Baby, It's Cold Outside

Donald Trump and the Republicans are yet again claiming that climate change is a hoax because, Baby, it's cold outside.

Yes, it's cold outside. That's the difference between weather and climate.

On a day-to-day basis, we have weather. Today, it's cold, tomorrow it's warm, it rains on Tuesday, it snows on Wednesday.

On a decade-to-decade and century-to-century basis we have climate. Hundreds of millions of years ago we had drastically higher seas, and a much warmer climate. Twelve thousand years ago we had an ice age. Two hundred years ago our "normal" climate had been established. But then we started burning coal and oil -- carbon which had been stored underground over billions of years -- in the span of two centuries, and the CO2 released has quickly warmed the climate. Faster than any time in history.

To understand climate you have to look at the whole planet. While it's been cold in the eastern half of the US for the last week or so, it's hot in the rest of the world.

In particular, it has been extremely warm in Alaska. For example, at 1:00 PM Central time today we had the following readings:

Nome, AK: 26
Anchorage, AK: 21
Juneau, AK: 35 and rain
Barrow, AK: -2
New York City, NY: 15
Washington DC: 19
Minneapolis, MN: 1

Yes, it's colder in Washington than it is in all the major cities of Alaska, and Minnesota is just barely warmer than one of the coldest places humans normally inhabit.

The planet has warmed so much that the jet stream has been affected. Essentially, hot air from the south has pushed its way into Alaska, forcing cold air into the lower 48.

The snow and cold in Florida are a direct result of extremely high temperatures in the western US and arctic regions. That is, the severity of the blizzard and cold in the east are a direct result of climate change.

This has been happening regularly for the past several years, so it's nothing new. But Republican shills for the oil and gas industry keep repeating the lie that the planet isn't warming, and even if it is, it's not their fault.

So, as long as they keep lying about climate change, I'll keep posting weather reports from Alaska to show how ridiculously warm the earth is getting.

The Problem with the Gig Economy, Illustrated

A week ago we ordered a waffle maker from Amazon.com, with free shipping. We tracked the package on the Amazon website, and Wednesday morning the site said the package it was in a suburb 12 miles southwest of us. Later in the day it said it was out for delivery and that it would arrive by 8 PM.

At 8 PM Wednesday still no waffle maker. This was weird, because in the past Amazon would ship us stuff and it would get here via UPS exactly when they said it would.

Thursday morning the Amazon tracking website said the waffle maker was in a suburb 22 miles southeast of us, and again said that it was out for delivery and would arrive Thursday by 8 PM. It was getting further and further away...

During the past two days we have seen UPS trucks go by again and again, but no delivery.

At 2:53 PM on Thursday we got the waffle maker. It was delivered by a guy wearing an orange and yellow safety vest driving an unmarked white van: Amazon had used their own delivery service this time. As "proof" that they delivered the package, they took a picture of the box at our door, which appeared on the Amazon website. So secure!

This service is called Amazon Flex, and it's patterned after Uber. But unlike Uber, you've probably never heard of it. I hadn't, until I looked into why it was taking so long to get the package.

According to this article on Gizmodo, Amazon Flex has all the problems that Uber has. It treats employees as contractors, uses an app to set up deliveries, and requires drivers to have their own vehicles. Drivers undergo a minimal background check and receive minimal training (watching videos on their phone). They don't wear a uniform and have nothing to identify their vehicles as Amazon Flex. But oh! They get a non-photo ID badge!

Like Uber, drivers compete with each other for deliveries, snatching up "blocks" of deliveries through the app. Like Uber, drivers are part-timers making deliveries for supplemental income. Some drivers cheat and use bots to secure more desirable delivery blocks in the app. Like Uber, a lot of drivers don't even make minimum wage due to expenses and wasted time (and there's a lot of wasted time, especially when delivering to apartment buildings).

There are many problems with this, especially when you consider that Amazon is rolling out Amazon Key, where they actually unlock the front door of your house, go inside and drop off packages. Do you really want someone who is basically a random person off the street going into your house?

In my experience, UPS and USPS drivers have always been professional and prompt. It's their full-time job, so they have a major incentive to do it well. With Amazon Flex, like Uber, you never know who you're getting.

My sister tried driving for Uber a couple of times, but didn't like it. So she just quit.

Do you really want your stuff delivered by people who are just "trying it out?" If your package goes missing was it really stolen from your doorstep, or did the delivery guy just decide he'd had enough of Amazon Flex and kept the package for himself after taking its picture on your doorstep, or just dumped it on the street in disgust?

Delivering packages isn't rocket science, but when there are regular routes UPS drivers and mail carriers get good at making efficient deliveries. They don't get lost, they know the ins and outs of the neighborhoods and the preferences of customers. They optimize routes for fuel efficiency, since UPS pays for the gas.

Amazon Flex drivers are essentially random, and will change every day. Since drivers pay for the gas, Amazon doesn't care how fuel-efficient the system is, as long as their Prime customers get the packages on time. No one else matters to Amazon.

Unions are quickly going out of fashion, but without the ability to bargain collectively, the American middle class would never had risen. UPS drivers and US mail carriers are some of the few remaining unionized workers in the country.

A big part of the rise of income inequality has been the disappearance of unionized blue-collar jobs. But even workers at non-union factories have some level of influence over their pay and working conditions because they're at the factory, working side-by-side with their supervisors, and therefore have some kind of relationship with management.

But with gigs like Uber and Amazon Flex, there is only the app. Workers have no relationship with their bosses. They have no influence over their wages and working conditions. Their fates and livelihoods are dictated by algorithms coded thousands of miles away. Their only option is to quit.

Amazon and Uber view their drivers as interchangeable cogs, unreliable meat puppets inconveniently required to ferry their passengers and packages around town. Both Uber and Amazon have made no bones about the fact that they fully intend to replace human employees with drones and self-driving cars and trucks as soon as possible.

And what, exactly, are people supposed to do to earn money?

The gig economy was supposed to be the wave of the future. So far it's a pretty bleak future. And it won't even be the the future for very long.

I Agree With Donald Trump

Time For A New Dear Leader

With the recent revelations from Michael Wolf's new book, Fire and Fury, I think it's time that conservatives jump ship. Folks, you need a new leader. Trump is more or less done. Consider the evidence.

-All the major players that were part of the Trump administration one year ago are gone. Michael Flynn, Trump's former National Security Adviser, is cooperating with the FBI.

-Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign manager that brought him to victory, has accused Trump's son and other Trump officials of treason. He recognizes where the political headwinds are blowing.

-Trump wanted to lose and was horrified when he won. As the book notes, "Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning."

-Trump doesn't read and grows bored when people try to explain things to him.

"Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. 'I got as far as the Fourth Amendment," Nunberg recalled, "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.'"

-Trump is viewed with disdain by the people around him.

"For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an 'idiot.' For Gary Cohn, he was 'dumb as sh-t.' For H.R. McMaster he was a 'dope.' The list went on."

-Gary Cohn, the leader of Trump's economic council, sent out an email last April that sums up the Trump presidency.

"It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I'm the only person there with a clue what he's doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror."

If you are someone who still supports Trump after this assessment, you are just as mentally ill as he is. It's time to find someone new to lead your cause. Anyone associated with Trump is now toxic. It's going to be a fucking bloodbath this year in the midterms. Trump is going to be indicted for money laundering and obstruction of justice...if he doesn't become incapacitated due to mental and physical ailments.

In short, you are on a sinking ship. Get off.

The Beginning of the End?

Donald Trump has never been loyal to his people, and now he has abruptly broken with Steve Bannon after reports surfaced of Bannon calling the meeting Don Jr. had with the Russians treasonous and unpatriotic (via the Times):

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Mr. Trump said in the statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Mr. Trump berated Mr. Bannon for the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama and said the former adviser did not represent his base but was “only in it for himself.” Rather than supporting the president’s agenda to “make America great again,” Mr. Bannon was “simply seeking to burn it all down,” Mr. Trump said.

“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” he added. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

The cause for this tirade was the publication of excerpts from a book called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff.

In the book, Mr. Bannon was quoted suggesting that Donald Trump Jr., the future president’s son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul J. Manafort, then the campaign chairman, had been “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians offering incriminating information on Hillary Clinton during a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower.

Reportedly Bannon has also come to same conclusion that I have: Trump's downfall will most likely come from his history of money laundering for the Russian mob:

According to Mr. Wolff, Mr. Bannon also predicted that a special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any coordination with Trump aides would ultimately center on money laundering, an assessment that could lend credibility to an investigation the president has repeatedly called a witch hunt. “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying.

Money laundering is a lot easier to prove than collusion, even though it's becoming clearer every day that numerous members of the Trump campaign were actively working with the Russians on targeting social media messaging.

The book is filled with lots of gossip and dirt, but it's hard to know how much of it is true, since it comes from interviews with members of the Trump administration, every one of whom has proved to be a self-serving liar.

Trump accuses Bannon of having lost his mind, but every day another story appears questioning Trump's mental and physical fitness. Reports are surfacing that Trump is even having trouble drinking water, requiring two hands to hold a glass.

Trump is famous -- and widely mocked -- for the wild gesticulations that accompany his rants. Some have speculated that these hand motions have been adopted to mask tremors that would be more obvious if his hands were at rest.

As of this writing Bannon has not responded, and the article on Breitbart simply reports the White House statement.

But it makes you wonder how long Trump can go on like this, instantly stabbing long-time allies in the back very publicly instead of keeping a civil tongue, waiting to see how things shake out: this story could have easily been dismissed by both parties as "fake news."

But by lashing out at Bannon Trump proved the story is true, at least in Trump's mind.

Trump's lack of diplomacy and tact may be popular among the rubes, but diplomacy and tact are the grease that keeps the wheels of politics from squeaking. If Trump alienates Bannon and Breitbart, he will lose rank and file racists; in other words, his base.

Sooner or later even Fox News will grow tired of Trump's childish antics, and then what will Trump watch on TV? All My Children has been off the air for years.

On What Planet Is This A Good Thing?

A Decline in Accidental Gun Deaths

A recent report from the CDC shows that gun deaths in 2015, the most recent year for which they are available, numbered a little more than half of what they were in 1999. In 2015, there were 489 gun deaths from accident whereas in 1999 there were 824 gun deaths from accident.

Experts attribute the decline to a mix of gun safety education programs, state laws regulating gun storage in homes and a drop in the number of households that have guns. While the improvement occurred in every state, those with the most guns and the fewest laws continue to have the most accidental shooting deaths. This is true of overall deaths by firearms.

It's most interesting to note that Illinois has a lower rate of gun violence then does then all of the the southern states where gun laws are very loose. California, as well as my home state of Minnesota, are among the lowest. The Gun Cult tends to focus on the raw number of deaths never taking into account the size of population. Size (ahem) matters because you have to take into account the number of people in an area and compare that to the number of deaths.

Of course, the Gun Cult would never admit that the states with the loosest gun laws have the higher rates of gun violence. That would completely destroy their "gun free zone" myth. It can't possibly be that states like Alaska, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Mississippi have a greater rate of gun violence.

Say it ain't so!

New Year's Day

Final Thoughts of 2017

As 2017 comes to a close, it's very clear that we have a president with a deteriorating mental condition. His recent interview with Michael Schmidt of the New York Times betrayed an incoherence that hasn't been seen since Woodrow Wilson had his stroke. This is nothing new to me because his behavior is akin to the mentally ill people that follow him (right wing bloggers and right wing blog commenters). They've completely lost the capacity for rational thought.

Charles Pierce from Esquire had the following to say.

In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart. (My father used to give a thumbs up when someone asked him a question. That was one of the strategies he used to make sense of a world that was becoming quite foreign to him.) My guess? That’s part of the reason why it’s always “the failing New York Times,” and his 2016 opponent is “Crooked Hillary."

Agreed. I saw the same thing in my grandmother. Ezra Klein from Vox had this to say...

Over the course of reporting on the Trump White House, I have spoken to people who brief Trump and people who have been briefed by him. I’ve talked to policy experts who have sat in the Oval Office explaining their ideas to the president and to members of Congress who have listened to the president sell his ideas to them. I’ve talked to both Democrats and Republicans who have occupied these roles. In all cases, their judgment of Trump is identical: He is not just notably uninformed but also notably difficult to inform — his attention span is thin, he hears what he wants to hear, he wanders off topic, he has trouble following complex arguments. Trump has trouble following his briefings or even correctly repeating what he has heard.

Right. Again, this is a sign of mental illness.

At the beginning of December, I wrote about four ways Trump could leave office early. Nikto added in some humorous possibilities. Perhaps both of us were wrong. Given this latest interview, I think it's possible that a mental meltdown could force him from office.

Our president is not well, folks. It's time for him to go.

Best TV Show of 2017

Twin Peaks: The Return is the best TV show of 2017. David Lynch is positively astounding. Most of us Twin Peaks fans thought 1992's Fire Walk With Me was the end of the story. Thank God it wasn't because this new 18 hour series on Showtime has become the greatest television show every produced.

My mind took days to process Episode 3. Episode 7 made me feel like I was 24 again in the early 1990s and geeking out to the characters of Twin Peaks with their various idiosyncrasies.

Episode 8 was the single best visual artistic expression I have EVER seen. It left me speechless in so many ways that it's pointless to count.

By the time it ended, I was left wanting more which is clearly what Lynch wanted. Folks, if you haven't watched this series yet, check it out. You can stream the the original series (Twin Peaks) on either Netflix or Hulu. The film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, is available on Amazon for 3 bucks. The new series, Twin Peaks: The Return, is on Showtime and Hulu w/Showtime.

Nearly every show that people love today owes something to Twin Peaks. There would be no Stranger Things, American Horror Story, Man Men, The Sopranos or Orange is the New Black without Twin Peaks. It was TV: Year Zero and this latest series has rewritten the rules once again! 

Here is the first episode of Twin Peaks: The Return which you can watch for free on YouTube.

 

Best Film of 2017

The best film of 2017 is Wonder Woman (d: Patty Jenkins). This film completely blew me away. Gal Gadot conveyed the perfect balance of the fierceness of an Amazon warrior and the vulnerability of someone new to the world of men. Period pieces are always important as well and Jenkins did a great job of capturing the WWI era. The action was spectacular, the production design was impeccable, and the story was riveting.

Here is a clip from one of my favorite scenes...

The Reasons Behind Mass Shootings in the United States

What are the core reasons behind mass shootings in the United States? There are multiple reasons why mass shootings occur in the United States and it's important to note that they all feed off of each other.

First, the current gun regulations are terrible. It’s very easy to obtain weapons that make mass shootings more efficient. People with little or no training can buy a gun at Wal Mart. Mental health history doesn’t matter. Some gun sales and transfers of ownership don’t even require a background check. Many states have very loose gun laws and some now allow guns in schools and churches. 

Second, mass shootings are #trending and have been since the Columbine shooting in 1998. People in the United States believe that they can solve their problems by shooting up some place. I think that many mass shooters want attention and the media certainly gives it to them.

Third, The United States is very rooted in gun culture even though less than a third of its citizens owns guns. Our entertainment (films, video games, television) are very violent. Even our language is gun based. Here are some examples…

“Number one hit—-with a bullet” (music)

“Rogers, out of the shotgun” (football)

“Faster than a speeding bullet (comics, films)

“He went off like a loaded gun” (common phrase)

With so many references to guns, it’s no wonder we don’t have more mass shootings.

Fourth, there is still a stigma in this country regarding mental health. Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook, was severely mentally ill. He was not given adequate treatment and was likely shunned by the people around him. His mom, an ardent 2nd amendment supporter, was ill equipped to deal with his issues. She paid for it with her life. If we addressed the mental health issue by removing the social stigma surrounding visiting a therapist, we’d have less mass shootings. It should be as common as going to the dentist with an equal amount of indifference when someone says they are seeking psychological help.

Fifth, the United States has a gun culture that makes it easier for unbalanced people to obtain weapons. These folks allow their own hubris and emotions about guns to override public safety. They don’t really care if people die in mass shootings. Their first reaction after a mass shooting is “Don’t take my guns!!!” or “More guns in more places” as opposed to “Hey, how can we help? Let’s make it safer out there.” They are enablers to mass shootings and bear a great deal of responsibility for all of the deaths the US has experienced from gun violence. In short, they are domestic terrorists and should be labeled as such by the Department of Homeland Security. Given that we have lost more people to gun violence just in the last 50 years than all of the wars we have ever fought in, they are a danger to public safety.

We address these concerns in a substantive way and we curtail the number of mass shootings in the United States.

Quote of the Day (Fucking Nazi Edition)

“What we’re seeing can only be explained by the Republican right’s broader embrace of authoritarianism, which both predates Trump, accounts for his rise and has in turn been accelerated by his presidency.”

----The Trump-True GOP by Josh Marshall

A good indicator as to who the authoritarian is? It's the assholes that are squawking the most about ___________ making them do __________.

Insert "smug liberal elites" in the first blank and "stuff I don't wanna do" in the next blank.

Happy Christmas!

The Infinity of Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve means different things to different people. To me, it's filled with 50 years of amazing memories. Here are a few...

My earliest memories are of my grandfather, Carl, and I looking up his chimney to see if Santa would be able to fit. I also remember the never ending showings of "It's A Wonderful Life" although it was right around this time when I discovered my all time favorite Christmas film, "Holiday Inn." This was Bing Crosby's first performance of "White Christmas."



In my younger childhood, the night before Christmas meant we would get to open up one present usually right after we got home from church. The Christmas Eve service at my church was magical. The singing...the candle marches...the message...all very comforting and amazing. My mom still goes to the same church and I've gone back with her on Christmas Eve from time to time but it's not the same as those years in the 70s and early 80s.

My later childhood saw many a Christmas Eve with our family friend named Tom who passed away in 2015. Tom was a an elder bachelor who sold yachts for a living and made a pretty decent salary. He always wanted to share it with us and his cousins so my sister and I would always get a pile of gifts from him so the one present thing pretty much went out the window.This was in the early 80s so it was games like this.

This was an upgrade to an earlier version that added in the feature of being able to pass. I remember laying in my old bed and playing this game late into the night.

During my senior year in high school (December, 1984) I was asked my our drama teacher to perform a dramatic reading of "A Child's Christmas in Wales." I've posted this as a tradition here for years.



When my children were little, I read this story to them. I continue the tradition to this day.

All the Christmases with my children have been stellar. It's been fun to watch them experience all the same things that I did when I was a kid. They are 17 and 15 now so the little kid Christmases are gone but they are replaced with hilarious game playing (usually Philadelphia Rummy) and new traditions like watching Die Hard (yes, it's a Christmas film!).

What traditions and memories will future Christmas Eves bring? Honestly, I can't wait!!

Oh, Look! A UFO!

For every unexplained UFO sighting there are 10,000 like this one:

No, it's not swamp gas, but it's the equivalent: hot gases from burning kerosene propellant.

It's actually  a SpaceX rocket launching satellites into orbit for the Iridium network. You can't see the rocket at all because it's so small and dark compared to the large, bright contrail backlit from the low sun.

At least Elon Musk has a sense of humor about it:

Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea pic.twitter.com/GUIHpKkkp5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2017

I'm not posting this to ridicule people who've seen UFOs. It's to underline the fact that it's very easy to misinterpret what you're seeing if you don't know what the object is, or you're looking at something from a weird angle, or under peculiar lighting conditions, or seeing a familiar object much further or much closer than normal.

The human brain is essentially a pattern recognizer, and it's always trying to match what we're seeing to a known object. If there's no good match, your brain may just pick the closest one, or leave you guessing. Just because you can't explain what you saw doesn't mean you're stupid or lying, it means you just don't know what you saw. That doesn't make it mysterious or a conspiracy.

I'm all for investigating weird phenomena in the sky, but the default assumption every time has to be that it's something like this. That doesn't mean you ignore these sightings, because it could very well be nuclear missile from Korea, or a drone from China or Russia.

But aliens shouldn't even be on the menu of possibilities at this point. It's been 70 years since Roswell, and there's been zero solid evidence of anything except incompetence and lying from officials who were trying to cover something up.

It's too bad the SpaceX rocket isn't a real UFO. But that contrail still looks really cool.

Young People Inspire Me

The main reason why I became a teacher was to inspire and motivate young people to change the world and make it a better place. I'll let you in on a little secret, though. The real "main reason" is that they inspire me.

Every. Single. Day.

Gitanjali Rao is a great example of a young person who inspires me. This young woman from Highlands Ranch, Colorado came up with a more portable way to test water for lead.

“Science allows me to look at approaches to solve the real-world problems out there,” she says in an interview at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado, where she’s currently a seventh-grader. Rao was inspired by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan when she came up with the idea that ultimately won her the top prize at the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge.

I see students like Ms. Rao every day. The things they say, the way they express themselves, and the hope they have for the future is very inspiring indeed!

How Trump Screwed Over Steelworkers

During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump kept repeating how he was going to rebuild America with a huge infrastructure project, restart the steel industry, and stop jobs going overseas.

He's done the exact opposite.

At this sprawling steel mill on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the workers have one number in mind. Not how many tons of steel roll off the line, or how many hours they work, but where they fall on the plant’s seniority list.

In September, ArcelorMittal, which owns the mill, announced that it would lay off 150 of the plant’s 207 workers next year. While the cuts will start with the most junior employees, they will go so deep that even workers with decades of experience will be cast out.

Why?

The layoffs have stunned these steelworkers who, just a year ago, greeted President Trump’s election as a new dawn for their industry. Mr. Trump pledged to build roads and bridges, strengthen “Buy America” provisions, protect factories from unfair imports and revive industry, especially steel.

But after a year in office, Mr. Trump has not enacted these policies. And when it comes to steel, his failure to follow through on a promise has had unintended consequences.

Foreign steel makers have rushed to get their product into the United States before tariffs start. According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year.

That surge of imports has hurt American steel makers, which were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel. When ArcelorMittal announced the layoffs in Conshohocken, it blamed those imports, as well as low demand for steel for bridges and military equipment.

In other words, when Trump issued hollow threats to impose tariffs on foreign steel during the campaign, his big fat mouth literally cost thousands of Americans their jobs.

It's been a year and the only thing Trump has done was give himself and all the other fat cats a huge tax cut. When are Trump voters going to realize that Putin's toady has been conning them the whole time?

Someone at Apple Needs to Be Thrown in the Slammer

When the new version of the iPhone operating system came out, many users thought that their phones were significantly slower. They believed that Apple intentionally slowed down the older phones to force users to buy new phones. 

Because, face it: at this point in the iPhone's product cycle, new phones aren't that much better than the old ones, so who needs to buy a new one every year?

But Apple's business model depends on customers buying new phones every year -- phones that cost $500 to $1,000. Without repeat customers, Apple's gigantic profits would evaporate very quickly.

So Apple told the customers they were imagining things. But the customers were right! Apple is intentionally slowing down older phones:

The difference was highlighted in a recent Reddit post — and it was quantified in a blog post at Geekbench, the processor bench-marking company.

Older phones operate more quickly if they're using older versions of Apple's iOS operating system, Geekbench found.

Faced with the evidence, Apple has now admitted what they are doing. They claim, however, that they're doing it to reduce strain on the battery to prevent the phone from shutting down.

Now, users could simply buy a new $80 battery and solve the problem completely. But Apple doesn't make much profit on batteries; they'd rather sell a new phone for ten times more.

Devoted Apple customers have long been accused of being saps and suckers for putting up with Apple's high prices and atrocious business practices. The company does have nice products, but they're not that much better than the competition. It's the Apple cachet that they're selling.

Apple is is a particularly rapacious corporation. They have reassigned the Apple IPs to subsidiaries in foreign countries to avoid paying state and federal taxes. They build their phones in factories in Asia where workers are essentially slaves. California has subsidized Apple with billions of dollars of infrastructure and college educations for their engineers. But because of the tax shenanigans, Apple pays California basically nothing in taxes.

Apple has parked hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in overseas banks, repeatedly borrowing billions of dollars to repurchase stock and give shareholders dividends. (Why borrow? Because they can deduct the interest and reduce their tax liability!) The Republican tax bill will be a huge windfall for Apple, and its wealthy shareholders, and will lower Apple's tax burden even further.

And because Trump's tax cut taxes overseas profits at half the rate, it will encourage Apple to move even more design and production overseas. Americans will lose more jobs to foreigners so Apple's CEO can rake in more cash.

What can we learn from this? Corporations have no loyalty to this country or its customers. They overcharge customers for overhyped products, they pay no taxes, and then they screw over the customers with all kinds of rotten gimmicks, like slowing down their phone CPUs.

These people don't deserve a tax cut. They deserve a ten-year jail term for fraud.

2018 Will Be The Year Trump Goes Down

A few months back, a conservative friend of mine and I were discussing the probe into Trump's dealings with Russia. He asserted that nothing much would come of it. When he said it, he looked at me with a slight trace of pity in his face that sort of said to me, "Silly liberal...trying to look for some way to save yourself. How naive." This friend of mine is no Trump fan but he does get his news from Drudge, Fox and the like so it's not surprising that he thinks nothing will come of the Russian probe. They only talk about the Russian connection in terms of how it's fake news or something to do with Hillary Clinton.

Most Americans, however, would disagree. They approve of the job Mueller is doing with his investigation and think that Trump has largely been dishonest. There have been a variety of stories in the last few days on the Trump-Russia connection that have been overshadowed by tax overhaul news. Here are a few...

IS DONALD TRUMP’S DARK RUSSIAN SECRET HIDING IN DEUTSCHE BANK’S VAULTS?

Short answer: YES

White House Counsel Knew in January Flynn Probably Violated the Law

There is your obstruction of justice. Right fucking there.

Trump -Russia investigation: Steve Bannon asked to testify before House Intelligence Committee

It's going to be entertaining to watch Bannon's ass go down...although after his embarrassing loss in Alabama one could argue that his time is done.

People can’t stop reading a professor’s theory of a Trump-Russia conspiracy — true or not

This one cracks me up mostly for its simplicity. From the post article...

After trying for many years to expand his business empire into Russia, Abramson asserts, Trump visited Moscow in 2013 to personally meet agents of Russian President Vladmir Putin, using his beauty pageant as cover. There, Abramson writes, a secret deal was struck: Putin agreed to open up his country’s rich real estate market to Trump, and Trump agreed to campaign for president while promoting pro-Russian policies. Simple as that. And everything that has happened since — the election hacking, Trump’s improbable win and a special counsel’s investigation into his campaign and administration — follows from that deal, in Abramson’s telling.

Here is the link with ongoing updates from Abramson.

Of course, let's not forget our very own Nikto Gravitas who put up this piece last summer, as he recently reminded me.

The Cast of Characters is Complete

Money laundering is where Trump is actually going to go down. This is going to happen whether the Democrats take back one or both chambers in Congress or not. If the Dems win in the fall of 2018 (and I think they will), it's going to happen very fast.

So, something is indeed going to come from the Russian investigation. I'm just sad and frustrated that conservatives will think it's fake news purely out of spite for liberals.