records, government documents; basically, everything that needs to stay truly private and secure is protected by the type of encryption these senators are seeking to outlaw. The reason for that is because data that is end-to-end encrypted can only be accessed by the individuals on either end of a line of communication, and no companies or governments have backdoors to access your information. Not everything needs that strong level of encryption, but a lot of things do. These senators want to take away your ability to truly protect your digital data and keep your information and communications private. If an altered version of iOS is the software equivalent of cancer, banning end-to-end encryption is the digital equivalent of demanding that people leave their front doors ajar 24/7.

Two talking points in particular come up every time this conversation gets started, and it’s important to address them head on. One of those issues is child pornography. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn’t prosecute people who abuse children; that isn’t what this is about. The other issue I’d terrorism. They say that by allowing people to encrypt their data in a way that is completely secure, you’re enabling terrorists a safe haven to plot attacks against America. Frankly, these are both tired tropes. They’re bad faith arguments peddled by people who favor less privacy and more invasive government surveillance capabilities, because while “we need to do this to stop terrorists and child abusers” sounds great on its face and will quickly garner public support, it doesn’t do as well when you explain to people what the real trade off is and how it significantly weakens their own privacy and safety. It’s unreasonable and unfair to suggest that because a small number of criminals could find ways to use end-to-end encryption to facilitate illegal activities, that the rest of us shouldn’t have access to it as a means to protect our most sensitive data from bad actors and prying government eyes. We will all be subject to a lot more abuse and attacks if we fling open the gates that protect our most sensitive data.

Also of note: the three senators pushing this legislation are all Republicans, but if there’s a political angle here, I’m missing it. I don’t see how this is a Republican issue at all; conservatives are usually the ones fighting for more restricted government, not a complete shredding of civil liberty. The only thing I can think is that maybe the republicans think this will help them with their base by showing that they’re trying to expand the capabilities of police to prosecute crime. As I mentioned before, that doesn’t really add up because if we allow end-to-end encryption to be allowed, the detrimental effects to law abiding citizens would far outweigh any positive impact on law enforcement’s ability to stop crime.

If this bill becomes law, it will be much worse than the Patriot Act. We’ll find ourselves a lot like the Chinese, living in a surveillance state where the government has unchecked ability to spy on its citizens. Contact your representatives and voice your opposition to this proposal.

As of today, many apps that are submitted for approval to be distributed through Apple’s App Store are required to support a new feature called Sign In With Apple. This is great news for you!

If you’re not familiar, Sign In With Apple is an excellent, user focused feature designed to make it easier to sign in to apps while protecting your privacy. Put simply, it’s a button that will allow you to quickly sign up for/sign in to apps with just a few taps, without having to remember a password or fill out long forms. It gives the application a very limited amount of information about you, including only a name (which you can change if you like) and an email address (which you can opt to disguise in case might later want to be able to easily revoke the app’s ability to email you).

As mentioned above, starting today, all apps that support other third party log in buttons — like the Facebook and Google sign in buttons — are now required to support Sign In With Apple as well, guaranteeing that users have a more private and secure alternative that affords them the same level of convenience. As it stands, Facebook and Google’s buttons are harmful because they set up a link between the tech giants and the app or website you’re using them to sign in to, creating a tunnel for an unfettered flow of your personal information between those entities and the apps, which can be used for targeted advertising and other user hostile practices.

If you have an Apple product*, I would strongly encourage you to start using Sign In With Apple. Not only is it safer and more private than the other third party sign in buttons, but it’s faster too, because you authenticate with Touch ID or Face ID rather than having to type in your Facebook or Google password with their respective sign in buttons.

If you ever need to manage the apps that you let use Sign In With Apple, you can do so on an iPhone or iPad by going to Settings → (Your Name) → Password & Security. You can also do this on a Mac under System Preferences → Apple ID → Password & Security, or on the Apple ID website.

*Note: if you haven’t already, you must first enable two-factor authentication to use Sign In With Apple. To do so on a iPhone or iPad, go to Settings → (Your Name) → Password & Security.

Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Michael Schwirtz, reporting for The New York Times:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops […]

Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step

We don’t need to make this about Obama, but can you imagine what would Republicans would (rightfully) be saying if they found out he’d known for months that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill American troops and did nothing to stop it? Where is the outrage?

There is no way to justify this. It is treason. It warrants impeachment, removal from office, and prosecution.

We’ve known that Trump doesn’t actually care about our servicemen and women (hail President Bone Spurs), but this is the most shocking and confronting example yet. He’s already been losing a ton of support within the military (if you know a service member, ask them what they think of Trump right now), and it could be a real turning point for many civilians in Trump’s base who genuinely care about supporting our troops.

Anyone who still supports Donald Trump doesn’t support our troops, they spit on their graves. After this, “Trump supporter” and “patriot” are mutually exclusive categories. Anyone still making excuses for this treasonous president should be ashamed of themselves, but they won’t be, because they’ve convinced themselves that maintaining the status quo of a white, racist, homophobic, xenophobic America led by an orange man with thirty or so rape accusations is of greater importance than the lives of those sworn to defend our nation and our constitution.

As we did last year, we’ll cover this up by platform/topic:

tvOS:

• They didn’t really say much about tvOS itself., but they did show off some cool new home features that work with Apple TV.

watchOS:

• The sleep tracking features look pretty nice (thought a bit overdue). You have to manually enable sleep mode every night, so that’s a bummer. Hopefully it’ll gain the ability to detect when you’re sleeping even if you forget.

• The new chronograph face is slick.

• For some reason, they removed Force Touch.

iOS:

•  The new home screen widgets and app library are all that I’d hoped for. I’m very excited for these changed, and they’ve breathed new life into my iPhone.

• The translate app is really neat, I just wish it supported more languages. I’m curious how well it could possibly work, given the shitty state of dictation and Siri.

• The Back Tap Accessibility feature is great.

• I’m very happy that the Siri UI is now less obtrusive. It makes using Siri feel better, even if she hasn’t improved in regards to speech recognition or intelligence.

• Incoming calls no longer hijack the entire screen. 🙌🏼

• The updates for the Messages app will be very nice once everyone’s upgraded. The ability to pin conversations is great, and the new controls and features within group messages will be great (name tagging and in line message threads!).

• We did get some good privacy features. The privacy cards in the App Store will be great, if people actually look at them (I know I will). It’s also really cool that you can now share a general location with an app rather than your precise location. I’m glad you can now restrict which specific photos in your photo library you give apps access to, rather than all or nothing.

• The Music app did get a refresh, but I’m not actually sure that it’s better. The library screen is unchanged.

• The Weather app now incorporates features from Dark Sky, a third party weather app that Apple acquired months ago. They’re using Dark Sky’s minute by minute precipitation predictions, and I’m hoping they incorporate precipitation notifications as well.

• No lockable photo album.

• No improvements to Siri’s speech recognition or intelligence.

• No updated Cash card.

iPadOS:

• The handwriting recognition is cool, and in my experience so far, it works very well.

• The lack of widget options on the iPad home screen is surprising and a little disappointing.

macOS:

• It’s nice that a lot of the iOS messages features are making their way to the Mac after several years.

• I’m glad control center is finally making an appearance.

• Is it just me, or do the redesigned buttons and apps look a lot more finger-friendly? It’s also interesting that most of the screenshots on the macOS Big Sur preview site lack cursors, except for two: in one of those it’s a standard arrow pointer, in the other, it’s a large translucent circle similar to the new iPadOS cursor. I’m not suggesting that they’re merging the platforms, but Apple recently realized that adding cursor support for the iPad didn’t take away from its standing as a touch-first device. I think they’re realizing that the opposite is true for the Mac: adding touch support doesn’t change the device’s nature, it just adds a bit of usability that’s really nice for some use cases.

  Apple Silicon:

• Apple announced that they’re going to start building their own processors for the Mac rather than using Intel processors. Apple’s A12Z chip used in the new iPad Pro (which is nearly identical to the two year old A12X) was able to run macOS and do some really heavy duty lifting without breaking a sweat. Just imagine what a custom Apple chip designed to run macOS will be able to do.

Privacy

• Safari tracking reports are very handy. The number of trackers that Safari has been able to identify and block in the two days I’ve been using iOS 14/iPadOS 14/macOS Big Sur are staggering. I hope people will look at these reports and question the long list of companies who are trying to follow them around the internet. (A quick example from my report: Safari blocked 44 trackers from Olive Garden’s website.)

• When an app wants to access your Local Network to find out what other devices are around you, a permission request will now pop up. Apps can use that information to learn the IP addresses of the devices (other phones, computers, TVs, routers, etc.) that belong to you and others you interact with so that they can send frighteningly specific targeted ads to those devices. There’s almost no reason to grant this permission: unless the app asking for it is an app that facilitates setup of other internet connected devices (like smart light bulbs, for example), you should say no. Amazon? No. Instagram? Nope. YouTube? Definitely not. Facebook? Hell no. Get in the habit of smashing that “don’t allow” button.

• Now, when an app accesses your clipboard, a little message pops up at the top to let you know. At first this seemed unnecessary to me, but the feature quickly outed TikTok for snooping on users (we’ve known that TikTok is a Chinese surveillance instrument — even the Navy and Army have banned the use of TikTok — I don’t know why anyone trusts them) by constantly checking to see what they had in their clipboard, regardless of whether they copied it from the TikTok app or not. They claimed it was to prevent spam (haha), and immediately disabled that function.

• Small dots now show up at the top of the screen to indicate when the microphone (orange dot) and camera (green dot) are being accessed. In time, I’m sure this will out a few apps, as well.

I’m very excited after this WWDC. I know I said I wasn’t particularly hyped up, but man, Apple didn’t disappoint this year. I can’t wait for more people to get their hands on the updates they announced; I’m having a ball with them.

Today, Verizon joined the credit card game by launching their Verizon Visa card.

Seriously, who the hell asked for this? It’s an obvious rip off of Apple Card (which was already a bad move, in my opinion), but from a company who is infinitely worse at customer service. And the APR starts at 21.74%. No thank you.

I’m not the first to point this out, but with watchOS 7, Apple decided to remove Force Touch from the Apple Watch. I’ve been using watchOS 7 for a little more than 24 hours, and I already miss Force Touch a lot.

The Apple Watch was the first device to feature a pressure sensitive touch option, and it made a lot of sense. The display is so tiny that Force Touch was able to solve a lot of problems by effectively doubling the screen real estate for on screen controls. I used it all the time: editing my watch faces, clearing notifications quickly, accessing controls in apps like messages and calendar; the list goes on. I don’t know why on earth they would remove support for it on devices that have hardware dedicated to it, but it’s safe to assume that future models wont have it (I’m really not okay with this, but maybe I’ll be able to make peace with it if it allows them to make the watch noticeably thinner or markedly improve battery life).

Some people have suggested that Force Touch wasn’t widely used on the Apple Watch, but I disagree. I think nearly everyone used it: it was the only way to change your watch face from the watch or clear all your notifications at once. People who say otherwise are likely associating Force Touch too closely with 3D Touch (basically the same thing, they just called it something different for the iPhone). The argument is that not enough people used them because they were difficult to discover, but there’s a diction between 3D Touch and Force Touch and I think that distinction matters: 3D Touch enabled neat shortcuts and features but was ultimately superfluous and unnecessary for navigating the iPhone, but Force Touch enabled some very important functions that couldn’t be accessed otherwise and was nearly essential for navigating the Apple Watch.

On Saturday, Donald Trump had his first campaign rally since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Before it even began, it was shrouded in controversy for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it’s pretty fucking stupid to plan a rally with tens of thousands of people in close proximity in the middle of a highly infectious global pandemic in a state where new cases are rising. Of course, the Trump administration’s response the COVID-19 has mostly been to ignore it, so this isn’t surprising. Secondly, they planned the administration on June 19th, a holiday that has been largely ignored, but which celebrates freedom by commemorating the day when slaves in Texas learned of their emancipation. They also planned the rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you don’t know anything about Tulsa, start here:

In the early 20th century, Tulsa was home to the "Black Wall Street", one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States at the time. Located in the Greenwood neighborhood, it was the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre; it has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history", in which mobs of white Tulsans killed black Tulsans, looted and robbed the black community, and burned down homes and businesses. Sixteen hours of rioting on May 31 and June 1, 1921, was ended only when National Guardsmen were brought in by the Governor. An official report later claimed that 23 Black and 16 white citizens were killed, but other estimates suggest as many as 300 people died, most of them Black. Over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, and an estimated 10,000 Black people were left homeless as 35 city blocks, composed of 1,256 residences, were destroyed by fire. Property damage was estimated at $1.8 million. Efforts to obtain reparations for survivors of the violence have been unsuccessful, but the events were re-examined by the city and state in the early 21st century, acknowledging the terrible actions that had taken place.

As per usual, Trump’s campaign is engaging is cruel, race baiting division tactics by holding a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth. Oklahoma is a state Trump won by 36 points: there was absolutely no legitimate political reason for him to hold a rally here, this was done entirely out of malice, and his campaign clearly thought they could pass it off as a coincidence. They did eventually conceded to reschedule the rally for June 20th after being criticized for the decision.

On Twitter, the Trump campaign bragged about having given out over a million tickets, and many users pointed out that if that many Trump fans showed up, roughly 980,000 ticket holders we be stuck outside during the event because the venue, the Bank of Oklahoma Center arena, only seats about 20,000 people.

The time for the rally came, 1,000,000 fans however, did not. Not only did a million people not show up, they didn’t even get close to 20,000, with nearly the entire upper bowl of the BOK arena center completely vacant. As reported by The Hill, the Tulsa Fire Department has announced that roughly 6,000 people (supporters, event staff, paid actors, security, etc.) attended the event in total. Not a huge number when you consider how much Trump hyped the event up. It’s also been hilariously pointed out that even The Wiggles managed to sell out this venue, while Trump could hardly reach 33% capacity giving away free tickets.

Trump tweeted photos of the event that were taken from angles clearly intended to highlight the crowd, but even in his own photos, you can see the empty seats in the upper bowl.

Here’s a more honest view:

The Trump campaign said recently that over one million tickets were requested for the Tulsa rally, the first rally in months due to covid-19.

Trump proclaimed that there wouldn’t be an empty seat.

I’ll let this video inside the rally speak for itself. pic.twitter.com/se6er6j49m

— Elizabeth Thomas (@lizzkatherine_) June 20, 2020

I’m sure Brad Parscale and Tucker Carlson will come up with all sorts of crazy reasons why the event’s attendance was so low. They’re already blaming it on the coronavirus and liberal protestors blocking the entrances, but let’s consider that for a second. A bunch of Trump supporters don’t even believe in the coronavirus, and the ones who do have made it well known that they aren’t very worried about it. Also, there probably would’ve been crowds outside if these mythical protesters were preventing people from entering the BOK Center, but there weren’t. In fact, there were so few people outside that they canceled the address Trump had planned to give for all the fans who wouldn’t be able to get in once the venue reached capacity.

Trump claims to have a silent majority, but a more more accurate phrase may be “invisible majority“.

We’re adding a point to our COVID-19 scoreboard based on the fact that our president was stupid and arrogant enough to have a rally during a pandemic.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 16

UPDATED: 7/9/20, 19:07

Apple’s WWDC kicks off on Monday, so it’s time for our annual wish list and predictions! This is always a fun time for the Apple nerds out there, and a much bigger deal for most regular people than they realize. Here are my thoughts about this year’s keynote, which is set for Monday, June 22nd, at 10AM (pacific time).

Wish List:

• Fix the atrocious Apple Music app. Get rid of the useless Browse, For You, and Radio tabs at the bottom, and replace them with Playlists, Artists, and Albums. Work in better sorting. Streamline the search feature. [recycled from last year’s list]

• It is HIGH TIME for some Siri improvements. We have been waiting and watching for years, every year expecting this to be the keynote where Apple rolls out a badass new Siri. They’ve teased us a few times with things like Siri suggestions and other minor voice improvements, but at the end of the day, I don’t give a shit about having Siri tell me hockey scores.  I’m talking Iron Man-style, JARVIS-level intelligence. I know that Apple is behind the curve on this as a result of their focus on privacy, but they’ve gotta figure out a way to at least get Siri up to speed with the Google Assistant. [recycled from last year’s list]

  Please. Please, please. Puhleeeaaaazeee. PLEASE. PLEASE make this the year that Siri gets a major boost. I would honestly be completely content, nay, happy, if this were the only change they announce this year. It’s so overdue. Siri was the first voice assistant on the scene, and now she’s in last place for speed, accuracy, and general capabilities. There’s so much potential here to make a truly intelligent voice assistant that would really set the iPhone apart from its competitors.

• I doubt Apple will ever implement this because it would be de facto acknowledging the fact that people use their iPhones to take nudes, but a locked photo album is also overdue.

• New privacy features are always welcome. They didn’t disappoint last year, but a VPN or a social network would still be great.

• iPadOS 14 has the potential to send my MacBook packing, if it’s upgraded as it deserves to be. The iPad Pro Magic Keyboard already has me reaching for my iPad more than I reach for my Mac, but there are some relatively basic everyday workflows (word processing, desktop class browsing, etc.) that are still just easier on the Mac. If they can use iPadOS 14 to make some of those processes even marginally easier, it will make the iPad a much more powerful platform and a truly viable option for people in the market for a new laptop.

• In my opinion, macOS just deserves some bug fixes and attention to detail.

• As I mentioned in my Apple Card review, I would really like for them to expand the capability of the Cash card to function more like a typical checking account.

• I would really like for them to revamp the Apple Watch UI in a meaningful way, and finally give the side button a distinct, useful role in controlling the device. [recycled from last year’s list]

Predictions

• Some people are speculating that we’ll see some new hardware at this year’s keynote. It wouldn’t surprise me to see an upgraded iMac, but I’m not holding my breath for anything brand new like the rumored, tile-like tracking devices (supposedly to be named “AirTags”).

• I predict that Apple will, once again, disappoint me by leaving the Music app practically untouched. [recycled from last year’s list]

• It seems like this may be the year that iOS finally allows for some basic widgets to be permanently affixed on the home screen, and a moderate rethinking of how the home screen functions.

• I feel sure that we’ll see the Apple Watch move more into the category of health/fitness device. Sleep tracking, finally?

• This isn’t an original prediction by any means, but it seems clear that Apple will announce that they’re moving on from using Intel processors in the Mac and begin the transition to their own, Apple designed ARM chips.

I said this last year as well, but this WWDC doesn’t feel particularly exciting. Maybe it’s because so much else is going on in the world, or maybe it’s because Apple’s most exciting platforms are reaching maturity and are now only getting incremental software updates. In any case, lower expectations going in means that there’s a higher likelihood of them surprising us with cool new stuff.

Ashley Cullins, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

Tucker Carlson doesn't have an obligation to investigate the truth of statements before making them on his show, and his audience doesn't expect him to report facts, a lawyer for Fox News told a New York federal judge on Wednesday. […]

Fox News' attorney Erin Murphy argued that […] a reasonable viewer would know [Carlson’s] show offers "provocative things that will help [them] think harder," as opposed to straight news.

"What we’re talking about here, it’s not the front page of The New York Times," said Murphy. “It’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is a commentary show.”

It’s always fun to see lawyers forced into corners where the safest legal route is to acknowledge the ugly truths about the companies they work for.

Sounds like Trump is gonna have to make a hard pivot to OANN, now that his longtime favorite network has more or less admitted to serving up fake news.

The final episode of “Defending Jacob”, one of the latest TV+ shows, was released a few weeks ago. If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, Apple describes it as follows:

[The] series unfolds around a shocking crime that rocks a small Massachusetts town and one family in particular, forcing an assistant district attorney to choose between his sworn duty to uphold justice and his unconditional love for his son.

I really enjoyed the show. I found it very engaging, and each week I found myself looking forward to the next episode being released. The story itself was well written, and the show was very well produced.

The cast was terrific. There’s absolutely nothing not to love about Chris Evans. I thought Jaeden Martell’s performance was particularly strong, and he really nailed portraying a likable but reserved character with depth and conviction (poor choice of words). Michelle Dockery’s character felt a little too scripted in the first episode, but her performance soon felt every bit as genuine as her co-stars. And Cherry Jones was brilliant, as usual.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would definitely recommend you check it out.

Spoiler Warning ⚠️

I’m not a huge fan of ambiguous endings, but speculation can be fun. There are two characters who can be reasonably suspected of being the murderer. Jacob sort of confessed but he was clearly scared and arguably under duress, so who’s to say if he was telling the truth? Leonard Patz absolutely confessed, but he was absolutely under duress, so again, who’s to say he was telling the truth?

There’s plenty incriminating evidence to suggest that Jacob is guilty, most of all the story he posted on “The Cut Up Room”. But as Joanna points out, the story he wrote didn’t have any details that weren’t already public knowledge: you wouldn’t have to have been the murderer to write the story, just a bit twisted in the head, maybe as a result of having been bullied by the kid who was killed. I didn’t find the whole knife debacle incriminating — plenty of teenage boys have knives, in the south at least — but Jacob’s fingerprint on Ben’s sweater was a different story. It isn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it certainly doesn’t look good. There’s not too much left to discuss in Jacob’s case, because they devoted eight episodes to it.

However, there’s a lot of room for further speculation in the case of Leonard Patz. There is evidence to suggest that he killed Ben, and the fact that he himself was murdered doesn’t exculpate him. There’s no explanation of why he had photos of Ben on his phone. His proximity to the scene of the crime on the morning of Ben’s murder is also difficult to write off. Not to mention that there’s a record of Patz being attracted to adolescent guys who fit the same physical profile as Ben Rifkin. Of course, it could’ve been a coincidence that Ben was killed in the park where Leonard walks in the mornings, and there’s no record of Leonard being aggressive or dangerous towards Matt McGrath (Leonard’s only “victim”*). It’s also worth pointing out that the photos Leonard had of Ben weren’t crime scene photos — as with the story Jacob wrote, while it doesn’t look good, you wouldn’t have to have been the murderer to have those photos — they easily could’ve been images Ben had posted on social media. In all honesty, I felt bad for Leonard pretty much the entire time because I truly don’t think he killed Ben, and if that’s the case, then he was harassed, scapegoated, defamed, and brutally murdered because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, his only crime having been copping a feel of a consenting fifteen year old’s package through his shorts.

All in all, the story was certainly thought provoking. I don’t really see how there could be a second season, unless they want to pull Jacob out of his coma (yes, it literally ends with him in a coma; very soap opera-y) and do the whole thing again with a different murder victim (which they very nearly repeated in this season).

*I use quotes around the word “victim” in this sentence not because I question the legitimacy of Matt McGrath’s accusation against Leonard Patz, but because I don’t consider him a victim, and I don’t think he considers himself a victim, either. Matt was clearly sexually active and knew what was going on, and he solicited a transaction with Leonard. That doesn’t make it legal — the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16 and Matt was 15 at the time — but still, it’s hard for me to see Matt as a victim when he had the agency to make Leonard an offer in the first place.

Ali Breland, reporting for Mother Jones:

The fact that the upside red triangle has been an explicit piece of deadly Nazi iconography for seven decades hasn’t deterred Trump’s 2020 campaign from using them in Facebook ads. This week, the campaign started running a series of ads, disparaging Antifa demonstrators and featuring a large, bright red, upside-down triangle. Antifa, is of course, short for anti-fascist. The red triangle was sewn on uniforms of people interned in concentration camps, including anti-fascist political prisoners. Millions of Soviet and Western anti-fascist soldiers died defeating Nazism, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

“Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting—it’s absolute madness,” reads one 2020 Trump ad featuring the symbol.

In case you don’t understand the parallels, refer to this chart used by the Third Reich. It specifies which badges should be afixed to the uniforms of concentration camp prisoners to denote the nature of their crimes against the reich. For those of you who haven’t recently brushed up on your German history and German language skills, the word “politisch” in the first column of the chart above the red symbols refers to political prisoners. Political prisoners included a variety of people, including anti-fascists, socialists, communists, and others who were critical of Hitler’s regime.

Image from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, available at https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/classification-system-in-nazi-concentration-camps

The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol.

Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and people who rescued Jews.

Trump & the RNC are using it to smear millions of protestors.

Their masks are off. pic.twitter.com/UzmzDaRBup

— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) June 18, 2020

The similarities are not subtle. The Trump campaign is growing more brazen in their fascism by the day.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company “removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”

In the name of giving credit where it’s due, this is one rare example of Facebook doing the right thing by removing the ads. (You should still #deletefacebook, though.) It’s worth pointing out that Facebook’s decision to remove these ads highlights just how egregious they were, given Facebook’s tendency to let Trump get away with things.

See also: my thesis paper, which explores the experiences of men who bore the pink triangle in Nazi concentration camps.

Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop😢😡 Come on America. We are better than this. pic.twitter.com/IcudsNfVLY

— 🌷🇺🇸Ann🇺🇸🌷🐇 (@tkag2020_ann) June 17, 2020

If a gun wielding police officer can have this much anxiety over whether or not they‘ll be able to defend themselves against a McMuffin that may have been spat in without provocation, just imagine how nervous black people must feel when they’re pulled over by a gun wielding cop that may execute them without provocation.

If you’re a police officer and your response to the current state of affairs in this country is to seek pity on social media by (a) posting a video of yourself crying over your McDonald’s drive thru experience and asking people to be nicer to you, or (b) posting a video announcing that you’re resigning because you can’t take a little bit of scrutiny to make sure you don’t abuse innocent black people, the I would suspect that lack empathy to such an absurd degree that a psychiatrist would probably like to study you. It goes without saying that you have no business carrying a badge, much less a firearm. You should resign.

If you’re not a police officer and your response to the current state of affairs is to flock to social media to share and boost videos like the ones above, and spread other nonsense about how “it’s just a few bad apples” and “more white people are killed by police than black people” you’re either openly racist, or you’re too ignorant to realize that you’re a racist. We have established that there is a deep, systemic problem with policing in America, and more people have realized that fact in the past few weeks than ever before. Just because you’ve always “backed the blue” before doesn’t mean it’s too late to open your eyes to the reality that is the abusive nature of policing in the United States.

Ed Kilgore, reporting for The Intelligencer:

In a sweeping and consequential 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the workplace anti-discrimination provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning discrimination on grounds of sex protect LGBTQ employees.

In Bostock v. Clayton County, Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for himself, Chief Justice Roberts, and the Court’s four liberals (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan).

From the opinion penned by Gorsuch:

Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s con-sequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

Few facts are needed to appreciate the legal question we face. Each of the three cases before us started the same way: An employer fired a long-time employee shortly after the employee revealed that he or she is homosexual or transgender—and allegedly for no reason other than the employee’s homosexuality or transgender status.

Gerald Bostock worked for Clayton County, Georgia, as achild welfare advocate. Under his leadership, the county won national awards for its work. After a decade with the county, Mr. Bostock began participating in a gay recreational softball league. Not long after that, influential members of the community allegedly made disparaging comments about Mr. Bostock’s sexual orientation and participation in the league. Soon, he was fired for conduct “unbecoming” a county employee.

Donald Zarda worked as a skydiving instructor at Altitude Express in New York. After several seasons with the company, Mr. Zarda mentioned that he was gay and, days later, was fired.

Aimee Stephens worked at R. G. & G. R. Harris Funeral Homes in Garden City, Michigan. When she got the job, Ms. Stephens presented as a male. But two years into her service with the company, she began treatment for despair and loneliness. Ultimately, clinicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and recommended that she begin living as a woman. In her sixth year with the company, Ms. Stephens wrote a letter to her employer explaining that she planned to “live and work full-time as a woman” after she returned from an upcoming vacation. The funeral home fired her before she left, telling her “this is not going to work out.”

[…]

Some of those who supported adding language to Title VII to ban sex discrimination may have hoped it would derail the entire Civil Rights Act. Yet, contrary to those intentions, the bill became law. Since then, Title VII’s effects have unfolded with far-reaching consequences, some likely beyond what many in Congress or elsewhere expected. But none of this helps decide today’s cases. Ours is a s-ciety of written laws. Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations. In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee. We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.

This is a truly historic ruling, and I hope everyone can appreciate the gravity of this moment, particularly for those of us who find ourselves attracted to members of the same sex, as well as others who don’t identify as the gender associated with their biological sex.

I’m particularly glad to see Justice Gorsuch on the right side of history. I’d imagine his ruling feels like as much of a slap in the face to conservative religious bigots and homophobic Trump supporters as it feels like an unexpected, resounding victory for those fighting for equality under the law.

For your records: dissenting justices include three straight men, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh (who still likes beer).

UPDATED: 06/15/20, 17:00

Judd Legum in Popular Information:

Several companies that have publicly embraced the Black Lives Matter movement are among the largest corporate contributors to [shitbag racist] Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).

Quick digression: it’s absolutely rich that one of our nation’s premier shitbag racist senators has the last name “Cotton”.

Cotton has positioned himself to the right of Trump on criminal justice issues. He was one of a handful of Senators to oppose the First Step Act, a modest piece of bipartisan legislation aimed at narrowing racial disparities in federal sentencing. […] The United States has the world's largest — and disproportionately Black — prison population. But Cotton argues America has an "under-incarceration problem."

Time and again, Cotton has shown little regard for Black Americans. He has a 6% rating from the NAACP. And yet, some of the corporations embracing the Black Lives Matter protests in U.S. cities have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Cotton's campaigns.

The list of corporations and their contributions to Cotton:

• Bank of America — $15,000

• Wells Fargo — $15,000

• Walmart — $18,500

• AT&T — $21,000

• Coca Cola — $2,500

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers — $22,500

Do with that information what you will, discerning readers.

Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, Gay Pride, or some other social cause, it’s time that we start making companies put their money where their mouths are. It would be regressive for us to allow them to keep up this habit of only caring when they can make a PR move for social clout.

Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies this month and every month 🌈 ⁣
(🎨: by @ramzymasri) pic.twitter.com/pENmTaQB0h

— Nickelodeon (@Nickelodeon) June 13, 2020

This wasn’t really that surprising.

Annie Linskey and Josh Dawsey, reporting for The Washington Post:

Seeking a city willing to allow a large-scale event amid the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans have tentatively settled on Jacksonville, Fla. […]

The highly unusual decision to seek an alternative location for the convention’s marquee events […] stems from Trump’s desire to accept his party’s nomination before an enormous crowd. […]

“I don’t want to be sitting in a place that’s 50 percent empty,” Trump told Gov. Roy Cooper (D) late last month in a phone conversation about the convention, according to two people familiar with the call, who, like others for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personal conversations and planning.

“We can’t do social distancing,” Trump said on the call.

As I said two weeks ago:

See ya. 👋🏼

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

The acronym “RINO” is short for “Republican In Name Only” and is a term used against Republican politicians who aren’t considered “Republican” enough by those who have bought into Trumpism. Lately, the list of accused RINOs has been growing at a staggering rate, with some very high profile names being added to the list.

The following is a list of Republican presidents, politicians, and officials who have denounced Donald Trump’s actions on the grounds of unconstitutional behavior and/or announced thier intentions to support Joe Biden in the 2020 general election.

• George H. W. Bush, President

• George W. Bush, President

• John McCain, Senator, 2008 Republican Presidential Candidate

• Mitt Romney, Senator, 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate

• Colin Powell, Bush Administration Secretary of State

• Jim Mattis, Trump Administration Secretary of Defense

• Mark Esper, Trump Administration Secretary of Defense

It takes an incredible amount of mental flexibility and a complete lack of moral rigidity to convince oneself that all of those people must have been brainwashed by the “lame stream media” and abandoned their long held conservative beliefs just to spite Donald Trump.

UPDATED: 06/08/20, 15:57