Cartoon: COVID’s over* party supplies:

23 Pandemic Decisions That Actually Went Right - The Atlantic:

Not every lesson has to be a cautionary tale, however, and the end of the COVID-19 emergency may be, if nothing else, a chance to consider which pandemic policies, decisions, and ideas actually worked out for the best. Put another way: In the face of so much suffering, what went right?

To find out, we called up more than a dozen people who have spent the past several years in the thick of pandemic decision making, and asked: When the next pandemic comes, which concrete action would you repeat in exactly the same way?

While I’m not willing to say we’re at the end of the emergency, the points raised are good and I wish we were continuing to engage with them.

CNN’s open-mic night for Trump was a disgrace:

From the very first moment of CNN’s beyond ill-advised open mic night for Trump, he simply lied in response to everything that host Kaitlan Collins asked and either ignored any attempt to correct his lies, or shouted (and sneered) Collins down with the help of a pro-Trump crowd, hand-picked by CNN, which cheered him at every lie, whooped over every insult, and applauded at every threat.

At the end of the evening, CNN issued a statement saying, “Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist. She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time.” Anyone unfortunate enough to watch even a moment of the evening knows that CNN has confused the term “journalist” with “doormat.” A day after Donald Trump was held responsible for the sexual assault and defamation of one professional woman, CNN simply gave him another professional woman to humiliate in front of the nation. And he did. While a room full of adoring worshippers laughed.

CNN has made a mockery of itself with this “event”… They have, like Fox before them, staked their existence not as a News organization but as an Entertainment one.

1-bit Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave” – Hypertalking:

Stunning take on the original, the concept feels in the spirit of Hokusai’s works (Japanese woodcut series inspired by the styes and colors of the Dutch Master artists).

5 years ago I started a now completely stalled project (fingers crossed I can figure out how to restart soon) to draw all of Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji as 1-bit pixel art.

– Via kottke.org

As Twitter sinks, Musk rearranges the deck chairs | Boing Boing:

An announcement from Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk yesterday put the world on notice: he is adding functionality to the Twitter app that has nothing to do with their core mission, or that you don't already find elsewhere. It is as if Musk is investing what little resources he has left in new deck chairs for the Titanic after throwing all the old ones overboard just weeks ago.

Why would Twitter now seek to add voice calling and encrypted private messaging? Twitter is, first and foremost, a public messaging system. Musk has been diluting the value of that public messaging system by undermining its trust, and now he invests his remaining engineers in developing "trusted" private messaging that is already widely available and used in other apps.

Remembering Phony Stark’s obsession with “X” as a rebranded twitter nee WhatsApp alternative, and his fan’s obsession with encrypted messaging as a feature of that when planning an illegal coup attempt or avoiding judicial oversight, etc, this seems on-brand in the efforts of destroying the brand.

there is no middle – WIL WHEATON dot NET:

Remember how much fun it was to harmlessly TP your friends’ houses? How silly and goofy it was to ding-dong ditch someone? Just to do silly, childish, ultimately harmless expressions of being a kid who’s fooling around? Or how about playing hide and seek? Remember how fun that was?

Thanks to the Republican fascists who have gerrymandered and suppressed their way into minority rule In 21st century America, any of those things will now likely get you killed by a paranoid gun nut who won’t suffer any consequences. And when it’s a white man who murders a BIPOC child, his state’s Republican governor will pardon any consequences that somehow slip past the barriers to justice they’ve built.

Pick a side. There is no middle.

You’re with the fascists and terrorists, or you are with the rest of us. There is no middle. There is no “both sides”. One side wants as much death and terror on the streets as possible. The other side wants all of us to have healthcare and a home.

GA Republican says fake elector scheme came from Trump’s legal team:

CNN and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution report Shafer's attorneys have said that Shafer was following the "repeated and detailed advice" of Trump's legal team when he gathered up a team of so-called "contingent" Republican electors and appointed himself as one of them. So they said to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office is investigating the fake electors plot as they probe other attempts by Trump and the Republican Party to override Georgia's official election results.

Shafer's lawyers told Willis in a letter sent last week that Trump's legal team had given him "very direct, detailed legal advice on the procedure he should follow, and he followed those instructions to the letter." Shafer was following the instructions of "legal counsel," says Shafer's new legal counsel. This "eliminat[es] any possibility of criminal intent or liability" in forming a new slate of "electors" inside a Georgia state house committee room on Dec. 14, 2020 to vote for Donald Trump even as the officially designated Georgia electors cast their votes for Joe Biden elsewhere in the statehouse.

Sheriff: Louisiana man shot child playing hide and seek:

Investigators learned that several children were playing hide and seek in the Starks neighborhood and were hiding on the neighbor’s property.

David Doyle, 58, told detectives that he got his gun when he saw shadows outside his home and shot at people he saw running away, unknowingly hitting the girl, officials said.

Firearms have only one purpose. If you discharge one intentionally, at something person shaped, it should be charged as attempted murder, period.

What does an AR-15 do to a human body? A visual examination of the deadly damage. - Washington Post:

This is not a pretty read. This is meant to be traumatic, because the subject matter is exactly that.

If you can view this, and still think any civilian should be carrying .223 or similar rifles, you are certifiably a monster.

The animation glosses over that a 9mm or other handgun ammo can also do hydrostatic shock, and depending on slug can still do massive trauma, but even with those considerations it’s nothing like the energy-transfer, cavitation, and fragmentation trauma from .223 or 7.63 rounds issued for combat.

Daring Fireball: Ford CEO Jim Farley Seems Very Happy That GM Is Dropping CarPlay:

Great 3-minute clip from Joanna Stern’s interview with Ford CEO Jim Farley at the WSJ’s Future of Everything Festival. She asks him about GM’s plan to drop CarPlay from their future EVs, and Farley starts by saying “Yeah, how about that?” and laughing.

Farley says, “The interior has to be really well done. But in terms of content? We kind of lost that battle 10 years ago. So get real with it, because you’re not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle. It’s going to be safety/security, partial autonomy, and productivity in our eyes. [...] 70 percent of our Ford customers in the U.S are Apple customers. Why would I go to an Apple customer and say ‘Good luck!’? That doesn’t seem customer centric.”

Right-wing commentator Stephen Crowder threatened wife and “exposed himself” to co-workers | Boing Boing:

Stephen Crowder, a right-wing commentator whose fame rose with YouTube's decision to favor his virulent brand of content, is being divorced by his wife. Footage released amid the proceedings shows Crowder berating, threatening and emotionally abusing his then-pregnant spouse: actions that once might have gotten him "canceled" for good but now seem mostly to have focused conservative anger on the right to a "no-fault" divorce–the right that allows his wife to free herself. Today we learned that Crowder is accused of exposing his genitals to colleagues, giving conservatives obsessed with male prerogatives something else to chew on.

Daring Fireball: The Onion: ‘Netflix Condemns WGA Strike for Putting Future Show Cancellations Behind Schedule’:

Emphasizing the negative effects the recent union action would have on the company, Netflix officials condemned the Writers Guild of America strike Tuesday for putting future show cancellations behind schedule. “We have dozens of shows already stuck in the early stages of the preproduction process, but this strike will cause significant delays in our eventual scrapping of those projects,” said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, who added that preventing work that writers had committed over a year of their lives to from becoming fully realized creations that the streaming platform could kill before they ever saw the light of day was unconscionable.

Microsoft Broke Google Chrome Feature to Promote Edge Browser:

An April Windows update borked a new button in Chrome—the most popular browser in the world—that let you change your default browser with a single click, but the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient.

I have tried to give MS the benefit of the doubt about getting better… Their cloud gaming offering is an interesting value proposition that works entirely in-browser on non-Windows systems, their ownership of Bethesda seems to be mostly benevolent, and they’ve been an OK shepherd of GitHub from outside appearances despite some missteps… But every once in a while they show that streaks of their old selves live on in the company, and every time it happens I have to reassess how much I trust any part of them.

Musk, who has been scuffling with the media since acquiring the platform last year, asked if NPR was going to start tweeting again. — Read on www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

It seems like Phony Stark is really hurt that content producing entities are dumping him.

The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector — Read on defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.

DeSantis wrote his own confession, to the delight of Disney lawyers:

Disney condemned the "Don't Say Gay" law as being bad for business, upon which Dear Leader Ron had an absolute public fit over the audacity of a U.S. corporation announcing an opinion he didn't like. Immediately after signing the bill into law, state lawmakers were already mulling a repeal of Disney's 1967-granted special property rights in the area surrounding their Florida theme parks, explicitly citing Disney's "woke ideology" as the reason why.

DeSantis and Florida Republicans would eventually follow through with that threat, though not before Disney's allies could so badly outmaneuver them as to render the whole thing nearly a farce, and that leads us to the present. Disney is now suing DeSantis and other Florida state officials for a "targeted campaign of government retaliation—orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney's protected speech."

Special points:

DeSantis did all of this in an effort to become the next Republican president, of course. That is why DeSantis has done everything ever since he came into office, as he mimes and mimics his way into the Republican psyche by attaching himself to every scrap of "culture war" he can find. But DeSantis is never going to get the nomination, because he is very creepy, completely devoid of personality, and has no political moves other than grumpy, whining showboating.

Unless Donald Trump dies. If Donald Trump dies, DeSantis will dig him up, wear his skin, and cruise to the nomination claiming to be him. But that’s a tall order, and Ron no longer has a plausible Plan B.

If there’s no Plan B, it’s because he outlawed it out of spite…

Luciole - Typeface:

Luciole (French for “firefly”) is a new typeface developed explicitly for visually impaired people. The result of a two-year collaboration between the Centre Technique Régional pour la Déficience Visuelle (the Regional Technical Center for Visual Impairment) and the type-design studio typographies.fr, this project received a grant from the Swiss Ceres Foundation and support from the DIPHE laboratory at the Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Tiny Illustrated Sci-fi Stories:

It’s a shame this is on phony stark’s vanity site, I’d probably be into it.

Far-right group gives Ivermectin to kids with autism — and it’s making them sick | Boing Boing:

It's bad enough when the Q-infused MAGA mob is in charge of the country. But put them in charge of children, and things get downright sick. At least with a group of hundreds of parents that meet on the far-right app Telegram, according to Vice, who encourage each other to treat their children living with autism and other disabilities with Ivermectin — a toxic medication meant to deworm animals.

Even when these children come down with severe side effects from taking Ivermectin — blurry vision, nausea, vomiting, pain, seizures — parents in this group, called "Learning to Fly," are told to just have their kids push through it.

Monsters.

10 principles of disability justice | Boing Boing:

At the beginning, and throughout the first two years of the ongoing, yet to be over, COVID-19 pandemic, ideas pioneered by disability justice organizations were finally given credence by larger swaths of the population. This is no longer the case. Given the ongoing pandemic, and the disproportionate short and long-term consequences for the communities most directly impacted, the insight provided by people on the front lines of eugenicist medical policies should be revisited. Particularly with regards to health-based discrimination and social ostracization of at risk people with auto-immune or other precarious health issues.

Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. - POLITICO:

This is, by far the smartest analysis of gun violence I’ve ever seen, breaking it down by major cultural influence rather than geography, and derives some really useful data from that.

In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.

The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed.

The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent — which has a rate of 3.8, which is comparable to that of Switzerland. Yankeedom is the next safest at 8.6, which is about half that of Deep South, and Left Coast follows closely behind at 9. El Norte, the Midlands, Tidewater and Far West fall in between.

America discovers the true meaning of ‘an armed society is a polite society’:

Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old in Kansas City, was shot when he knocked on the wrong door while looking for his twin siblings. Twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed when the car she was in turned into the wrong driveway while looking for a friend. Two cheerleaders—Payton Washington, 18, and Heather Roth, 21—were shot when one of them accidentally opened the wrong door in a parking lot. Six-year-old Kinsley White, her father, and the father of a friend were shot after children went into a neighbor’s yard to retrieve a basketball that had rolled away.

All of these incidents happened in a week. In that same week, five people died and 32 others were injured in a shooting rampage at a Sweet 16 birthday party. Four men were shot when someone took offense to their painting over graffiti outside an ice cream shop. Four more were shot when an argument got heated on a residential street corner. And those are only a selection of the 14 mass shootings—those in which four or more people were wounded or killed—over that seven-day period.

The aphorism “an armed society is a polite society” is a frequently used saying among gun supporters on the right. It’s also been featured on banners, buttons, and T-shirts from the National Rifle Association. But no one ever seems to ask what it really means.

This is what it means. All of this. It means in a society with more guns than people, even the slightest provocation ends with someone getting shot.

The quote in question is a Heinlein quote taken WAY out of context and even in context it was part of a satiric viewpoint that wasn’t meant to be emulated… (Which acutally is a trend with Heinlein quotes)

Daring Fireball: If You Come at the King:

We still don’t know much about Humane’s device, as Wong’s colleague at Inverse Ian Carlos Campbell notes in this follow-up piece. But everything we do know seems positioned around the notion of relieving us of the burden of being tethered to our iPhones all day every day. The fundamental flaw in Humane’s entire premise, as I see it, is that people don’t feel burdened by their phones. People love them — especially iPhone owners. And those who are ambivalent or even downright antipathetic toward their phones surely aren’t the sort of people who are interested in a newfangled laser-projecting AI-driven chest-badge computer.

I wrote about this all the way back in 2010, in the era of the iPhone 4, when Microsoft debuted a high-budget ad campaign for their answer to the iPhone, Windows Phone 7. The ads were very entertaining — particularly this one — but the whole premise was fundamentally flawed. Microsoft’s message was that if you switched to Windows Phone you wouldn’t need to stare at your phone all the time. The problem is that people stare at their phones all the time not because they have to but because they want to.

“Finally, you can replace this thing that you despise” is a powerful marketing message. “Finally, you can replace this thing that you love” is not.

Most people who seem most exicted about this seem to be Android users who hate actually using their phones.

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Opium Underworlds:

I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, so if you’re reluctant to step inside the world of 19th century junkies, I suggest you close the door and choose something a little lighter and brighter from our menu. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here myself, stockpiling antique photographs that have survived from the Opium Age and ended up on the internet. In my years of hunting and gathering in the far corners of the web, I’ve always been stopped in my tracks by these images because they seem like such rare and almost unreal insights into late 19th century society.

Technological Antisolutions: The Difference Between Public Transit and Self-Driving Cars:

In fact, most of the world’s richest man’s wealth has come from precisely this phenomenon. Investors and analysts have long puzzled over the wildly inflated valuations of his companies, noting that Tesla’s market cap has oftentimes exceeded the combined market cap of its five major competitors. It is because Elon Musk does not sell cars, or spaceships, or tunnelling equipment; he sells political apathy. He tells us he can solve our social problems by replacing them with cool sounding technology that he will never be able to deliver.

There is perhaps no better example of technological antisolution than the self-driving car. American transit is a political crisis on so many levels. The average American’s daily routine involves spending an inordinate amount of their day operating 4,000 lbs of heavy machinery that burns fossil fuels. Oftentimes, these machines capable of cruising safely at 70+mph are forced to sit in queues miles long because there are so many of them. This twice-daily society-wide masochistic ritual destroys the air quality in our cities, the psychological well-being of its participants, the physical spaces we inhabit, and the only wet rock capable of sustaining human life in an otherwise cold and unwelcoming universe.

Note - There’s no such things as “cruising safely at 70+mph” - Brakes, human reflexes, visual acuity and road conditions just don’t combine in a way that anything over 60 or so is acutally safe most of the time, much less all the time.