This is certainly an exciting announcement.

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

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

Tom Porter, writing for Business Insider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 3

UPDATED: 04/03/20, 22:25

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

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

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

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

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

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

Monica Black, writing for The Sewanee Review:

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Stankiewicz, reporting for CNBC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 2



Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Dave Sanders, reporting for The New York Times:

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

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

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

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 1

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

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

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

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

Israel is doing it. Fuck them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Benjamin Franklin

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

UPDATED: 04/09/20, 17:12

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chauncey Alcoron, writing for CNN Business:

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

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

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

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

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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