Jennifer Henderson, reporting for CNN:

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.

Woodruff later learned she was implicated in the alleged incident after the facial recognition software hit as well as the carjacking victim allegedly identified her in a lineup of six photos that included her mugshot from a 2015 arrest, the complaint states. Police had access to her current driver’s license photo issued in 2021, but used the older photo, according to the complaint.

This is seriously concerning, especially for black people. We know that police officers go out of their way to respect the rights of black Americans /s, but photography companies have long been biased towards taking photos of white people, often making black people appear far too dark and featureless in photographs, which necessarily makes artificial intelligence models less capable of identifying them accurately in images.

Aside from that, ALL citizens of the world should have strong concerns about governments using technology like this for law enforcement purposes. It’s chillingly dystopian.

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.

The girls who got pregnant were stigmatized—until their babies were born. Then they were revered as mothers. Our school was full of young moms who were still students, and those newly graduated would come back for ball games and other events, babies on their hips. It was an endless churn, baby after baby, raised in families that spanned five or six generations because so few years separated grandmothers and mothers and daughters—and because the girls couldn’t take care of their newborns without help. […]

The message at church was that we had to keep ourselves pure for our husbands, and the message at school was that sex would either kill us or leave us pregnant, and there was nothing we could do to prevent either scenario except abstain.

Despite the sermons, my friends were still having sex at about the same rates as teenagers elsewhere in the country. They were keenly aware that it was frowned on, and if a crisis resulted, they hesitated to seek help from an adult. In some cases, it kept them from breaking up with their boyfriend and made them vulnerable to exploitation and assault […]

When it came to liquor, there were two modes in Clinton: alcoholism or abstinence. This paralleled the bifurcated morality I saw everywhere: Girls were either virgins or whores; students were either geniuses or failures; you could go to church or you could be a sinner. The town seemed to operate in two modes—the buttoned-up propriety of the churchgoers, who held power in the county, versus the rowdy hillbillies in families like my dad’s. The rigid divide allowed no room for subtleties or missteps.

This is a truly sagacious piece; its analysis and anecdotes perfectly describe Gaston County, North Carolina, where I grew up. Except, this article was written about a place almost 500 miles away from the county I was raised in. This article was written about Clinton, a city in Van Buren County, Arkansas.

A particularly insightful anecdote:

Our friend Vanessa Allen, who was maybe the most boy crazy of us all, suffered the most. Vanessa had long, curly black hair and was the oldest of four kids. Her mom, Susie, had gotten married as a teenager and had Vanessa at 18. Vanessa wore a promise ring in middle school, but she liked attention from boys and had a reputation for being a flirt. I remember her wearing a tight-fitting bodysuit at a football game. When she walked past a group of grown men, they whistled at her, and one of them said admiringly, “Someone’s been eating her beans and cornbread!” She was 14.

Adults had taught us girls to keep boys from touching us before marriage, but no one ever told us what to do if we wanted to touch them. In that space between Vanessa’s desire and her shame, other girls smelled blood. The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do […]

This really pulls back the curtain on the generational cycle of poor parenting by barely educated individuals reproducing in rural America, and showcases the true toxicity of the sexually regressive culture that evangelicals have imposed upon the south. It’s hard to blame the teenagers and young adults for their poor choices, because its the only thing they know and have seen demonstrated by their own too-young parents, but at some point, you have to start blaming them for perpetuating these harmful beliefs and destructive habits as adults in their mid/upper twenties, because by that point they're subjecting their own children to the same environment that failed them, and then a new generation is forced to pick between striving towards a life of nearly unattainable white-picket-fence holiness or settling for impulse driven, don’t-give-a-fuck redneckery.

This is just such a great piece of personally informed journalism. Potts’ commentaries on and summations of southern teen life and the whole culture that simultaneously shames and offhandedly excuses teen sexuality as something to be expected yet not addressed (particularly as experienced by girls and young women, in relation their young male peers, but also by those young men) as informed by the dichotomy of evangelical versus redneck social classes is just so astute.

It impresses upon me that perhaps it would be worth my time to take a stab at expounding upon the experiences of the young men raised in this environment, particularly the ones who wrestled with attractions largely aimed towards their male peers, rather than young women. Lord knows they faced similar struggles, if not often more taboo and personally detrimental. We’ll see, I think there’s an interesting story to be told there as well.

Frankly, this piece reminds me a bit of Idiocracy.

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.

Fabio Rampelli, a member of the lower chamber of deputies, introduced the legislation, which is supported by the prime minister.

While the legislation encompasses all foreign languages, it is particularly geared at “Anglomania” or use of English words, which the draft states “demeans and mortifies” the Italian language, adding that it is even worse because the UK is no longer part of the EU.

[…]

The move to safeguard the Italian language joins an existing bid by the government to protect the country’s cuisine.

It has introduced legislation to ban so-called synthetic or cell-based cuisine due to the lack of scientific studies on the effects of synthetic food, as well as “to safeguard our nation’s heritage and our agriculture based on the Mediterranean diet,” Meloni’s Health Minister Orazio Schillaci said in a press conference.

Italy on the fascism fast-track, what could go wrong?

John Gruber, on Daring Fireball:

Interesting turn of events that it’s the Play Store that is being more strict about this than Apple’s App Store, where Truth Social has been available since February.

Not a good look for Apple, but seems difficult to walk back now without looking like they’re trying to mirror Google, which would surely be met with a cacophony of conservative outrage and accusations of cancel culture-fueled hypocrisy.

This is the sort of story you love to see. From Deepa Seetharaman and Salvador Rodriguez at The Wall Street Journal (via Apple News+):

Meta shares plunged after the results were announced, dropping more than 20%. If shares dropped that much when trading opens on Thursday, it would wipe more than $175 billion from the tech giant’s market capitalization.

Quick update: the Journal’s story was published on the evening of Facebook’s report, before the market opened the next day. They ended up dropping slightly more than 25%, and they lost over $200B.

The company said it expected revenue growth to slow because users were spending less time on its more lucrative services. Meta cited inflation as a weight on advertiser spending and estimated that ad-tracking changes introduced by Apple Inc. last year would cost Meta some $10 billion this year. 

I bet Apple is happy about this. And they certainly should be. Their App Tracking Transparency policy wasn’t designed to cripple Mark Zuckerberg’s company, it was designed to give users a little more control over their data and prevent unwanted tracking. Facebook blaming Apple for the loss would be like a peeping tom blaming his victim for his blue balls when they finally close the curtains of the window he’s looking through. Merlin Mann put it well on Twitter (quipping about a particularly stupid framing of the issue by the New York Times):

“Local burglar blames revenue shortfall on industry-hostile doors.”

From the Journal again:

Meta also lost about a million daily users globally and stagnated in the U.S. and Canada, two of the company’s most profitable markets, the results show.

The fact that they’re losing users is a good sign, but it it shouldn’t take Facebook by surprise unless they’re so high on their own supply that they've completely isolated themselves in echo chambers reaffirming how much good they’re doing in the world (probably by means of Facebook groups). The global social media market is saturated, this plateauing shouldn’t come as a surprise, and Facebook acting like this caught them off guard is bullshit. They clearly did see it coming because they decided to refocus the whole business on personal porn theaters virtual reality goggles. We’ll see how that goes, but here’s to the next Google Glass.

I must say though, it pisses me off that Wall Street is gonna get the credit for finally dealing a significant blow to Facebook when those of us who have been paying attention have been screaming about how terrible they are for years. Fuck capitalism, fuck Facebook.

#deletefacebook

I wrote this on October 28th, 2021 and forgot to publish it, but better late than never:

Presumably because they make all their money selling your metadata?

Somehow this feels desperate, dorky, cowardly, and creepy all at the same time. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are pathetic, greedy human beings.

#deletefacebook

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:

Full statement from Carl Nassib. #PRIDE pic.twitter.com/92cSSDqZoR

— NFL (@NFL) June 21, 2021

I think this has the potential to spur similar announcements (not that they’re required to share the details of their personal lives) from more NFL players and other professional athletes. 

Whether that happens or not, I think this announcement will definitely be a big deal for boys and young guys who are having trouble reconciling their attractions to other guys with stereotypically masculine demeanors and interests, because Nassib is totally correct, representation does matter. And it doesn’t just matter for little boys who want to be broadway stars or princesses, but also for boys who want to be soldiers or football players. There’s nothing wrong with boys who have more feminine personalities or interests, but our society seems to forget that not all same-sex attracted guys fit that mold. 

For the first time, boys who can tell that they’re a little different but otherwise feel normal will have a man to look up to who acts them and likes some of the same things they like. And I think that means a lot — I know it would’ve made life a lot less confusing for me, personally — because it’s important for boys to know that honestly acknowledging who you’re attracted to, whether publicly or privately, doesn’t mean you have to alter your behavior, interests, or personality to fit a stereotype. Seeing masculine, everyday guys come out in roles they look up to will help to show young guys that healthy expressions of traditional American masculinity don’t just belong the insecure, conservative, evangelical men who have tried to exclude other men who make them feel threatened.

On that note, while progressives have done a ton for same-sex attracted people, there’s a large part of the movement that thinks being male and acting like it gives you enough privilege to alleviate all your other problems, and that’s just not the case. Being able to pass as a straight guy in a homosexual-hostile community has its advantages, but it also results in a lot of internalized problems that these men don’t deserve to be blamed for, because they’re conditioned to never feel comfortable addressing them. Given this hurdle, it’s remarkable that a successful football player with everything to lose finally worked up the courage to go against the grain and take this step, but it’s great that he did because it helps to break a link in a vicious cycle. If more young guys in those homophobic environments see same-sex attraction as a normal aspect of human sexuality, then they won’t have to wrestle those demons as young men, and our whole society will be better off. 

All that to say, representation does matter, and for a lot of kids, having a football player to look up to who is open about his same-sex attraction is a big deal. Nassib is going to be at least a few kids’ new favorite player.

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.

Steve Kovach, writing for CNBC:

Apple said it received a subpoena from a federal grand jury on Feb. 6, 2018. According to Apple, the subpoena requested data that belonged to a seemingly random group of email addresses and phone numbers. Apple said it provided the identifiers it had for some of the requests from the DOJ, but not all of the requests were for Apple customers.

Katie Benner, Nicholas Fandos, Michael S. Schmidt and Adam Goldman, reporting for The New York Times:

All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had been subpoenaed.

Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.

Kovach, again:

Because of a nondisclosure order signed by a federal magistrate judge, Apple could not notify the people that their data was subpoenaed. The so-called gag order lifted on May 5, which is why Apple only recently alerted the affected users. According to Apple, the subpoena did not provide details on the nature of the investigation.

[…]

Microsoft on Friday told CNBC it received a similar subpoena from the DOJ.

The DOJ doesn’t play fair here. Not only in this specific instance, which was egregious because it represents a Watergate-level instance of a President spying on his political enemies (and at least one member of his own administration, apparently), but in general. At any time, you could receive the same notice from Apple that they had been forced to give the government all your data years ago, and that they’re just now allowed to tell you about it. The Department of Justice has operated with impunity in this arena even before Trump’s corrupt impulses and arm twisting got added into the mix, and they need to be reeled in. The accounts they demanded access to were not government accounts. They were personal iCloud accounts belonging to elected officials, their aides, and even more outrageously, their family members, including their kids.

The DOJ knows this is outrageous, and they don’t like having this conversation. They don’t want you to cause a fuss over your civil liberties or privacy, so they put Apple under a gag order, forbidding them from telling you that they were forced to give the government your data until several years have passed. The incident we’re learning about now actually occurred in 2018, but Apple was just now allowed to inform those whose accounts had been violated. This is egregious. Our elected officials need to hear from us, loud and clear, that despite living in a post-9/11 world and a Facebook surveillance state, we still value our privacy, and are willing to protect it with our votes.

Political pressure may be one of our most effective tools, in fact, because the very small number of tools that are currently available to us are partially effective at best. For example, my suggestion from last year of disabling iCloud backups to safeguard your iMessage decryption key remains useful to protect your messages, but it’s a bit of a hassle and a risk, and it only protects your messages. There’s nothing you can do (besides pulling out of iCloud altogether) to protect data like your photos, notes, voice memos, contacts, your backups, and your iCloud Drive files. But there is something Apple could do.

They need to give us the option to encrypt the entire contents of our iCloud account. Of course, doing that comes with more risk, so they should make sure customers are informed about the risk of data loss and the greater responsibility they would have to protect and maintain their own access to their accounts, and let users opt-in only if they want to. But I bet a lot of users would opt in. Financially, I think Apple could offer this as a free option for customers without much overhead, but they could even charge more for it if they wanted to, whether by rolling it into an iCloud+ tier or charging a separate fee. I’d pay for it, and I’m sure a lot of other people would too, from power users, to privacy advocates, to those working with exceptionally sensitive data. Their most loyal customers and promoters care about this, but Apple currently gives them no good options. Whether it comes down to a paid iCloud service or not, Apple must stand up for their users here.

Perhaps, though, Apple just needed an example; maybe this story about the DOJ (and the gag order expiring) is what they were waiting on. My hope is that they wanted to wait for an incident like this that they could point to to rally public support for end-to-end encrypted iCloud data, despite government objections. It would make some amount of sense, to help sustain themselves (PR-wise and legally) against the gale-force winds that are sure to come from the peeping toms that comprise the law enforcement and investigative communities. It’s basically a redo of the showdown between the Apple and the FBI over the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, but with Apple taking a more reactive step forward (whereas last time, they were just refusing to take a step backward). Again, I hope that is the case. And if it is, then Apple needs to know that their customers have their back and will support them through this change and the fight that would ensue.But whether that’s the case or not, we all need to let them know we’re concerned about government overreach, and that we want the option to have ALL the contents of our iCloud accounts protected by end-to-end encryption. Feel free to whip something up yourself, or copy and paste the prompt below into Apple’s iCloud Feedback portal.

Hi. I’m reaching out because I’m concerned about the extreme government overreach we’ve recently learned about regarding subpoenaed iCloud account data. I don’t think it’s right that a government agency can seize private user data without permission or notice.

I’m concerned that there’s no truly secure way to use iCloud. I want the option to have ALL of my iCloud data (including backups, contacts, photos, and everything else) protected by end-to-end encryption. Privacy is a fundamental human right, and Apple users value that right. I believe Apple truly values that right as well, and that’s why I’m hopeful that you’ll soon provide users with an option to protect all of their data with end-to-end encryption.

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.

[One] potential flaw in any digital cash scheme would permit a digital token to get spent more than once. 

To solve this problem, Bitcoin broadcasts messages to its entire network to get everyone to confirm each transaction, all to prevent malicious […] players from cheating. Bitcoin achieves such consensus by implementing a blockchain, which is a secure ledger of all transactions in the system that is maintained by its community of users instead of any intermediary such as a bank.

In order for blockchains to reach consensus on the validity of all transactions, users must execute complex, energy-intensive computing “proof of work” tasks. […]

However, [some computer scientists] argue that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on blockchains are essentially overkill. They suggest that solving the problem of double-spending does not require the complex task of achieving consensus. Instead, much simpler, faster, and less energy-intensive algorithms can suffice.

The latest algorithms the scientists developed broadcast messages about each transaction in a manner similar to gossip: one user tells a small group about the transaction, and they go on to inform others about it, and so on, with the message spreading to a growing number of participants in the system in an exponential manner. […]

[Then,] instead of seeking consensus from every participant in the system for each transaction, the algorithms check to see if a random sample of users has received messages about each transaction. If this sample is sufficiently large, the chance that malicious attackers can fool the system into thinking another transaction occurred is lowered enough to ensure that such hacks do not occur within the age of the universe, the researchers say.

[…]

The consensusless algorithms also generate just a few grams of carbon dioxide per transaction, compared to an estimated 300 kilograms per Bitcoin transaction. In addition, while the original Bitcoin protocol took up to an hour to confirm that a transaction went through correctly, the Swiss team’s prototype algorithms can do so in less than a second.

This seems like a promising system. Hopefully there will be a way for established cryptocurrencies to take advantage of it, but I seriously doubt it. That said, if we can’t find a way to make cryptocurrency work that isn’t so preposterously bad for the environment — whether through the methods these researchers proposed or through some other method — then the entire idea deserves to be abandoned. It bears repeating: a single Bitcoin transaction produces 300 kilograms of carbon dioxide. That is atrocious.

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.

Dan Pfeifer makes an excellent point about this from a largely unconsidered angle on Thursday’s episode of Pod Save America, taking aim at Facebook:

It is a massive indictment of Facebook in particular, because their argument always is that “this is the content people want, we’re just serving it up to you.” But here you have: Trump has content, he’s off Facebook, and no one is going to get it. And so what that shows is that it’s not that Facebook is giving people what they want, Facebook is giving people something pretty dangerous that they think they want. And that has had a very alarming, radicalizing effect on the American people.

#deletefacebook

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 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.

Science is science and facts are facts, regardless of whether the CDC has publicly acknowledged them yet. The CDC obviously wants to be dealing in facts, but the truth is they also have to weigh the political effects and the real world outcomes of any announcements they make. Their credibility has been seriously shaken in the past year, so I think it makes sense for Americans to start making their own decisions based on the science, even if the CDC hasn’t given them those specific directions yet. By March, anyone with eyeballs could see that the vaccination campaign was moving at a good clip and that it wouldn’t be long before a majority of Americans were vaccinated. While it would take a bit longer to reach herd immunity, the risk of any one person catching COVID was quickly falling, and we also knew that the vaccines had extremely high efficacy. Vaccinated individuals who were truly motivated by science had practically nothing to fear, so it makes sense that they would do the math for themselves and decide that it was safe enough to start the process of getting back to normal (and leaving masks behind) even though the CDC hadn’t yet relaxed any of their recommendations.

Experts believe we need roughly 70-90% of adults to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. My understanding is that we’re currently at about 60%, but we’re fighting an uphill battle because we’re now at the point where supply has outstripped demand; vaccinations rates are slowing because most of the people who wanted vaccines got them early, so we’re now dealing with the slower process of convincing those who were skeptical or hesitant that vaccines are safe and in their best interest. I doubt we’ll ever get more than 80-85% because a significant number of people now believe the rampant disinformation that’s been spread from antivaxxers and the far right (largely on Facebook and Fox News), but I do think there are a number of convincible people out there who just need a little more encouragement or incentive.

My decision to stop wearing a mask isn’t just some libertarian urge to get back to normal and stop letting the government “control my life,” which was a pretty stupid argument to begin with. The best reason for taking the masks off (aside from the fact that it is undeniably safe to do so) is that for those who are hesitant about vaccines, this could be the extra incentive they need to do their research and decide that it may be worth it for them to take the shots, provided that they can then also ditch their masks. Nobody really likes wearing them. They’re uncomfortable, they cause glasses to fog up, they force to you smell your own breath, and generally make breathing a bit less efficient. Seeing vaccinated people go in stores and conduct their lives like normal may be the best incentive we could come up with, for a lot of people.

The only counter argument to using freedom from masks as a vaccination incentive worth considering is that we would have no way to know for sure if someone is fully vaccinated, and whether they’re technically allowed to take their mask off just yet. I think the response to that argument is pretty straightforward: it doesn’t matter. As long as we don’t have any sort of vaccine passport (and that’s something I think the federal government needs to be looking into), it’s true that we can’t verify who’s been vaccinated and are therefore forced to rely on the honor system. But again, it doesn’t matter. The only people who are going to be hurt by people lying about their vaccination status are other people who are lying about their vaccination. If you’ve already been vaccinated, you really have no reason to fear a redneck Trump supporter who lied to the greeter at Walmart: the only people he’s going to hurt by spreading COVID in there are the other unvaccinated morons who lied to get past the greeter.

If you’re a liberal who has been vaccinated and you’re still desperately clinging to your mask despite the fact that the science says you have no realistic chance of getting COVID from the redneck in Walmart, you need to ask yourself if it was ever really about the science for you. I suspect it probably wasn’t. A disappointing number of people on the left seem to have entangled their political identity with mask wearing (as many on the right have done with their refusal to wear one), using masks as a way to virtue signal, wearing them proudly as a badge of their status as good, obedient liberals. If that’s what it’s about for those who claimed to be following the science, then it becomes a lot harder to blame those on the other side and those who are honestly skeptical of the science. The left accused Trump and the right of politicizing masks from the start, and while they were certainly guilty of that, the left wasn’t innocent: they were just more subtle. If you were using the science to shit on Republicans for not wearing mask six months ago, then you should expect them to use that same excuse to shit on you for continuing to wear masks now.

The bottom line: get your shots, ditch your mask.

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

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

Wow. Internal facebook memo regarding the recent breach leaked to @Pieterjanvl:
👉 If we stop talking about it, FB will NOT provide more info
👉 FB wants to FRAME and normalize ONGOING scraping
👉 FB wants to avoid criticism on them NOT being transparenthttps://t.co/8XlcJarcAg pic.twitter.com/qAogft4MVi

— Inti De Ceukelaire (@intidc) April 20, 2021

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.

The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Rico Marley, now faces a slew of charges related to the incident, which came just days after 10 people were killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

It was that tragedy that was fresh in the mind of the Instacart shopper, Charles Russell, he told CNN affiliate WSB.

"I saw an AR-15," he said. "And I was like, you know, this kind of startled me just again with events that recently happened in the grocery store up in Colorado."

Authorities have not said what they believed Marley intended to do with the weapons.

Yeah “authorities,” I fucking wonder.

This might as well count as a mass shooting. Real nice country we got here.

It’s also worth pointing out that rather than do anything about this near miss massacre, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp spent that day passing a modern day Jim Crow voter suppression bill that makes it illegal to give water to someone waiting in line to vote.

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.

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

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.

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.