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

Brad Parscale, Trump's former campaign manager AND CURRENT DIGITAL OPERATIONS ADVISOR, just barricaded himself in his house with weapons and threatened to kill himself. https://t.co/MybM6tPGYg

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) September 28, 2020

Trump demoted Brad Parscale from campaign manager just two and a half months ago, and kept him on as a senior advisor to the campaign. This isn't someone Trump kicked to the curb years ago—he's one of the heaviest guys in both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) September 28, 2020

Sounds like that camp is full of Stable Geniuses™.

This isn’t an original musing of mine, but imagine how this would’ve gone down if he was a suicidal black guy who had barricaded himself in his home with an armory and someone called the police. White privilege is real.

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:

To delve into the records is to see up close the complex structure of the president’s business interests — and the depth of his entanglements. What is popularly known as the Trump Organization is in fact a collection of more than 500 entities, virtually all of them wholly owned by Mr. Trump, many carrying his name.

Having 500 companies hardly passes the sniff test.

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.

[…]

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

Some patriot.

When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

This certainly seems like a national security concern.

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.

For a fairly succinct roundup of Trump’s many personal debts, check out this thread. 👇🏼

1/ The New York Times #TrumpTaxReturns story is terrific. I had about a million thoughts as I was reading though. I'll be annotating those here, in this thread, for the next few hours. https://t.co/LeVjIwATpl

— Dan Alexander (@DanAlexander21) September 27, 2020

Worth noting: I suppose $1M might seem like a small loan to someone who is in debt by $1.1B.

UPDATED: 09/28/20, 19:23

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 incredibly 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.

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

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.

UPDATE: 9/16/20, 11:32;

Apple did not announce AirTags yesterday, so it’s time to eat my words I suppose. Tile will live another day (or month). I expect we‘ll hear about AirTags along with new iPhones whenever they’re announced, so we’ll table this article for now and revisit it in a few weeks.

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.

Trump knew it was worse than the flu.

Trump knew coronavirus was deadly. #TrumpKnew and he did nothing. pic.twitter.com/rWKzj5Ti1i

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 9, 2020

This is real audio (expertly assembled into a video by our friends at The Lincoln Project), straight from Donald Trump, where he admits to knowing how deadly the coronavirus was, and a subsequent admission that he intentionally downplayed it to the public. Allegedly he wanted to avoid creating a panic.

This is a stunning revelation, but to hear it come directly from Trump’s own mouth is really something else. The pandemic is the biggest issue of this election, and a lot of pundits have been saying the election could boil down to a referendum on the Trump administration’s response to it. If the election really does turn out to be a referendum on the COVID response, then Trump’s already hole-y ship just hit an iceberg. The question now isn’t whether the ship will sink (it’s undeniably going down; history will not look favorably upon his response), but whether they can keep it afloat until November third. They’ll certainly try to patch up the damage as much as they can (probably by releasing an untested vaccine in mid-October), and they’ll try to deflect attention to other issues, but I personally think they’re taking on water too quickly to stay afloat until the election. If it does come down to a COVID referendum — knocking on lots of wood here — I don’t think Trump can win.

From a CTV News interview with American History Professor Allan Litchman, summarized by Graham Slaughter:

[The revelation that] Donald Trump knew COVID-19 was deadly in the early days of the pandemic but publicly downplayed the virus will go down in history as "damning."

“This is the greatest dereliction of duty in the history of the U.S. presidency,” Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University for nearly 50 years, told CTV News Channel on Thursday.

I respect Litchman and his analysis a great deal. You may recognize his name, as he’s the historian who constructed the unbelievably accurate “Thirteen Keys” model of predicting U.S. presidential elections.

Why Trump felt comfortable speaking so candidly with Woodward, one of the most influential journalists in American politics, has everything to do with his “pathological ego” Lichtman said.

“Donald Trump thinks he’s smarter than everyone, he thinks he’s more cunning than everyone,” said Lichtman, who is a Democrat. Only one of the dumbest people in the room would constantly act like they’re the smartest person in the room.

As for Trump’s defence that he didn’t share how deadly the virus was because he didn’t want people to panic, Lichtman said it simply doesn’t pass the sniff test.

“What is Trump’s whole campaign based on? Causing panic. ‘Elect Joe Biden and your streets are going to burn. The criminals will be attacking your houses. The suburbs will be abolished.’ This is a guy who’s worried about causing panic? Come on. How could you possibly believe that?”

Again, rich hypocrisy. He’s effectively saying “look at what’s happening, our cities are on fire, Antifa* is coming, this is what will happen if you elect Joe Biden”, hoping his followers are stupid enough to ignore the fact that Trump is president now and it’s already happening. It’s so self unaware.

But let me guess, Republicans: y’all are totally okay with this. Something about not wanting to create a panic, sometimes you have lie to your kids because you love them, yadda yadda yadda. Republicans should be more offended by this than anyone. It’s an outright admission by Trump that he’s playing them for fools because they take every (self conflicting) thing he says as gospel.

*The “Pod Save America” boys aptly pointed out that Trump’s whole “Antifa” play is basically the 2020 rebrand of his “caravan” play from 2018. Baseless, divisive fear mongering that his most ignorant supporters are all too happy to gobble up without any evidence.

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

UPDATED: 10/06/20, 14:58

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.