The protesters have demanded that Google pull out of a $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract — in which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services for the Israeli government and military.

Critics at the company raised concerns that the technology would be weaponized against Palestinians in Gaza.

Reasonable.

“This evening, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests,” the workers said in the statement.

Unreasonable.

israel is a shit ally and an illegitimate nation, and we shouldn’t support them in any way, much less continuing to support their arrogant, dehumanizing, dictatorial antagonization of their neighbors.

Man, wouldn’t it just be delectable if Trump lost the election (again) because his home state of Florida (shout to to DeSanctimonious, who seems like the biggest high-heel-wearing loser in the country) voted to legalize weed and protect abortion access after his stacked court overturned Roe.

I’m really not a Beyonce fan, but I liked this album more than any of her others. She’s got an undeniable set of pipes, but I’ve never connected much with her lyrics or style. “Halo” is probably my favorite song of hers, and one of the only ones I listen to with any frequency. Recently though, she hasn’t really appealed to me at all. “Lemonade” nor “Renaissance” did nothing for me, unfortunately: literally not a single song. But “Cowboy Carter,” while I think it suffers from being too long and having too many transitional tracks, does have a few that I can’t get out of my head, and I wanted to give credit where it’s due.

The web developers who build these sites not only have no capacity to balance profit with design, they seem to genuinely loathe their readers.

Porcha Woodruff, 32, was home around 8 a.m. on February 16, helping her 6- and 12-year-olds get ready for school when six Detroit police officers arrived at her door with an arrest warrant for carjacking and robbery, the complaint states.

“Are you kidding, carjacking? Do you see that I am eight months pregnant?” she asked them, the lawsuits says. Still, she was handcuffed, taken to jail and booked, it states.

Taylor Swift:

WELL. We had our first rain show of The Eras Tour. And it was SO MUCH FUN. The dancers, band, crowd and I all pretty much turned into little kids joyfully jumping in puddles all night. I wanted to thank the crowd again for waiting for the weather to clear. And my amazing crew for keeping the stage, lighting and equipment all dry and working so we could play. That was a late, great night I won’t forget. 🥹

“It was rare, I was there”

Monica Potts, writing for The Atlantic:

In Clinton, sex—and the question of whether we were allowed to have it or talk about it—was related to how people viewed girls’ futures. The idea that we might become fully realized adults, experiencing sexual freedom and fulfillment, was not fathomable. We could become helpmeets for our future husbands, or we could be ruined.

Zachary Cohen and Jennifer Hansler, reporting for CNN:

Russian paramilitary group fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Vladimir Putin attempted to buy weapons and equipment from an unlikely source: NATO member Turkey, according to a leaked US intleaked US intelligence document that was obtained by CNN.

Does this surprise anyone? Of course it was Turkey. Why are they still in NATO? They been antagonistic towards the goals of the rest of the NATO members for years. Fuck Turkey, and fuck the fascistic piece of shit Erdogan.

Veronica Stracqualursi, Gregory Krieg, and Kaanita Iyer, reporting for CNN:

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has announced that he’s running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, launching a challenge to former President Donald Trump, who remains the front-runner despite his looming criminal indictment.

“I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts,” Hutchinson, 72, said in an interview on ABC News that aired Sunday. He will make a formal announcement on April 26 in his hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas, according to a news release.

I must admit this was unexpected.

But also: another white male septuagenarian, but this time from the state that gave us Walmart.

The only thing that drives Zuck is profit, engagement drives profit, and Donald Trump drives engagement.

Joesph White, reporting for Reuters:

General Motors plans to phase out widely-used Apple CarPlay and Android Auto technologies that allow drivers to bypass a vehicle's infotainment systems, shifting instead to built-in infotainment systems developed with Google for future electric vehicles.

Barbie Latza Nadeau, reporting for CNN:

Italians who use English and other foreign words in official communications could face fines of up to €100,000 ($108,705) under new legislation introduced by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

Nicole Chavez and Justin Gamble, reporting for CNN:

A film about a Black first grader who integrated an all-White elementary school in the South is under review in a Florida school district after a parent objected to the movie[…]

Two weeks before the movie was shown to second graders at North Shore Elementary, permission forms were sent to the students’ parents along with a link to the “Ruby Bridges” trailer, Mascareñas said. The parent who filed the objection was among the two families that opted to not have their students watch the movie, she said. […]

Basically, what I’ve done here is create a series of custom wallpapers using photographs that I took myself that I feel match the vibe of some of my favorite albums. I then created a shortcut to change the wallpaper to the corresponding image when a particular album plays using automations.

David Remnek, writing for The New Yorker:

It’s not even clear that the most vociferous of the pro-Trump groups such as the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, which have endured intense investigation and legal charges for their roles in the Capitol insurrection, will be eager to take to the streets again in Trump’s name.

If you’re going to the tour and don’t want to know the setlist, then:

⚠️ Spoiler Warning

What for you ask? Good question, the list of possible charges is pretty long.

From Emily Olson at NPR:

A quick refresher: Trump is currently facing at least five investigations, covering everything from his possession of classified documents to his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But the latest indictment rumors stem from just one of those probes: the one led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Bragg's office is examining whether Trump and his company broke state laws in paying hush money to adult film star Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels.

A few notable excerpts from the BBC’s obituary:

She became for many the one constant point in a rapidly changing world as British influence declined, society changed beyond recognition and the role of the monarchy itself came into question.

The year is 2021, the NFL has been around for a century, and an active player has just come out of the closet for the first time. On the one hand, it’s astonishing that it took this long, but on the other hand, it’s a miracle that it happened at all.

Earlier today, Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib posted a video and a statement on Instagram today coming out as gay:

Jasmine Wright and Veronica Stracqualursi, reporting for CNN:

Vice President Kamala Harris held a private dinner Tuesday night for the female US senators, a show of bipartisanship among a deeply divided Congress.

It was the first known time that Harris hosted lawmakers in the vice-presidential residence at the Naval Observatory since moving in April, a process that was delayed due to renovations.

CNN previously reported that Harris had invited all 24 female senators -- 16 Democrats and eight Republicans.

Rebecca Kern, reporting for Bloomberg (for whatever that’s worth):

Cicilline told reporters Wednesday that a proposal prohibiting tech platforms from giving an advantage to their own products over those of competitors would mean Apple must let consumers decide which apps to use or remove.

[…]

The bill contains a provision that would prohibit Apple, for example, from restricting or impeding iPhone users from uninstalling apps that have been pre-installed

David Cicilline is a sixty year old single gay man, the only substantial experience he has with technology is searching “NSA young tops” on the Craigslist personals section. Nobody asked him to come up with asinine legislation that would force Apple and other manufacturers to ship phones that allow users to delete every app. Sure, let users delete the phone, or the clock, or the settings app, or the App Store. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m not an audiophile, but most people who claim to be are full of shit anyway, so. Long story short: Spatial Audio is incredible. Lossless is completely unnoticeable.

Apple has really hyped up this announcement, and I don’t think the hype is unwarranted. Everyone I’ve had try listening to a song in Spatial Audio has been thoroughly impressed by it. It might take a little getting used to, but I think this really could be the next big step for audio quality that we’ll point to decades from now as a turning point.

A few weeks ago, Apple issued an iOS update with a killer new feature to protect users from unwanted tracking. It’s pretty straightforward, the policy is called “App Tracking Transparency,” and it requires applications to display a pop-up box asking the user for their permission to track their activity across other apps and websites. You should always click “Ask App not to Track.”

I’ve written before about how the government could unjustly subpoena Apple for your iCloud backups to receive a copy of literally everything on your phone at any given moment. I knew the threat was very real, but I was forced to write about it in a mostly hypothetical manner because there wasn’t a great example to point toward. Now, we have an example.

Advances like this just don’t happen. Yes, technology improves every year and computers get faster, but Apple is the only player in the industry making chips that routinely double their clock speed. They’ve been on an exponential increase with the A-series chips, and the M-series is based on the same basic formula, using the same cores. If the M-series chips continue to improve at the same rate as the A-series, Apple’s M-series chips will be a decade ahead of Intel and the rest of the industry within the next three years.

Charles Q. Choi, in a 2019 article for IEEE Spectrum:

A major weakness of Bitcoin is the extraordinary amounts of energy it demands, and the vast amounts of the global warming gas carbon dioxide it spews out as a result. Bitcoin reportedly has a global electricity consumption approaching that of the entire nation of Austria, and a global carbon footprint comparable to that of Denmark.

I will be the first to admit that I don’t fully understand how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin really work. I think most of the people who devote a lot of time and energy to it are nerds who need to get a life (and if you ever ask a retail employee if their establishment accepts bitcoin, you deserved to be ridiculed and shamed until you leave, you fucking dweeb).

That said, I have a general understanding of how the concept (and I did buy some DOGE a year ago as an experiment), including how the mining process works, but I had no idea how much energy it wastes.

It’s that time of year again, where Apple nerds will gather around their screens for two hours to watch Apple executives tell us what we get to geek out over for the next year. Like last year, this year’s WWDC will be completely online, but for most of us, that’s how we’re used to experiencing it anyway.

My gut feeling is that this is going to be a big year. There have been several large, exciting announcements from Apple in just the past few weeks about new products and new software features. Announcing things like Spatial Audio and lossless Apple Music, the new iMacs and iPads, and impressive new accessibility features a month or two before Dubdub seems to indicate that they didn’t have time to include them in the keynote, which is exciting because it suggests the keynote is chock full of other cool stuff.

Here are the lists of things I’m hoping to see (or not to see, in a few cases), and then some things I’m expecting to see.

Kevin Breuninger, reporting for CNBC:

Former President Donald Trump’s blog — a webpage where he shared statements after larger social media companies banned him from their platforms — has been permanently shut down, his spokesman said Wednesday.

The page “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” has been scrubbed from Trump’s website after going live less than a month earlier.

It “will not be returning,” his senior aide Jason Miller told CNBC.

I’m shocked that this didn’t take off. I mean, it’s not like Trump only acquired an audience because the type of people who wanted to listen to him prefer short, incendiary tweets and were seemingly allergic to any sort of long-form reading. He should write another book, I’m sure his base of voracious readers would tear through a several hundred page volume with glee.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

Josephine Wolff, writing for Slate:

If you’ve already reconciled yourself to the privacy implications of owning an Echo or a Ring, the additional privacy and security drawbacks of participating in Sidewalk seem very limited and the benefits are potentially considerable, for you and for everyone around you.

I like this take. The thing to consider is whether you trust Echo and Ring devices with your privacy. If you do, you might as well participate in Sidewalk. It’s not that different, conceptually, from Apple’s Find My network.

I don’t like this take. There’s absolutely no reason you should trust the Ring or Echo, and you shouldn’t trust Sidewalk, either. In technology especially, trust has to be earned, and Amazon has done nothing to earn anyone’s trust.

President Joe Biden, giving remarks on the White House’s partnerships in the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination effort:

Anheuser-Busch announced that beer is on them on July the 4th. That’s right, get a shot and have a beer. Free beer for everyone 21 years or over to celebrate the independence from the virus.

What an absolute bro.

Now get your shots, you filthy animal.

Remember the other guy? He wanted you to drink bleach; what a contrast.

To support users with limited mobility, Apple is introducing a revolutionary new accessibility feature for Apple Watch. AssistiveTouch for watchOS allows users with upper body limb differences to enjoy the benefits of Apple Watch without ever having to touch the display or controls. Using built-in motion sensors like the gyroscope and accelerometer, along with the optical heart rate sensor and on-device machine learning, Apple Watch can detect subtle differences in muscle movement and tendon activity, which lets users navigate a cursor on the display through a series of hand gestures, like a pinch or a clench.

This is technically astonishing. Watch the video. It’s less than two minutes long, and it’s one of the most technically impressive things you’ll watch this year. Seriously, watch it.

Also astonishing, is Apple’s commitment to accessibility. It’s something that is totally unparalleled in the tech industry, and it’s something everyone at Apple should be truly proud of. Features like this don’t make Apple money and they probably take a lot of resources to develop, but for the individuals who rely on them, they really can be life changing. It warms the heart to see Apple continuing to make products that are truly for everyone.

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors:

Apple has been revealed to be the largest customer of the British electronics start-up Rockley Photonics, The Telegraph reports.

Rockley Photonics has developed non-invasive optical sensors for detecting multiple blood-related health metrics, including blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood alcohol levels, many of which are only normally detectable with more invasive dedicated medical equipment. Rockley's sensors beam infrared light through a user's skin, much like the existing sensors on the back of the Apple Watch for detecting heart rate and blood oxygen levels.

The idea is quite straightforward. An AirTag is a small round tracking device, slightly larger than a peppermint. You can pair an AirTag with your iPhone (which is extremely easy and can be done in just a few seconds) and then attach the it to something you don’t want to misplace. If you do lose that item, your iPhone will be able to lead you back to it.

To the despair of my most liberal friends, I stopped wearing masks indoors weeks ago, about two weeks after my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and well before the CDC updated their guidance that vaccinated individuals no longer need masks indoors. Also, I never really wore masks outside. As anyone who followed CopyrightBro throughout 2020 surely knows, this is not because I didn’t take the pandemic seriously, but because I trusted what the science said. I’m now wondering whether some of my friends actually care about the science or whether they used it as a convenient talking point in an elaborate game of identity politics disguised by a public health crisis.

Seeing as I am an American, my opinion on maters concerning Israel and Palestine are obviously limited and informed by my personal experiences in the United States, and my concerns with the crisis that is unfolding tends to focus on aspects of American involvement (and the avoidance thereof). Though, as a citizen of a nation that is definitely recognized by the international community as a legitimate country (if not one of the premier legitimate countries), I feel pretty secure in the first point I want to make regarding Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty. While the Israelis claim that Palestine isn’t a real country and Palestinians claim that Israel is a made up country, they’re both internationally recognized by the United Nations as sovereign states, and they were BOTH made up and given to the people who live there by the United Nations, more or less out of pity. So I don’t think either side has any ground to be making arguments about the sovereignty of the other.

I’ll get my most unpopular opinion out of the way early:

This was a pretty packed event, especially for the spring. Apple announced (or teased) several updates to services, included the ability for users to share an Apple Card account and a new podcasts service. When it comes to hardware, we got updates in four major categories, from Apple TV to iMac, and the introduction of a cool new accessory. Let’s get to it.

“Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” was released over a month ago to incredible fanfare, immediately breaking records. Though, at this point, it’s fair to point out that Taylor could release an EP of herself covering some of Barney the dinosaur’s hit musical numbers and probably still manage to break at least one or two records. But alas, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” did extremely well in its first week, (though it understandably dropped off a bit the following week; these are, after all, thirteen year old songs that just about everyone on earth has already heard and probably knows the lyrics to), coming at number one on the Billboard 200 chart and claiming the title of biggest country music album release of the past six years.

Lauren Feiner and Salvador Rodriguez, reporting for CNBC:

Facebook’s independent oversight board ruled Wednesday to uphold the company’s January decision to suspend the Facebook and Instagram accounts of former President Donald Trump.

Facebook seemingly doing something good? Nah, you know there’s a “but” coming:

But, the board said, the indefinite time frame of the suspension “was not appropriate.” The board effectively punted the decision on the length of the suspension back to Facebook, saying it “insists” the company “review this matter to determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform.”

This is good news for now, but don’t count on the decision from this “independent oversight board”* to last for very long. I’d bet a thousand dollars that Zuckerberg comes up with some bullshit excuse to allow him back on the platform before 2023, and probably by the end of this year. The only thing that drives Zuck is profit, engagement drives profit, and Donald Trump drives engagement.

*Calling this entity an ”independent oversight board” is laughable. It’s basically a new arm of Facebook, paid by Facebook, to issue faux ethical positions on decisions made by Facebook proper.

#deletefacebook

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard:Joseph Cox, reporting for

While I was on a Google Hangouts call with a colleague, the hacker sent me screenshots of my Bumble and Postmates accounts, which he had broken into. Then he showed he had received texts that were meant for me that he had intercepted. Later he took over my WhatsApp account, too, and texted a friend pretending to be me.

Looking down at my phone, there was no sign it had been hacked. […] But the hacker had swiftly, stealthily, and largely effortlessly redirected my text messages to themselves. And all for just $16.

I hadn't been SIM swapped, where hackers trick or bribe telecom employees to port a target's phone number to their own SIM card. Instead, the hacker used a service by a company called Sakari, which helps businesses do SMS marketing and mass messaging, to reroute my messages to him. This overlooked attack vector shows not only how unregulated commercial SMS tools are but also how there are gaping holes in our telecommunications infrastructure, with a hacker sometimes just having to pinky swear they have the consent of the target.

Sure, the carriers have patched this flaw now, but how many others exist? SMS is and has always been an inherently unsafe way to communicate.

Two things to take away from this:

1. Two-factor authentication using SMS is only going to stop the laziest, stupidest “hackers.”

2. SMS messages are on the verge of being publicly available, and you should use an encrypted messaging service (iMessage, Signal, etc.)

Filipe Espósito, reporting for 9to5Mac:

WhatsApp recently introduced new privacy policies for its users, which includes new terms ensuring that the app will share data with Facebook as a condition of use. Although this was postponed at first, WhatsApp will now disable some app functionalities until users accept the new privacy terms.

WhatsApp was the longtime holdout among Facebook’s three main platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) when it came to maintining some of their original identity and palatable privacy practices, but the sun is finally setting on WhatsApp. I’m frankly surprised it took this long, and I’m sure it won’t be too much longer before they start talking about getting rid of end-to-end encryption.

#deletefacebook

From the Signal blog:

Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives.

This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past. The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.

However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea.

Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.

Shamelessly hypocritical. Facebook is fine with your data being distributed, sold, and leaked to just about anyone on the planet, just so long as it isn’t you.

Sami Fathi, reporting for MacRumors:

Over the next two years, Apple will transition its Mac lineup away from Intel processors to its own Apple silicon chips. Apple is already well underway on the transition, having released three Mac computers based on its M1 SoC. Intel in response launched a marketing campaign last week to label Macs and ‌M1‌ as inferior to Intel processors.

Despite the barrage of attacks, Gelsinger has indicated that he hopes to have Apple as a future customer.

Coming on the heels of Apple absolutely eating Intel’s lunch with the M1’s performance and versatility, and then Intel’s tactless ad campaign against Apple, this shit is just embarrassing. It sure looks like Intel is a ship on fire.

These fuckers are absolutely shameless. Rather than putting forth any meaningful effort to actually prevent data leaks from their surveillance network, they just want to convince you that it’s something you’ll have to live with and not really a big deal. It’s just a part of their larger to plan to keep user’s from realizing how much value all the data Facebook steals from them really holds.

#deletefacebook

Dan Goodin, reporting for Ars Technica:

[…] a researcher has provided a side-by-side comparison that suggests that, while both iOS and Android collect handset data around the clock—even when devices are idle, just out of the box, or after users have opted out—the Google mobile OS collects about 20 times as much data as its Apple competitor.

Google and Apple have both disputed aspects of this “research,” and there are glaringly obvious shortfalls to the methods the researchers used, but the basic findings are still probably pretty close to the truth. Of course Google collects as much data as they can, that’s how they make money. Their statement saying that the research was off by an order of magnitude probably means that they’re underestimating how much data Google scrapes: I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 200x the amount Apple takes.

Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. said its Hold to Talk feature, introduced on hand-held devices in 2015, already lets users control how long they want the voice assistant Siri to listen for, preventing the assistant from interrupting users that have a stutter before they have finished speaking.

The company is now researching how to automatically detect if someone speaks with a stutter, and has built a bank of 28,000 audio clips from podcasts featuring stuttering to help do so, according to a research paper due to be published by Apple employees this week that was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The data aims to help improve voice-recognition systems for people with atypical speech patterns, an Apple spokesman said.

Maybe they can train Siri to understand users with typical speech next.

In all serious, Apple’s commitment to accessibility is a good thing, but you’d think they would start by making Siri work well for the vast majority of the population.

Stephen Collinson, reporting for CNN:

Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.

Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters in a battleground vital to the 2020 election and future presidential and congressional contests.

[…]

The new law in Georgia requires more stringent voter verification requirements for absentee ballots, allows state officials to take over election boards and limits ballot drop boxes that make it easier for people to vote. The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.

Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.

The part of this bill that makes it illegal to give water to voters waiting in lines has easily gotten the most attention, but some pundits have pointed out the scariest parts are the provisions that allow the Georgia state legislature to oversee elections and toss out ballots.

In any case, this should be a warning to southern voters in states that are inching left: don’t split the ticket with your state legislature picks. Even if you vote blue at the national level because you think it’s important to get rid of someone like Trump, that’s not enough. If you don’t get rid of bad faith Republican politicians down the ballot, they’ll come for you with a vengeance. Jim Crow voter suppression is alive and well, and the link between Republicans slowly losing power and Republicans passing voter suppression laws is 100% linear.

I do take issue with Collinson for framing this story as a win for Trump, whom I think should be getting the amount of national media coverage he deserves: none. Let’s not exaggerate his influence here. Yes, there’s a connection between the “big lie” narrative and this bill, but it’s not nearly as direct as the connection to Democrats and their policies simply being more popular among Georgian voters. Republican lawmakers in Georgia don’t really believe the election was stolen, it’s just a convenient cover to pass these laws, but Republicans can create a permission structure for themselves to do horrendous things out of thin air, and I feel certain this would’ve happened without Trump. Let’s not give him undue credit.

Dakin Andone, reporting for CNN:

An Instacart shopper who entered an Atlanta supermarket bathroom this week told police he saw an AR-15 style rifle and heard what he believed was the sound of someone loading guns in a bathroom stall.

The witness rushed out of the bathroom and notified staff at the Publix Supermarket. When police arrived soon after, they arrested a suspect as he was exiting the bathroom -- with six loaded guns in his possession.

This piece began well before the Biden Administration did, well before the election, even. I thought about this a lot, considered different directions I could go with this article to make my point, but I think it’s actually better off as a short commentary on reputations.

Donald Trump and Henry Ford are two of the most well known businessmen of the past 100 years, both seen as moguls in their fields.

The story with Ford is that while he himself was not an expert at many of the various processes vital to the growth of his company, his management skills and business savvy helped him create one of Americas most famous automobile companies. It’s said that he had a button on his desk that he could press to summon a subject matter expert on any number of topics, bridging the gap between his lack of specific expertise and the needs of his company.

Let’s quickly contrast this with Donald Trump. Trump also had a button on his desk as president, but his button summoned diet cokes, not experts. In fact, Trump’s narcissism often got in the way of him actually taking advantage of the experts he had access to. Remember when he drew his own hurricane map? Or when he said we should drink bleach?

Trump’s arrogance and ignorance led him to be an antithesis to Ford. To suggest anything else is to romanticize Trump beyond recognition.

If the rest of the “From the Vault” songs are this good, Taylor could seriously be looking at a second Album-of-The-Year Grammy for “Fearless.” I guess I was expecting 13 year old scraps from the original “Fearless” album, but this is not that. This song is terrific, better than several of the songs that made it on the album. It makes you wonder how much of it was written at the time and how much of it was fleshed out present day.

To me, it doesn’t sound exactly like the rest of “Fearless.” It’s certainly country so the similarities are there, but it doesn’t sound like 2008 country. It sounds like what great country music could be in 2021, if it weren’t for the repetitive pop-hybrid garbage that’s been coming out of Nashville for the past decade. Given the slight changes made to “Love Story,” I wonder if perhaps that’s what she’s going to give us, a timeless country album remade to be just a little more timeless and show the country music industry how off base they’ve been since she left.

Check out “You All Over Me” here.

Joe Biden’s top legislative priority was signed into law last week, and working class Americans are already enjoying the benefits of a loosened financial noose, but they didn’t get as much relief as they could've.

Thanks to peculiarly moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia who wanted to appear bipartisan by kowtowing to bad faith Republicans’ cynical demands of reducing the bottom line for the COVID relief package from $1.9T to a smaller figure — their proposal was just $600B, despite the fact that they had no qualms passing Trump’s $2.2T CARES act and a $1.9T tax cut for the wealthy in 2019 — there were several last minute changes to the bill. These changes resulted in fewer people receiving stimulus checks (roughly 17 million people making between $80k-$100k were excluded, a move which saved a paltry total of $12B from the bottom line number) and a 25% decrease in the amount of supplemental unemployment insurance that would be received by those filing unemployment (keep in mind that the current unemployment rate is still roughly double what it was before the pandemic, and also that the unemployment rate disproportionately reflects a healthier workforce than we actually have, since it calculates individuals who work multiple low wage jobs as multiple employed individuals).

It’s worth noting that despite Democrats having made these legislative concessions, not a single Republican in either chamber of Congress voted for the bill. Presumably, they were too preoccupied bitching about Dr. Seuss. Though, in the time since it passed, several Republican congressmen have actually tried to take credit for elements of the bill, despite having voted ‘no.’ The hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Several of the pieces of legislation they chose to limit had broad, bipartisan support among the American electorate. At the time it passed, the bill as a whole was polling very well, with 69% of likely voters supporting it compared to 24% opposing it. When polled on specific elements of the bill, nearly every element had more support than the bill as a whole. According to Data for Progress:

Likely voters continue to overwhelmingly back the bill’s substance, including grants to small businesses (83 percent), additional stimulus checks to most Americans (78 percent), funding to help schools reopen (75 percent), and extensions to unemployment benefits (71 percent).

This should be a lesson to Democrats for the next two years, and it highlights why we need filibuster reform/abolition. They need to use the political power they earned in the 2020 elections with brute force, focusing next on the For The People Act, which aims to protect voting rights from the barrage of hundreds of Republican voter suppression bills snaking through state legislatures across the country by ending partisan gerrymandering and changing campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics.

Matthew Panzarino, reporting for TechCrunch:

Apple has discontinued its original HomePod after four years. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple’s assistant feature.

The original HomePod was a feat of audio engineering that Apple spent over five years developing. In order to accomplish its development, the team at Apple built out a full development center near its headquarters in Cupertino, with a world-class development environment with a dozen anechoic chambers, including one of the bigger anechoic chambers outside of academic use in the US. I visited the center before its release, noting that Apple took it the extra mile to get the incredibly complex series of tweeters and woofer that built its soundspace:

But slathered on top of that is a bunch of typically Apple extra-mile jelly. Apple says that its largest test chamber is one of the biggest in the US, on a pad, suspended from the outside world with nothing to pollute its tests of audio purity. Beyond testing for the acoustic qualities of the speaker, these chambers allowed Apple to burrow down to account for and mitigate the issues that typically arise from having a high excursion subwoofer in such a small cabinet. Going even further, there are smaller chambers that allow them to isolate the hum from electronic components (there is a computer on board after all) and make attempts to insulate and control that noise so it doesn’t show up in the final output.

I found it to be one of the best speakers ever made for the home when I reviewed it in 2018. From the booming base and well-shaped nature of the tweeter assembly inside; the cloth cover that was specially shaped to avoid interfering with sound quality in any way; the way that it sensed the way that audio was being shaped by walls and other obstructions and adjusted its output to compensate. It was the definition of ‘no effort spared’ in the speaker department.

I found this news surprising and disappointing, but not shocking. Plenty have tech pundits have already remarked that the HomePod’s demise was almost certainly a direct result of its high price. Not enough consumers care enough about audio quality to pay $300 (or $350, when it first launched) for what they understood to be a smart speaker whose virtual assistant was actually rather dim witted. The public perception was the problem all along: the HomePod was always intended to be an incredible sounding speaker, not an astonishingly intelligent one, but the market was (and still is) captivated by shitty little Amazon pucks that can do about a billion “smart” tasks but have sound quality akin to an iPhone 4 speakerphone inside a Folgers can. Apple wasn’t playing the same game as their competitors, and the market didn’t understand that.

The only thing I do find odd is that Apple was rolling out brand new, meaningful HomePod (proper) features as little as a couple months ago. The ability to use a pair of them as the default audio output for your Apple TV 4K just launched late last year, and it’s a great feature that is easy to set up, works flawlessly most of the time, and makes your tv sound incredible. Perhaps we’ll continue to see new features despite its discontinuation? Maybe they’ll revamp the HomePod, or come out with some sort of HomePod Pro? One can dream.

From a Twitter press release:

[…] we want to hear from the public on whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter. And, should a world leader violate a rule, what type of enforcement action is appropriate.

Starting on March 19, we’ll be calling for responses to a public survey that will help inform the development of our policy framework […]

Crowdsourcing advice for platform rules seems like a great way to quickly sink a social network.

Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters:

Google was sued on Tuesday in a proposed class action accusing the internet search company of illegally invading the privacy of millions of users by pervasively tracking their internet use through browsers set in “private” mode.

The lawsuit seeks at least $5 billion, accusing the Alphabet Inc unit of surreptitiously collecting information about what people view online and where they browse, despite their using what Google calls Incognito mode.

According to the complaint filed in the federal court in San Jose, California, Google gathers data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager and other applications and website plug-ins, including smartphone apps, regardless of whether users click on Google-supported ads.

This helps Google learn about users’ friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and even the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they search for online, the complaint said.

Real shocker.

Last night at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift took home one of the biggest awards of the night, when her surprise eighth album “folklore” was named album of the year. This honor follows several other album-of-the-year awards for “folklore,” including titles from Rolling Stone and the Apple Music Awards.

Many people were talking about Beyoncé’s record setting wins, but nobody mentioned the historic nature of Swift’s most recent award. Prior to last night, there were only two artists in Grammys history who had won the “album of the year” title three times, and they were Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder. But last night, Taylor Swift joined their ranks, as only the third person to ever win the Grammy for album of the year three times, and the only female act ever to do so. She had previously won the title in 2010 (for her second album, “Fearless”) and in 2016 (for her fifth album, “1989”).

Regardless of how you felt about “folklore” and whether or not it was your style of music, it was clear that there was something special about it from the very start, and I’m glad it’s gotten the recognition it deserves. It was the perfect quarantine album, and it was a masterful showcasing of Swift’s talent for songwriting and storytelling.

Robert Schlesinger, writing for NBC News:

Dr. Seuss Enterprises — the very profitable company which controls the estate of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, the man behind the pen name — has decided of its own free will to stop publishing a half-dozen of his books because, the company told The Associated Press, they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” deploying stereotypes about Black and Asian people in a manner that Seuss’s own estate thinks is offensive and inappropriate.

The Fox outrage machine revved itself to high dudgeon over how this private company has decided to conduct its business, bemoaning the Seussian scalp-taking; the GOP’s culture-war ambulance chasers quickly followed suit. “First, they outlaw Dr. Seuss” — mind you, Theodore Geisel died in 1991 and its his own estate taking this action — “and now they want to tell us what to say,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a mendacious non sequitur while debating proposed election law reforms.

[…]

Let’s get some perspective here: Seuss Enterprises made $33 million last year, more than 650 million of his books have been sold around the world and they’re available in more than 100 countries. There is no significant move — and certainly not from Seuss Enterprises — to ban, burn or otherwise cancel Dr. Seuss. A private company has made a considered business decision by pulling a small fraction of the Seuss catalog (none among its top sellers).

Exactly why is this any of the business of the federal government? Surely Republicans, who supposedly believe the government should interfere in private business decisions as little as possible, don’t think the market should cease to work its infallible will; surely if Seuss Enterprises is erring and catering to a political correctness that nobody wants, market forces will correct it.

Schlesinger hammers his broader point home with a sharp analogy to Republicans’ persistent hard-on for the “free market” and voting rights:

Republicans have long declared their supposedly unwavering obeisance to the great invisible hand of the market; as former House GOP Leader Dick Armey liked to say, “Markets are smart; government is dumb.”

And yet several recent moments have made that commitment seem situational. Whether discussing Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, voting rights or Twitter, Republicans seem ill at ease with — or just ignorant of — the ways the mighty market actually functions.

[…]

Republicans have lost the presidential popular vote in seven of the last eight elections — or to put it another way, they have been losing political market share. But instead of adjusting their product (their candidates and policies) or how they sell it (their messaging), the GOP increasingly relies on government interference to maintain power, including the distortionary nature of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate (which is evenly split despite the fact that Democrats represent 41 million more constituents), radical gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws

The whole Seuss issue was just manufactured outrage that actually led ignorant Republican consumers to purchase more Seuss books, directly benefiting the enterprise that made the decision to stop publishing six of his books in the first place.

The Republican Party doesn’t know who they are anymore; they didn’t even put together a party platform last year. Their only agenda is to obstruct real governance and “own the libs” whenever possible, hoping that concocted fury will be enough to hold their voting bloc together because they can no longer sell most of their (racist, homophobic, intolerant, bigoted) “principles” to a majority of the American electorate.

If you haven’t spent much time in an evangelical church, you may not be familiar with a practice I call “amen begging,” but it’s pretty straightforward concept. Essentially, “amen begging” is when a pastor encourages his audience to show support for a statement or claim he’s just made, a bit like a light up “APPLAUSE” sign one might find on the set of a television show filmed in front of a live studio audience. A pastor doing something along the lines of an “APPLAUSE” sign asking people to clap or feign laughter to make a mediocre sitcom joke seem funnier may appear insignificant on the surface, but I believe it has insidious consequences.

I believe what this really does is condition the congregation to respond positively and visibly for others to see when something spicy or controversial is said, when most audiences would respond negatively to such remarks. This allows for a normalization of the heated statement du jour among the congregation, creating a permission structure for less sure audience members to subscribe to whatever belief or idea was just voiced, and positioning them to be accepting of increasingly outlandish remarks, opening the door for complete inoculation and radicalization. The more “amen begging” that goes on in a particular church, the more cult-like that church is likely to be.

Time for an anecdote: I once had a pastor from the church I grew up in say to me “don’t question me, I’m a pastor” when I raised a concern about his interpretation of a particular bible verse. Rather than engage with the interpretation I offered or answer my question, he called me a wicked, deceived sinner. That is not the mark of a caring leader who wants to guide his sheep to the lord, it’s the mark of someone whose authority is illegitimate and whose professions of faith are hypocritical, who is personally benefiting from his leadership position. For what it’s worth, this pastor was someone who very frequently begged his audience for amens.

If a pastor has done his job correctly, his congregation will applaud or “amen” his sermons appropriately without instigation. An honest pastor’s biblically inspired words will serve as a conduit for divine influence amongst a congregation who think for themselves, while the way for a dishonest pastor to legitimize his claims is to rely on a Pavlovian conditioned response from a mindless audience who’ve been trained not to think for themselves.

If you’re a member of a congregation where your pastor frequently tries to spur these inorganic reactions to his words, perhaps you should do some soul searching on whether or not you’re in the right place. A pastor’s role is to lead their congregations in their faith, but we’ve seen countless perversions of this model by corrupt, greedy individuals who benefit from their roles in the church at the expense of their congregations, whom they invariably lead astray. This tendency toward corruption has led many to believe spirituality and religion are best practiced on an individual level, and that argument holds water. However, I don’t necessarily believe that there can’t be healthy groups of people who practice their faith together without resulting in the cult-like, blind following of clergymen, but “amen begging” should be a red flag for those participating in religious organizations that their leaders may not be as genuine as they appear.

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

— 2 Peter 2:1

For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.

— 2 Corinthians 11:13-15

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.

— 1 John 4:1

I know we’ve had pictures of Mars before, but not like this. These images are really breathtaking and hard to comprehend, even though they’re mostly just pictures of the Martian ground. There are already over 5,000, and I’m sure they’re going to keep coming and weI’ll see plenty more wild sights from Mars, but it’s already well worth your time to click through a few pages of the images NASA has made available.

Jorge L. Ortiz, reporting for USA Today:

Even as the USA becomes the first country to reach half-a-million COVID deaths – the actual figure was 500,071 as of Monday at 4:40 p.m. EST – there are signs the pandemic may be abating, from the decreasing number of cases, hospitalizations and fatalities to the improved vaccine rollout and production.

Amid this hopeful scenario, the emergence of coronavirus variants scrambles the picture of what the near future may look like.

[…]

Closing in on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a pandemic – March 11, 2020 – it’s still not clear when the United States, which has reported more than twice as many cases and deaths as any other country, will have a hold on the health crisis.

It’s hard to know who to blame at this point. China? Trump? Ignorant people who refuse to wear masks? State governments who’ve managed to fuck up the response at every step of the way? Take your pick, really. Five hundred thousand deaths leaves plenty of blame to go around.

Get rid of it. Pretty simple.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good points to be made on both sides of this debate, but I think the right answer is to either get rid of the filibuster entirely, or to at least reform it to the point where it can no longer be used to completely kill popular legislation.

As many have pointed out, the filibuster has not always been a tool in the Senate’s tool belt. It has a long and complex history, but it gained its popularity during the Jim Crow era when southern Senators used it repeatedly to halt legislation that would have benefited black people at the time, like the federal criminalization of lynching or the outlawing of requirements that people pay to be able to vote.

Getting rid of the filibuster entirely is a scary concept, because then a simple majority in the Senate would be able to pass whatever legislation they wanted. However, I think it would also force more cooperation from the minority party, who would have to be less hostile towards their across-the-aisle colleagues in order to have a say in amending the passing legislation to benefit their constituents. You would also see more unique coalitions of senators who could come together to pass legislation that isn’t perfectly aligned with one party’s platform or the other, instead bringing together more specifically focused factions of senators whose aims would be to help their constituents rather than to toe the party line. It would free up a lot of the gridlock in Washington, and even if you don’t agree with everything the party in power wants to do, at least progress could be made, unlike the past several decades of stagnation. If a law were passed that proved to be unpopular or to have negative consequences, then a faction of senators opposing the legislation would be able to remove it from the books the next time they take power (assuming the legislation in question is actually unpopular with voters, and not just the special interest groups who fund the senators’ campaigns). Everyone says they hate Congress because they never get anything done, and the filibuster is to blame for that.

For those who aren’t aware, Taylor Swift is in the process of re-recording her first six albums.

My hope for the re-recordings was that they would be as similar to the originals as possible. I’ve never been a fan of remixes, and Taylor’s old songs in particular hold such a sacred place for so many people. I was very afraid that we’d end up with pop versions of country songs that would just sound like garbage, and that’s probably the worst case scenario. I wanted to be able to listened to the re-recorded songs instead of the originals, not have them as supplemental versions.

While the originals will always hold a special place in my heart, from what we’ve heard so far, I think I’ll be able to make a clean break from them, and leave them in the past to prevent Taylor’s bullies from profiting off of their underhanded deal to buy her music out from under her.

The first re-recorded song to be released was “Love Story,” and it sounds incredible. It’s so similar to the original that you may not notice it isn’t the original, but once you’re clued in, you can hear subtle differences, like the more present violin in the chorus, and a few words that Swift pronounces ever so slightly differently. On the whole, her voice is smoother and more mature, but the song is just as authentic as ever. It’s nostalgic, it really feels like you’re revisiting a moment in time.

The album artwork is great, it’s a similar pose to the original album, and it makes use of the yellow/gold color, but it too is more mature. Like the other albums Taylor owns, the cover does not feature her name.

The rest of the re-recorded “Fearless” album comes out April ninth, and you can go ahead and pre-order/pre-add it to your library here.

Ben Hall, reporting for News Channel 5 Nashville:

Police were warned Anthony Warner was making bombs in his RV more than a year before his Christmas morning attack in downtown Nashville.

The tip came from Warner's distraught girlfriend in August of 2019.

Police went to Warner's home the day of the complaint, but were unable to make contact with him.

The case was later closed as unfounded.

“He’s not home, case closed!”

She told officers that her boyfriend - Anthony Warner - "was building bombs in the RV trailer at his residence."

Yes, completely “unfounded.”

The police report states that an attorney who was also there and represented both the woman and Warner - told police that Warner "frequently talks about the military and bomb making."

Attorney Ray Throckmorton told police that Warner "knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb."

"I made a report on the spot for him to get checked out and I did all that I knew I could do," Throckmorton said.

The police suck at everything they do (except lynching black people and getting away with it). Defund the police. Fuck the police.

Sami Fathi, also reporting for MacRumors:

Starting with iOS and iPadOS 14.5, Apple will proxy Google's "Safe Browsing" service used in Safari through its own servers instead of relying on Google as a way to limit which personal data Google sees about users.

While Google doesn't know which specific URL you're trying to visit, it may collect your IP address during its interaction with Safari. Now on iOS/iPadOS 14.5, that's no longer the case.

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

The iOS 14.5 beta, available to developers and public beta testers, adds a new Apple Maps feature that lets you report accidents, hazards, and speed checks along your route when getting directions.

Apple is out for blood with the privacy measures, and I’m here for it.

The change for safe browsing doesn’t seem like a big deal and it isn’t something users will notice, since Google wasn’t getting the URL you were gong to in the first place, but this also prevents them from getting your IP address, and a good rule of thumb is the less information funneled through Google, the better.

However, the change for Maps is huge. If it proves popular, it could effectively kill Waze on iOS. Apple’s implementation of crowdsourced traffic conditions certainly isn't as robust and feature heavy as Waze, but honestly, Waze was a pain to use from a design perspective, and its feature set was bloated. Apple’s option is a lot more straightforward while still conveying most of the data you’d want. I could see them expanding it a little bit in the future (to give more specific options for road hazards, or to indicate heavy traffic without any apparent accidents), but since it is a feature that most people will use while driving, the simpler it is to report conditions, the better.

These are two great steps to reducing iOS users’ reliance on Google, but the most obvious step remains: stripping Google’s status as the default search engine in Safari. That may not be super popular with users at first, but if more people realized that Google remembers every query they make and then uses that data against them, AND the new default search engine is at least 90% as good as Google (which has been getting steadily worse, increasingly bloated with advertisements), I think Apple could throw up a splash screen that would convince people to try the new option (or just don’t even clue users in until they start making queries and notice they aren’t landing on Google). Speaking of that new option, I think the best bet would be for Apple to just build their own search engine, but they could also set DuckDuckGo (the browser I personally use, because it doesn’t track or record your search history and sell you out to companies looking to buy that data) as the out-of-the-box browser and make users change it back to Google if they don’t like DDG, perhaps even explaining the privacy differences in the settings menu or forcing them to tap accept on a pop up acknowledging that they’re choosing to use a search engine that tracks them.

Be sure to check out the whole list, but here are a few highlights from AZQuotes.com’s list of Rush Limbaugh’s top 25 quotes:

Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

Ideal women: 36-24-36, five foot seven, flat spot on top of the head, deaf mute. The flat spot on the top of the head is for your drink.

When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it's an invitation.

There is no conclusive proof that nicotine's addictive... And the same thing with cigarettes causing emphysema, lung cancer, heart disease.

Even when I think I'm wrong I'm right. I am all-knowing.

It wasn’t cancer that killed Rush Limbaugh, it was karma.

While it’s a bit uncouth to relish someone’s death, Rush Limbaugh’s absence from this world is inarguably a net good. Mourning his death would be a bit like mourning for Joseph Goebbels. Speaking of whom, I’m sure those two peas-in-a-pod propagandists will have a splendid time falling in love with each other over brunches in hell.

Don’t miss: Another tally mark in the “Fuck Florida” column, as Governor Ron DeSantis issues a brazenly partisan order to lower flags to half staff for this asshole. Disgusting. Next time Florida threatens to secede, I say we let them.

Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, reporting for The New York Times:

Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising.

[…]

A source has provided [The New York Times with] another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump’s political rally turned into a violent insurrection.

[…]

The sacking of the Capitol was a shocking assault on the republic and an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of American democracy. But history reminds us that sudden events — Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union testing an atomic bomb, the Sept. 11 attacks — have led to an overreach in favor of collective security over individual liberty that we’d later regret. And more generally, the data collected on Jan. 6 is a demonstration of the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike.

The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building.

[…]

The data presented here is a bird’s-eye view of an event that posed a clear and grave threat to our democracy. But it tells a second story as well: One of a broken, surreptitious industry in desperate need of regulation, and of a tacit agreement we’ve entered into that threatens our individual privacy. None of this data should ever have been collected.

[…]

This collection will only grow more sophisticated. This new data set offers proof that not only is there more interest in location data than before, but it is also easier to deanonymize. It gets easier by the day. As the data from Jan. 6 eerily demonstrates, it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.

In our previous investigation, we wrote that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.

Excellent reporting, you should really read the full article. For additional context, also check out their 2019 piece, “One Nation, Tracked” as well as CopyrightBro’s commentary on it.

The thing to understand here is that it wasn’t just the insurrectionists at the Capitol that were being tracked, and they weren’t specifically targeted for this tracking beforehand. Granted, they’re probably a little bit stupider on average than most Americans, but probably not to the extent that they were more susceptible to the tracking and data collection that made it possible for a private company to compile all this information and recreate minute-by-minute itineraries of their little field trip to D.C.

Everyone’s phones (Android devices to a greater degree than iPhones, but still) are collecting troves of data about their lives and their behavior, practically at all times, and turning it over to creepy companies you’ve never heard of that can sell it or use it themselves to do astoundingly unethical, privacy-invasive shit like what we’ve seen here. Sure, there are some settings you can change to make it harder for them to spy on you, and CopyrightBro is committed to helping you understand what you can do, but this problem is too big to be solved by any amount of accountability journalism, hard hitting exposés from the New York Times, or even attempts by well intentioned companies like Apple to pressure their competitors to play by a fair, understandable set of rules. This problem requires sweeping regulation.

This is so much bigger than any one company, but it bears repeating: #deletefacebook

Ryan Mac and Rosie Gray, reporting for Buzzfeed News:

The Trump Organization negotiated on behalf of then-president Donald Trump to make Parler his primary social network, but it had a condition: an ownership stake in return for joining, according to documents and four people familiar with the conversations. The deal was never finalized, but legal experts said the discussions alone, which occurred while Trump was still in office, raise legal concerns with regards to anti-bribery laws.

Talks between members of Trump’s campaign and Parler about Trump’s potential involvement began last summer, and were revisited in November by the Trump Organization after Trump lost the 2020 election to the Democratic nominee and current president, Joe Biden. Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered the Trump Organization a 40% stake in the company. It is unclear as to what extent the former president was involved with the discussions.

Nothing says “capitalism” like shady white collar crime wherein you bribe a corrupt demagogue president with partial ownership of your company in exchange for his exclusive endorsement and use of your product.

Parler was a dangerous joke. John Matze was a dangerous joke. Donald Trump was a dangerous joke. Rebekah Mercer is still dangerous and she isn’t a joke: it’s people like her who use their money to pull the strings, and it’s people like her that we need to be paying attention to.

Adi Robertson, reporting for The Verge:

Stock trading app Robinhood is facing dozens of lawsuits after the company restricted several stocks popular on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. At least 30 parties across 10 states have sued the company in federal court, many seeking class action status. They allege that Robinhood users lost millions of dollars because they were unable to buy or sell stock during the freeze, and that the company chose to “manipulate the market” to help other financial institutions.

[…]

Disgruntled users aren’t the only threat for Robinhood, however. The company’s decision drew bipartisan condemnation from lawmakers, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and others calling to investigate the company’s decision.

Fuck Robinhood. What they did, regardless of the reason — let’s be clear, their own financial unpreparedness is not an excuse — was market manipulation and they should be held criminally liable. Even if their woe-is-me story about not having enough money to cover the trades makes sense, it’s much easier to believe that they did what they did because it directly benefited the hedge funds who were losing money even though it came at the expense of their users, for whom Robinhood claimed they were “democratizing the stock market.”

Many people didn’t realize this, but Robinhood is actually financed by those hedge funds. Their entire shady business model is based on selling information to hedge funds about what trades their users are making, so that the hedge funds can make split second trades before Robinhood actually processes their user’s trades. If you use Robinhood, you might as well delete your account because they’re more than willing to sell you out. I’ve already deleted my personal account.

Clearly, the free market is only free for the wealthy. When the little guy loses money on investments, they say “oh well, if you play the game you run the risk of losing,” but when it looks like big banks on Wall Street might lose, they just turn the game off.

Eat the rich.

Apple’s Privacy page has gotten a fresh update that explains how their products work together to keep your data safe from prying eyes. It includes this useful PDF, which uses an anecdote of a father-daughter date at the park to flesh out all the unethical, privacy invasive data collection tactics companies use to spy on you. It’s a good way to get your arms around just how ready and able companies are to unethically collect, analyze, and redistribute your data without your consent, and it also demonstrates how the tools Apple builds into their products can help you protect yourself in tangible ways. Even if you already have an Apple product, I implore you to check out the site and read the PDF.

If you aren’t sure about whether Apple’s commitment to privacy is genuine, or you don’t believe their products and services are substantially more respectful of their users privacy, the PDF explainer should convince you. Apple’s commitment to privacy is real, and it’s infinitely stronger than the other tech giants like Facebook and Google because Apple’s bottom line depends on selling you cool devices rather than selling you out to advertisers.

Taylor Swift’s surprise ninth album dropped December 11th. “evermore” broke records, but it’s one of her worst albums, in my opinion.

First, my general feelings:

Described as a sister album to “folklore,” “evermore” certainly does have much in common with its predecessor. Generally though, such comparisons only serve to make “folklore” look better: “evermore” is, undoubtedly, the ugly sister. Well, maybe not ugly — “evermore” doesn’t completely lack redeeming qualities — but “folklore” was objectively the better.

My gut tells me that there is enough sonic cohesion and similar themes that there was potential for “evermore” to be good, but it just missed the mark. Yes, it tries to be about storytelling in the same way that folklore was, and that’s not entirely bad, but it feels like too much of a stretch. If I had to sum up the theme of what this album SHOULD have been in one word, that word would be “closure.” Yes, there is a track called “closure,” but that’s not why that word comes to mind: “closure” is the unacknowledged overarching theme of this album because the best songs are about making peace with turbulent pasts.

Song by Song:

I’ve given each song two ratings out of ten, the first rating is how I felt about it after the first time I listened to it, the second is how I feel about it now, a few weeks later and after dozens of listens.

“willow”: 7.5/10, 7/10

I think this was probably the best choice to start the album with. It’s a solid song, catchy and sweet. Although, as someone whose name escapes me pointed out, the lyric “lost in your current like a priceless wine” doesn’t really make any sense.

“champagne problems”: 6/10, 8/10

“champagne problems” is a very specific and I don’t suppose very many people are going to feel a direct connection to a called off engagement, but it really has some solid lyrics and a gripping story. You can almost imagine it being an alternate reality version of “All Too Well.” It certainly has a similar sound. Definitely works with the “closure” theme I mentioned.

“gold rush”: 5/10, 5.5/10

I expected this track to be my favorite, but it just isn’t. I expected something historical based on the title, and was left with something disappointingly metaphorical.

“‘tis the damn season”: 7/10, 6.5/10

This is another one that’s quite specific, but to the holidays rather than a called off engagement. It’s a relatable story about a desire to rekindle an old flame, though personally I find the temporary nature of the sought after relationship to be a little off putting on the grounds of its disingenuousness.

“tolerate it”: 7/10, 3/10

A real bore, if I’m being honest. I think my initial rating was based more on the expectation that it was going to be great because it was track five, but that’s simply not the case. Yes it’s sad, but it’s not as emotionally stirring as a track five is supposed to be. Sonically, it’s monotonous and certainly not the best track five candidate from the album.

“no body, no crime (feat. HAIM)”: 8/10, 5/10

People seem to like this one a lot, but I’m not the biggest fan. Yes it tells a fun story, but it’s very fictional and the music sounds a little… cliche. It sounds like something from the movie “Holes.”

“happiness”: 9.5/10, 9/10

All hail track seven, the track five of “evermore.” It’s emotionally gripping, not just sad for the sake of being sad. The pace is good, the lyrics are great. Best track on the album, no contest. It’s one of the only songs on this album that can hold it’s own with the rest of Taylor’s work. Fits beautifully with the “closure” theme.

“dorothea”: 5/10, 4/10

How many tracks do we need named after old ladies? This is filler.

“coney island”: 4/10, 3/10

Another song that, based on the title, had a lot of potential to tie in a cool historical element like “the last great american dynasty,” but it’s just another missed opportunity. It drones on, the national sucks, and it’s very forgettable. The most memorable line is a stupid one about a birthday cake in a hallway that’s completely out of place. You could argue that this goes well with the “closure” theme, though.

“ivy”: 6/10, 6.5/10

Not a bad song. It’s catchy and it tells an interesting story, but Taylor’s inner potty mouth really came out on this one. I’m not personally offended by swearing, but a lot of people are, and making the catchiest line of the song include the word “goddamn” for no reason is an interesting choice.

“cowboy like me”: 4/10, 3/10

This one is just monotonous and forgettable. Filler.

“long story short”: 6.5/10, 7/10

Definitely one of the better songs on the album. It’s upbeat and positive. Nothing super remarkable about it, though. This one also definitely works with the “closure” theme.

“marjorie”: 4/10, 5/10

Maybe I’m a dick for saying that I don’t like the song about Taylor’s dead grandmother, but I just don’t like it. It’s a sweet idea to have a recording of Marjorie herself singing in the background, though, so I’ll give it an extra point for that. Fits the theme.

“closure”: 5/10, 5/10

“closure” is alright. It isn’t my favorite, but I dare say it works with the theme.

“evermore”: 3/10, 3/10

I don’t like this one at all. The pacing is weird, and Taylor and Justin Vernon singing over each other was annoying and impossible to follow. Terrible choice for the album title based on how bad the song is. Maybe if you got rid of Bon Iver, this song could be better. I think it would actually still work as the album title if it sounded a little better, because I do think it fits with the “closure” theme.

“right where you left me”: 4/10, 5.5/10

This one is a little bit catchy, and it grew on me a little after the first time I heard it, but it also feels like filler. Probably why it ended up being a bonus track.

“it’s time to go”: 5/10, 6.5/10

This one is not bad. I don’t love it but I’m not mad that it exists, it could’ve been a nice addition to an album that wasn’t “evermore.” I can’t say exactly why, I just don’t think it fits here. Maybe a different version of “evermore” could’ve made it work: the version where the “closure” theme was properly recognized.

Final Notes

I don’t love the cover. The colors and the photography are nice, but a closeup shot of the back of her head is an odd shot to go with.

Unfortunately, this album just feels a bit aimless; I don’t know what it set out to accomplish. “folklore” was all about telling stories, and this one tells a few stories, but some of them feel manufactured just for the sake of calling this a sister album to “folklore.” The stories “evermore” tells weren’t stories that were dying to tell themselves.

Rather than writing a bunch of songs and then deciding which ones to form into two distinct albums, I get the impression that Taylor wrote “folklore,” saw how well received it was, and decided to just keep going. A bit like when a child tells a joke and makes the adults in the room laugh, so they quickly try to make up another joke to bag a few more laughs, and the adults are forced to awkwardly go along with it when really the joke is a real stretch and doesn’t make much sense. Taylor should have stopped after “folklore,” we didn’t need “evermore.” In my opinion, it’s an overcrowding addition to a distinct era that was doing just fine with one album.

If she did write all of the songs on “folklore” and “evermore” at the same time, she sure did arrange them in a weird manner between the two albums. If that’s the case, I think this project would’ve been better off as one album with a side A and side B, with about 12 songs per side.

I keep coming back to the closure theme. It seems like such a missed opportunity. Toss out a handful of the songs and then maybe add one or two more that work with the theme, and you could’ve had a great album.

Rebecca Rubin, writing for Variety:

Warner Bros. executive Tom Ascheim has been promoted and will oversee the studio’s Harry Potter franchise and Wizarding World properties. Ascheim also serves as the president of kids, young adults and classics at Warners. He reports to WarnerMedia chief Ann Sarnoff.

As part of his new responsibilities, Ascheim acts as the chief representative of WarnerMedia in its relationship with author J.K. Rowling and her reps, agent Neil Blair and Blair Partnership Chief Creative Officer James McKnight. He will also be tasked with expanding the Wizarding World property for the studio’s various outlets and platform partners. The studio didn’t make any concrete plans for the future of Harry Potter in Thursday’s announcement.

Lauren Sarner, writing for The New York Post:

Warner Bros. and HBO Max released this killjoy joint statement: “There are no Harry Potter series in development at the studio or on the streaming platform.”

This announcement definitely carries some strong implications, even despite the fact that Warner Brothers has denied any current Harry Potter projects; they could definitely be contemplating something for the future that may not be in development yet. My guess is that they probably want to just wait a while before they announce anything, allowing more time for the outrage surrounding J.K. Rowling over her comments on biological sex and transgenderism to die down a bit before they announce a new project.

I’m super excited for the possibility of a Harry Potter show. It would be a delightful way to give fans fresh content for years to come, if they did seven seasons with roughly one episode per book chapter. But they could really go for a lot more than that: I could see ten seasons with 15-20 episodes each, if they start before book one and don’t equate one book to one season (which I think there’s a strong argument for). I think the best option for a Harry Potter television show would be a more in-depth dive into the books: break out of the tendency to focus on the story from Harry’s perspective, utilize plenty of flashbacks, expand on smaller story lines, etc. Show us scenes that we saw in the books but not the films, and even scenes that were implied in the books but not directly shown (e.g. Hagrid rescuing Harry from Godric’s Hollow, Hermione in the library spotting the basilisk through her mirror, Sirius escaping from Azkaban, Voldemort creating a Horcrux, etc.). Something like Game of Thrones would be great, but I don’t think it needs to be quite as dark or bloody.

They could also be considering more of a spinoff series that still takes place in the Wizarding World, perhaps a “Quidditch Through The Ages” adaptation following the Chudley Cannons (something in the vein of “Ted Lasso” could be fun, with that specific idea), or as mentioned on Mugglecast #498, a Grey’s Anatomy-style drama about the daily goings on at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, or maybe a political drama about the Minister of Magic. There are lots of possibilities for spinoffs, but given how spectacularly the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise is nose diving and the complete disaster that resulted in giving other authors creative control with “Cursed Child,” I think they’d be better off to stick to a more direct adaptation of the books, with J.K. Rowling heavily involved in creating content for the new scenes, but with someone else actually writing the screenplay.

TEXT

NONSENSE & ODDITIES, ENTERTAINMENTJANUARY 27, 2021

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COLLEGE STUDENTS AND RECENT GRADUATES CUT OUT OF STIMULUS BILL, AGAIN

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The point of the stimulus checks is to help people who are in tough spots, and to keep people spending money so that the economy doesn’t stall and enter a downward spiral of layoffs → less spending → more layoffs → even less spending.

Many people are surprised to realize that our congressional leaders cut one specific group out of the stimulus bill with surgical precision. Anyone who was claimed as a dependent by their parents does not get a stimulus check of their own, and parents don’t get the extra stimulus for any children who are over the age of 16. This leaves a large group of people — primarily consisting of young adults (mainly college aged students) and those with disabilities who are unable to care for themselves — who get no help and whose parents receive no help for them.

The determination for who is viewed as a dependent and is therefor ineligible for a stimulus payment was made by the IRS based on the parent’s most recent tax filings, which was either for 2019’s taxes if they were prompt in filing, or 2018’s taxes if they hadn’t filed for 2019 by the time the stimulus checks were cut, which many hadn't. This means that when the stimulus checks went out this spring, they were using information about who to send them to that was outdated by anywhere from 3 months to nearly two years. This is a devastatingly porous structure. An individual could’ve flown the coop in the fall of 2018 and their parents could've claimed them as a dependent (since they lived at home for the first half of 2018). This means that by the time the checks were going out, this person could’ve been living independently and supporting themselves for nearly two years, and they would not receive the stimulus check, despite likely having mountains of student debt on top of the usual expenses of living by oneself. Furthermore, having only been out of school for a year or two, they would likely be one of the first employees to be let go when their employers need to lay off a few folks on account of the pandemic. So again, one of the most financially vulnerable groups of people, recent college students and recent graduates, were cut out of a stimulus program that would’ve benefitted them the most, and also would’ve benefitted the economy the most because they would’ve been the least likely to just throw the extra money into a savings account.

Then, with the second round of stimulus checks, they did the same thing again. It’s brutally unfair, and there’s absolutely no justification or explanation for it. It’s criminal, and young people should remember this when politicians ask for their votes.

Fortunately, it looks like President Biden’s proposed plan will include a full stimulus amount for ALL individuals claimed as dependents. Alicia Adamczyk, reporting for CNBC:

Unlike the last two relief measures, Biden’s plan includes payments for non-child dependents, including many college students and those with disabilities. It would also expand eligibility for those payments to mixed-status families in which one parent is an immigrant.

Nothing is set in stone yet and no bills have passed, but at least someone in the federal government has finally acknowledged this gaping hole in the previous stimulus packages.

When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice.

…

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it. Because being American is more than a pride we inherit; it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

…

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

…

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised, but whole; benevolent, but bold; fierce and free.

…

We will rise from the gold-limned hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it—if only we’re brave enough to be it.

Given CopyrightBro’s founder’s history of employment with Apple, Inc., we are especially well equipped to serve and inform Apple product owners of the best practices to get the most out of their devices while protecting their privacy. This PSA, like many of our PSAs, is intended for people who use Apple products, and the advice contained herein is not applicable to Android devices or non-Apple PCs. If you have an iPhone or iPad, continue on:

That’s a bold, scary headline, we get it. Here’s what you need to know: there is an intentional design flaw present in Apple’s iCloud Backup system that can allow the government to spy on you and that can provide them with complete access to the full contents of your device. But it is fixable, and we’ll tell you how.

The first question, naturally, is “why is it an intentional flaw?” This is a good question, and the answer is that Apple doesn’t see it as a flaw. iCloud Backups exist to help everyday consumers who either aren’t concerned about privacy or aren’t very tech savvy by giving them a backup plan in case something happens to their device, so that they can just log into iCloud from a new device and recover all their data without missing a beat. It’s intended to be very easy for customers: they happen automatically, they’re turned on by default, and there’s really nothing you need to do, and if you forget your password, Apple can still help you access your data because they keep a spare key. However, this ease of use comes at a price: privacy. Because Apple does keep that key to help you recover your data if you lose your password, the data can never be totally safe. The keys Apple keeps are subject to government subpoenas, meaning the government could at any time force Apple to turn over your iCloud backups, which would provide them with a snapshot of everything on your device at the moment the backup was created.

While Apple wants to be able to help their customers in case they forget their passwords and sees the spare key as a feature, CopyrightBro sees it as a design flaw. We’ve been aware of this flaw for months now, but the reality was that it wasn’t really something that everyday people needed to worry about, so we didn’t warn our readers. However, following the terrorist attack at the U.S. Capitol, the facts on the ground have changed. In recent days, there have been a lot of conversations about domestic terrorism and how the government may adapt to face the challenge that white supremacists, Qanon, and other extremist groups pose to our nation, with a lot of speculation that authorities may seek to expand their power to surveil U.S. citizens to collect intelligence that could aid in the prevention of these types of attacks.

CopyrightBro stands firmly against any and all violent extremist groups, but we don’t believe the United States government needs any more tools to allow them to spy on law abiding U.S. citizens; with just a little bit of reform, we can remove some of the institutional racism that plagues our government agencies, allowing them to be much more effective at stopping far right extremism (or any other domestic terrorism threats) without invading everyone else's privacy.

In the past few months, government officials have argued that we should get rid of end-to-end encryption altogether, but that is simply not feasible and it would put countless vital government and civilian systems in jeopardy of being exploited. Our society depends on some information being able to stay truly private, and we should not budge when it comes to protecting our right to digital privacy.

Given those pushes and the renewed interest among the intelligence community to increase surveillance of American citizens to prevent domestic terrorism, CopyrightBro feels that now is the proper time to warn our readers about this design flaw in the iCloud Backup system. Until Apple implements an option for customers to protect their backups with end-to-end encryption, knowing the risks of holding the only key to their data, iCloud Backups are simply too vulnerable to government overreach to be trusted. However, there are still iCloud tools you can use to protect the vast majority of your data in a manner that (while still not 100% secure in some cases) is much less susceptible to government surveillance.

This is what CopyrightBro recommends:

1. Go to Settings → [Your Name] → iCloud

2. Scroll down and tap “iCloud Backup,” then switch the toggle OFF.

3. Go back to the previous screen, and under the section called “Apps Using iCloud,” make sure all of the toggles here are switched ON, including “Messages.” These toggles control which of your data use iCloud to sync between devices, and are therefore preserved in iCloud. If you leave any of these switches off and you don’t have a backup, the data in that app won’t be saved if something were to happen to your device.

4. Tap “Manage Storage" near the top of the page, and then scan the list for any leftover backups. If you find one, tap on it, and then tap delete. You’ll likely have a couple, do this for each of them.

It’s unfortunate, but until such time as Apple introduces a truly private iCloud backup option, disabling it and instead relying on the iCloud syncing toggles is the best balance between privacy and protecting your data.

From a White House press release:

The National Garden will draw together and fix in the soil of a single place what Abraham Lincoln called “[t]he mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart.” In the peace and harmony of this vast outdoor park, visitors will come and learn the amazing stories of some of the greatest Americans who have ever lived. The National Garden will feature a roll call of heroes who deserve honor, recognition, and lasting tribute because of the battles they won, the ideas they championed, the diseases they cured, the lives they saved, the heights they achieved, and the hope they passed down to all of us — that united as one American people trusting in God, there is no challenge that cannot be overcome and no dream that is beyond our reach.

I actually like this idea a lot. It sucks that it was born out of racism, a white man’s desperate attempts to coddle his base full of white people who are uncomfortable with their shrinking privilege in a society that is waking up to the injustices that were for so long perpetuated by a white ruling class, but if we include a truly diverse cast of historical figures, from various backgrounds and various areas of achievement, this statue garden could be one of the best things to come out of a nightmare of a presidency. We all have both light and dark inside us, but if done properly, this garden could be a place for nuanced conversations about the often-flawed human beings that made America what it is today.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been one of many firsts (most of them very negative), but the first that will live on in textbooks forever was penned in the annals of history today, as Donald J. Trump became the first president to ever be impeached twice.

This impeachment had bipartisan consensus, with the final vote being 232 in favor and 197 opposed.

In the wake of this historic impeachment, I want to address three audiences.

First, to the people who still support Donald Trump:

This impeachment was carried out swiftly by a bipartisan majority, in fact, it was the most bipartisan impeachment vote in the history of the United States. If you are still standing with Donald Trump, you are a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, ignorant bigot. At this point, you can longer support Donald Trump despite the horrible things he’s done; no, at this point, you are with him precisely because of those horrible things. Whether you realize it or not, people still enamored by Trump never truly cared about his “policies” or his alleged business acumen. Those who still support Donald Trump do so because he offered a perpetuation of a status quo that afforded them great comfort and privilege as a result of their race and their religious beliefs.

You are not a patriot if you care more about has an orange conman who easily duped you into believing his lies than you care about the sanctity of democracy in the United States. You are a fool, and you have been fooled.

Secondly, to congressional Republicans:

Over the past week, many Republican leaders have made bad faith arguments and performed gold-medal-worthy mental-gymnastics routines to explain to themselves and their constituents as to why Donald Trump shouldn’t be impeached or held accountable for inciting the attack on the Capitol.

One of those arguments was that Donald Trump shouldn’t be impeached a second time because it would be too divisive at a time when the nation needs healing and unity. This is the biggest pile of dog shit I’ve ever heard. You can’t have unity without first getting closure for the transgressions that were committed. You can’t have healing before the would has been stitched back together.

You’ve also argued that Trump shouldn’t be impeached because doing so could further enrage his base, prompting them to organize additional attacks. The response to this point is simple: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.

A common theme of all the arguments is that the attack was a spontaneous event that occurred independently of Donald Trump and his lackey’s incitement. It’s hard to believe that this wasn’t planned: since when do innocent citizens find themselves in violent riots, just happening to have zip tie hand cuffs in their backpacks? Give me a break. And apparently, you don’t consider phrases like “fight like hell,” “let’s have trial by combat” to be incitements of violence. If that’s the case, then you’re seriously calling into question your comprehension of the English language.

Finally, to everyone else:

Trumpism has been its own plague, which took in many new followers and steeped them in hatred and emboldened them to spread that hatred far and wide, from cowardly internet intolerance to physical violence at the U.S. Capitol. Without a doubt, Trumpism has been an immeasurably destructive force in American society, and going forward, we must chastise and shame anyone who subscribes to and promotes Donald Trump’s ideology. Trumpism is a social cancer, and we must treat it as such. Chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are aggressive, damaging treatments to get rid of cancer that come with negative impacts for healthy tissue and organs, but they are effective. We will have to employ similarly aggressive tactics to rid our society of Trumpism, and those efforts may well have negative consequences for those of us trying to do good in society. We will have to have difficult conversations with our neighbors, and we may have to burn some bridges.

However, Donald Trump was also a symptom of the sweeping problems our country has never addressed. The racism and other intolerances that lie at the root of Trumpism are problems that have been with our country since it was in the womb, Donald Trump merely came along and rebranded them for his own personal gain. We have to have real conversations about topics like race and other intolerances. For a tolerant society to survive, the only thing they cannot tolerate is intolerance. Trumpism is a doctrine that is built on intolerance, and we must now undergo the painful process of purging Trumpism from our nation. We have to remove the cancer, the fascists. Then we can work toward unity and healing.

I can’t quite imagine what this could be. There are a few things I think it could be, but none seem any more likely than the next.

King made it a point to clarify that Apple’s announcement is not necessarily related to Cook’s comments about holding Donald Trump accountable, and that this announcement/interview was already scheduled. It wouldn’t be like Apple to just whip something up in the days following the attack on the Capitol; this is something they’ve been working on for a while. That said, it did seem relevant enough that they made room in the interview for questions about what should happen to Trump and others who incited the insurrection, so that leads me to think this is something related to politics. Some people think it will be COVID related, but that just doesn’t seem likely to me. Apple has already done the contact tracing thing, and it was rather poorly received. I can’t think of much else they could do in that realm, especially things that would be more well-implemented.

If I’m correct that it will be more related to politics than COVID, there are a number of projects I would like for Apple to be working on that seem within their wheelhouse and could solve some of the problems with our politics. A search engine or social media network that actually values privacy and doesn’t lead people to misinformation would be great, but those both seem too close to “products”, even though they aren’t products in the physical-device sense.

If I had to guess what we’re going to see, I would say they’ll announce something along the lines of a software framework or program that is designed to spur citizens to take more initiative in shaping our politics. Maybe some sort of donation program, or a way to contact legislators and share feedback. Highly unlikely given the challenges of working with 50 different state governments, but what if they’d worked out a secure, verifiable platform for digital voting; that would be revolutionary and absolutely more exciting than any product they could announce.

Time will tell, but I’m very excited to hear what they’ve got to say.

UPDATED: 01/12/21, 23:30

From a statement by Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD) and his wife on the death of their son, Tommy:

Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind. He began to be tortured later in his 20s by a blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’ as Tabitha put it on Facebook over the weekend, a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.

On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.

He left us this farewell note on New Year’s Eve day: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”

This is absolutely gut wrenching.

The fact that Raskin had to experience the Capitol siege the day after his son’s funeral is just unconscionable. And for him to still be working at this point, doing interviews and holding his colleagues accountable, is nothing shy of heroic.

I hope his family is able to find as much solace as they can amidst these impossibly difficult events, and may Tommy truly rest in peace.

Tony Romm and Rachel Lerman, reporting for The Washington Post:

Amazon suspended the pro-Trump social network Parler from its Web-hosting service this weekend, a move that threatens to darken the site indefinitely after its users glorified the recent riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Describing Parler merely as a “pro-Trump social network” is a bit rosy, let’s not get it twisted. From racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and white supremacy, to outright calls for and plans to commit physical violence and anti democratic terrorism/insurrection like what we saw at the U.S. Capitol, hate speech and vitriol are omnipresent and essential elements of the Parler experience. It is/was a home and a breeding ground for Nazis and Proud Boys.

The e-commerce and Web-hosting giant said Parler had violated its terms of service given its inadequate content-moderation practices, adding in a letter that it would implement its punishment just before midnight Pacific time Monday.

The move by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, marks the latest and most crippling blow for the pro-Trump social network, which has emerged as a haven for conservative users who have fled more mainstream Silicon Valley sites that crack down on harmful, viral falsehoods online. Earlier this week, Apple and Google removed Parler’s app from their stores for smartphone downloads, similarly citing concerns that posts on Parler could contribute to violence.

Parler’s whole schtick was that they were going to be an unmoderated online space for free speech, but they have never been the beacon of free speech they claimed to be. The free speech cover was a thin veneer for an operation intended to provide a Wild West environment for Trump’s base to drive one another closer and closer to the edge of complete delusion and radicalization.

Private companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have absolutely no constitutional obligation to provide their services to companies who violate their rules or whose values they disagree with. Facebook and Twitter have no obligation to allow users who incite violence and inspire coups to enjoy their platforms. Publishers have no obligation to publish books from by seditious senators. It is not censorship and it is not a violation of Parler’s or anyone else’s first amendment rights, it’s the free market at work. Parler, immediately upon its launch, became an infinite cesspool of hatred. Since hate speech is not protected by the first amendment, it’s important to understand that not only can private companies refuse to do business with them, but even if it were Congress that had banned Parler, it still wouldn’t be an infringement of anyone’s first amendment rights. However, that’s exactly what Republicans have tried to assert.

Over the past few days, the far right has gotten a small taste of the social justice they deserve for the first time as the big tech companies have finally stood up to them, one by one. Faced with this incomprehensible reality where their actions have actual consequences, far right mouthpieces from Capitol Hill to trailer parks have been left spluttering, the only semi-coherent talking point they’ve been able to stitch together is that the radical left and big tech have teamed up to cancel and deplatform conservatives. Your dime-a-dozen Trumpers are embarrassing themselves by advertising their primitive understandings of “freedom of speech,” while their Republican elected officials CONTNUE to mislead those very same idiots by perpetuating misinformation about what type of speech the first amendment actually protects and from whom. Cynical assholes Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have learned no lessons. They deserve to be expelled from the Senate and they deserve to be shamed publicly, never to be taken seriously again.

Bringing things full circle, Parler was funded by the Mercer family, who were directly involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal that unethically collected mountains of personal data from American voters’ Facebook pages and used it to build profiles of them, which were then used to send them highly targeted ads designed to influence how they voted. Most people familiar with the Cambridge Analytica scandal know that the Trump campaign paid them to help target and turn out persuadable voters in key precincts of swing states, but most people don’t know that before Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Trump campaign (which was only after Trump won the nomination) they had previously been helping none other than Ted Cruz who, with their help and despite his perpetual “I just shit the bed” face, went from the bottom of the list of serious contenders to the last man standing before Trump ultimately clenched the nomination.

Hopefully Parler won’t find another company willing to host their site for any amount of money, but if Republicans are good at anything, it’s finding others whose morality is trumped by their greed.

I was going to title this article “Rest-in-Peace, Parler,” but after 0.5 seconds of consideration, it occurred to me that that would be far too kind a sentiment for the greedy, ill-intentioned assholes at Parler.

The last time the Capitol Building was overrun was over two centuries ago, when it was taken by the British in 1814. As was the case in 1814, the individuals laying siege to the U.S. Capitol Building are insurrectionists, terrorists. Their actions are seditious and treasonous, but the difference is that these people hail from the United States, not Britain.

Nonetheless, they are still terrorist insurgents. They are ignorant, hateful, cowardly racists, homophobes, and xenophobes who are terrified at the thought of a United States that doesn’t go out of its way to favor and cater specifically to the whims of straight white Christians. They are not patriots.

The implications of this coup on the long term (or short term) health of our nation are unknowable. Personally, I am in awe, and I am furious.

Here’s what I think should’ve happened to them. They should have been gunned down by the United States Capitol Police. They should have been treated as enemy combatants, a threat to be neutralized as swiftly and efficiently as possible, and as enemy combatants, they should be afforded no constitutional rights. The fact that the Capitol Police were so laughably unprepared for this, juxtaposed with their ludicrous over-preparedness during the Black Lives Matter protests, is another blinding example of institutional racism.

What do I think should happen to the insurrectionists now? I think they should all be immediately arrested and held without bail to face trial for treason. The odds of that happening are slim, so here’s to hoping they spread plenty of vicious COVID cases amongst themselves and their families.

What did Donald Trump say to them? He affirmed “this election was stolen from us, it was a landslide”, and followed it up with “we love you, you’re very special.”

The question now, is what should happen to Donald Trump.

Twitter and Facebook should immediately ban him from their platforms lest he continue to pour gasoline on the flames, but that’s just the start. He is clearly unfit for office. He needs to be ousted from the presidency immediately. He deserves to be impeached and removed from office immediately. At this point, I wouldn’t put it past Mitch McConnell. If impeachment is not the solution lawmakers choose to take, then the 25th amendment should be invoked. Let Mike Pence take over for the next two weeks and facilitate the transition to Biden’s administration. I wouldn’t necessarily put it past Pence and the Cabinet at this point, either. Once he’s out of office, he needs to be put in jail to rot. I wouldn’t even take the death penalty off the table at this point: his actions have cost countless lives and had an immeasurable destructive impact on the foundations of our democracy.

As for his pathetic minions and mouthpieces who incited this rebellion, namely Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rudy Giuliani, they should face jail time. All the representatives and senators who challenged the results of the election should be expelled from Congress. This parasitic weed has deeply intertwined itself in our national politics, and we must rip it out, root and stem, before it chokes the life out of the Great American Experiment.

Michael Grothaus, reporting for Fast Company:

The last time any Google iOS app was updated was on December 7. This includes updates to major Google apps like Google Drive, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Sheets, YouTube Music, Google Duo, Google Authenticator, and Gboard.

Why is December 7 a significant date? Because starting on December 8, Apple mandated that any new apps or app updates submitted to the App Store would require the developer to fill out the privacy label information for the app it was submitting. This privacy label reveals exactly what data the app is collecting about the user and how that user data is being used.

I’m sure this is just a coincidence. 🙄

The Band Camino is one of my favorite bands, and they’ve got a ton of great, catchy songs that look at life from different perspectives.

Their latest single, “Roses”, is a great song, and it’s the perfect anthem to kick off 2021.

Check out the song, but also the music video.

How much do you want to bet it’s a white guy?

How much do you want to bet that if it is a white guy, the president, right wing congressional leaders, nor the mainstream news outlets will call him a “terrorist”?

From The Guardian:

A key measure in the NDAA to which Trump objects is the move to rename US military bases currently named for leaders of the Confederacy, which seceded from the union over slavery, leading to the civil war of 1861 to 1865.

Pressure to rename the bases grew this year amid nationwide protests over the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd […]

Trump also threatened a veto if the bill did not repeal part of a 1996 telecoms law which prevents online companies from being sued in relation to third-party content.

If Section 230 is not “completely terminated”, Trump tweeted earlier this month, “I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk.”

[…]

The Senate backed the bill 84-13, with the no votes coming from some of the most conservative Republicans and most liberal Democrats. The Democratic-led House backed the NDAA by 335-78, with some “no” votes also coming from liberal Democrats less likely to back a Trump veto.

The NDAA determines everything from how many ships are bought to soldiers’ pay to how to address geopolitical threats. The measure vetoed by Trump was a compromise, combining separate measures already passed in the House and Senate.

Lawmakers take pride in the bill having become law every year since 1961, saying it reflects their support for the military. Trump’s veto, if upheld, would delay a 3% pay raise for active-duty troops.

Donald Trump, bone spur survivor and champion of veterans everywhere.

I bet if you polled active duty service members, you’d find that they’d overwhelmingly want this bill (which gives them a raise) signed into law. Donald Trump is a selfish prick: this is all about catering to his base of racists, both the part about not wanting to rename military bases and the part about wanting social media companies to be held legally responsible when their users say mean things about them. Talk about snowflakes.

I guess we’re taking “Buzzfeed News” seriously now? Whatever. Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac, reporting for Buzzfeed News:

[…]Facebook employees complained about what they called a self-serving campaign that bordered on hypocrisy, according to internal comments and audio of a presentation to workers that were obtained by BuzzFeed News. A change in Apple’s iOS 14 mobile operating system — which requires iPhone owners to opt in to allow companies to track them across other apps and websites — hurts Facebook, some employees argued on the company’s private message boards, and their employer was just using small businesses as a shield. […]

“It feels like we are trying to justify doing a bad thing by hiding behind people with a sympathetic message,” one engineer wrote […]

Several employees seemed unconvinced by the presentation. Some did not understand how Apple’s changes would negatively affect small businesses, while one said Facebook’s attempt to undermine Apple’s privacy policy made it “a traditional trojan virus.” […]

“The only thing I’m hearing, again and again, is ‘this is bad for the businesses,’ and I’d really like someone at the top to explicitly say, ‘People are better off if they don’t know what we’re doing, if we don’t have to explain ourselves to them, if they don’t get a choice to opt in or opt out of our practices, if we obscure it as much as possible behind interesting features and then get them to accept surreptitious tracking on the back end as long as we downplay it,’” they wrote

I’m glad these individuals are speaking up about how shitty Facebook’s tracking practices are, but where have their voices been for the past decade? They’re way late to the party; they aren’t heroes, they’re squeamish accomplices.

Isabel Kershner, reporting for The New York Times:

Israel’s government collapsed Tuesday, pushing the country into yet another early election — the fourth in two years.

The Israeli Parliament dissolved itself at midnight on Tuesday. The move forced a new election after weeks of infighting and paralysis in the so-called unity government, an uneasy coalition sworn in just seven months ago

What a shit show. Israel was a fun little post-WW2 experiment that seems to have run its course. They spent a few decades feeling victimized and pretending to be a country, but the whole time, they were just stirring the Middle Eastern pot. One starts to think maybe the #freepalestine people have a point. Granted, everyone in that region has been fighting for thousands of years over who gets to play in what sandbox according to which invisibly sky wizard, so frankly, fuck all of them. I’m sick of America sending our troops over there to die trying to break up their pointless, unending wars (or just join them for profit, where the military industrial complex is involved).

Conservative Christians get so caught up in their allegiance to Israel, I really don’t get it. The Jews were “God’s Chosen People” is usually the best answer they can come up with, but I thought God loved everyone? If the Jews really are the favorites, why the hell would you subscribe to a religion where your god says you’re second best? What a joke.

The possibility of touchscreen Macs coming to market in the next handful of years is a hot topic with a lot of intense debate, and I want to add my thoughts to the discourse about what I think Apple will do and what I would like Apple to do.

I think Apple is going to introduce Macs with touchscreens the next time they update the physical design, likely in late 2021 or 2022. I was curious if they would introduce touch screens when they announced the M1 Macs, but in hindsight, it wouldn’t have made a ton of sense.

For argument’s sake, let’s presume that Apple always knew that within the next two years or so that they were going to 1. transition to Apple Silicon chips, 2. update the physical design of the MacBook Pro (which has been the same since 2016) and possibly the MacBook Air (which has been the same since 2018), and 3. add touchscreens. That’s a lot of advancements. And as difficult as it is to get sustained attention in today’s media environment, I think it makes sense from a marketing perspective that they would try to time these advancements to give them the most positive coverage as possible. Given how powerful and efficient the M1 is, it seems obvious that Apple knew beforehand that they would get a lot of great press when they released machines that used it, regardless of whether the machines looked the same on the outside or not. That’s exactly what happened. The other two changes, however, had the potential to feel cosmetic (in the case of the physical design update) and overdue and gimmicky (in the case of touchscreens), if they were to incorporate those features asynchronously. To me, it seems like the best way to roll out those three updates would be to first put out the new chips, let people “oooh” and “aaah” over them, and use the next year or so to iron out any kinks. Then, a year or two later, release machines with a new form factor and touchscreen support, completely ushering in a new era of Mac hardware, and reap the media coverage benefits of a new design and a new input method at the same time.

There are a few breadcrumbs I point to as indicators that this is probably Apple’s plan, namely the updated UI elements in macOS Big Sur. I know, I know, Craig Federighi has said that they didn’t even consider touchscreen support when redesigning some interface elements, but of course he said that. The truth is that elements like the Control Center, the straight-from-iOS widgets, and the new, rounded-off-square app icons are all begging to be poked by a crude, imprecise finger, as opposed to clicked by a nimble little cursor. Frankly, if they weren't designed for touch, then they’re just unattractive and inefficient, wasting display real estate (particularly Control Center, they could’ve fit so many more toggles and checkboxes in there if they were appropriately sized for manipulation with a cursor).

As far as what I would like for Apple to do: I want them to add touchscreens.

Now, I understand the concern that touchscreen Macs would have to go through some rather extensive UI redesigns to make the whole operating system navigable via touch. For a while, I was solidly on the team who never wanted touchscreen Macs. After all, pretty much all touchscreen laptops suck, and it’s uncomfortable to spend any amount of time with your arm hovering in the air to touch a vertical pane. But just because other companies couldn’t do something well doesn’t mean Apple can’t come right in and eat their lunch, “best not first” is Apple’s whole schtick. But the fact that touchscreen laptops are uncomfortable and finicky to use is not at all the point. Many PC manufacturers really put their eggs in the touchscreen basket, and they positioned their touchscreen machines in a very gimmicky way and created so much (undeserved) hype that made it seem like you were supposed to use your finger to control them all the time.

Apple knows the Mac is at it’s most powerful as a cursor-first device, and they won’t try to change that any time soon for a brief spell of good advertising fortune. I think they love the Mac as it is, but I think they recognize that they can make it better by allowing people to use their fingers to interact with the Mac when it feels natural. Not everything needs to be done with a finger, and redesigning the entire UI to that end would waste tons of screen real estate and slow down most users. But they could redesign a few things without harming the experience, and the convenience of being able to touch the screen would provide more value than it would cost.

When I first tried the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard, I was skeptical about cursor support on a device that was always designed for Touch. The truth is, it’s not a perfect experience. There are instances where the cursor seems too small and slow, and where my finger could whip around the operating system with a lot more ease. But it does have its advantages: for example, selecting text is far more convenient with a cursor. The situation would be similar on the Mac. Using your finger all the time wouldn’t be a perfect experience, but for simple gestures like scrolling or tapping an app icon, it can be a lot faster and more convenient. In fact, since I bought the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard, my use of my iPad has increased by a factor of ten, seriously. I’m so used to it that on a weekly basis now, I embarrass myself by reaching up to touch the screen of my Mac. It’s not that I don’t like my Mac and have therefore made a conscious choice to use the iPad instead, it’s just that it offers me more input methods that give me greater flexibility to manipulate small on-screen objects with precision and still enjoy the convenience and expediency of swiping and tapping the screen with a finger. More input methods has directly led to fewer annoyances when interacting with the device, and I think the Mac could enjoy the same (inverse) benefits.

I’ve listened to a few episodes of the “Noble Blood” podcast, and this episode about the King Edward II of England, and his lover Piers Gaveston is really fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell from Game of Thrones.

Also worth noting: the host does a great job of contextualizing same sex relationships during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, before it was given a label and assumed an entire identity. Men today often seem compelled to perform a particular lifestyle upon acknowledging their same sex attractions, but that’s actually a very recent phenomenon, and prior to a few decades ago, that wasn’t the case at all. I’m glad the host took the time to make sure listeners understand that while we have labels for men in positions similar to Edward II and Piers Gaveston, they did not define themselves in this way.

It’s a fascinating story, and well worth a listen.

Drew Harwell and Ellen Nakashima, reporting for The Washington Post:

A security executive with the video-tech giant Zoom worked with the Chinese government to terminate Americans’ accounts and disrupt video calls about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, Justice Department prosecutors said Friday.

[…]

Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.

Jin monitored Zoom’s video system for discussions of political and religious topics deemed unacceptable by China’s ruling Communist Party, the complaint states, and he gave government officials the names, email addresses and other sensitive information of users, even those outside China.

We’ve known Zoom has plenty of issues for a while now, but this is outrageous. Where is our strongman president when foreign adversaries are directly impeding American citizens’ freedom of speech? He’s made a huge issue about social media companies and their alleged censorship of conservative voices (which is bullshit), but now that there’s real censorship of Americans by China, he’s silent, either too stupid to understand what’s going on, too selfish to care, or so pathetic that he’s still nursing his post-election wounds.

The first amendment was designed to protect Americans against government overreach, but I never imagined we would have our first amendment rights challenged or stripped away by another government than our own. There has to be consequences for this.

Rob Price, writing for Business Insider earlier this year:

In an email to Facebook's chief financial officer at the time, Zuckerberg said Facebook wanted to buy Instagram to give itself more time to fend off competitors.

"One way of looking at this is that what we're really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again," he wrote. "Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won't get much traction since we'll already have their mechanics deployed at scale."

Mark Zuckerberg.

Isobel Asher Hamilton, Katie Canales, and Paige Leskin, reporting for Business Insider last week:

The lawsuits allege that Facebook used a strategy of neutralizing competitors before they could threaten the company's dominance of the social-media market. The suits call out Facebook's decisions to buy rather than compete with Instagram and WhatsApp, and they allege it imposed "anticompetitive conditions" on software developers.

Both complaints seek a "divestiture of assets" for Facebook — that is, breaking off Instagram and WhatsApp from the social-media giant. Additionally, Facebook could be required to get approval from the government before any mergers or acquisitions in the future.

[…]

The coalition of attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, began an investigation into Facebook in September 2019, and the FTC subsequently joined. Attorneys general from 46 states as well as Washington, DC, and Guam have signed on to the lawsuit. The only states whose attorneys general have not signed on are Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota.

Forty six states. That’s more than enough to pass a constitutional amendment. Facebook is about to get fucked up.

This investigation (and any resulting regulation) is clearly focusing on antitrust issues, but I sincerely hope that congressional leaders take a long hard look at Facebook’s privacy practices while they’ve got them under the microscope.

I hope Facebook gets what they deserve for capitalizing on the destruction of privacy and the polarization of the American people.

#deletefacebook

Hartley Carlton, reporting for MacRumors:

Facebook has today attacked Apple in a series of full-page newspaper ads, asserting that iOS 14's privacy changes regarding data gathering and targeted advertising are bad for small businesses (via Bloomberg).

The ads are running in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, feature the headline "We're standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere."

Earlier this year, Apple introduced a number of privacy changes that curb the ability of companies like Facebook to gather data on users and target adverts. In ‌‌iOS 14‌‌, Apple has made the "Identifier for Advertisers," used by Facebook and its advertising partners for ad targeting, an opt-in feature, providing more transparency for users who would prefer not to be tracked in apps and on websites. The update simply asks users if they want to agree to ad tracking or prevent cross-app and cross-site tracking to provide targeted ads.

I was going to post the text of the ad and pick it apart line by line, but it would be a waste of time. Facebook has committed a logical fallacy, completely misrepresenting what Apple has chosen to do (which is give people more control over what data they share with big companies) as some sort of offensive play against small businesses. It’s a strawman argument designed to make small businesses look like the victims of Apple’s “forced software update”.

John Gruber recently wrote about this on Daring Fireball, again making the salient point that the privacy issue boils down to entitlement:

The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do.

This so clearly isn’t about small businesses not being able to advertise as effectively, it’s about facebook no longer being able to run behind you with a shop-vac, sucking up every crumb of data you leave behind. Don’t think they aren’t still trying though, Apple’s privacy tools are just limiting their ability to do so a little, taking them down from an industrial grade shop-vac to a consumer grade Dyson.

But still, let’s humor Facebook for a second and respond to their strawman argument. Here’s my take: if you built a small business that relies on Facebook (for advertising or any other aspect of your business), then you built a shitty small business. You put all your eggs in one basket, so captivated by the reach they could offer you that you didn’t consider the risks of relying on a company whose business model was inherently unethical and who could pull the rug out from under you at any moment. The problem here is not Apple giving people control over their own data, it’s that your small business was built on a foundation of stolen information that facebook gobbled up and turned into something you could use to target potential customers with. Looks like it’s time for you to find a more honest way to reach potential new customers.

This is a mature topic, but we’re going to be straightforward. Practically everyone in America who’s older than like 13 and has an internet connection watches porn, lets not kid ourselves or feel ashamed about it; it’s normal.

Pornhub sounds like they were scared for their life, and their reaction supports that assessment: they chose to go with the nuclear option. Rather than just hiring more moderators or looking into solutions like artificial intelligence to flag videos that could be against the rules, they removed nearly 80% of their content after being stiff armed by Kristof and the credit card networks.

Freedom of the press is important, so there’s not much we can do about reporting like this, other than dismiss it as flawed and take that into account when judging the credibility of future work from the journalists or publications involved. However, it’s clear that of the entities involved here, some of them are well overdue for some regulation, but Pornhub isn’t one of them. I hadn’t considered it much until this point, but it doesn’t take much attention to realize that credit card network companies weird enormous power, and they’ve just demonstrated that they’re willing to wield it to drive companies they don’t like out of business. The United States only has four major credit card networks (the aforementioned three, plus American Express), and while they’re independent companies, in a world where physical currency is becoming less and less relevant, it’s outrageous that four companies have gatekeeping roles over virtually ALL of the United States’ digital/electronic commerce.

Of course they did, the lawsuit was absolutely ridiculous. Shame on Texas. The people who brought this suit should face immediate disbarment, if not prosecution. It’s glaringly obvious that the Constitution doesn’t have the guardrails necessary to protect itself from bad faith attempts to subvert it. There needs to be a standard for how to punish people who bring suits like this, because they have they long term potential to erode our democracy. I want to see every one of the 130+ legislators that signed onto this outrageous, anti-democratic bullshit punished.

I say, the next time Texas flirts with the idea of concession, let them.

Dan Merica, reporting for CNN:

President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Pete Buttigieg to be his transportation secretary, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN, elevating the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to a top post in the federal government.

Buttigieg would be the first Senate-confirmed [LGB] Cabinet secretary should his nomination make it through the chamber.

The choice vaults a candidate Biden spoke glowingly of after the Democratic primary into a top job in the incoming administration and could earn Buttigieg what many Democrats believe is needed experience should he run for president again.

The role of transportation secretary is expected to play a central role in Biden's push for a bipartisan infrastructure package.

This choice makes sense for a lot of reasons. Pete is fairly moderate and will be able to reach across the aisle and get things done, and he could have a good impact as far as climate change is concerned.

And I’ll say this right now: if Pete gets that elusive high speed rail system built, he will be president one day.

CopyrightBro is releasing a series of damning screenshots in which a staffer from Senator-elect Bill Haggerty (R-TN) admits that their loud endorsements of President Donald Trump’s policies is largely based on political convenience, and that he and the campaign actually sees the Tennessee voters who elected them as ignorant sheep, falling prey to Trump’s divisive demagoguery, whom they simply intended to use to get into office.

During my senior year at the University of Tennessee, my tendency to be a bit bold kicked up a lot of dust with the student government crowd, and when I had the opportunity to sink the ship of one of the worst campaigns, I took it.

The “Tennessee Way” campaign was easily the most annoying of the four campaigns vying for control of the (largely useless) student government, relying on a series of Trumpian candidates who were clearly unqualified for any sort of leadership positions and frankly just unintelligent. Their decidedly conservative posture had them poised to coast into the three highest offices (President, Vice President, and Student Services Director) and sweep a lot of the senate seats, while the three more liberal campaigns were cannibalizing one another’s support.

I was leaving UT soon and I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it came to SGA (after getting involved myself, I found it to be a way for overly ambitious college kids to pad their resumes without actually having to accomplish anything, though campaigns will occasionally stumble into a situation where they can affect change), and I was in a unique position to neuter the Tennessee Way campaign and make way for a more honest campaign to come in.

I had been involved in a months-long casual relationship with one of the young men at the very top of the Tennessee Way’s ticket. Personally, he was an arrogant dick, and I told him as much on a few occasions, but our arrangement scratched an itch for both of us (what can I say, I was a 22 year old guy in college). Occasionally, he and I would have more mundane conversations before or after our meetups, and he would often talk about how the campaign was going. I couldn’t have been less interested in his faux political wins and woes, but his arrogance was his fatal flaw and I was able to play him like a fiddle: I pretended to find his dramatic campaign stories fascinating, and he would absolutely gush, often indiscriminately. On multiple occasions in person and in writing, he told me about how he had offered multiple campaigns blank checks to allow him to run for one of the big three spots at the top of their ticket. The first campaign to which he made this offer refused. The second campaign to which he made this offer accepted, and that was the Tennessee Way.

I sat on that information for a while, but after a bit of time and a lot of inflammatory, Trumpian rhetoric from the Tennessee Way campaign, and approximately a week before the election, I met with the SGA Election Commission to show them screenshots of my conversations with the young man who made the offer. They approached the Tennessee Way campaign for an explanation, and when faced with the irrefutable evidence that the names at the top of their ticket had bribed each other to the tune of $2000, the entire campaign dropped out of the race within hours.

And in the words of Marty Huggins, “and that’s my story!”

My remarks from five months ago are very applicable again today:

Usually when Taylor Swift is gearing up to drop a new single, she always drops little breadcrumbs and Easter eggs for fans to collect and theorize about what they could mean and whether they’ll lead to new music, but this time, there was none of that. Not only were there no signs of a single, we’re getting an entire album. And we’re getting it at midnight TONIGHT. As a big Taylor Swift fan, it’s pretty safe to say I was blindsided but thrilled by this announcement.

It’s really interesting that she turned this around and surprised us again. This time, there was a sign or two that we could’ve picked up on, but I think most people assumed any hints were referring to her process of re-recording her first six albums. I’m curious to see if these songs were written at the same time as “folklore”, or if they came after “folklore” was finished. It’ll also be interesting to see if any of the stories from ”folklore” are continued in “evermore”.

Last time I correctly predicted that at least one song on “folklore” would prominently feature a harmonica, but this time I’m feeling violins and maybe a harp. We’ll see.

Apple announced four new iPhone models at their event in October, and they’re all very similar to one another. The easiest way to think of them is in two distinct groups: the 12 series (which consists of the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12), and the 12 Pro series (which includes the iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro Max).

We’ll break down thew differences between these models, but first, it’s important to understand what they all have in common. There are three tentpole features that define the new iPhones, and they are the newdesign, the new processor, and 5G. In each of these areas, the new iPhones are all identical.

All of the new iPhones feature:

1. A new design. The form factor finally got a nice upgrade, having remained basically the same since the iPhone 6. This years models feature squared off edges, similar to the current iPad Pro models. It’s reminiscent of the iPhone 5, but a little more premium. They also have stronger glass on the front, which is supposed to be up to four times more shatter resistant.

2. Apple’s brand new processor, the A14 chip. The A14 is an absolute powerhouse that is faster than a significant number of PC laptops. These phones are fast, and they will be fast for years.

3. 5G connectivity. While Apple spent a lot of time talking about 5G at their event, it’s not all its cracked up to be. Most people will notice a slight speed increase (roughly 20%) when doing things over a cellular connection like opening web pages or downloading apps. Still, it’s not a bad thing to have.

It seems like the U.S. is just a few days away from rolling out the first COVID-19 vaccine. I’m not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch of the imagination (gets your kids their shots), but something about this vaccine process just isn’t sitting quite right with me. In all likelihood, and hopefully, this post won’t age well, and in a few years we can talk about how silly we were to be worried about it, but as of right now, I don’t want the COVID vaccine.

Most of all, I don’t trust big Pharma. They’re one of the most egregiously exploitative industries in world history, and report after shocking report keeps proving this. It sucks that they’re going to reap all the credit and the profit for saving everyone. The opioid epidemic is completely their fault, but now we’re going to act like they’re heroes because they’ve ostensibly concocted a vaccine for a virus that has caused far less death and suffering than the products they’re usually pumping out.

Furthermore, it seems like it happened too quickly and with too much coordination. Back in March, they were predicting it would be at least 12-18 months before we would have a viable vaccine. Now, here we are and multiple companies happened to cut that time in half, making this the most successful vaccine production campaign ever, and they ended up with a finished product that’s 94% effective? It just seems a little too good to be true.

What doesn’t seem too good to be true is the period of time for which the vaccine is effective. Presumably because the COVID-19 virus mutates rather quickly, the vaccine is only predicted to provide about three months of protection. Logistically, if everyone were in line to get the vaccine, I don’t think we’ll have enough to vaccinate everyone in America for many months, given that one vaccination requires two injections spaced a few weeks apart. That means that the number of people who can be vaccinated is half of the number of doses we have. So if everyone has to get back in line for another round of two shots after three months, it seems like we won’t ever catch up unless the companies manufacturing them can miraculously increase their output.

On a different note, some people have had severe allergic reactions to the vaccine, so at what point should we start to wonder about the risks? Not only the short term risks of possible allergic reactions, but what about long term risks? This is a brand new vaccine, we don’t know what long term effects it could have. If you’re an elderly person, there’s a good chance you could die from COVID, so you probably don’t need to worry about long term effects, but if you’re a young, healthy person, you should consider whether this vaccine will do more damage to you in the long run than COVID itself could.

Further contributing to my safety concerns, the Trump administration has hopelessly politicized this process. Their political strategy has been to rely almost entirely on the promise of a vaccine rather than preventing the spread of the virus in the first place, so I don’t exactly trust them to have followed all the necessary safety guidelines. As I said before, this feels like a rush job. Plus, if you wanna talk crazy conspiracy theories, then it’s worth acknowledging that if the government (or a private entity, @bigpharma) ever were going to try to get the majority of the population drinking some kool-aid, this would be the time to pull that lever. I don’t believe that’s what’s happening, but this would be a great opportunity.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t get the vaccine. I’m just saying it’s a decision you need to make carefully, and that we should be asking questions rather than falling in line like sheep.

Worth noting that wearing a mask is a lot different, and you’re not a sheep for wearing one. Wearing a mask has no long term or short term risks, and you should absolutely wear a mask unless you’re a selfish asshole, in which case, you should wear a sign that says as much.

Netflix has a new, four-part docuseries that walks through the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in an explanatory way while still being respectful of the tragedy of the event. It features a lot of interviews with NASA personnel, as well as heartbreaking accounts from the families of the astronauts who were killed. It’s really interesting and insightful; if you’re interested in the history of the United States’ space programs, or if you just don’t know much about what happened with the Challenger, this docuseries is well worth your time.

A broader societal question occurred to me while I was watching this. American history has no shortage of tragedies, but the ones people tend to obsess over and analyze endlessly (I’m thinking of JFK’s assassination, 9/11, the Challenger disaster, , have something in common. They all feature people dying in violent, gruesome ways, on camera. It makes you wonder.

President Reagan's address to the nation in the aftermath of the explosion actually included a line that is one of my favorite quotes: “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave.”

Miley’s new album “Plastic Hearts” is pretty good. It’s got big 80s-rock vibes, and while it’s definitely a new arena for Miley, it still sounds like her. A lot of the songs are rather vulnerable and a little dark, I hope Miley is in a good mental place.

In my opinion, the best tracks are “Plastic Hearts”, “High”, “Angels Like You”, “Golden G String”, and “Hate Me”. I think a couple of them may have the staying power to become truly iconic songs that people will love decades from now, like so many songs from the 80s are. It was really cool that she worked with iconic rockstars for some of the songs too: Joan Jett and Billy Idol made for good collaborators.

Give it a listen.

Reporting from Felipe Ventura of tecnoblog (translated to English by Safari’s webpage translation feature):

The documents in Anatel state, however, that none of the three devices will be sold with a charger in the box; the headset will also not be included, following Apple's steps with the iPhone.

So predictable, even after Samsung put out ads giving Apple shit for not including a power brick.

Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump has discussed with advisers whether to grant pre-emptive pardons to his children, to his son-in-law and to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and talked with Mr. Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as last week, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Just so we’re clear, you don’t pardon people who’ve done nothing wrong. The notion that this is a necessary step to protect Donald Trump’s fragile, innocent little children from some leftist witch hunt is bullshit. They’re grown ass adults, for Christ’s sake. As for Giuliani, is it a coincidence or is it karma that he got COVID after pulling this shit? You decide.

As reported by Claire Hymes for CBS News, we’re also now entertaining the idea of bribes for pardons:

The Justice Department is investigating a bribery scheme that directed money to the White House or used political contributions in exchange for a presidential pardon, according to court documents released Tuesday.

Prosecutors asked the court for permission to review email communications […]

But… but.. what about HILLARY’s emails?!?!?

[…] they believe revealed a "bribery conspiracy scheme in which [redacted] would offer a substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence for [redacted]."

I don’t know who this is for (I’m sure Trump has plenty of criminal acquaintances who’ve wound up behind bars and want to buy their way out) but it doesn’t matter who it is: this is banana republic shit, and it is fundamentally damaging the credibility and the integrity of our institutions as well as the notion of “law and order” in our country. Fuck Rudy Giuliani. Fuck Donald Trump’s kids. And fuck Donald Trump.

Sincerely, a 2016 Trump voter.

From their list of the top 50 albums of the year:

It’s not a stretch to say that Taylor Swift’s Folklore may go down in history as the definitive quarantine album, and not just because of the record’s homespun, folksy presentation. Without the pressure of having to write radio hits or build up her usual prolonged album-release schedule — full of music videos, Easter eggs, and Good Morning — Swift shed the über-pop trappings of her previous album, Lover, for a project that put her once-in-a-generation songwriting talent front and center. Regardless of what you think of the album’s “indie” cred, with contributions from the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Folklore’s 16 tales of lost love, coming-of-age, and redemption provided us with solace and catharsis just when we needed it most. Songs like “August” and “Mirrorball” will persevere long after this pandemic is over — and so, evidently, will Taylor Swift.

Hard to argue with Rolling Stone.

I don’t presume to know what everyone in America did for the Thanksgiving holiday, but it sure doesn’t seem like very many people I know heeded any sort of advice from health experts to reduce the spread of COVID-19. For example, my family — despite my protests — decided that we should actually go a bit further than just holding our usual festivities unchanged, and invited extra people outside of the 16 members of our family who showed up to spend four or five hours in the same room. Yep, we brought in more people, and some of them were quite old. The line between their perverted, bad faith “southern hospitality” and an increase in “southerner hospitalizations” is linear and quite short, I reckon. And of course, our venue was decorated with a multitude of Trump signs and flags; sommeliers of political symbolism would’ve nutted over what an apt pairing it was.

Believe me, I let them know what I thought about it, but I’m sure it wasn’t just my ignorant relatives who intentionally flew in the face of expert recommendations. A lot of people tried to justify their normal get togethers by saying things like “well, what if this is your last thanksgiving with some of your elderly family members”, but my response to that is the rather obvious “it’s almost certainly going to be their last one if you give them COVID”.

If my perceptions are representative of the South or of the United States as a whole — and I hope they aren't — then it’s fair to say that Americans are remarkably selfish and short sighted. This is a grim prediction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see 1.5 million positive COVID tests this week, Monday-Friday.

Wear a mask. Don’t attend events with crowds. Don’t be a dick.

About a year ago, I stumbled across an interesting corner of Twitter, and subsequently a bunch of other websites, where people were complaining about the ethics of circumcision. At first I found it puzzling, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that they had a point. Still, I didn’t get too deep into it, because at that point, twenty two years removed from said procedure, I didn’t have much skin in the game (pun intended).

A few months later, in episode six of Adam Ruins Everything (you can find it on Netflix), Adam tackles some of the more common misconceptions surrounding routine infant circumcision, and this got me thinking about the topic again, so I decided to finally educate myself a bit. My conclusion was that, for a long list of reasons, infant circumcision is, in fact, a deeply unethical practice. In short, it is medically unnecessary, permanent, and nonconsensual. Allow me to elaborate.

“Greyhound” is a new Tom Hanks film about a Navy captain during World War 2 that debuted on Apple TV+ over the summer. It was originally destined for a theatrical debut, but that wasn’t a possibility given the COVID-19 pandemic, and Apple ended up securing the rights for an exclusive debut on Apple TV+.

I’m a fan of historical movies, especially ones centered around WW2, and I really enjoyed the film. Tom Hanks was great, story was gripping, and the effects were well done. Check it out.

Side note: I’m a big fan of special features and behind the scenes content — I’ve always really enjoyed seeing how movies and TV shows are made and how the creative processes come together to build something people find entertaining. Along a similar vein, director/producer/cast commentaries have always been really interesting to me. In the past several months, I’ve stumbled across a few shows and movies where the creators have gone on to host or guest host podcasts to talk about their work (one example being the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl”, which is also definitely worth your time). Delightfully, there’s a great podcast episode you can listen to which encapsulates a conversation between Tom Hanks and host Dan Carlin (of the podcast Hardcore History) that is a great accompaniment to the “Greyhound” film.

I really enjoyed the film. Tom Hanks was great and the story was gripping. Check it out.

Side note: I’m a big fan of special features and behind the scenes content — I’ve always really enjoyed seeing how movies and TV shows are made and how the creative processes come together to build something people find entertaining. Along a similar vein, director/producer/cast commentaries have always been really interesting to me. In the past several months, I’ve stumbled across a few shows and movies where the creators have gone on to host or guest host podcasts to talk about their work (one example being the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl”, which is also definitely worth your time). Delightfully, there’s a great podcast episode you can listen to which encapsulates a conversation between Tom Hanks and host Dan Carlin (of the podcast Hardcore History) that is a great accompaniment to the “Greyhound” film.

I’m not going to lie, I’m sick of seeing people blame college kids for the pandemic. Back in March, it was their fault for going on spring break. Then in the fall it was their fault for not staying locked up in their dorms. Now, the New York Times has a page dedicated to tracking COIVD outbreaks at Universities.

Here’s the deal: this pandemic wasn’t caused by college kids. Maybe they aren’t being as responsible as they should, but how long can we expect them to put everything on hold during one of the most transformative and exciting times in their lives, especially given that they aren’t at great personal risk and there’s no sign of things getting better because the government has done nothing to mitigate the virus’s spread? At some point, you have to start deciding what risks are worth it to get back to something resembling normal, and college kids simply had the least to lose when our national patience began to wear down and were therefore the first to start making those risk assessments.

If you want to blame this shit on one group, blame it on Donald Trump and his crooks who were supposed to be running this country. Blame it on stupid Christians who go to church and refuse to wear masks and ignore science even though they’re more susceptible and should know better. Don’t blame it on kids because they’re acting like kids are supposed to act.

For more articles about the United States’ failed federal response to the pandemic, check out CopyrighBro’s COVID-19 Roundup.

A few excerpts from a long twitter exchange/thread from Lincoln Project Senior Adviser Tom Nichols:

“I know we want to believe our fellow citizens voted as if they are just making a civic decision about what's best for America. I think that was a legit way to view 2016. I think there is almost no way to view Trump's voters in 2020 that way.”

[…]

“It's time to stop trying to see the good in the most loyal Trump voters. The media has been tromping around diners for five years looking for the spark of goodness and civic virtue in them, and it isn't there. We just have to accept that”

Taylor Swift’s surprise eighth album dropped July 24th. It came completely out of the blue, and not that anyone was expecting it to come so soon, but it’s certainly much different than what anyone expected TS8 to be. Let’s get into it.

First, my general feelings:

I like this album a lot. It’s very alternative and folky, not at all like the albums that preceded it. One of my biggest criticisms of “Lover” was that it wasn’t sonically cohesive, and that is certainly not the case this time around—this album knows exactly what it is. None of these songs are going to end up getting played to death by the radio stations the way songs like “End Game” or “I Knew You Were Trouble” were, but that’s okay: it isn’t Top 40 music and it doesn’t want to be.

As is supported by the fact that Taylor was nominated for several Grammys and won the Apple Music Award for songwriter of the year, the fact that she isn’t making pop music does not mean she’s not doing some of her best work. A lot of fans think this is her best work from a lyrical perspective since “Red”, which was an undeniable lyrical masterpiece. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, "Taylor Swift’s greatest strength is her ability to tell stories, and folklore is an album full of stories; her stories, fictional stories, historical stories, our stories.

Ella Koeze, reporting for The New York Times:

Stocks on Wall Street climbed for a second day on Tuesday, buoyed by news that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. had chosen a former Federal Reserve chair, Janet L. Yellen, to be the next Treasury secretary, and as the Trump administration’s efforts to contest the election were further diminished as several key states certified Mr. Biden’s victory.

The S&P 500 rose about 1.4 percent, and by late morning was trading above its most recent closing record of 3,626.91, reached on Nov. 16. The Dow Jones industrial average rose to a new high, crossing above the 30,000 mark for the first time.

I guess all these Wall Street investors don’t realize that Joe Biden is going to drive the economy into the ground. 🙄

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard:

The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a "level" app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

Through public records, interviews with developers, and technical analysis, Motherboard uncovered two separate, parallel data streams that the U.S. military uses, or has used, to obtain location data. One relies on a company called Babel Street, which creates a product called Locate X. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), a branch of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, bought access to Locate X to assist on overseas special forces operations. The other stream is through a company called X-Mode, which obtains location data directly from apps, then sells that data to contractors, and by extension, the military.

How many times must someone sound the alarm before people start taking digital privacy seriously?

About a week ago, Johnny Depp posted a memo on his Instagram account saying that Warner Brothers had asked him to step down from his role as Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, and that he had agreed to leave the role.

This news came on the heels of a British court’s decision in a libel case where Depp had tried to sue a British tabloid for libel, after they called him a “wife beater” in reference to Depp’s toxic marriage to actress Amber Heard. The court found that the tabloid’s assertion that Depp was a “wife beater” was backed up by the evidence, and Warner Brothers subsequently asked Depp to step down from the role. It’s worth acknowledging that this case was only concerning the libel charge, not the alleged abuse. The general consensus seems to be that it was a troubled and toxic relationship, in which both parties contributed plenty of vitriol.

Less than two weeks after Depp announced his departure, it sounds like Warner Brothers may have already found an actor to replace him. Reports seem to suggest that Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen is favored to play Grindelwald in the remaining films.

A lot of reports have come out recently from men who are alleging that they experienced sexual abused at the hands of adult leaders while while participating in activities organized by the Boy Scouts of America as boys/young men. I find these accusations to be very troubling, and I’m having a hard time believing them. At this point, more than 80,000 accusations have been made.

I recognize that my experience is not necessarily representative of everyone else’s experiences, but for what it’s worth, I was involved in Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts from the age of 6 until I was 18 when I earned the rank of Eagle Scout, and during my twelve years in scouting, I never once experienced or heard about any inappropriate behavior from the adult leaders in my pack/troop. I also reached out to several men I know who were involved in Boy Scouting (from my troop as well as other troops), and none of them ever encountered anything like what’s being alleged here, either. Boy Scouts make exhaustive use of the buddy system, practically never going anywhere or doing anything alone, so the notion of widespread sexual abuse being covered up just doesn’t seem terribly practical to me. Again, I’m not suggesting that my experience and the accounts of the handful of men I asked are an exhaustive representation of everyone else’s experiences.

This award is well deserved.

Taylor Swift’s ability to tell viscerally specific yet widely applicable stories that anyone can relate to has always been her greatest strength, and her songwriting shines on “folklore”.

“The Comey Rule” was recommended to me by a friend in the days leading up to the election, and I’m very glad I took his recommendation seriously.

It’s a two part series that lays out the timeline of events that dragged the FBI into the political muck during the 2016 presidential campaign, including the scandal surrounding Hillary’s email servers, as well as the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s rather dense and you need to pay attention to the details, but I found the first half in particular to be absolutely gripping. It’s laid out so that part one covers the events leading up to the election, and part two covers the events after the election.

Though many of the characters make their political beliefs clear, I found it to have been produced in rather apolitical fashion. The show makers clearly wanted to lay out the documentable facts for the audience and help people understand what happened, and teasing out which “bombshell” headlines from that campaign season were actually of seismic importance, and which were just filler. It really impresses upon you the importance of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies remaining independent of the politics that consume the most of the federal government, and it demonstrates how our institutions can be fundamentally damaged when they kowtow to political pressure.

You can watch “The Comey Rule” on Showtime, but if you don’t have showtime, you can purchase it for seven bucks on iTunes or Amazon Prime.

COVID-19 diagnoses have been trending upwards lately, and by a lot. For a solid week now, the United States has seen more than 100,000 new cases per day. The warm weather didn’t make the virus “miraculously disappear”, but by all indications, the cold weather is allowing another, far more severe wave of infections to clobber the United States.

Wear. A. Mask.

Nobody who went into Apple’s November announcement with any idea of what they could reasonably expect came away from it disappointed (unless you were expecting AirTags, which wasn’t an unreasonable expectation, but didn’t come to fruition).

Apple’s first custom designed laptop/desktop processor is called the M1, and while nobody’s gotten their hands on one yet and Apple’s claims were a little light on specifics, it seems like it’s going to be kicking ass and taking names. They’ve put in into the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini, and thhe’re claiming it’s going to yield significantly better performance (up to 3x faster CPU) and allow for nearly double the battery life when compared to the intel processor based models that preceded them. Usually better battery life comes at the expense of performance and increased performance comes at the expense of speed, but Apple has managed to make remarkable jumps in both. And these aren’t even going to be Apple’s most impressive chips; all the machines they announced that are shipping with the M1 are casual consumer level machines. Just wait until they unveil their processors for machines built for professional use.

If you’re in the market for a new MacBook and aren’t afraid of buying a first generation product, now is the time to buy. Usually choosing which Mac is best for you can be an arduous process, but since the new MacBook Air and the new MacBook Pro both use the M1 chip, the differences are almost negligible.

The new MacBook Air comes in two preconfigured models (with the option to custom config). Both have 13” retina displays, and they have the same physical design and weight (2.8 lbs). They both have Touch ID sensors, neither have a Touch Bar.

• The baseline config costs $1000, it has 256GB of storage, and its M1 chip has an 8-core CPU and a 7-core GPU.

• The upgraded config costs $1250, it has 512GB of storage, and its M1 chip has an 8-core CPU and an 8-core GPU.

The differences between the preconfigured models are three: the amount of storage, the number of GPU cores on the M1 chip, and the price.

If you’re looking for more RAM (up to 16GB) or storage (up to 2TB), you can custom configure the new MacBook Air. While you can’t upgrade just the M1 chip to get that extra GPU core, you can toy around with the custom config options and deduce that the extra GPU core costs $50. The baseline model can be custom configured with 512GB of storage (to match Apple’s upgraded pre-configuration) for a $200 up charge, which would put it at $1200. At that point the only difference between the two machines is that extra GPU core, showing that it effectively costs $50. Not a terrible price for slightly better graphics performance, but you can’t get that upgraded GPU on the baseline model, so the only way to get it is to spring for the upgraded config which means you also have to pay for the extra storage. My recommendation would be to ignore the GPU difference and order the configuration with the amount of storage you need. If you know you don’t need 512GB of storage, there’s no point in paying a $250 up charge to get the better GPU. If you do want the 512GB of storage, don’t custom config the baseline, go ahead and get the upgraded preconfiguration and enjoy the benefits of that extra core for only $50. That said, I generally don’t think 256GB is enough storage for most people on a laptop these days. Once you sync your photos, download a movie or two, and backup your iPhone, its going going to fill up: my advice to anyone who wants a machine to last more than six months before you have to start deleting files to make room for new stuff is to go for the 512GB model.

The new M1 MacBook Pro also comes in two configurations, with even fewer differences. They both have 13” retina displays, and the same physical design and weight (3.0 lbs). Both have the Touch Bar. Both have the same M1 chip with an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU.

• The baseline config costs $1300, and has 256GB of storage.

• The upgraded config costs $1500 and has 512GB of storage.

The only difference between these machines is the storage and the price. As I said before, I don’t think 256GB is going to stretch very far for most people these days, so would recommend the 512GB model.

So taking all that into account, these four models look very similar. Across the four of them, three have the exact same M1 chip, and there are only two storage options. There are other differences worth noting, but not ones that should make a huge difference in which machine you should go for. These differences are direct results of the physical design of the machines. While the MacBook Air is slightly lighter and has less physical volume than the MacBook Pro, the reduced amount of internal space results in reduced thermal capacity and less space for batteries.

• More space for batteries obviously allows for the MacBook Pro to have slightly longer batter life—roughly 10%, based on Apple’s claims. That’s not insignificant, but both of these machines already have battery life that is so much better than the ones that came before them that either would feel like a huge upgrade over any MacBook you may currently have.

• Thermal capacity matters because even though both machines have the same chip, the MacBook Pro can use that chip at high speeds for longer amounts of time because it is better equipped to deal with the heat produced by the chip (the design of the MacBook Pro allows for better dispersal of heat than the MacBook Air’s design does, plus the MacBook Pro has a fan inside while the MacBook Air does not). Both of these computers are going to be extremely fast and very capable of everyday tasks, but the MacBook Pro will be a little better for amateur creatives or gamers: people who want to game or edit photos and videos for an extended period of time would benefit from the MacBook Pro’s increased thermal capacity. However, despite the “Pro” designation, neither of these machines are intended for truly professional use; as I mentioned before, Apple’s truly “Pro” machines are yet to come. That doesn’t mean that these machines aren’t going to be blazing fast; one of these new models will be perfect for 80% of Apple’s customers. This isn’t something you need to worry about.

• The MacBook Pro has the Touch Bar — the touchscreen panel that replaces the keyboard’s top row of function keys — and the MacBook Air does not. A few people love the Touch Bar. A lot of power users hate it. Most casual users think it’s neat and flashy, but are more or less indifferent to it. While it does add functionality, I find that the existence of an additional display on a separate physical plane from the primary display causes a little mental lag when you go to use it; because it changes dynamically to show controls for whatever app you’re using, the buttons are always in a different place making you look down and find what you’re looking for every time, whereas with a row of static, physical function keys, you can memorize which ones perform which functions so that you don’t have to look down at it each time. Whether you want a Touch Bar or not comes down to personal taste.

If you take my advice about going for the upgraded storage, there’s really only crucial decision to make, and that is whether or not you want a Touch Bar. If you do, go for the MacBook Pro for $1500. If you don’t, you should pick the MacBook Air for $1250.

For mental ease, I’ve rounded all of Apple’s prices up by $1.

Final electoral college tally seems like it’s going to be 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump. The popular vote is roughly 78,000,000 for Biden to 72,000,000 for Trump.

A few thoughts:

• We need to have a conversation about the modern utility of the electoral college, but we’ll save that for another day.

• Historian Alan Litchman’s “Thirteen Keys” framework for predicting presidential elections held up, yet again.

• For what it’s worth, my gut feeling about this election also proved to be correct. I’ve said for over a year now that the political climate leading up to this election did not feel the same as the political climate that preceded the 2016 election, and clearly that was the case. Not to brag, but my electoral college prediction map was entirely correct except for one state, which happened to be the state I’m from, funny enough.

• To those worried about election fraud: the possibility that our elections have been manipulated is certainly something worth being concerned about. However, it would be damaging to our democracy in the long run to undermine the credibility of a legitimate election by crying “fraud” where none exists simply because you aren’t pleased with the outcome. Of the dozen court cases the Trump campaign has brought in an attempt to overrule the results of the election, he’s 0 for 12. They have been laughed out of court by liberal and conservative judges after admitting that they had no grounds to allege fraud.

• The responses from world leaders and international news outlets has been very positive, as if they’re eager to welcome us back to our seat at the international table and will continue to respect us as the world’s premier superpower. It seems like the world is willing to forgive the United States for the damage and offense Trump caused them; let’s not put ourselves in a position to need to ask their forgiveness again. My favorite international headline: ”America. Great Again.”

• We can’t take our eyes off the ball yet: control of the Senate still hasn’t been decided, and there’s a good chance that Mitch McConnell could maintain his majority. If that were to happen, we would experience a two year long lame duck period where none of Joe Biden’s plans could come to fruition because Mitch McConnell would strike them down in the Senate. It isn’t over yet, though. There are still two runoff elections that have to take place in Georgia on January 5th before we’ll know if the Republicans will maintain their majority. Runoff elections occur when neither candidate in a race got more than 50% of the total votes; Georgia had two senate elections going on this cycle, and both of them are headed to runoff elections. One is between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Kelly Loeffler, and the other is between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue. Democrats must win both of these elections to break Mitch McConnell’s stranglehold. Click here to get email updates about ways you can volunteer remotely to help turn out voters in Georgia, or click here to donate to Stacey Abrams’s organization Fair Fight, which helps register voters and fight back against racist voter suppression in Georgia.

The big news for this event will be the introduction of Apple Silicon. The fact that they’re using “one more thing” in the announcement for the event is, I think, in itself significant, as well as indicative of how Apple views today’s announcements as a milestone in the history of the Mac. I’m truly expecting mind blowing announcements today.

Apple’s chip team will be the star of today’s show, but they’ve deserved more praise than they get for years now; they’re massively under appreciated. The A14 that they’ve just introduced in the new iPad Air and iPhones is significantly faster than most new PC notebooks and Chromebooks. They’ve been years ahead of their competition for many years at this point, putting out new chips every year that are only rivaled by their own chips from the previous year. Qualcomm, in the smartphone industry, simply cannot keep up. Apple is about to jump years ahead of Intel in the PC market.

Just look at some of the benchmarks from the Developer Transition Kits that run macOS on a chip that they originally designed for iPhone (the A12, from 2018) and optimized for iPads (the A12Z, which is exactly what’s in the DTKs). Imagine what they’ll be able to when they really put their weight behind notebook and desktop chips.

On that note, there‘s been speculation about whether Apple will announce notebooks or desktops, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or two of each. The AR graphic from Apple’s event page certainly seems to indicate that new MacBooks will be present; I’m hoping we will see the 12” MacBook from 2015 — which remains Apple’s most impressive notebook from a design perspective — reincarnated.

Recent leaks also seem to indicate that we may see AirTags today, but that’s an interesting possibility because AirTags aren’t a product that couple naturally with Macs; they’re iPhone accessories. We’ll see; maybe they see enough potential in AirTags to let them be the “one more thing” after they announce the Apple Silicon Macs.

My decision to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 wasn’t a difficult one, but it was a mistake. However, I believe it’s a mistake that history will judge as being a forgivable one. Nobody can be right 100% of the time, but the closest we can come is to acknowledge when we make mistakes and correct them. The time has come for America to correct one of our greatest wrongs, for the sake of our rights.

Voting for Donald Trump in 2020 will not be a mistake future generations are likely to forgive. It’s not a mistake that many people today will be likely to forgive either: in my view, anyone who has lived through the past four years and still decides that voting for Donald Trump is a good decision is a racist, a homophobe, and a xenophobe. Point blank.

That’s a strong statement, but I want to reiterate that while I have my own biases and discrete life experiences, as we all do, this isn’t about partisanship for me — I’m a registered independent and most of the candidates I’ve ever voted for have been Republicans — this is about preserving the foundations of American democracy for generations to come, and demonstrating to the world that the United States of America is truly the greatest nation on earth by rebuking hatred and division in favor of empathy and honor. The decision to choose Trump over Clinton was not very difficult for me. But the decision to choose Joe Biden over Donald Trump — to choose honor, truth, integrity, science, and democracy — that was a much easier choice.

Vote.

We’ve known Samsung will copy just about anything Apple does, including reusing Apple’s symbols and logos rather than just making their own, but it’s always been tech related. Now it seems that Samsung has even ripped off Apple’s in-house designed face masks.

Apple’s design was fairly unique, with multiple panels assembled to create a more fitted, ergonomic mask. I have more than five years of experience in the healthcare field and used plenty of PPE, including masks, and I’d never seen a design like the one Apple came up with. I think it was an original.

Nonetheless, here is Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong wearing a mask that looks strikingly similar to the Apple mask, shown in a screenshot from an Unbox Therapy video.

The complete lack of respect for intellectual property is gross. These Asian companies have no shame.

Most people first heard about Chris Taylor back in February when he garnered a few national headlines. Eight months ago, Taylor was running as a Republican for the U.S. House of Representatives seat for Arizona’s 1st congressional district, but he dropped out of the race when it was reported that he was struggling from a drug abuse relapse that resulted in a traumatic heroin overdose. Check out his interview with a local Arizona news channel to learn more about his personal story.

Now, CopyrightBro has some original reporting to contribute which adds color and context to Taylor’s story.

Following the news of his overdose and withdrawal from the race, we decided to poke around his campaign website a bit. As you might imagine of Republican campaign site for a congressional seat in a swing state in 2020, it was extremely Trump-y. Every opportunity to name drop the president was taken. They opted for utilitarian fonts that appeal to men with militarized concepts of masculinity. It was extremely polarizing. The policy section was light on specifics but used plenty of inflammatory language and relied on common Fox News tropes. Interestingly though, the website offered up Taylor’s personal phone number. I decided to reach out to him, personally.

To be frank, my initial intentions in contacting him weren’t entirely innocent and devoid of political influence. I did want to wish him well, but in doing so, I wanted to demonstrate that empathy is more important than dying on political hills, and that connecting through our shared humanity is a good way to traverse the widening ideological boundaries that plague our country and are often exacerbated and exploited by Republicans. I truly did want to wish him a swift and successful recovery, but I also intended for my message to serve as a subtle indictment of the way his party had abandoned honor, empathy, and respect in recent years, as well as their inaction when it comes to addressing America’s opioid crisis. The message I sent read:

Hi, my name is Broc. I’m from NC and may not have been a fan of some of your political views, but I just saw your story online and wanted to say I hope you get the help you need and that your recovery goes well. The opioid epidemic doesn’t discriminate based on political parties, and well wishes for folks trying to overcome that challenge shouldn’t either. 🇺🇸🤟🏼

To my surprise, he responded. And his response shocked me. He said:

Thank you so much! And I bet we aren’t too far off, politically. I actually can’t stand Trump.

Wh.. what? I was blown away. I didn’t expect a reply, and I certainly wasn’t expecting him to say that. My response was a bit incredulous:

Dude really? Your website is very ride-or-die Trumpian haha. I guess you gotta play to your audience a bit. […]

Again, Chris’s reply struck me:

Yeah, I had to, but it’s not worth selling my soul for his hatefulness.

Hatefulness and selfishness are not only afflictions that ail Donald Trump, they’re endemic to the friends he’s found in the Republican Party. The only politician to contact Chris while he was in the hospital recovering from his overdose was his Democratic opponent—no one from the Republican Party reached out to him. He recently announced that he is now supporting that Democratic candidate who was his former opponent. That’s not the only Democrat he’s supporting, though.

In further conversations, Chris revealed to me that he was privately supporting Pete Buttigieg in the presidential primaries, and even told me that Mayor Pete was the only candidate he had ever donated money to. I was also a big fan of Pete, and I personally donated to and volunteered for his campaign, in addition to endorsing him here on CopyrightBro. It was remarkable for me to learn that we really were on the same political page, as he had suggested in his first message to me. It gives me a little bit of hope that not every Republican in office right now is as bought into the performance as they seem.

If you’re a lifelong Republican, it’s worth considering how many more Republican politicians may be running under that label and being manipulated by the Republican Party writ large. How many others’ commitments to Donald Trump self serving, devisive antics are simply a facade they’ve been forced to erect for the sake of receiving support from the Republican Party’s political machine? For people who truly hold some conservative beliefs, considering this paradox for more than a few seconds will lead you to an uncomfortable mental place.

Do your allegiances lie with Donald Trump? If so, you should be offended my the prospect that many Republican politicians don’t actually support him, and are taking advantage of your votes by riding his coattails.

-or-

Do your allegiances lie with your conservative principles? If so, you should take note of the fact that Republican politicians who share your beliefs are breaking from Donald Trump, and consider that Trump is more of a demagogue than a true conservative.

The Republican Party is in disarray: they’re corrupt, they lie, they’re running out of principled stances. That doesn’t mean that the same is necessarily true for conservatism; not all conservative principles are useless or harmful. America’s political system is being ruined by the two party system, and what we need is more parties, not less. For the sake of the future of American politics, let’s hope there are more people like Chris who could build new, righteous political parties that incorporate some legitimate conservative principles once the current Republican Party inevitably implodes.

Today, Chris Taylor tweeted a message announcing his endorsement of Joe Biden. In the wake of his endorsement this morning, we reached out to Chris again, and he provided the following statement regarding his decision:

I swore an oath to the Constitution, I will defend it with my life. There is a reason we don’t swear an oath to the President, but that’s where the allegiance lies today in the Republican Party and that’s why I can’t be a part of it anymore. We need to defend all of the constitutional amendments as vigorously as we defend the Second Amendment: especially the First Amendment, all of it. Freedom of religion means all religions, not just Christianity. Freedom of speech means that athletes have the right to kneel in protest during the national anthem, that people have every right to peacefully protest racial inequality and police brutality, that businesses have the right to mandate masks during a pandemic. Freedom of the press means not discrediting and disregarding reputable news organizations by calling them fake news and “the enemy of the people” simply because the coverage is unflattering.

With all the different serious fires raging in our country right now, the ideal situation would be to elect a once-in-a-generation kind of leader. A professional firefighter, figuratively speaking— a fire science expert who knows exactly what to do to put the fires out and who possesses the courage needed to advance the firehose to the seat of the raging inferno. Someone to finally close this devastating chapter in American history and ultimately heal and unite our wounded nation.

How we long for the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, the talent of JFK, the energy and compassion of Bobby Kennedy, the tenacity of Teddy Roosevelt and the steady crisis leadership of FDR. I don’t pretend to believe Joe Biden will be that caliber of leader. But I know in my heart that Joe has the love, empathy, compassion, and courageous soul needed to at least attempt to put those fires out.

With the current occupant of the White House, the little hope I ever had that he would even try to do the right thing in any given situation is lost completely. I’m endorsing Joe Biden because I know at the very least, he won’t start anymore fires. Donald Trump has and will continue to light new fires, and he will keep pouring gasoline on the ones that are already raging. He’s unfit for office of any level, and his repeated, disgusting remarks about America’s war heroes wholly disqualify him from continuing to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

It’s evident that Chris’s decision to support Joe Biden did not come as a result of him being a closeted Democrat. He made this decision because Joe Biden is a better vessel of many true conservative ideals than Donald Trump.

In any case, publicly endorsing Biden is an incredible, courageous conclusion to his 2020 character arc of political reckoning and personal growth. I don’t know Chris terribly well, but if I know anything about him at all, these three things are true:

1. He has massive balls.

2. He gives me hope for the future of responsible conservative ideas.

3. He makes me proud, and whether get’s back into the fray of national politics or not, he’ll make you proud. Anyone in America would be lucky to have a Congressman like him.

Sam Fossum, reporting for CNN:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski announced Saturday that she will ultimately vote yes on Amy Coney Barrett's confirmationto the Supreme Court of the United States.

Four weeks ago:

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said on Sunday that she will not support President Donald Trump’s nomination of a replacement to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before Election Day.

“For weeks, I have stated that I would not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to the election. Sadly, what was then a hypothetical is now our reality, but my position has not changed,” Murkowski said in a statement.

“I did not support taking up a nomination eight months before the 2016 election to fill the vacancy created by the passing of Justice Scalia,” she added. “We are now even closer to the 2020 election – less than two months out – and I believe the same standard must apply.”

Of course she changed her mind. Did we expect her to actually do the right thing? No, but still. Fuck Lisa Murkowski.

There’s a good chance that the Senate will soon confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Donald Trump quickly nominated Barrett to the court following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month, in hopes of rushing through another SCOTUS appointment before the election. Amy Coney Barrett is a devout catholic and a member of People of Praise, a Christian faith commune that believes women shouldn’t hold positions of leadership (a source of internal conflict for her, I imagine).

I’ll cut to the chase: if the Senate confirms Barrett to the court, it will be a disaster for the United States. Supreme Court Justices hold their positions for life, so this would cause a drastic imbalance on the court that would last for decades.

In her confirmation hearings (which have been taking place over the past few days), she has been asked how she would rule if presented with cases that would give her the opportunity to overturn previously decided cases, and she’s shown a blatant disregard for precedent. She has indicated that she would be open to reversing several important Supreme Court decisions, including ones that determined the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, upheld the Affordable Care Act (which prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to Americans with preexisting conditions), and established the trimester framework that dictates the legality of abortion.

And she will have the opportunity to do those things and more. There’s a case scheduled for just four weeks from now which could deconstruct the Affordable Care Act, and there are also likely to be cases that could determine the outcome of the election if Trump continues down his path of feigning voter fraud because he knows he’s losing. If she is appointed to the court, Barrett could very well be the justice who hands Trump four more years in office despite the will of the people.

While Democrats are doing what they can to delay her confirmation until after the election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown on multiple occasions that he’s perfectly willing to change the rules as he goes and punt this nomination through, no matter what. There is only one way to stop it for sure, and that’s for enough Republicans to vote against confirming her. While that may seem like a lost cause, history shows us that phone calls and emails from constituents can influence how senators vote, and this close to an election, they have to be especially considerate of what the people want. Our only chance to prevent Barrett’s confirmation is to flood their phone lines and email boxes with messages making it clear that the voters want the next elected president to nominate the next SCOTUS Justice.

Click here to find out who your senators are and let them know how you feel about this.

Not sure what to say? Whether you call and get a voicemail box or a real person, or whether you’re sending an email, here’s an easy script you can follow:

Hi, my name is _______, and I live in _______. I’m reaching out to share my thoughts about the pending confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.

Given that voting has already began for the upcoming election, I believe that it should be the next president’s decision as to who should be appointed to the court. It’s not right to rush a nominee through at this point, and efforts to do so make the Republican Party look corrupt, morally inconsistent, and disconnected from their constituents.

Please vote against the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett and allow the people’s voice to be heard in this matter by waiting to let the next president fill the vacancy.

Thanks for your time, and I’ll remember your decision in this matter when I make my decision at the ballot box.

This is going to be one of the most important things that happen in American politics this year, possibly even more important than the election. Do your part and reach out to your senators, because at this point, we are our own last hope.

Just about everyone in America realizes that this election is going to have massive consequences for our country for decades to come. What a lot of people don’t realize is that as of today, there are only three weeks left until the end of the election. It’s time to rally.

The polls look good right now (I’m knocking on wood, trust me), but things can always change and the stakes are too high to take our eye off the ball. There are a variety of ways for you to get involved and help Joe Biden and Kamala Harris snag a dub (as well as other candidates down the ballot), and it’s time to kick it into high gear.

The first and easiest way is to donate. South Carolina Senate challenger Jaime Harrison’s campaign actually set a record for the most money raised in a quarter by a senate challenger, but that record could galvanize big Republican donors with millions of dollars to spare hoping to keep Lindsey Graham and other slimy Republicans in power. Now is the time to donate, if you have the extra cash; we can’t afford to cede any fundraising ground. Click here to donate to Joe Biden or here to donate to the most competitive Senate races.

Now is also the time to be talking to your friends to make sure they have a plan to vote early. Get the word out and make sure the people around you know what they need to do. In 2016, Donald Trump won one state by just two votes per precinct. TWO VOTES!!!

I’m usually not one to encourage social media use, but we also need to be sharing lots of pro-Biden and pro-democrat content. Everyone already has their mind made up about whether they like Trump or not, but they may not have decided yet whether they think it’s worth their time to vote for Biden. We need to be spreading content that highlights his humanity and his plans, creating a marked contrast with Donald Trump’s campaign of aimless vitriol.

You should also be volunteering: you do things like calling and texting voters, or you could sign up to work at a polling place.

We have the power to change the course of American history and kick Trump and his cronies out of office before their weakness and corruption cause more harm to our democracy, we just have to use that power. Now is the time.

You love to see it. 

My last round of predictions and gut feelings was astoundingly incorrect, but there are a few things that have been on my mind leading up to this event, so here they are.

Obviously, we’re going to get iPhones. 5G seems inevitable. The rumors are suggesting there’ll be four new models this year, which in my opinion is too many. The rumors are also suggesting that between the two pro models (both of which are rumored to be getting bigger, which sucks), the Pro Max is going to get better camera improvements than the Pro (non-max), which really blows. I’m not a huge fan of massive phones, but I am a huge fan of great cameras, and with four new models, and that doesn’t seem like a compromise I should be forced to make.

AirTags seem to have been shelved yet again, but the HomePod mini rumors have been swirling up. I don’t know how excited I am about a smaller HomePod. The HomePod has always focused on quality sound over it’s smart capabilities, and frankly that’s been a good play because Siri is quite a disappointment these days. I don’t see why they would introduce a smaller, cheaper HomePod that ultimately will not sound as good (and again, sound quality is the only area the HomePod has excelled in), unless they’ve got some serious Siri improvements up their sleeve as well. But my god, don’t count those chickens yet.

It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see Apple Silicon at this event, but that would be a nice surprise. I can’t wait to see what they’re capable of doing in that arena.

If you think this needed to be said, if you think they had a point, if you think what they said was funny: fuck you. These people are cruel, racist, and self-serving, and they lack any capacity for empathy. They’re a good example of the worst type of human beings our country is capable of producing.

Also, their grammar was predictably atrocious.

Read the original story from the Grand Forks Herald about Elvia Ramirez’s beautiful life and tragic death.

“The Social Dilemma” is a new documentary on Netflix that talks about the dangers posed by social networks and other big tech companies who draw large portions of their revenue from advertising. It details how the people who created platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and others intentionally designed features to exploit human psychology and make their products addictive. It’s a good follow up to “The Great Hack”, another incredible documentary that explores how dangerous these companies are through a more political lens.

“The Social Dilemma” features a long list of ex-silicon valley inventors and programmers confirming the fears I’ve had about social media for a while now. The whole problem boils down to greed. Companies that make their money from advertising are greedy, and they deal in the business of selling human attention. The more of your attention you give to them, the more they can predict and influence your behaviors, and they’ve demonstrated that they have no problems auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder, and subsequently allowing those bidders to use your attention and the mountains of data they have on you to manipulate your feelings and your behavior. We saw what this can lead to with the Cambridge Analytica scandal; political polarization is only getting worse, and it’s already to the point where people are practically experiencing separate realities because algorithms — that very few people understand, even within the companies — are presenting them with inflammatory ads that offer “alternate facts” based on what they think will keep them engaged with the platform. The more time you spend on a social media app, the more ads you see, and the more money they make. Their goal is to capture 100% of your attention, and they have more than a few unsavory tricks up their sleeves.

The picture this film paints is bleak, but we do have a chance of brightening it up. People have got to understand what’s going on, how if affects them, and where the path we’re currently on will lead us so that we can start a real conversation about these issues and demand that companies like Google and Facebook be regulated. On an individual level, the best thing you can do is to delete your accounts. Personally, I’ve deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts, and I’ve switched to using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine instead of Google.

I’ll admit that deleting your social media accounts is easier said than done. People are afraid they’ll lose touch with people or that they’ll be less informed. While I am in touch with fewer people on a regular basis, my connections with those people are much deeper and far more fulfilling. I’m more informed than ever, and my opinions are more reasoned and less reactive. I recognize that not everyone has the self control to delete their accounts, but there are some things you can do to reduce their influence over you. For starters:

• Never share anything that you haven’t personally fact checked from at least one other source (by the way, your friend who also shared it isn’t a source).

• In services that allow it, opt out of receiving personalized ads. Never click on ads.

• Turn off notifications so you’re less tempted to log on.

#deletefacebook

Two days ago, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that they were cancelling the second debate, originally scheduled for this upcoming Wednesday, October 15th.

After news of Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis broke just nine days ago, the commission had announced that they were transitioning to a virtual event, presumably to protect the moderators, participants, and staff safe from the infectious Trump campaign.

But that just wouldn’t do for Donald Trump (who was hospitalized with COVID just a week ago). He refused to participate in a virtual debate, calling the proposal “ridiculous”. According to Trump’s rent-a-doc physician Sean CONley, Trump is no longer contagious. Even though he had the virus just a few days ago, it seems to have just disappeared. Like a miracle. The standard time for quarantine has been fourteen days all along, but somehow, Trump is a-okay in less than 10? Interesting.

No, no. Don’t be fooled by the blurred line between medicine and politics. Trump is still contagious, and he should not be returning to public events for several more days. I’m positive he pressured Conley into telling the press that he would be fine to return to business as usual. His campaign had to know the Commission wouldn’t allow an in-person debate so soon after his diagnosis, and having Conley give the all clear was a tactic to give Trump some wiggle room to at least pretend he wanted to debate in person; Trump never would’ve agreed to a virtual debate because it highlights his failure to contain the pandemic. Best case scenario for Trump, they cancel the debate altogether, or refuse to move to an in-person debate, giving Trump latitude to back out. Worst case for Trump, they allow the debate to happen in-person, and he has the opportunity to infect Joe Biden with Trumplague.

Donald Trump may have walked away from the first debate thinking he won, but he was the only one. Even others in his campaign came away realizing how much more sane, reasonable, and likable Biden was than Trump. They know he’s weak, and they don’t want to showcase his weakness on the national stage again, if they can prevent it. The possibility of Trump refusing to debate has been lingering for months, and now it’s coming to fruition. Add that to the list of our destroyed democratic norms.

As of right now, the next debate is scheduled for October 22nd. We’ll see what excuse the Trump campaign comes up with for that one.

I hate headlines that ask a question, so if you want the baby and not the labor, I’ll spare you a few minutes of reading: no, trans people don’t seem to be murdered at a disproportionate rate.

It’s common for trans rights advocates to assert that trans people are being murdered violently and at a higher rate than other groups in America, offering anecdotal evidence to support their claim. This goes without saying, but nobody deserves to be murdered on account of their gender. Murder is a heinous crime, and anyone who kills a trans person because of their gender deserves to be charged with murder and a hate crime. That said, the argument that they are being hunted down simply doesn’t hold water when you look at the numbers.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, this year is tied for the highest year on record for number of trans murder victims in the United States. Upon reading that, I expected them to report a number in the hundreds or thousands. The number they reported was 31.

According to the FBI, the United States has roughly 16,000 murders each year. If you do the math, the percentage of those murder victims who were transgender would be 0.1%. Surely, the HRC and trans rights advocates aren’t saying that’s a disproportionately HIGH number? That would mean the average number of trans and gender nonconforming people in America is less than one in one thousand, and that certainly doesn’t seem to fit within their narrative.

Of course, the HRC does offer the caveat that the number of trans murders goes underreported. I’m sure thats true to some extent, but I doubt that’s causing such a drastic discrepancy. So which is it?

Based on the numbers, it seems like either the trans/gender nonconforming community is fortunate to be murdered disproportionately less than everyone else, or the number of trans people is so tiny that 31 murders is a proportionate figure. But to say that 31 is disproportionately high and that they’re being viciously hunted down because of their gender would indicate that the number of trans and gender nonconforming people in the United States is microscopically small.

Of course, it again goes without saying that each of those 31 lives had value and that people don’t deserve to be murdered for something as inconsequential as their gender. However, if trans rights advocates hope to bring people on board with their cause, they should use claims that are backed up by statistics; we get enough attacks on science and data from the far right, we don’t need them from the left, too.

The final episode of “Ted Lasso” was released last Friday, and it was a great conclusion to the season. If you haven’t heard of “Ted Lasso”, it’s a new TV+ show about an amateur American football coach hired as head coach of a premier league soccer team in Britain. It’s a terrific concept and it’s absolutely hilarious, but not quite like the trailer presents.

While it is extremely funny, it’s also dynamic and the plot doesn’t shy away from heavier topics affecting the characters. It celebrates open mindedness and healthy expressions of masculinity; it feels like a boys club, but an inclusive one that’s happy for you to a part of it.

“Ted Lasso” is my favorite TV+ show so far, and my favorite show of this year. Check it out.

The United States has a uniquely backwards relationship with sexuality that can be traced back to the Puritans, and it’s something that most other developed countries aren’t plagued by. Anything relating to sexuality is shamed and considered taboo. There’s a willful ignorance when it comes to the sexuality of teenagers and young adults. Harmless, natural expressions of sexuality are actively repressed, especially in kids and teenagers. Anyone who’s attractions fall outside of the “normal” heterosexual variety are shamed and compelled to hide their sexuality. Some preach abstinence for these groups, even though mountains of data exist proving that abstinence-only sex education leads to increases in STIs and unwanted pregnancies. Still, many states have abstinence-only sex education, or sex education that’s so inhibited by what the instructors are allowed to tell the students that it’s effectively useless.

Because we’re trained to see any topic relating to sexuality as impolite and shameful, the problems we face with regards to sex education naturally aren’t something that we talk about very often. I think it’s an important conversation to have for a plethora of reasons, so I wanted to offer my personal experience with public school sex ed as an example of how inadequate it is and why things need to change.

The school system I attended (shout out to Gaston County, whose interstate welcome signs aptly read “Welcome to Gaston County, Please Don’t Litter”), offered two opportunities for students to receive a watered down version of sex education, which, in both cases, required a signed permission slip from a parent for the student to attend.

Fifth Grade

The first course, offered in the final weeks of fifth grade, was a single, sex-segregated, two hour presentation called “family life” (a name that none of the kids in the class really understood before or after the course). Even though it was specifically tailored for a room full of of boys, the class spent almost the entire two hours teaching us about the female reproductive system. One of the two hours was devoting to watching videos of how a babies grow in the womb. And periods! My god, did they tell us about periods. They probably spent thirty minutes telling us about periods and thirty seconds telling us about ejaculation, but hey, why would we need to know about the fluids that would eventually be produced by our own genitals?

I came away from it having learned very little new information about my own body, and nearly nothing I hadn’t already guessed. It was all very hypothetical and entirely divorced from any degree of specificity. A lot of it didn’t make sense, but the atmosphere was so tense that nobody asked questions for fear of getting in trouble. They devoted about ten minutes to covering the male body. The extent of the knowledge presented about what changes we should expect was:

• Soon enough, you’ll get taller and your voice will change.

• Some hair is gonna grow in new places: in your pants, on your legs, your armpits, maybe even your chest in a few years, if you’re lucky.

• You may need to start shaving soon.

• Your penis won’t necessarily look like all your buddies’ because a lot of you had the tips chopped off when you were born but some didn’t. It’s called “circumcision” but it doesn’t matter or make a difference either way.

• For roughly the next decade, it’ll be normal for your dick to get hard at random times throughout the day and no you can’t control it but you should be embarrassed by it and do everything you can to hide it. (Why does it get hard, you may wonder: so did we, but they never told us why erections happen.)

• At some point, your balls will start to make sperm, the ingredient that combines with a female’s egg to make a baby start to grow. (You may wonder how it combines with an egg: again, so did we.)

• Deodorant is EXTREMELY important. The teacher probably mentioned a dozen times how essential it was to start wearing deodorant.

And that was pretty much it. They did curtly ask if we had any questions, and I presume everyone had so many questions that we didn’t have a clue what to ask. One brave soul did raise his hand to mumble a question about condoms, which the instructor refused to answer. I had no clue what “condom” meant; the instructor hadn’t mentioned anything about them (the boy who asked the question must’ve heard about them from an older brother or something). No further questions were taken.

I did walk away with a goody bag, though, after being sworn to secrecy and threatened with a trip to the principal’s office if we discussed any of what we had just learned after the class had ended. What was in the goody bag, you ask? A tiny stick of deodorant, some paperwork, and a signed card promising I would wait (though they never explained what it was I was waiting for). Certainly no condoms or anything useful, but rumor had it that the girls’ bags had pads in them.

Naturally, my parents asked what I’d learned, and I told them it was mostly about girls and deodorant. Some of my male friends’ parents had apparently received similar responses from their sons, because I specially remember overhearing several phone conversations between my parents and my male friends’ parents about the course, wondering why they’d chosen to exhaust the two hours focusing primarily on the changes girls could expect rather than boys.

Seventh Grade

The second course was actually a series of three, hour-long classes worked into the health class curriculum and taught by the PE coach, so it was also segregated by sex. It was certainly more informative and frank than the first course, but it was still very inadequate. This time, the class focused on puberty and maturation a bit more broadly, with the first day being dedicated to how our bodies would develop, from height and musculature to our nutritional needs and safe ways to exercise. There were only brief mentions of deepening voices, growth of body hair, and genital development.

The second day focused on the science of reproduction, explaining in great detail how a fertilized egg becomes an embryo, a fetus, and eventually a baby. Of course it’s important for prospective parents to understand that process in detail, but is it necessary for 12 and 13 year olds who don’t even know how the process starts? Most of us were quite bored and uninterested that day.

The last day was only half the length as a result of our regular class schedule, so it was primarily used to answer questions. Middle schoolers are certainly less innocent than elementary school kids, so there were a couple questions fielded by the health teacher that didn’t come up in the fifth grade class. The funniest and most memorable question was when someone asked if the penis was a muscle, to which the coach emphatically informed us that it is NOT a muscle and, as if he could read minds, urged us not to try to stretch it or otherwise exercise it with the goal make it bigger (he offered us a consolation prize though, promising us that they’d get bigger with time and that no partner worth having would care how big it is anyway). We were all ready to leave the class after that. Nobody was brave enough to ask the biggest question we all had.

___ Ed.

You may have noticed that none of my sex education addressed anything to do with sex, the verb. Never any mention of what happens during sex, what consent means, how to put on a condom, how to avoid sexually transmitted infections, etc. There was certainly no mention of oral sex or what options may be available to the boys in the class who were attracted to the same sex.

There was absolutely no reference to sexual intercourse at all, much less as something that people would ever do for fun or for emotional benefit. The closest we came to an acknowledgment that sex is not exclusively for reproductive purposes was when the PE coach told us (in response to a rather blunt question about the definitions of “ejaculation” and “orgasm”) that ejaculation and orgasm sort of the same thing, and that that’s what it’s called when semen comes out of your penis and that it feels really good. The coach was kind of a bro.

You may be thinking, “well, by middle school, some kids are going to know what sex is”, and that’s true. Some of my classmates did know what sex was by that point, but the problem lies in that the coach wasn’t allowed to define it for the majority of us who didn’t know what it was, and that resulted in most of us feeling like we were on the wrong side of an inside joke most of the time.

Call me a late bloomer, but I was in ninth grade before I realized what sex actually was, and that a penis had to go inside a vagina for the sperm and egg cells to come together, and I only learned that when I discovered porn (I guess up until that point I thought naked cuddling was sex). The sex education I received was so inadequate that for four years after my first sex ed class and two years after my seventh grade sex ed class, I honestly thought sperm crawled out of a man’s penis, across the bedsheets, and into a female’s vagina like sticky, microscopic inchworms. Laughable. But not actually that funny when you consider the theoretical consequences.

The sex education my classmates and I received was woefully incomplete. As a matter of fact, though, the consequences weren’t all that theoretical. One of my classmates missed a few weeks of class in eighth grade following the birth of her daughter, and now, there’s a little girl running around somewhere named after a “twilight” character because she was born amidst a teenybopper, pop culture phenomenon and her mother was a thirteen year old girl. Talk about consequences.

The first presidential debate was widely regarded as a shit show, but that wasn’t entirely how I felt about it. Calling it a shit show implies that everyone involved detracted from what the event could’ve been, and that isn’t what happened. Rather than type ad nauseam about the many aspects of this debate that could be analyzed, I’m just going to give my thoughts on some key moments and how I perceived each candidate and their debate strategies.

BIDEN

Biden’s strategy seemed to be to ignore Trump’s petty insults, fact check his most egregious lies, call out his hypocrisy and his ineffectiveness, and to communicate his own plans when possible. It was a tall order given Trump’s behavior, but he faired well enough, and I think people recognize that most of the incivility and interruptions were coming almost exclusively from the other side of the stage.

He did a great job of not lingering on Trump’s baseless attacks and moving back to the issues he wanted to talk about, at times looking at the camera and speaking directly to the viewers about what he intended to do if elected, ignoring Trump’s antics and interruptions in the background.

You could tell he was trying to remain calm, and while he never lost his cool, it was evident that he got annoyed a few times, but that annoyance led to several good lines:

• Early on in the debate where it became clear that Trump had no intention of allowing anyone else to talk, Biden said to a flailing Chris Wallace: “You’re not gonna be able to shut him up.

• At one point, fed up with Trump’s aimless interruptions, Biden exclaimed “Will you shut up, man?”

• In response to Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the number of COVID-19 deaths: “It is what it is because you are who you are.”

• He flatly called Trump a clown and a racist.

• "You're the worst president America's ever had."

TRUMP

Donald Trump had roughly two coherent responses, and spent the rest of his time making blunt interjections, tactless interruptions, and talking over not only Joe Biden, but over moderator Chris Wallace as well. His conduct was so bad that Wallace had to remind him during the debate that he was breaking the rules he agreed to. He behaved like a playground bully.

Trump is behind in the polls, and this was a good chance to make up some ground. His debate performance against Hillary Clinton was a huge boon for his 2016 campaign, so I’m sure his 2020 campaign was hoping the debate would boost their poll numbers this time, too.

Despite the significance of this event for Trump’s campaign, there isn’t very much to analyze in the way of his debate strategy: his only goal seemed to be to talk over Biden and the moderator as much as possible, and the “points” he made were nearly all ad hominem attempts to destroy Biden’s character. It was a similar approach to the one he took in 2016, but with one key distinction: this time, it didn’t work.

Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. Biden wasn’t in the center of the national spotlight for decades before ending up on the debate stage, and while he’s less well known, he’s generally more likable and people find him honest and sincere. Blaming the muck of the D.C. swamp on Hillary Clinton was easy for Trump to do as a political newcomer. It was nearly impossible for him to do this time, now that he’s been in charge for the past four years and virtually nobody (except the top 1%, perhaps) is better off than they were in 2016. The only argument Trump can make is “yeah things suck right now, but they would be worse with Joe Biden”, which isn’t exactly a home run message. I doubt anyone who wasn’t already in Trump’s base watched this debate and came away from it thinking he was the more reasonable candidate.

KEY MOMENTS

As expected, Wallace raised the issue of Trump paying just $750 in federal income tax. Trump’s response was that he paid “millions of dollars” in federal income tax, and that “you’ll get to see it” as soon as he’s able to release his tax returns. He claims that he can’t release his tax returns right now because he’s under audit, but it’s worth noting that he used the same excuse in 2016. Also worth noting, being under audit does not prevent you from releasing your tax returns. Every president is required to be audited by the IRS, and they all managed to release their tax returns.

At one point, Joe Biden was talking about his late son Beau Biden’s military achievements. Trump interrupted Biden, saying “I don’t know Beau, I know Hunter” and proceeded to antagonize him over Hunter Biden’s prior struggle with cocaine. Joe acknowledged this, saying that like a lot of people, his son did have a drug problem but that he overcame it, and that he was proud of him. In the midst of the opioid crisis, it was an extremely tone deaf and downright cruel interjection from Trump, and it teed Biden up for a heartfelt moment that would resonate with millions of Americans who’ve been affected by substance abuse and addiction.

The biggest takeaway from this debate was when the moderator asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacy. Trump initially said that he was prepared to do so, but he immediately tried to change the subject. When pressed by Biden and Wallace to actually denounce white supremacy, Trump’s response was to tell the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”. It was less a denunciation than a call to arms. The Proud Boys like his message to them so much that they put it on t-shirts. It goes without saying, but whether Trump is truly a white supremacist or whether he feels he can’t afford to alienate even a single, fringe member of his shrinking base is not the point.

WHAT’S NEXT?

In the wake of Trump’s COVID diagnosis, it seems hugely unlikely that the second and third presidential debates will go forward as planned, if at all.

Reports indicate that Trump knew he had been exposed prior to the first debate, yet refused to warn the Biden campaign or give anyone a heads up that he could’ve been contagious; it’s criminal negligence. It’s also disrespectful and irresponsible that the Trump family didn’t wear masks for the duration of the debate: if they take them off next time, kick them out. Better yet, just don’t allow them inside the venue in the first place.

If I were running the Biden campaign, I would insist on much stronger health precautions if more in-person debates are to occur.

Two weeks ago, Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE at their online event.

The Apple Watch Series 6 boasts a few new features over the Series 5, but it’s certainly more of a refinement than a revolution. It now includes a sensor capable of measuring blood oxygen, an always-on altimeter, a processor that’s 20% faster, and the always-on display is now 2.5x brighter while inactive outside. It also comes in a few new aluminum and stainless steel finishes, with two new styles of bands.

The Apple Watch SE is a combination of features from the Series 3, 4, 5, and 6, made to be a bit more future proof than the older models while coming in at a lower price point. There’s nothing new here, so we’re going to focus primarily on the Series 6’s new features, and then offer some comparisons at the end of the article for people considering which model they may want to upgrade to.

The blood oxygen sensor is the most advertised new feature, but in my opinion, it doesn’t deserve to be. It’s a nice feature to have and it seems to be fairly accurate, but the sensor is quite temperamental and doesn’t always produce a reading if your wrist isn’t perfectly flat and still. Even if the sensor was a lot more capable, it still just doesn’t have a lot of utility. More data is always better than less, and I’m sure it will be used more frequently than the ECG sensor (mostly because it only takes half the time and it’s something the watch can do on its own throughout the day without user initiation), but I still can’t imagine that it will be used except by people experiencing medical emergencies, or perhaps very serious athletes. I’m sure it’s for legal reasons, bit it’s important to note that Apple includes a disclaimer in the blood oxygen app that the pulse oximetry readings it provides are not intended for medical use, which raises the question of what they actually are intended for.

The story on the display is short: the display is noticeably brighter while your wrist is down. It’s nice.

The altimeter is a nice feature to have and it seems to be fairly accurate, and I’m excited to toy around with it on a hike. I imagine it will make the “flights climbed” metric in the Activity app a bit more precise.

Apple claims the S6 chip is 20% faster than the S5 (which was exactly the same as the two year old S4), and I beliebe them, but 20% honestly isn’t enough of an improvement to be noticeable. It’ll just make this watch a little more future proof.

My overall experience with this watch has not been terrific. WatchOS is a fairly simple operating system (relative to iOS), and I’ve never had problems with it being buggy or feeling undercooked in the past, but that’s a big issue with this one. In the first two days I had to power cycle it four or five times to resolve various bugs. I encountered an issue during setup where 90% of the usual complications available to you when creating a new watch face simply weren’t available. At seemingly random times, it becomes impossible to access Notification Center and Control Center.

Another thing I don’t like about this watch (well, less about this watch and more any watch running WatchOS 7) is the lack of Force Touch. For some reason — I presume to be more consistent with the current iPhone models — Apple has removed the watch’s ability to detect a more forceful press on the display as opposed to regular taps. The feature on the iPhone was called 3D Touch, but it was the same thing, just less widely implemented and not as necessary to operating the device. They finally got rid of 3D Touch on all the new iPhone models last year, and now with WatchOS 7, they’ve taken the ability to use Force Touch away from every Apple Watch. The new watch models don’t have the hardware necessary to detect those more forceful presses, so it’s clear that it isn’t coming back. I’m personally quite upset by this. Force touch was an integral part of the watch experience from day one, and it added a lot of convenience and depth to an operating system that was hugely restricted by a tiny display, effectively doubling the number of controls that could be accessed from any given screen. Now, if you want to end navigation directions, you have to tap a back arrow several times and find a new “end” button that’s difficult to locate, as opposed to force touching one time and then tapping the “end” button. If you want to clear all the notifications in Notification Center, you now have to scroll all the way to the top and tap an ugly button that says “clear all” rather than force touching to be presented with that button. Changing watch faces now takes a few extra seconds, because you have to long press on the face to enter the editing mode, and then again to get out of it. It’s a markedly worse user experience.

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth your money to upgrade, the factors to consider are:

1. Which model do you have now?

2. How much do the Series 6 specific features appeal to you?

If you have a Series 4 or Series 5 and the always-on display, always-on altimeter, and blood oxygen sensor aren’t of critical importance to you, then the Series 6 is only a modest upgrade, and the SE wouldn’t really be an upgrade at all, so you can feel good about holding on to your watch for another year.

If you have a Series 3 or older, you may want to consider upgrading, but perhaps not to the Series 6. There’s a good chance that the Apple Watch SE will be a better (and more affordable) fit for you if the display isn’t a huge factor for you. The Apple Watch SE has the same physical design with the larger screen, and it can take advantage of all the new watch faces with richer complications. It uses the S5 chip, does NOT have an always-on display or an always-on altimeter, and it can’t take ECGs or blood oxygen measurements, but otherwise, it’s the same as the Series 6, and it costs quite a bit less. It’s also worth mentioning that for people interested in a cellular watch, you can get a cellular SE model for only a $50 up charge, as opposed to the $100 up charge for the Series 6 models.

No matter which model you currently have, if you’re hugely attracted to the always-on display, then you’ll obviously want to go for the Series 6. If the pulse oximetry capabilities or the always-on altimeter are important to you, then again, you’ll want to spring for the Series 6.

I wouldn’t wish sickness on anyone, but Donald Trump isn’t just anyone. He’s the man trying the hardest to unravel our democracy for personal gain. He’s spent countless hours denying the gravity of and spreading misinformation about the pandemic which now ails him because he thought it made him look bad, and the optics were more important to him than the 200,000+ lives lost as a result of his negligence. Karma is a bitch, and Donald Trump deserves this.

This news raises a few practical questions and concerns for the next few weeks. Will Trump get a boost out of pity? Will his base see this news as a national tragedy and rally around him, potentially pulling in some undecided voters? I doubt it. I don’t see how news of Donald Trump getting infected with the virus he played down for months will do anything other than make him appear weak to his base, or force them to believe he was lying the whole time. If anything, I think this will raise concerns about Trump’s longevity and help Biden. After all, Trump’s beloved stock market doesn’t seem to have a ton of confidence in him.

If his case is asymptomatic or very mild, he could actually take this as a chance to say “look, I had it and it wasn’t bad, so it was smart of me to downplay it”, which could be more influential for undecided voters.

Some people have suggested that the president may not have COVID-19 at all, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think any “look how strong he is for beating COVID” bump he may receive would be extremely small, and the people who would say that are almost certainly in his base already. It could drive turnout a little bit, but I doubt it. A campaign’s most valuable resource is the candidate’s time, and even if Trump wanted a get out of jail free card for the last two debates, having to spend half the time between now and the election quarantined is an astronomically high price to pay.

However, reports indicate that Trump is already experiencing mild symptoms, which raises the question, if his sickness progresses and becomes more debilitating or even life threatening, what happens? Surely, Trump won’t participate in the next presidential debate in person. Could the rest of the debates be cancelled altogether? If Trump’s sickness progresses the point of requiring ventilation, what happens on Election Day? Mike Pence will be in charge of the country while Trump is incapacitated, and presumably, votes for Trump will be counted as usual and he will resume power after he comes off the ventilator. What if he were to die before the election; do votes for Trump then count as votes for Pence? Can the Republican Party nominate someone else in the days before the election? Can votes already cast for a Trump/Pence ticket then be converted to support the new nominee? I don’t think so.

Another important question: what if Joe Biden gets sick? He spent nearly two hours on stage with the man yelling like a maniac. Fortunately, Joe Biden and his wife Jill have just tested negative, so we won’t wander too far down the path of hypotheticals, but man, there’s a lot to ponder.

New reporting from the Channel 4 News Investigations Team:

Channel 4 News has exclusively obtained a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters.

It reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorised by Donald Trump’s campaign as ‘Deterrence’ – voters they wanted to stay home on election day.

[…]

Vast in scale, it contains details on almost 200 million Americans, among more than 5,000 files, which together amass almost 5 terabytes of data – making it one of the biggest leaks in history.

It reveals not only the huge amounts of data held on every individual voter, but how that data was used and manipulated by models and algorithms.

[…]

In Georgia, despite Black people constituting 32% of the population, they made up 61% of the ‘Deterrence’ category. In North Carolina, Black people are 22% of the population but were 46% of ‘Deterrence’. In Wisconsin, Black people constitute just 5.4% of the population but made up 17% of ‘Deterrence’.

This is a modern example of voter suppression.

Brad Parscale, the campaign’s 2016 digital director told PBS Frontline: “I would say I’m nearly 100 percent sure we did not run any campaigns that targeted even African Americans.”

This racist piece of shit was the campaign manager, how does he not know for sure? Don’t be fooled by this “nearly 100%” bullshit, he knows they targeted black potential voters, he just doesn’t want to admit it. Why anyone would try to prevent Brad Parscale from killing himself is beyond me.

But Channel 4 News has uncovered evidence that the campaign did target Black voters with negative ads designed to crush Hillary Clinton’s turnout.These included videos featuring Hillary Clinton referring to Black youths as “super predators” which aired on television 402 times in October 2016 and received millions of views on Facebook.

This story relates directly to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was one of the biggest turning points for me in deciding not to vote for Trump again in 2020. It also happened to be one of the most damning revelations to come out about Facebook, and it sent them down the road of one PR disaster after the next, leading to public scrutiny and likely congressional intervention into their toxic, undemocratic business practices.

Whether President Bone Spurs himself was aware of the details or knows how targeted advertising works is irrelevant. He probably couldn’t understand it if he tried, and that doesn’t matter. I’m sure he was absolutely giddy when he found out what the crooks he employed were capable of doing with the wealth of stolen data Facebook supplied them with, even if he only had a slight grasp of how powerful that information would prove to be. Just because Trump is a babbling moron doesn’t mean the people around him are; he has authoritarian instincts, but he’s too dumb and weak to make anything happen for himself — the people around him and in his campaign are a lot more dangerous. Their whole game plan in 2016 was to use that data to target a handful of voters in just a few key counties they needed to win the electoral college, and to the nation’s election-night bewilderment, it worked.

Today, a Facebook spokesperson said: “Since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook – what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today.

Sure, let’s take their word for it.

#deletefacebook

Sounds like that camp is full of Stable Geniuses™. 

Kim Bellware, reporting for The Washington Post:

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed [two weeks ago] against the for-profit jail alleges Barlow-Austin died following 10 weeks of abuse and neglect during which she suffered inhumane conditions and “deliberate indifference” by jail staff that left her emaciated, blind and unable to walk.

When Barlow-Austin was taken into custody on a probation violation April 5, 2019, she had been managing HIV and mental health issues with regular medication and had otherwise healthy vitals, according to the complaint. She was not given her full therapy of medication in the jail, and staff failed to follow up on an outstanding request for her health records for more than a month.

For-profit prisons are tantamount to modern day slavery.

Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire, reporting for The New York Times:

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

[…]

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

[…]

In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

Some people who voted for Donald Trump — myself included, to a large degree — did so thinking that his public demeanor and the actions he was taking were a part of a facade designed to cloak a more serious, organized plan for what he would do with the presidency. It was just a gut feeling that you were voting for something more than met the eye.

I think it’s safe to say that’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, the master plan was not to fix any of America’s systemic problems. Rather it was a last ditch, Hail Mary attempt to rescue Trump from his own personal finances as he dangled by a shortening thread over an alligator infested swamp.

When Mr. Trump glided down a gilded Trump Tower escalator to kick off his presidential campaign in June 2015, his finances needed a jolt.

His core businesses were reporting mounting losses — more than $100 million over the previous two years. The river of celebrity-driven income that had long buoyed them was running dry.

If Mr. Trump hoped his unlikely candidacy might, at least, revitalize his brand, his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.

He’s just… dumb.

His entire presidency has focused on one thing: himself. There have been countless stories of Trump’s blatant corruption and very public abuse of his office for personal gain, yet they never stuck because his supporters would say “oh that’s a drop in the bucket for him, he’s so rich he doesn’t need that money”. Now, we know he needs it more than ever: the financial conflicts of interest have been one of the most central themes of his tenure. They weren’t a byproduct of installing a “businessman” as president, they were the whole point. He doesn’t care if he makes America “great” again or not, he’s happy to betray the ignoramuses, bigots, and fools who voted for him if it results in an ounce of personal gain. He only cares that the powers of the president remain available to him while he scrambles to rescue himself from impending financial ruin.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, writing for The New York Times:

A grand jury in Kentucky has indicted a former Louisville police detective, Brett Hankison, on three counts of “wanton endangerment in the first degree” for his actions during the raid of Breonna Taylor’s apartment. What does that mean?

Under Kentucky law, a person commits that crime when he or she “wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person,” and does so “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Other states may use terms like “reckless endangerment” for an equivalent offense.

But the charges against Mr. Hankison are not for killing Ms. Taylor. None of the 10 shots he fired are known to have struck her. Instead, the Kentucky attorney general, Daniel Cameron, who is overseeing the prosecution, said the former detective was charged by the grand jury because the shots he fired had passed through Ms. Taylor’s apartment walls into a neighboring apartment […]

Not to sound too crass, but this pussy fired ten shots and still missed; why was he on the police force anyway? I don’t exactly consider myself a marksman, but if given ten shots at a sleeping target, I’m pretty sure I could course correct enough to land at least one of them.

We need to be asking if he was indicted because he maybe could’ve hit people through the wall, or if he was indicted because he failed to shoot Breonna Taylor. Why the hell weren’t the two officers who murdered her charged with anything? This is a disgusting example of systemic racism and police brutality. It should make you uncomfortable. Don’t look away, lean in. This is a conversation we must have.

For anyone trying to visualize privilege as a ladder, make sure you include a rung for “drywall” somewhere above the rung for “black women”.

They’re all so eager to go back on their word. Aaron Blake, reporting for The Washington Post:

Now that three key GOP senators — Mitt Romney (Utah), Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Cory Gardner (Colo.) — have said they will not object to their leaders pressing forward with a Supreme Court nominee, despite their party’s 2016 stance against doing so in a presidential election year, the direction this fight is headed seems pretty clear.

Everyone knows Cory Gardner is a pussy, but Mitt Romney is a little more interesting. He’s been trying to act like he’s not a rank and file Republican, and he can get away with distancing himself from Trump and the rest of the republicans because he’s largely insulated from the voters by their short memories and the fact that his next election isn’t until 2024, but now we see where his priorities lie. Sure, he voted to remove Trump from office during the impeachment debacle, but he did so knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. Here, his vote could have a real impact, and his decision not to stand up for what’s right (as well as the precedent set by his own party four years ago) is unforgivable.

But some Republicans are going quite a bit further than that. They’re effectively signing off on whomever the nominee is, despite there not actually being a nominee yet. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said as much this weekend in announcing his support.

“There is a clear choice on the future of the Supreme Court between the well-qualified and conservative jurist President Trump will nominate and I will support, and the liberal activist Joe Biden will nominate and Cal Cunningham will support, who will legislate radical, left-wing policies from the bench,” Tillis said.

Thom Tillis is a spineless, bootlicking cunt. In his recent, televised debate with Cal Cunningham, he spent the entire hour misconstruing Cal’s responses and setting up straw man arguments because he knows he can’t defend the positions he’s taken on their own merit.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), meanwhile, declared Monday night that his committee would sign off on the as yet unnominated nominee.

“The nominee’s going to be supported by every Republican in the Judiciary Committee,” Graham said on Fox News.

I bet Lindsey Graham doesn’t want his words to be used against him now. The flip flopping is out of control. In 2016, he said the following:

"If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination," Graham said March 10, 2016. "And you could use my words against me, and you'd be absolutely right.”

Chris Cillizza, writing about Graham for CNN:

No one who has followed politics for the last five-ish years -- basically since the rise of Trump -- should be surprised AT ALL that Graham is the Republican senator with the most outrageous flip-flop on, ahem, principle.

You'll remember that when Graham was running against Trump for president in 2016, he described the billionaire businessman as a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." And said this: "You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell."

Fast forward a few years -- and suddenly Graham is one of Trump's biggest defenders (and regular golf buddies.)

What happened? Well, The New York Times' Mark Leibovich put that question directly to Graham back in 2019. And here's how Graham answered: "Well, OK, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it'd be odd not to do this." Pressed by Leibovich on what "this" was, Graham said: "'This' is to try to be relevant."

And, scene.

Americans who are paying attention realize that even if Joe Biden wins the election, it won’t be good enough unless Mitch McConnell gets booted from his current role as Senate Majority Leader, and enough of these morally bankrupt (but certainly not financially bankrupt) Republican senators get voted out.

The right’s obsession with Supreme Court seats ultimately boils down to a deep-seated hope to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, but they’ve proposed no alternative to how abortion should be handled under the law. Would they prefer to ram a SCOTUS nominee through amidst the election, possibly exciting conservatives (exciting or placating? Hmmm.), but certainly enraging liberals? That seems like a surefire way to lose their majority in the senate, at which point, the Democrats would have all the power to legislate new (possibly even more liberal) laws governing abortion. Is that what they want? Republicans are only focusing on the short game, here.

Well calculated or not, this is perhaps the most brazen display of their partisanship and hypocrisy. As Majority Leader, McConnell led the Republican effort to stall on President Obama’s SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016. Their reasoning was that because 2016 was an election year, the Senate shouldn’t confirm a nominee from a president in the final year of his term, and should instead wait until after the inauguration to let the newly elected president nominate the next justice. Of course, that meant that the court would have a vacancy for nearly 11 months at the least. Now, when the same thing has happened in the last year of Trump’s term, yet they now claim to believe that time is of the essence and that it would be irresponsible to wait just four months to allow the newly elected president to make the nomination. It’s shameless partisanship that has real consequences.

Crooked Media is running a fundraising campaign called the “Get Mitch of Die Trying Fund”, which aims to funnel resources to the most competitive senate races of this cycle with the aim of stripping the Republicans of their Senate majority. Throughout the months long campaign, they had raised $40M as of last Friday. In the following three days, as news of RBG’s death circulated, their fund brought in an additional $17M. Click here to check out the fund and make a donation.

Also, register to vote.

Schitt’s Creek is an absolutely phenomenal show, and all of the awards they won were incredible well-deserved.

Each of the four main actors won awards for their performances, and the show also won awards for outstanding writing, directing, casting, and costumes, as well as the category award for “Outstanding Comedy Series”. In total, they took home nine Emmys, more than any show in the comedy category has ever won for a single season.

From Dan Levy’s acceptance speech: “our show, at its core, is about the transformational effects of love and acceptance, and that is something that we need more of now than we’ve ever needed before.”

I could spend a long time talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s past and her impact on women’s rights and American history in general, but I don’t claim to be an RBG expert, and I certainly wouldn’t do her justice. Instead, spend a few minutes reading the other justices’ statements on her passing.

I don’t want to politicize a tragedy, but 2020 has been one politicized tragedy after the next. It’s been a bit like a movie — if political thriller were a popular genre — with about seven hours worth of plot shoved into ninety minutes, and RBG’s death is the plot twist.

When I got the CNN breaking news alert on my watch, I felt my stomach drop; I’m desperately afraid we’re about to see the great American experiment finally collapse on upon itself. Throughout this year, we’ve seen just how dysfunctional and corrupt the majority of our federal government officials truly are. One much needed respite from the bad faith politicking came when a majority of our Supreme Court justices proved that they were, at least for the time being, still managing to hold the judicial branch above the political warfare that has consumed the executive and legislative branches.

Now the high court faces a real chance of receiving a Trumpian makeover that will throw the last remaining branch of our federal government into hyper-partisan disarray. Trump will have yet another opportunity to nominate someone to the court, and the group of people who are capable of standing in his way is hopelessly small and demonstrably spineless. I think we can be sure that Trump’s third nominee to the court will not be as moderate or as qualified his second, or especially his first. After all, in the coming months, the Supreme Court very well may be in a position where they’re making decisions regarding the election results, or hearing cases on any number of Trump’s alleged crimes. It’s all but guaranteed that Trump’s next nominee’s loyalties will lie not with the law, but with the most dangerous demagogue in our nation’s history.

Hopefully, notorious flip flop and shameless Trump simp Lindsey Graham still wants his words used against him.

From the website for “Class Action Park”, a new documentary streaming on HBO Max:

Here's the gist: During its 1980s and 1990s heyday, New Jersey’s Action Park earned a reputation as the most insane — and possibly the most dangerous — amusement park that ever existed.

It was known as a lawless land, ruled by drunk teenage employees and frequented by even drunker teenage guests. The rides were experimental and illogical, and seemed to ignore even the most basic notions of physics or common sense—not to mention safety. […]

Lying somewhere between Lord of the Flies and a Saw movie, Action Park is remembered as a place so insane and treacherous that, decades later, anybody who ever stepped foot in it is left wondering whether their memories could possibly be true. It became a nearly perfect breeding ground for urban legends and myths.

Do yourself a favor and watch this documentary.

Erika Edwards and Denise Chow, reporting for NBC News:

In the predawn hours of March 30, Dr. Deborah Birx stepped in front of the camera on the White House lawn and made an alarming prediction about the coronavirus, which had, by then, killed fewer than 3,000 people in the United States.

"If we do things together, well, almost perfectly, we can get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities” […]

On Saturday, Birx's prediction came true, as the number of lives lost to Covid-19 in the U.S. topped 200,000.

Now, many experts are making another ominous prediction: A surge in the number of new infections in the fall and winter, combined with growing fatigue over social distancing and other public health measures, could result in more than 415,000 deaths in the U.S. by January, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, at the University of Washington.

Uh oh Republicans, it looks we’re outside of Trump’s defined “very good job” territory. It’s okay, I’m sure he’ll soon move the goalposts again to ease your cognitive dissonance so you’ll carry on with supporting him via willful ignorance.

From a nuance lacking report from The Guardian on the results of a survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference):

The survey, the first to drill down to state level in the US, ranks states according to a score based on three criteria: whether young people have definitely heard about the Holocaust; whether they can name one concentration camp, death camp or ghetto; and whether they know 6 million Jews were killed.

My gut instinct is that whoever conducted this survey didn’t know what they were doing, or they were trying to produce clickbait-y results.

In regards to the first question:

One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

I can’t imagine a single person in the United States has “definitely not heard” about the Nazi’s genocide. My K-12 education focused enormously on it, from grade four, to eight, to ten. Collectively, we spent months covering it. It makes me wonder about the surveyors’ definition of “Holocaust”, as well as whether the survey was conducted in a way that treated people like they were stupid and compelled them to give incorrect answers out of spite. I simply do not believe that 12% of people aged 18-39 years in the USA have “definitely not heard” about the Germans’ extermination campaigns. You’d have to be immaculately stupid to not know anything about it.

In regards to the second question:

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

I don’t think we ought to expect people who haven’t studied the third reich to be able to list off their concentration/death camps: they’re German names that people here have no idea how to pronounce, and they all served roughly the same purpose, so it’s hardly fair to fault people for not committing the names of the camps to memory when they aren’t of integral importance to their lives or careers. It’s worth noting that 44% of people surveyed were able to identify the Auschwitz camp; I would’ve expected that number to be a little bit higher.

In regards to the third question:

Nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and more than one in three (36%) thought 2 million or fewer had been killed.

I also don’t think we ought to blame people for not knowing the number of millions of people who were killed. Any number that large is too difficult for people to visualize, so the best way to understand it is by comparison, but to compare it to the general population of Europe or of specific countries (the most natural comparisons to make) would portray the number of people killed as a small percentage, and discounting the number of people who were murdered just isn’t an acceptable outcome when trying to educate people about a genocide. It’s a difficult problem for educators to tackle.

Another reason I don’t expect people to know the exact number is because different numbers get thrown around a lot, and that comes back to the definition of “Holocaust”. The vast majority of people think the word “Holocaust” refers to the genocide in general, not realizing that it’s a more specific term that ONLY applies to the extermination of the Jews. So while it is accurate to say “the Holocaust was the event/time period/operation where the Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews in concentration camps”, it misses the big picture, and excludes form the conversation everyone the Nazis killed who wasn’t Jewish. In total, 11,000,000 people were killed by the Nazi state.

It’s possible that the survey could’ve have a number of respondents give close-to-accurate numbers like 10 or 11 million, but counted those responses as incorrect on the grounds that they were only asking about Jewish victims. Given the wide misunderstanding of the term, if the surveyors intended to use the technical definition of “Holocaust”, then they should’ve taken the time to explain the term to the people they surveyed before allowing them to answer. I doubt any such effort was made.

Obviously, I don’t make that distinction to diminish the gravity or significance of the Jews who were killed — the Nazis certainly had it out for them — but I do find it oddly judeocentric and frankly and irresponsible that the number most frequently thrown around when we talk about the Nazis’ genocide is 6,000,000. Yes, they killed that many Jews, but again, they killed 11,000,000 people in total. I find it disrespectful to focus only on the Jewish victims. Let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees and forget about the other 5,000,000 political opponents, homosexuals, Russians, and people with physical/mental disabilities that the Nazis imprisoned and exterminated.

Let’s get this out of the way: several of my pre-event thoughts turned out to be pretty incorrect. But hey, the only way to be right all the time is to correct yourself when you’re wrong, so here we are. My gut feelings about how yesterdays announcements would go were, admittedly, not as accurate as some of the rumors and leaks. Now, moving forward.

Before we jump into the new products, some general thoughts:

• They’re really killing it with the announcement videos. The production value is very high, the transitions are fun, and the videos don’t feel too long. I do miss live demos, though.

• In hindsight, it still doesn’t feel quite right that they announced new watches without phones.

• The lack of AirTags also makes sense. That’s another accessory that will be primarily used with the phone.

• No phones in general at a September event just doesn’t feel right.

Apple Watch:

• The blood oxygen saturation measuring capabilities are nice, but it seems like the type of feature that takes a lot of R&D overhead, but will be ignored by most customers. I have never once seen someone taking an ECG with their Apple Watch. I doubt very many people will check their blood oxygen saturation either, except maybe serious athletes or people experience cardiac/respiratory distress. I don’t say that to devalue the watch’s lifesaving capabilities (the stories they told were, as always, very moving), it’s just a very rare scenario and I’m not sure how lifesaving that particular capability (or the ECG function) will prove to be, especially compared to the high/low heart rate notifications.

• The new altimeter is nice feature for hiking, and I imagine it should make the “flights climbed” metric in the activity app more accurate.

• Making the display brighter while inactive outdoors will make for a nice upgrade to the general experience.

• I don’t love the solo loop and braided solo loop bands. I find the multitude of sizes distressing, and I’m not sure how comfortable a non-adjustable band could really be (I don’t know about you, but my watch fits tighter or looser depending on how warm I am — whether because of the weather or physical activity — and I like being able to adjust it accordingly). Also, the braided one doesn’t look great to me, and yet it costs a hundred bucks.

• The new colors are nice. I really like the blue and (PRODUCT) red aluminum, but the new gold and graphite stainless steel colors are nice as well. My only concern with the blue and red would be how bright the colors are and how few bands will pair nicely with them, but they’re undeniably fun.

• The Apple Watch SE is an interesting product. I imagine it will be a popular gift for kids, now that Family Setup let’s parents give their kids a watch without giving them an iPhone first.

iPad:

• I didn’t expect them to introduce the A14 chip without the iPhone, but they did. It seems like a solid upgrade over last year’s A13.

• I imagine the iPad Air will be a good fit for some high school college students, now that it supports the Magic Keyboard.

• Touch ID built into the top button is interesting. In any other year, it would seem like a weird lateral step and almost a regression to build a full screen iPad that doesn’t use Face ID, but during 2020 and with everyone (who’s not a dick) wearing masks, Touch ID is more convenient. At the end of the day, I think Apple’s motivation was probably money: I figure it would’ve been more expensive to build the iPad Air with Face ID, though, completely redesigning the Touch ID sensor to fit in the power button probably wasn’t too cheap, either.

• The new iPad Air colors were unexpected, but I don’t hate them. I wish they were a little more vibrant, though.

• Also: the bottom of the barrel iPad model is six times faster than the top selling Chromebook. And that’s using Apple’s A12 chip, which they built for the 2018 iPhones. Let that sink in.

Fitness+:

• This is an interesting category of service that I wouldn’t have expected Apple to get into. There were some rumors about it and they seemed credible, but it still just didn’t make a ton of sense to me.

• I think $10/month is too expensive, and I think it should’ve been free for a year with the purchase of a new watch, rather than free for three months.

• I have a theory that Fitness+ is less about giving you workout videos synced with your watch, and more about giving Apple the sensor data from tons of people. They could take anonymized motion and heart rate data from a session, sync it with the workout you did, and calibrate new sensors with more specific data. Suddenly, the whole world becomes their Apple Watch health and fitness development lab.

One:

• I think this is generally a good deal. With the individual plan, you can get Music, TV+, Arcade, and 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage (which isn’t really enough) for $15 for an individual, or it’s $20 for a family plan (and the iCloud Storage jumps up to 200 gigabytes, though I still don’t think it’s quite enough). The highest level, One Premier, includes all of the above, plus News+ and Fitness+, a respectable two terabytes of iCloud storage, and it can also be shared with your family for no additional charge.

Software Updates:

• I’ve been using iOS 14 since the developer betas were released, and while it’s gradually gotten more stable, it still doesn’t feel ready for prime time. Another four or five weeks to iron out the kinks would’ve been good.

• I know the developer community isn’t happy about having one day’s notice before the official release. Usually they have a week to get their apps ready.

Well, it seems like today may well be the day that Tile dies. Apple’s AirTags have been rumored for a long time, but all signs are indicating that Apple will finally reveal them at their event today.

Apple’s AirTags will likely have a few advantages over Tile’s trackers, from a much wider audience of prospective buyers (I don’t know the makeup of Tile’s user base, but I would guess it skews strongly toward iOS users), to the increased functionality and precision added by the (all but guaranteed) inclusion of Apple’s W1 chip, and other features Tile never would’ve been able to develop properly because they didn’t have the financial bandwidth to invest in the necessary R&D. I’m no doctor, but I’ve got a feeling the announcement of AirTags will be roughly the equivalent of a stage four cancer diagnosis for Tile.

It’s kind of sad. But not really. Their trackers were never great in the first place. I had quite a few of them over the years, and even bought them as stocking stuffers for my family for Christmas one year. The experience was never as good as I wanted it to be. The batteries died after a year, they only worked about 80% of the time, and they weren’t even that accurate or helpful when they were functioning properly. Furthermore, I read Tile’s privacy policy a while ago, and immediately threw all of my still-functional tiles in the trash. Their privacy policy allows them plenty of legal latitude to collect your personal data and location data, and then funnel it back to other companies, including Facebook. The only way to limit that data sharing is to delete your account and stop using your tiles.

The Tile company saw the end coming, as evidenced by the fact that they took legal action against Apple on the grounds that the “Find My” app was anticompetitive because it came with the operating system, and they proceeded to argue on the record that it gave Apple an unfair advantage to sell their AirTags (which, mind you, at the time, and still as of 12:39, September 15, 2020, did/do not exist). They’re smart folks, but the transition to a different type of product or expansion into a niche market should’ve began long ago. Perhaps more partnerships with companies to build Tile functionality into their products directly for items like wallets or remote controls (assuming that using the functionality would be optional and the data collection could be disabled) would be a sustainable route. Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.

But still, here’s to Tile. 🥂

You had a good run, and you’ve given the tech industry a good idea that they can now make into a successful business without relying on flagrant privacy abuses and vaguely prototypical hardware. I’m truly grateful for that, but I can’t say that I wish you any further success.

A lot of the rumors and leakers have been suggesting that tomorrow’s Apple event won’t feature new iPhone hardware. Allegedly, the even will focus on Apple Watch, iPad, and the long-rumored “AirTags” tracking devices. My gut instinct is that they’re nuts to say we won’t see iPhones.

My inside sources can’t confirm whether we’ll see new iPhone hardware tomorrow or not, but it’s hard for me to imagine a September Apple event with no new iPhone hardware. Of course, Apple did let us know on their earnings call a few months ago that iPhones will be a few weeks behind schedule this week, but I didn’t take that to mean that we wouldn’t still hear about them in September. After all, the iPhone X wasn’t released until November of 2017, but it was announced in September. The iPhone XR was announced in September of 2018, but didn’t ship until October of that year. It’s not unprecedented, particularly in recent years, for Apple to announce new iPhones several weeks before they’re ready to ship.

For a few reasons, an event that focuses on Watch and iPad (and AirTags) doesn’t seem to pass the sniff test for a couple reasons. First, it’s difficult for me to imagine Apple announcing new watches before new phones (especially if the rumors about a new, “midnight blue” color option for the watch are legitimate; it would give the game away for the new “midnight blue” iPhone, which was rumored long before a blue watch). Second, a whole event for Apple Watches, iPads, and AirTags would feel a bit lean to me, unless the watch gets some pretty major upgrades, which again, based on the rumors, doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps, if we truly don’t see new iPhones, we’ll see an Apple Silicon Mac or something else that will take a bit of time to introduce.

So, I’m not saying the leakers and the rumor sites are wrong, I’m just saying it’s hard for me to believe they’re right on this one.

Bonus thought: Why do we, the Apple-obsessed community, put up with John Prosser? Sure he’s had a handful of accurate leaks, but he’s certainly had his share of downright wrong calls as well (as recently as last week). And his attitude is so annoying that I’d just as soon abandon the possibility of any future, correct leaks he may share just so that I don’t have to hear the slurping noises from him trying to suck his own dick.

Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, writing for The Washington Post:

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

[…]

“Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states,” Woodward writes. “There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced.”

No shit.

Jeffery Goldberg, reporting for The Atlantic:

In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit [to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018], Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

[…]

… he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.” […] “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides.

[…]

Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.

[…]

The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”

[…]

According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”

[…]

Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

This behavior would be disgraceful from any American, but coming from our Commander in Chief, it’s absolutely abhorrent. You cannot support Donald Trump and call yourself a patriot.

Further reading: Trump Knew The Russians Were Paying The Taliban To Kill U.S. Troops.

From the Apple Newsroom:

Today Apple announced it will invest in the construction of two of the world’s largest onshore wind turbines, a source of clean, renewable energy that will bring its supply chain and products one step closer to carbon neutrality. Located near the Danish town of Esbjerg, the 200-meter-tall turbines are expected to produce 62 gigawatt hours each year — enough to power almost 20,000 homes — and will act as a test site for powerful offshore wind turbines. The power produced at Esbjerg will support Apple’s data center in Viborg, with all surplus energy going into the Danish grid.

These wind turbines are sleek.

Also, 20,000 homes! From just two wind turbines! Anyone who says renewable energy isn’t practical because it’s inefficient is ill informed. Don’t buy into the lies that the fossil fuel lobbyists pay their congressional Republican lapdogs to feed to you.

Holly Yan and Madeline Holcombe, reporting for CNN:

Just over seven months ago, no one in the US had a confirmed case of Covid-19. On Monday, the US topped 6 million cases of coronavirus, which has killed over 183,000 people and left many young adults with long-term problems.

My god, this is getting old.

The pandemic seems to slowing at this point, but this most recent million can still be attributed to the south. Southerners: see here.

For more articles about the United States’ failed federal response to the pandemic, check out CopyrighBro’s COVID-19 Roundup.

A fascinating story from David Shayer, writing for TidBITS:

“I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.” […]

They didn’t actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod’s disk in a way that couldn’t be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod. […]

We discussed the best way to hide the data they recorded. As a disk engineer, I suggested they make another partition on the disk to store their data. That way, even if someone plugged the modified iPod into a Mac or PC, iTunes would treat it as a normal iPod, and it would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. They liked that, and a hidden partition it was.

Next, they wanted a simple way to start and stop recording. We picked the deepest preferences menu path and added an innocuous-sounding menu to the end. I helped them hook this up inside the code, which was rather non-obvious. In all other respects, the device functioned as a normal iPod. […]

My guess is that Paul and Matthew were building something like a stealth Geiger counter. Something that DOE agents could use without furtively hiding it. Something that looked innocuous, that played music, and functioned exactly like a normal iPod. You could walk around a city, casually listening to your tunes, while recording evidence of radioactivity—scanning for smuggled or stolen uranium, for instance, or evidence of a dirty bomb development program—with no chance that the press or public would get wind of what was happening.

Wow, what a story. It’s a commentary on the cultural ubiquitousness of the iPod in the 2000s, and an intriguing throwback to the secretive exploits of the U.S. government were not limited to the cold war. It reminds me of this clever image from the HBOMAX listing of CNN’s docuseries, “The 2000s”.

Graeme Wood has a great piece in The Atlantic about the sheepdog mentality of people like Rittenhouse. It’s well complimented by my piece on militarized masculinity. From Wood’s piece:

If you have never walked around with a gun in your pocket, you probably have poor intuitions about how it feels—the power; the discomfort of having a hunk of metal or plastic impeding your gait and mobility; most of all, the sense of responsibility. The writer Dan Baum strapped on a .38 in the course of researching a 2013 book on gun culture and described the experience well:

“Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away ... It made me more organized. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill.”

Baum would avoid trouble, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a fistfight, unstable people, or anything that might raise the possibility that he would fire his gun. The feeling of empowerment comes with a wearying imperative of caution: You do not seek out danger, and instead you live the most boring life possible, to avoid using the murder machine you have for some reason decided to attach awkwardly to your midsection.

What distinguishes Baum, who crossed the street to avoid violence, from Rittenhouse, who carried openly and crossed state lines to find violence? One is a seersucker-wearing, middle-aged journalist, and the other is an adolescent. The other salient difference, though, is that at 17, Rittenhouse has never known a world where owning a gun did not go along with what is sometimes known as the “sheepdog mentality”—the belief that your gun exists to protect others, and that you should rush in to perform that duty. [...]

Here are my thoughts on Kyle Rittenhouse: electric chair.

No, wait, that’s too easy. Give him life in prison but make him work to earn his meals and housing. And none of that special treatment for his own safety; put him in with the general population and let the inmates who are in for petty drug charges take turns turning him out in the showers. Don’t give me that “he’s only 17” nonsense, he clearly didn’t let his young age restrict him when it came to possessing a firearm, no reason to let it stand in the way now.

If you think he’s innocent or that he acted in self defense, go ahead and tap out of the argument, carve a swastika into your forehead and leave the real patriots with fully developed brains to deal with this shitbag Republican superstar.

I first heard about Allan Litchman in the weeks before the 2016 election, and at the time, his prediction that Trump would win seemed far fetched. Still, I was enthralled with his “thirteen keys” system, and anxious to see if it would prove accurate for that election cycle. Of course, it did. However, Trump’s win wasn’t the only thing Litchman predicted: he also predicted that Trump would be impeached way back in 2017. Suffice to say he has a strong track record, and I trust his judgment.

Allison Gordon, reporting for CNN:

He has correctly predicted the winner of each presidential race since Ronald Reagan's reelection victory in 1984 using his "13 keys" system. […]

Now, Lichtman and his "13 keys" are ready to call 2020.

In an interview with CNN, Lichtman was definitive in his answer: "The keys predict that Donald Trump will lose the White House this year."

Lichtman bases his prediction on a model of "13 keys" that can be answered as either true or false for any given election. The "13 keys" in his system include factors such as the economy, incumbency, social unrest and scandals, as well as the candidates' personal charisma. […]

When asked if the key model could account for something as cataclysmic as the Covid-19 pandemic, Lichtman remained confident. "Look, retrospectively and prospectively, the keys go all the way back to 1860. They are what we call a robust system. So, I don't fiddle with them. They've lasted through enormous changes in our politics, in our economy, in our democracy. Don't fiddle with the keys," he explained.

I’ve been feeling pretty good about Biden’s chances the past few months, and this really cemented my belief that he will win the election (I’m knocking on wood read hard, though, believe me). Things can certainly change, and this doesn’t mean we should let off the gas in our attempts to get people excited about the Biden Harris ticket, but for the past 12-18 months, you could just feel Trump’s public support eroding. He still has his inalienable base, of course, but I think he’s losing ground among fair-minded people. I believe America has enough non-racists, non-xenophobes, non-white supremacists, non-homophobes, and non-bigots to outvote Trump’s base. The the issue now is whether we can get enough of those people to turn out to be able to counteract the damage that will be done by his blatant efforts to cheat.

If you’re interested in learning more about the thirteen keys, here’s a good place to start.

Jessica Bursztynsky, reporting for CNBC:

Apple hit a market cap of $2 trillion, doubling in valuation in just over two years.

It’s the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $2 trillion market cap.

Apple was also the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market cap.

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors:

"Now, more than ever, people need a secure payment solution they can rely on. We're excited to be able to put the control back into our customers' hands, by launching Samsung Pay Card” […]

Samsung Pay Card offers five percent cashback on purchases from Samsung, and one percent cashback at other retailers. […]

Unlike ‌Apple Card‌, Samsung Pay Card does not offer a physical card. It is a purely digital service available via NFC on Samsung smartphones and smartwatches.

I think we’re past the point of nitpicking over which device or OS had a particular feature first and who copied it — smartphones have matured to the point where virtually any new idea is bound to be iterated upon by a competitor — but credit cards don’t really have anything to do with smartphones.

To me, Apple Card didn’t even seem like a very strong product, and the credit card market didn’t seem like a space that a company like Apple would want to be in. The fact that Samsung (and Verizon, for what it’s worth) has now blindly followed Apple into that thicket a year later is just another indicator that they’ll never be anything more than shameless copycats who happen to have a side gig making household appliances.

Side note: “Samsung Pay Card” is a clunky, unattractive name that sounds like it was poorly translated from another language, and the design of the card itself looks like something you’d apply for in a Best Buy.

Robert Burnson, reporting for Bloomberg*:

In the new lawsuit, filed Monday in state court in Redwood City, California, the company is accused of collecting, storing and profiting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent.

The practice violates an Illinois privacy law that bars the unauthorized collection of biometric data, according to the lawsuit. Under the law a company can be forced to pay $1,000 per violation -- or $5,000 if it’s found to have acted recklessly or intentionally.

Everything Facebook does is either reckless or underhanded. The company is defined by their old motto of “move fast and break things”.

The system needs to come down hard on Facebook. Clearly, they don’t care about legal slaps on the wrist: what they need is a hard, legal kick in the balls that causes them to double over in pain and take a beat to catch their breath. Prosecutors need to not back down and accept a measly settlement, they need to pursue every dime they can in the hopes that they get enough to teach Facebook a real lesson, and if it financially levels them and drives the whole operation into the ground, so be it. All of Facebook’s products are doing more harm than good at this point, anyway.

#deletefacebook

From the Biden campaign’s website:

Kamala Harris Will Be The Next Vice President of The United States.

My first response to this news wasn’t outright disappointment, just the kind of let down you feel when you’re expecting something incredible and receive us something acceptable but bland. I just don’t feel like this pick really energizes the ticket or adds to it in a way that other options couldn’t have.

My first pick for Joe Biden’s VP was Stacy Abrams, followed by Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. There was a lot of speculation about Kamala Harris in recent weeks, but in her last few debates, she just didn’t seem very genuine to me, so I was hoping it wouldn’t be her. Plus, there was the issue of her record which didn’t sit well with me, but I suppose the Biden campaign has decided that, while unsavory, her record isn’t likely to be a disqualifying issue for many of the undecided voters they’re gunning for. Kamala checks a few demographic boxes while keeping the ticket moderate enough not to scare away undecided independent voters. I liked Abrams most because I thought it would be a good move for the campaign to announce a fresh, young running mate with more progressive ideas, but I suppose the DNC wasn’t going to pick Biden’s running mate based what I or anyone else would’ve liked.

All in all, Kamala is more exciting than Mike Pence, but I feel like the Biden campaign has fumbled an opportunity to get people excited.

From The New York Times:

President Trump is considering new immigration regulations that would allow border officials to temporarily block American citizens and legal permanent residents from returning to the United States from abroad if authorities believe they may be infected with the coronavirus. In recent months, Mr. Trump has imposed sweeping rules that ban entry by foreigners into the United States, citing the risk of allowing the virus to spread from hot spots abroad. But those rules have exempted two categories of people attempting to return: American citizens and non-citizens who have already established legal residence.

This is outrageous and treasonous.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 26

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Gary NG, reporting for iPhone in Canada:

According to the founders [of Prepear], Apple “has opposed the trademark application for our small business, Prepear, demanding that we change our obviously pear shaped logo, used to represent our brand in the recipe management and meal planning business.” […]

Prepear says they are a small company with only five staff and legal costs have already cost them “many thousands of dollars” plus laying off one team member, in their legal fight against the iPhone maker.

From Apple’s notice of opposition to Prepear:

The Consumers encountering Applicant’s Mark are likely to associate the mark with Apple. Applicant’s Mark consists of a minimalistic fruit design with a right-angled leaf, which readily calls to mind Apple’s famous Apple Logo and creates a similar commercial impression

I’m usually inclined to defend Apple but this is a real stretch. Are all other potential minimalistic fruit designs completely off the table now? Would a left-angled leaf have made it better? It just seems like Apple is throwing their weight around here for no real benefit and to the detriment of real people. It’s disappointing.

Shan Li and Jennifer Calfas, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. has surpassed five million confirmed cases of the coronavirus as some states saw sharp upticks while others showed signs that the spread of the virus was easing.

The U.S. continues to lead the world in number of confirmed cases, followed by Brazil with about three million cases and India with more than two million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Brazil and India. Great company we’re keeping these days.

It’s been a little over two weeks since we hit 4,000,000. Still, it seems to be the south’s fault.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 25

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Sam Byford, reporting for The Verge:

Google has discontinued the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, its flagship phones that were released in October of last year. Both devices are out of stock in Google’s store in the US, though some variants are still available in other regions for the time being. […]

It’s unusual for Google to discontinue a Pixel phone so quickly. The Pixels 2 and 3 were on sale for around 18 months each, with Google stopping sales roughly six months after the introduction of their successors. The move means Google technically no longer has a flagship phone for sale.

Wow. Hard to imagine Apple pulling the plug on a current flagship iPhone before releasing the next one.

Russel Brandom, reporting for The Verge:

President Trump has signed a new executive order which will block all transactions with Bytedance, TikTok’s parent corporation, in an effort to “address the national emergency with respect to the information and communication technology supply chain.” It isn’t effectively immediately, but has a 45 day deadline.

“The spread [of apps controlled by the Chinese government] continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” the order reads. “The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security.”

Did Trump make this decision because his understands that TikTok is a national security threat? No. He made this decision because he’s a small person: he’d probably never even heard of TikTok before a bunch of teenagers hurt his feelings by using it to screw up his rally by bloating the number of expected attendees by requesting tickets despite not intending to attend.

But, would the U.S. better off without TikTok? Yes, we would. And 45 days isn’t a ton of time to arrange an international business acquisition.

Harriet Torry, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. economy contracted at a record rate last quarter and weekly jobless claims rose for the second straight week, amid signs of a slowing recovery as the country continues to struggle with the coronavirus pandemic.

The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a 32.9% annual rate in the second quarter, or a 9.5% drop compared with the same quarter a year ago. Both figures were the steepest in records dating to 1947.

It’s a good thing we elected a businessman whose market savvy uniquely positions him to be able to shield the American economy from disaster and deliver us to a new era of economic prosperity. No, wait.

It’s a good thing we have the opportunity to reelect a businessman whose market savvy uniquely positions him to be able to fix the American economy after he drove it into the ground by fumbling the federal response to a global pandemic.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 24

Bruce Haring, reporting for Deadline:

Taylor Swift’s new folklore album has had a fabled sales beginning.

Since its Thursday release, the album surpassed 1.3 million global sales in its first twenty-four hours, according to her Republic Records label.

Beyond that, folklore also dominated on the global streaming platforms. Spotify said Swift’s total of 79.4 million streams is a new record for an album by a female artist. Apple Music’s total of 35.47 million is a new high for a pop album.

That means the album will easily debut at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, and will have the best showing since Swift’s Lover album came out in 2019.

Taylor Swift is an icon and that’s all there is to it.

A thorough folklore review is forthcoming, but I do want to jot down a few quick thoughts.

1. At first I thought the songs all sounded a bit too similar, but the more you listen, the more distinct they really are. Plus, it was one in the morning the first time I listened to it, so I was a bit tired and not at my most aurally discerning.

2. The vibe of the album was much slower and more mellow than any of her previous albums, and it’s her first to be categorized as “alternative” instead of “country” or “pop”.

3. Each song has layers of rich detail that weave myth, reality, past, and present in a way that’s truly incredible. Not only that, but there are themes, story lines, and lyrics that recur throughout the album, almost like a puzzle or riddle waiting for listeners to parse together; Taylor is quickly becoming a lyrical J.K. Rowling. That said, as a history major and someone who really appreciates stories, this album feels like it was made for me. One song in particular felt remarkably specific to one of the most emotionally monumental events I’ve experienced this year, and it came a mere 18 hours after said event. Crazy.

4. I was right about the harmonica!

Kim Lyons, reporting for The Verge:

In the latest instance of iOS 14’s beta mode tattling on unexpected app behavior, some users reported that they were seeing the green “camera on” indicator while using Instagram when they were just scrolling through their feeds, not taking a photo or video.

An Instagram spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that the behavior was a bug and that it’s being fixed.

A bug. Sure.

Don’t forget that Instagram’s privacy policy (which is exactly the same as Facebook’s) provides them with the legal leeway to access your camera at virtually any time, and then do whatever they want with whatever they may happen to see. Convenient.

#deletefacebook

Jim Morrill and Francesca Chambers, reporting for The Charlotte Observer:

Trump had forced Republicans to move the event to Florida after failing to get guarantees he could have a full house in Charlotte because of the coronavirus. But Jacksonville, like the rest of Florida, has been hit with a surge of COVID-19 cases. Trump said Thursday it was irresponsible to hold the convention there.

“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” he told reporters at the White House. “We’re going to do some other things with tele-rallies and online the week that we’re discussing ... I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form. But we won’t do a big crowded convention per se, it’s just not the right time for that.”

Womp womp.

Too bad they moved it from Charlotte.

That didn’t take long. Just fourteen days to add another million cases — that’s a 33% increase from July 9th — and it’s almost entirely the south’s fault. Like I said when we hit three million, these next few are on us.

On the bright side (ha), at least the Trump administration seems to be taking this a little bit more seriously now.
God knows how long that’ll last, but hopefully it’s not an act.

Southerners, listen up:

• Stop being selfish and put on a mask. Don’t confuse inconvenience with oppression.

• Wash your hands, and carry some hand sanitizer.

• Don’t listen to antivaxxer bullshit. Or do, honestly, cause if you’re that far gone you’re beyond reason. If your kids die from COVID-19 because you won’t get them their shots, don’t act surprised, Darwin called that shit like a hundred years ago. Can’t believe we’re still having the conversation about vaccines.

• Stay home.

• Push your representatives to renew the $600 weekly unemployment benefit so that people whose jobs aren’t essential can stay home.

From Taylor Swift on Twitter:

Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening, but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen. And that thing is my 8th studio album, folklore. […]

Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music at the ‘perfect’ time, but the times we’re living in keep reminding me that nothing is guaranteed. My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world. That’s the side of uncertainty I can get on board with.

Usually when Taylor Swift is gearing up to drop a new single, she always drops little breadcrumbs and Easter eggs for fans to collect and theorize about what they could mean and whether they’ll lead to new music, but this time, there was none of that. Not only were there no signs of a single, we’re getting an entire album. And we’re getting it at midnight TONIGHT.

As a big Taylor Swift fan, it’s pretty safe to say I was blindsided but thrilled by this announcement.

Matthew Pierce, writing for The Daily Boulder:

Marco Rubio showed his true colors on Saturday by sharing a photo of him and the late Elijah Cummings to pay tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) – a beloved civil rights icon.

Rubio took to Twitter where he shared a photo of him and Cummings with a message that read: “It was an honor to know & be blessed with the opportunity to serve in Congress with John Lewis, a genuine and historic American hero. May the Lord grant him eternal peace.”

Of course, Rubio’s first attempt also had a typo in it.

Lots of other Republicans apparently felt obligated to say a something as well. Even Bryan Kemp made a statement, the Georgia governor who, in the words of podcast host and former White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer, “has done more to disenfranchise black voters in Georgia, maybe than anyone else alive at this moment”.

The Republican response to Lewis’s death has been disgusting and hypocritical. They would be doing everyone a favor, themselves included, by keeping Lewis’s name out of their mouths (as well as MLK’s, Abraham Lincoln’s, and a long list of other people who actually stood up for true American ideals). They’ve spent their careers trying to undo the progress made by people like Lewis, so it’s cowardly and in poor taste for them to cling to his legacy now that he’s dead. It’s obvious gaslighting.

Quick note: if your response to Rubio’s and Sullivan’s blunders is “it was a mistake anyone could make, they look the same!”, you’re a racist.

Alana Wise, reporting for NPR:

President Trump took to the White House briefing room on Tuesday to praise his administration's response to the virus that has killed more than 140,000 Americans so far. In a reversal of his recent statements and tone, he acknowledged the severity of the pandemic and urged Americans to comply with preventative measures.

"It will likely unfortunately get worse before it gets better," Trump said in uncharacteristically somber remarks, encouraging Americans to social distance, practice good hygiene and wear masks.

The president said his administration is in the process of developing a strategy for the coming months, including developing treatments and vaccines for COVID-19.

Trump — who has mostly cast mask usage as a personal choice and declined to wear one himself — urged people to wear face masks, citing a spike of cases in the Sun Belt in recent weeks.

"Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact," he said.

Is this a realization that their plan of ignoring the pandemic and hoping it will disappear was not only stupid and ineffective, but costing them support? Is it just an attempt to correct course for their political strategy? I truly hope so, becuause if it’s the result of some new discovery about the virus, we should be scared. What could the administration have learned that would caused Trump to change his tone so suddenly and drastically?

Erica Werner and Jeff Stein, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

Point me in the direction of a single public health expert who says we need less testing. I’ll wait.

Of course we don’t need less testing, we need far more testing, and we need more accurate tests. I’ve been saying this for months, as has anybody with a brain. The fact that Trump thinks we need less testing indicates at best a wholly political approach to addressing the pandemic, and at worst a complete misunderstanding of object permanence.

One of the best ways to safely get the economy back up and running would be to let people who we suspect have immunity (those with COVID-19 antibodies) go out and keep businesses afloat while those who haven’t yet been exposed continue to stay home. The crazy thing is that if everyone played along, we could put this whole thing behind us in a matter of weeks. Blocking funding for testing would be idiotic, selfish, and cruel (nothing new for the Trump administration), but it’s also a huge miss from a political perspective: Americans love an opportunity to rally behind their president to achieve a common goal or defeat a common enemy. Why would the Trump administration pass up such an opportunity during an election year? It’s remarkable hubris and short-sightedness.

A few of my most despised senators have teamed up again, but this time, they’re not trying to destroy strong encryption so that the government can spy on us, they’re just peddling some xenophobic bullshit clearly designed to pander to their base.

Senators Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, and Tom Cotton (all from my despised senator list) have joined forces again, this time with Senators Martha McSally and Josh Hawley to introduce legislation that provides an avenue for U.S. citizens to sue the Chinese government for the loss of life and financial hardships they’ve endured as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not only do they blame China for the pandemic’s disastrous (yet preventable) effects on the U.S., but the press release on Tillis’s website goes so far as to compare the COVID-19 pandemic to 9/11, as if it was somehow an instance of state sponsored terrorism (which won’t help to tamp down preposterous, idiotic, completely unproven conspiracy theories that the coronavirus was designed as a weapon in a Chinese lab). They purport that their bill “is closely modeled after the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), that gave more legal remedies to victims of terrorism, particularly those of 9/11 victims”. Again, obvious pandering, this time packaged with a pathetically weak comparison.

These senators have a remarkable ability to talk out of both sides of their mouth. They’re simultaneously downplaying the severity of the pandemic to make the Trump administration’s inadequate response seem acceptable (god forbid they piss off the Trump klan), and hyping up the death toll and financial costs to rile up their base against a common (and more or less manufactured) enemy.

The bill doesn’t provide any directive or course of action for citizens seeking to hold the United States government responsible for the ongoing, reckless negligence that they’ve branded as a “response” to the disease.