James.galbraith

Get rid of the debt ceiling, so America can't be subject to this ever again.

Now that we're finally having a real debate on the issue, everyone has to defend their position. And that changes everything.

Bitcoin and other digital currencies plunged on Friday as a proposed capital gains tax hike from U.S. President Joe Biden led to a wave of selling. From a report: At around 9:30 a.m. ET, bitcoin was down 7.6% in the last 24 hours at $49,000, according to Coin Metrics data. It's the first time bitcoin has traded below $50,000 since early March. Ether fell to $2,255, down 10.7%. XRP, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, plunged 16%. This wiped out more than $200 billion of value from the entire cryptocurrency market, according to data from CoinMarketCap. "The market has run up quite a bit overall, and it's probably cooling off before the next leg up," Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, told CNBC by email. President Biden is expected to raise long-term capital gains tax for the wealthiest Americans to 43.4%, including a surtax. That would be higher than the top federal tax rate on wage income. The new tax rate would apply to returns on assets held in taxable accounts and sold after more than a year. This triggered a sell-off in stock markets overnight, with all three major U.S. indexes ending Thursday's session in the red. Analysts said fears over Biden's capital gains tax proposal may be extending to crypto investors, who have had a great year with the price of bitcoin having climbed more than sixfold in the last 12 months.

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At least heading back to the office means cheaper electric bills.

There are plenty of reasons why you might dread heading back to the office, but your home electricity bill isn’t one of them.

Americans — many of whom worked remotely this past year rather than in their offices — have shouldered larger electricity expenses than usual as they stayed home, charged their computers and phones, and kept the lights on. Their offices, in turn, saved money on electricity.

In the three quarters last year after the US Covid-19 epidemic became widespread, residential electric usage rose by about 7.5 percent compared with the same period the previous year, according to an analysis of Energy Information Administration electricity sales data by Tufts University economics professor Steve Cicala. Commercial electricity consumption, meanwhile, declined by 7 percent in that time.

That works out to roughly $75 more on average in electric bills per customer over the three quarters, but that figure disguises big jumps in certain places like Connecticut and California, where many office workers worked from home and where bills increased $240, on average, according to Cicala.

Using monthly pricing data for electricity and adjusting for weather patterns, that works out to about $10.4 billion more in residential electric spending, in Q2-Q4 2020. Commercial spending, which includes offices but also establishments such as restaurants and hotels, declined nearly $7 billion in that same time. In addition to individual homes being less efficient than shared offices for electricity consumption, residential electricity rates are higher than commercial rates.

Cicala’s previous research found that residential energy usage had risen by as much as 10 percent from April to July 2020 — energy usage is at its highest during the summer. That usage moderated a bit as the year went on. Still, Cicala said, “a 7.5 percent increase is just completely jumping off the charts of normal year-to-year charges.” Indeed, before the pandemic, residential energy usage had been declining about 1 percent per year, thanks to more efficient appliances and lights, among other improvements.

Increased electric bills mean many Americans were having to shell out more money during a precarious economic time. Of course, that could be balanced out by less money spent on commuting to and from work, depending on your situation.

What’s more, after the 2017 tax overhaul under former President Donald Trump, employees can no longer claim federal tax deductions for their home offices, even as their employers — whose offices have sat empty — can. While not available for federal taxes, several states offer their own tax breaks for employee expenses. Some employers also reimburse work-from-home costs, and some states require them to do so.

“Simply put, in general, if you’re an employee working from home, you can’t deduct unreimbursed employee expenses (including the use of a home office),” Susan Allen, senior manager for tax practice and ethics at the American Institute of CPAs, told Recode.

And there are also other issues at play than electricity. Staying at home and not commuting helped contribute to a rare decline in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic and saved Americans many hours in transit. (But working from home has meant longer workdays and more meetings, as well, so perhaps it’s a wash.) Either way, this trend may not last much longer, since many Americans will be heading back to the office this summer or fall.

The CDC and FDA on Friday accepted recommendations that Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccinations should resume, but with a warning.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday evening accepted recommendations from an advisory group to lift the pause on the one-dose Covid-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson after determining that the benefits of the vaccine far outweigh its risks. The vaccine, however, should now come with a warning about the risk of blood clots, they said.

The agencies instituted a pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on April 13 after six cases of a rare type of blood clot leading to one fatality were reported in people who had received the shot. The injection has already been administered to 8 million people in the US.

By the time the advisory group to the CDC met on Friday, there had been 15 cases of blood clotting complications known to be associated with the vaccine, including three deaths. Seven of these patients remain hospitalized while five have been discharged.

“These cases are not just numbers to any of us, and we take them very seriously,” said Joanne Waldstreicher, the chief medical officer of Johnson & Johnson, during the meeting of advisers on Friday. “These are people.”

While these complications are serious, it’s also clear that they are extremely rare. This posed a challenge for regulators in how to handle the risks as well as how to communicate the concerns to the public without undermining vaccination efforts. So far, though, it seems Americans remain confident in Covid-19 vaccines.

Having a third vaccine back online in the US could help close gaps in vaccination, particularly since the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only requires one dose instead of the two needed for the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is also cheaper and can be stored in ordinary refrigerators rather than freezers.

It’s also an important player in the global race to contain Covid-19. In addition to its lower costs and logistics requirements, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been shown to be effective against the new, more dangerous variants of the virus that causes Covid-19. South Africa, which is fighting a fast-spreading variant, decided to resume distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine this week after the country paused its own distribution campaign last week.

On balance, experts say the decision to pause distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to investigate these complications was the right one, but some argue that the decision to resume could have been made sooner, particularly given the continued onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What we know about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and blood clots

The complication of concern here is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), or vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).

Thrombocytopenia is a condition where platelets, blood cells that help form blood clots, drop to abnormally low levels in the bloodstream. That can lead to bruising and uncontrolled bleeding.

In the case of the Johnson & Johnson and the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines, it seems that the vaccines in very rare cases can trigger an autoimmune response. White blood cells form proteins called antibodies that normally target hostile invaders, but in these cases, antibodies are binding to proteins that trigger platelets to form clots.

Those clots can spread throughout the body and have, alarmingly, been found in blood vessels leading away from the brain, a condition known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, or CVST. This can quickly turn deadly.

So the problem ends up being that so many platelets are consumed in making these unnecessary and dangerous blood clots that not enough are left over to form clots where they are actually needed.

That means that traditional treatments for clots like heparin, a blood thinner, won’t work here and could actually make the situation worse.

The blood clotting complications also mirror similar problems associated with the AstraZeneca/Oxford Covid-19 vaccine. Both of these vaccines use a modified version of another virus to deliver DNA instructions for making the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. It hints that there is a common mechanism at work.

But again, this is such a rare complication that only 15 cases were reported out of 8 million Johnson & Johnson shots. All of the cases were reported in women, with 13 TTS cases in those between the ages of 18 and 49 and two above the age of 50. Beyond warning young women to keep an eye out for any blood clot-related symptoms — headache, blurred vision, seizures, pain in the extremities, and a loss of control of the body — there’s not much health officials can offer in terms of screening vulnerable people.

CDC

“The benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risk, at least in the older population,” said Robert Brodsky, director of the hematology division at Johns Hopkins University.

And if patients are concerned about blood clots, Brodsky said the risk of clots from contracting Covid-19 is far, far greater than the likelihood of one occurring in the wake of a vaccine. “My concern is that this vaccine gets deep-sixed,” he said. “It’s a very effective vaccine.”

The recommendation to lift the pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine echoes a similar decision from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) — the European Union’s pharmaceuticals regulator — on Wednesday. The EMA also said that a warning about rare blood clots should be added to the list of side effects for the vaccine. (The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is often identified with the name of its subsidiary Janssen in Europe.)

The pause turned out to be the right decision for the US

One of the main fears with the pause on the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine was that it would undermine public trust in vaccines, but polls seem to show that’s not the case.

An April 14 poll of 600 adults found that 58 percent of respondents were more confident in Covid-19 vaccines after the pause.

Another poll on April 15 of 1,000 adults found that 36 percent of respondents saw no change in their likelihood of getting a vaccine and 40 percent said they were more likely to get a Covid-19 shot after the pause was announced. And a poll of 1,033 adults between April 16 and 19 found that 88 percent of respondents thought that the FDA and CDC were being responsible in pausing the Johnson & Johnson shot.

So it seems that most Americans were not fazed by the pause to review the vaccine, which was a relief for some observers.

“When I woke up that day, I was really depressed that they had paused the J&J vaccine rollout ... I thought that it would increase vaccine hesitancy,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. “However, I actually changed my mind over the ensuing week.”

She noted that the polls aligned with the attitudes she saw in patients, who appreciated that regulators were taking safety issues seriously. Another factor that changed her mind is that with so many vaccines already administered in the US, the challenge now is convincing the remaining people who are more reluctant to get immunized.

“Anything that we can do to assure people who are still concerned about the safety of these vaccines, that everything is going to be closely looked at, I think will hopefully increase vaccine uptake,” Gandhi said.

But the pause had an opportunity cost. People who were in line to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had to scramble to find alternatives. And now more than a week has passed where people who otherwise would have had some degree of protection against Covid-19 may not have any.

Though pausing the distribution of the vaccine was warranted, waiting more than a week to make a decision about it was likely excessive, according to Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “There was enough data to make the call last Wednesday,” he said.

Topol added that while vaccine confidence remains high in the US, it’s also important to keep the international context in mind with respect to Covid-19. People in the US also have multiple effective vaccines in circulation while other countries barely have any, and hesitancy on other continents is already on the rise. How the US manages rare complications will ripple into other countries. “The US is in the fishbowl of the world,” he said.

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Earlier this week, Apple unveiled the refreshed 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with a notable change: The new iPad Pro models are powered by the M1 chip, the company's in-house chipset that also powers the current-generation MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. Is the company planning to put macOS on the iPad in the future or merge iPads and Macbooks? No remains the answer. Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak, in an interview: "There's two conflicting stories people like to tell about the iPad and Mac. On the one hand, people say that they are in conflict with each other. That somebody has to decide whether they want a Mac, or they want an iPad. Or people say that we're merging them into one: that there's really this grand conspiracy we have, to eliminate the two categories and make them one. And the reality is neither is true. We're quite proud of the fact that we work really, really hard to create the best products in their respective category." Hardware chief John Ternus, in the same interview: "We're pushing to make the best Mac we can make; we're pushing to make the best iPad we can make."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States no longer has to stand by for a daily White House downplaying of the threat from COVID-19, promotion of fake cures, or encouragement to get a bleach injection. That’s a good thing. So is the increased availability of vaccines that, though a long way from herd immunity, may be playing a significant role in preventing the United States from seeing a real “fourth wave” of cases.

Last November, researchers at the National Institutes of Health produced a study that now seems eerily prescient. Based on the idea that vaccines could be 95% effective in preventing COVID-19, and that these vaccines would also reduce transmission, they modeled the effect in the U.S. of achieving 40% vaccination of the total population. The researchers concluded that the rate of new cases could be almost cut in half, the burden on ICUs greatly reduced, and the number of deaths drastically cut back well in advance of hitting the kind of numbers usually associated with herd immunity.

With 40.9% of Americans now having received at least one dose, that effect could be preventing a surge in the United States right now. We’re only now reaching the levels where that effect is significant, but as the vaccine numbers go up, the possibility of a return to normal draws ever nearer. The math and science shows that every American who gets a vaccination is taking a step that benefits the whole nation.

But what if you don’t believe in science? Or math? Or doing anything that helps someone else? In that case, look no further than the advice being offered by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-is for Russia) who is doing his best to keep vaccine hesitancy high.

While some very smart people were working out the benefits of vaccination and healthcare workers all over the nation were working to turn these numbers into reality, there has continued to be a cadre of Republicans who have undercut the vaccination effort. And with Trump reduced to sideline player, the biggest in-office source of pro-death propaganda may be the Kremlin favorite, Johnson.

As Forbes reports, Johnson has declared himself “highly suspicious” of the “big push to get everyone vaccinated.” Part of this appears to be back to that not understanding math thing. Johnson has argued that because the vaccine is 95% effective, that means “only a limited number” of people really need to be infected. How that works in Johnson’s head is unclear, and no one really wants to go in there, but however this is supposed to work, it doesn’t.

Johnson then went on to encourage young people not to get vaccinated, and pushed back against the use of any sort of vaccine passport to protect public safety, calling it “a very freedom-robbing step.”

Johnson then turned to the ultimate basis of all Republican policy: selfishness. “If you have a vaccine quite honestly what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?” said Johnson said. “What is it to you? You’ve got a vaccine and science is telling you it’s very, very effective. So why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?”

The Republican Party no longer has a platform beyond “Obey Trump,” but if they were adding planks, “I’ve got mine, why the hell should I care about anything else?” would certainly be high on the list. Only it shouldn’t be surprising that Johnson has this thing completely upside down.

If he, and other Republican “thought” leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson are really so set against getting a vaccine, what they should be doing is telling everyone else to get vaccinated.

Right now, 43% of Republicans are saying “no” to the vaccine. All over the country, red counties are finding themselves with a vaccine surplus. Whole states like Georgia, Mississippi and Montana are pondering what to do about wasted vaccines and unfilled vaccine appointment calendars (Hint: Send them to communities of color, where demand is high). Unless that number goes down, it would take near perfect participation from every other American adult to reach the lowest threshold for herd immunity. And what herd immunity does is protect the people who did not get vaccinated.

By discouraging everyone from getting vaccinated, the people Ron Johnson is most putting at risk are his Republican followers. Which makes it tempting to adopt a Johnson-esque attitude and just sort of  … snicker. However, these are human lives on the line. And in addition to Republican vaccine conspiracy theorists, in every community there are a small number of people who legitimately cannot get vaccinated. That can be due to very specific allergies, or to immune system issues. Those people are protected when the population reaches herd immunity, because the disease is no longer readily spread within the community. Efforts of bozos like Johnson also put those people at risk.

It’s important to counter the lies spread by Johnson, Greene, Carlson and others, and to encourage the maximum number of people possible to get vaccinated. That protects the people who can’t get vaccinated, and it helps to protect everyone from having millions of lingering infections that kick out new, ever more resistant, variants. More effort needs to be put into public campaigns to push or pull people to get vaccinated.

But looking at it from Vladimir Putin’s point of view, convincing people not to get vaccinated does make America weaker. So … good job, Ron.

Donald Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary, Ben Carson, proposed a rule that would permit single-sex homeless shelters that receive taxpayer funding to discriminate against transgender people. As an example, the policy would have allowed shelters to bar transgender women from women’s shelters, effectively limiting transgender women to sharing bathrooms and sleeping spaces with cisgender men. The proposal would have also allowed staff to try and verify the unhoused person’s sex assigned at birth. Thankfully the rule never took effect. Even better is that the Biden administration is withdrawing the proposal altogether, as Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge announced on Thursday, as reported by The Washington Post. 

If you’re wondering where the initial transphobic proposal came from, it was likely in response to an inclusive effort from the Obama administration, when it was decided all programs funded by HUD would be open to all people—including transgender folks. And if there’s one scapegoat Republicans have loved especially in recent years, it’s the transgender community.

You might remember that in the Trump-era proposal, shelters would be able to deny transgender folks on the basis of religious beliefs. You might also remember Carson lamenting about the possibility of “big, hairy men” trying to sneak into women’s shelters while speaking at an internal HUD meeting. Along the same lines, the Trump guidance on how to identify a transgender woman is precisely as horrifying as it sounds.

Thankfully, Fudge is not spewing transphobia and mocking the most vulnerable people in our nation. In a statement on Thursday, Fudge stressed that access to reliable, safe housing is a “basic necessity.” She went on to add that: “Transgender and gender-nonconforming people report more instances of housing instability and homelessness than cisgender people.”

This is true: Transgender folks face barriers when it comes to seeking housing (in addition to reports of being evicted because of their gender identity), finding employment, and for transgender youth, even finishing high school with a diploma can be a nightmare. Systemic issues really do mount and leave many transgender folks without reliable housing, income, health insurance, or even safe family relationships. 

As Daily Kos continues to cover, Republicans have no qualms about trying to turn the tide against transgender people—including transgender kids—as a means of distracting from the ongoing global pandemic. We’ve seen state lawmakers push bills that would ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, as well as bills that would bar physicians from providing gender-affirming care to minors. We’ve also seen efforts to prevent people from updating their birth certificates. There’s even a bill that would compel state employees (i.e., teachers) to report instances of gender nonconformity to parents.

Parents have gone viral for speaking on behalf of their trans children, as well as transgender youth themselves attending hearings to essentially plead with lawmakers for an inch of humanity. These stories are moving and inspiring for sure, but they also shouldn’t need to exist—transgender kids and teenagers already face barrier after barrier to simply enjoying adolescence. They shouldn’t need to beg lawmakers to see them as equals, too. 

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Republicans keep dropping hints about what they want to see happen to the economy under President Joe Biden’s leadership, but the economy doesn’t seem to be listening. Despite all their dire predictions, things are looking up, driven by continuing government COVID-19 relief and the prospect of widespread vaccinations changing the course of the pandemic.

Donald Trump’s big reelection pitch on the economy was that a Biden win would mean a major crash. “If he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen. Your 401(k)s will go to hell and it’ll be a very, very sad day for this country,” Trump said in an October debate. Republican voters responded, with their optimism about the economy crashing after Trump lost.

As Democrats pushed the American Rescue Plan, Republicans warned that it was too big and would lead to problems. “There are a lot of warning signs that have not been worrisome in the past but now are certainly blinking yellow,” Sen. Pat Toomey said on Feb. 23, cautioning against “too much liquidity going into the system.”

Now, American Rescue Plan money is flowing out into the economy, things are still going well, and Republicans are … issuing the same kind of dire warnings about Biden’s next set of plans. Spending too much could set off inflation, they say, though Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell (a Trump pick) says those concerns are overblown. “We’ve averaged less than 2 percent inflation for more than the last 25 years,” Powell told the Senate Banking Committee in February. “Inflation dynamics do change over time, but they don’t change on a dime.”

Republicans are also howling about the prospect of a corporate tax increase. “Why, as this country begins to reopen and recover economically, would the Biden administration be proposing tax policy which would in the end hurt the American family and millions of struggling small businesses?” Rep. Ann Wagner asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during a recent House Financial Services Committee hearing, based on the theory that raising the corporate tax rate would cause prices to go up. Except that none of the Republican claims about how the Trump-era corporate tax cut would lead to increased household income panned out, so why would anyone believe the dire warnings of what would happen if less than half of the corporate income tax break was rolled back?

That corporate tax increase back to less than the rate in 2017 is planned to fund Biden’s American Jobs Plan, focused on infrastructure. Expect another round of Republican howling as Biden proposes raising the capital gains tax on people earning more than $1 million a year and returning the top marginal income tax rate to what it was before the Trump tax cuts for the rich. These moves would pay for Biden’s American Families Plan, establishing national paid leave, cutting child care costs for most families, and establishing free prekindergarten and community college. Cutting child care costs alone would help parents—mostly mothers—enter the paid workforce.

All of Biden’s moves are aimed at strengthening the working people’s economy and bringing U.S. infrastructure into the 21st century, and all Republicans want to do is predict doom because corporations and the very wealthiest individuals would have to pay a little more, money they’d be paying to invest in schools and roads and bridges and transit and drinkable water, as well as a workforce that was healthy and educated and not overburdened by trying to care for children and elders with no support. These are investments in the future of the U.S., but Republicans can’t see it because they think corporations will be able indefinitely to squeeze just a little more, just a little more out of a workforce already stretched to the breaking point and beyond. And most of all, Republicans want Biden and Democrats to fail, so that a weak economy will propel Republican wins in 2022 and 2024. They’re rooting against the United States’ economy for partisan gain, and all their predictions of economic doom are reminders of that.

SACRAMENTO — California's two public university systems announced Thursday they will require nearly 800,000 students to receive the Covid-19 vaccine as soon as this fall in the nation's most sweeping higher education testing requirement.

California State University and University of California proposed the requirement for students, faculty and staff for the fall 2021 semester — contingent on full FDA approval. All told, the requirement could apply to more than 1 million people.

Both UC and CSU are planning for mostly in-person instruction when the academic year begins in August.

The timeline for full U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval remains unclear. Vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have been administered under emergency use authorization, and the J&J shot is on hold as federal officials study rare cases of blood clots. The process for some vaccines have taken years before, though some health officials have predicted that one of the vaccines could be approved by the fall.

Students and staff would be able to seek a medical or religious exemption under the new policy, CSU officials said Thursday.

"The state of California has been a leader in the administration of Covid-19 vaccines, and Californians receiving a vaccine has led to significantly reducing the transmission of Covid-19 in our state," CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro said in a statement. "Continued vigilance will further mitigate the spread of the disease that has radically altered our lives over the past year. We will continue to strongly encourage all members of our respective university communities to receive a Covid-19 vaccination as soon as it is available to them."

A growing number of private universities have begun announcing fall vaccine requirements for students without the FDA contingency. On Thursday, that included Stanford University, whose provost announced plans for a mandate along with a regular Covid-19 test requirement for students who receive an exemption for personal or religious reasons.

Before officially adding the vaccine to CSU's existing immunization requirements, the 23-campus CSU system will meet with labor unions and student associations, officials said Thursday, adding that the policy details are still in development.

UC, which has 10 campuses including graduate-only UC San Francisco, released a "proposed policy" Thursday while encouraging students and staff to get vaccinated now.

The millions of Trump voters who have thus far refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 want us to know that we’re going about it all wrong if we want them to get the shot.

They’re tired of being “bullied,” they say. Besides, as one says, they haven’t gotten sick (yet) despite being “out and about” the entire pandemic. There’s just too much information out there to trust anyone, another says. Most of them are going to get themselves a fake vaccination card, anyway. And if you ever want the slightest, barest chance of them getting that COVID-19 vaccine, whatever you do, don’t mention Dr. Anthony Fauci.

If they take that vaccine at all, it will only be after the country falls over itself, bending backward to persuade them. And even then? They’re probably not going to take it anyway. As conservative Jennifer Rubin, writing for The Washington Post, observes, “The number of those who do not want the vaccine (roughly 20%) has been immovable since January, suggesting these people—which includes as much as 40% of Republicans—are impervious to reason and facts.”

Perhaps, then, it’s time we stop catering to them.

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, there was a lot of finger-pointing—much of it, such as the “economic anxiety” trope, horribly off the mark—the product of a media tendency to find rationality where there really is none to be found. Adam Serwer, writing for The Atlantic, came closer to reality in his landmark 2018 essay, “The Cruelty is the Point.” But there was another prominent feature of these millions of Americans who decided to waste their sacred right of franchise on someone as utterly unqualified as Trump: a plain, heedless lack of any interest or concern for the rest of us.

As observed by The Washington Post’s Charles Lane in early 2016, before most in the media gave Trump a chance in hell to actually win, his campaign was seen as a chance for some of the most self-absorbed and ignorant people in our country to send a message. A message that ensured they’d receive the attention they knew they were due. They’d burn it all down for no better reason than to watch the flames.

Lane quoted the conservative bomb-thrower du jour at the time—Bill O’Reilly—to make his point.

Incoherent though it may be, there is no denying the power of the animus propelling what can only be called the Trump movement; as O’Reilly says, “they want someone to blow that system to hell.”

These are the same people who now believe the 2020 election was stolen because they can’t wrap their minds around the fact that a majority of Americans could possibly disagree with them. They’re the people who cheered when an incoherent mob led by white supremacists sacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. They’re wrapped up in their own self-importance, and irredeemably hooked on their Fox News intravenous grievance feeding tube. So it was just a small step to dismiss the worst public health crisis to hit this country in over a century as a “hoax,” and then to dismiss the vaccine as a conspiracy. Of course, they were encouraged and empowered in this by Donald Trump, one of the more successful con artists in history and the worst, if not the first, of his breed ever to occupy the Oval Office.

And now they’re digging in. They aren’t going to get that hoax vaccine—ever. It’s now become a point of pride among them. It may be an ignorant point, and most of us rightly would call it selfish and self-destructive, but that’s where they’ve chosen to make their stand.

Although more than half of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, more than 40 percent of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they’re not planning to be vaccinated — a group that could threaten efforts to tamp down the virus’s spread, public health officials fear.

Excuses for refusing the vaccine are ubiquitous on the internet and social media. For some it’s a harbinger of totalitarianism; for others it’s tantamount to some billionaire’s master plan to inflict either genocide or social control, depending on who you talk to. For religious zealots, it’s the mark of the Beast in the book of Revelations. But do 35 million Republicans actually ascribe to these conspiracy theories? Or is there something a little more basic that’s driving them?

Republican pollster Frank Luntz conducted a focus group of Trump-voting vaccine “skeptics” to try to fathom what was driving their obstinacy. What he found was that the latest excuse among many of them is an amazing newly minted distrust of corporate motives, evidenced by the Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s recent concession that booster shots may be required to ensure the vaccine’s effectiveness.

As reported by The Washington Post:

“I feel like this is not going to end. I mean, we’re just going to be shot up and shot up and shot up,” said a man identified as Erzen from New York. “We can’t live like this. This is not sustainable.”

Presumably this person has never received a flu shot, which people get every year.

When reminded that Trump himself had been vaccinated, most members of the focus group shrugged that off. “I’m very thankful to Donald Trump, but all his efforts to make it happen don’t have anything to do with its continued or long-term efficacy,” one said. Left unsaid was the fact that this person, even after Trump’s prolonged, highly publicized months-long campaign to create and distribute these vaccines, wasn’t going to get jabbed anyway. Now it appears he’s simply latched on to the excuse of having to get a booster to further justify his denial.

One “bullied” woman complained of “being humiliated, basically” by the media, presumably by challenges to her anti-vaccine sentiments. The same vaccine-denying woman declared she saw no reason to change her position until the “media” grew more to her liking.

This is all very telling. But even more telling is one particular response from people assured of their continued anonymity.

The focus group revealed another unexpected development: Most participants said they would want a fake vaccination card that would allow them to claim they had received shots, after Luntz granted them anonymity to speak honestly.

“One-thousand percent,” one woman said.

"He was already out of the Army at the time of this incident," Sully said.

The video follows heightened media attention to racism and excessive force allegations tied to race after the death of George Floyd, a Black father killed when a white Minneapolis cop kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes. That cop, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of murder on Tuesday, but at the time of the incident involving Miles, the trial was still underway.  

Brig. Gen. Milford Beagle Jr. added in a statement on Facebook: "This type of behavior is not consistent with our Army Values and will not be condoned. We have begun our own investigation and are working with the local authorities.”

The Supreme Court spent more than a decade putting limits on the punishments dealt out to people who commit crimes as children. The Trump Supreme Court abruptly turned back that progress on Thursday, with a 6-3 decision making it easier to sentence a juvenile to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent for the ages, shredding Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion with repeated reference to Kavanaugh’s own past writing in which he preached respect for precedent.

“Today, the Court guts Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana,” Sotomayor wrote—the first a decision banning mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles and the second making Miller retroactive and banning not just mandatory life-without-parole sentences but going a step further, limiting life without parole to “all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.” In Jones v. Mississippi, the case decided Thursday, a man who killed his grandfather as a 15-year-old in 2004 challenged a judge’s imposition of life without parole because the judge did not describe him as permanently incorrigible.

Brett Jones, the man seeking to be released from a sentence of life without parole, was a victim of abuse by multiple people in his life, including the grandfather he stabbed to death—then tried to save with CPR. In prison, he has earned his GED. His grandmother—the widow of the man he killed—is “steadfast in her belief that Brett is not and never was irreparably corrupt.”

To Kavanaugh, the fact that the judge exercised discretion without formally considering whether Jones was permanently incorrigible was good enough. To Sotomayor, “the court is fooling no one” in the pretense that this was not a major rollback of earlier decisions—the kind of rollback that should require an admission that a precedent is being overturned. 

”The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court knows what it is doing.” 

Of course it does. But it comes as no surprise that the man who, red-faced and screaming, lied his way through his confirmation hearing would write opinions lying about what he was doing to precedent once he was on the court.

And speaking of the Supreme Court, lies, and Republicans, in response to a Democratic proposal to expand the Supreme Court, Sen. Ted Cruz got out there and claimed, with a straight face, “You didn't see Republicans when we had control of the Senate try to rig the game. You didn't see us try to pack the court.” Sure, they held one seat open for nearly a year of then-President Barack Obama’s term and then rushed another confirmation through in record time weeks before the election, but that’s not packing, is it? (It totally is.) And Cruz is on the record saying that if Hillary Clinton had been elected president, he would have backed holding more seats open rather than allowing her to have justices confirmed.

It’s chapter infinity in “Republicans lie,” but it’s especially relevant as Kavanaugh lies in his official Supreme Court opinions, while writing for the Trump majority. This court can have no moral standing.

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ewhac writes: Firefox has long had a built-in PDF viewer, allowing users to view PDF files in the browser without having to install a third-party application. In addition to the other weird things PDF files can contain, one of them is JavaScript. Putatively offered as a way to create self-validating forms, this scripting capability has been abused over the decades in just about every way you can imagine. Firefox's built-in viewer, although it has apparently had the ability to execute embedded JS for some time, never turned that feature on, making it a safe(r) way to open PDFs... Until now. The newly released Firefox version 88 has flipped that switch, and will now blithely execute JavaScript embedded in PDFs. Firefox's main preferences dialog offers no control for turning this "feature" off. To turn off JavaScript execution in PDFs: Enter about:config in the address bar; click "I'll be careful." In the search box near the top, enter pdfjs.enableScripting. Change the setting to False. Close the page.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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File this under asked and answered. Former Georgia House minority leader and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams trended much of the day on Wednesday after Republican Sen. John Kennedy questioned whether she thought a restrictive voting bill signed into law last month is racist. “I think there are provisions of it that are racist, yes,” the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate answered. Abrams was speaking during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on voting rights on Tuesday when Kennedy made the mistake of asking her for a list of the provisions she objects to in the Georgia legislation.

The former state legislator, who is nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize for her work to register voters of color in Georgia was perfectly prepared to fulfill Kennedy’s request.

“It shortens the federal run-off period from nine weeks to four weeks,” Abrams said. “It restricts the time a voter can request and return an absentee ballot application. 

“It requires that a voter have a photo identification or some other form of identification that they're willing to surrender in order to participate in the absentee ballot process. It eliminates ..." Apparently seeing that she wasn’t the stumbling, ill-equipt naysayer he might’ve assumed she was, Kennedy cut Abrams off to ask her other questions. Then he cut her off again when she attempted to answer them. “What else? What else?” the Louisiana Republican demanded. Abrams ignored the slights and just kept listing.

“It eliminates over 300 hours of drop box availability,” she said. Kennedy responded with a hurried, “Okay, what else?”

“It bans nearly all out-of-precinct votes,” Abrams said, “meaning that if you get to a precinct and you are in line for four hours and you get to the end of the line and you are not there between 5 and 7 PM, you have to start all over again."

Kennedy interrupted: “Is that everything?”

”No it is not. No, sir,” Abrams responded with a chuckle. “It restricts the hours of operation because it now, under the guise of setting a standardized timeline, it makes it optional for counties that may not want to see expanded access to the right to vote. They can now limit their hours. Instead of those hours being from 7 to 7, they’re now from 9 to 5, which may have an effect on voters who can not vote during business hours during early voting. It limits the voting hours ...”

Kennedy interrupted yet again. “Okay, I get the idea. I get the idea,” he said. 

Georgia Democrats had been fighting elements of the bill spread among other proposed legislation in the state for months when Republicans decided in the final days of the legislative session to hijack a tangentially related piece of legislation. They turned a two-page bill to make sure eligible voters didn’t repeatedly receive absentee ballot applications into nearly 100 pages of voter suppression tactics. “The GOP just won’t stop when it comes to making it harder for Georgians to vote,” the Democratic Party of Georgia said in an earlier statement.

Abrams told Republican Sen. John Cornyn at the same committee hearing that she thought Georgia lawmakers made "deliberate attempts to suppress the minority vote."

When asked if she thought the law in question was a “racist piece of legislation,” she responded that she did indeed. “I think there are components of it that are indeed racist because they use racial animus as a means of targeting the behaviors of certain voters to eliminate their participant and limit their participation in elections,” Abrams said.

RELATED: Georgia GOP 'hijacked' bill with nearly 100 pages of voting restrictions, and now it's law

RELATED: GOP senator says people shouldn't vote on Sundays because 'in God we trust' is printed on money

RELATED: 'They don't get to hide': These 22 companies donated to sponsors of voter suppression bills

RELATED: 'Folks got lynched': Georgia senator pushes GOP on what it's willing to sacrifice to suppress vote

By Cedric Voets  Published: April 21st, 2021 

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In response to the high rate at which American police kill civilians, many on the left have taken up the call for defunding the police, or abolishing the police entirely. But some policing experts are instead emphasizing a different approach that they say could reduce police killings: training officers better, longer, and on different subjects. “We have one of the worst police-training academies in comparison to other democratic countries,” Maria Haberfeld, a police-science professor at John Jay College, told me.

Police in the United States receive less initial training than their counterparts in other rich countries—about five months in a classroom and another three or so months in the field, on average. Many European nations, meanwhile, have something more akin to police universities, which can take three or four years to complete. European countries also have national standards for various elements of a police officer’s job—such as how to search a car and when to use a baton. The U.S. does not.

The 18,000 police departments in the U.S. each have their own rules and requirements. But although police reform is a contentious subject, the inadequacy of the current training provides a rare point of relative consensus: “Police officers, police chiefs, and everyone agree that we do not get enough training in a myriad of fields,” Dennis Slocumb, the legislative director of the International Union of Police Associations, told me.

Small police departments are already straining to provide officer training for just a few months, and might struggle to extend that initial training period, much less provide the ongoing education and refreshers that some experts recommend. Additional training would require devoting more funding to policing, at a moment when activists are calling to defund the police.

The mix of instruction given in police academies speaks volumes about their priorities. The median police recruit receives eight hours of de-escalation training, compared with 58 hours of training in firearms, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank for police executives. But despite the initial focus on firearms, American police don’t receive much ongoing weapons training, either. Slocumb said that when he was an officer in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, pistol requalification went from happening once every 30 days to four times a year, and then to three times a year. “That’s not because the sheriff or anyone else wants us to become less proficient,” he said. “It’s just a financial consideration.”

Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, trained as a reserve police officer in Washington, D.C, while writing a book. After the first few weeks of firearms training in the academy, Brooks said, “twice a year you have to requalify, and you get some little refresher training, which usually consists of a bored instructor going through some PowerPoint slides. And he’s like, ‘Okay, you guys know this stuff. Okay? Good.’”

American police training resembles military training—“polish your boots, do push-ups, speak when you’re spoken to,” Brooks told me. In an article for The Atlantic last year, she described practicing drills and standing at attention when senior officers entered the room. “I don’t think I’ve been yelled at as much since high-school gym class more than three decades ago,” she wrote. Reformers worry that this type of training teaches recruits that the world runs on strict power hierarchies, and that anything short of perfect compliance should be met with force and anger.

Though he generally agrees with the push toward less militaristic police academies, Slocumb thinks the stress of military-style drills can be a useful proving ground for new officers. “You don’t want the first time that you have to make a decision while people are screaming in your face to be out in someone’s living room,” he told me. “It needs to be something you’ve been accustomed to during training.”

Many policing experts recommend that officers be trained to slow down when they are able to do so, giving themselves time to decide the best course of action. “Police are taught in the academy [that] police always have to win,” says Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. But sometimes it’s okay not to win, particularly if it means saving a life.

“So many of these bad cases are a result of an officer incorrectly perceiving a threat,” says Sue Rahr, the former sheriff of King County, Washington, who now serves as an adviser to police-reform organizations. Rahr has developed a method to train recruits to be courteous, show empathy, explain their actions, and preserve everyone’s dignity. Police should be trained “to be sympathetic, to be guardians, rather than warriors,” Wexler says.

That might mean adding new subjects to the curriculum. Few American officers receive much education about the history of policing or the role of police in a democratic society. “The officer coming out of one of the European training programs, he’s much more likely to have a much broader perspective on what the job is, what your role is, what your society is like, how do you fit into it,” says David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “Those things are just not really part of what’s going on in most American police-training programs.”

American police academies are also light on training in “soft skills,” such as how to communicate or use emotional intelligence to see a situation clearly. “We didn’t talk about any of what you might call the big issues in policing: race and policing, policing and excessive force, what is good policing?” Brooks said. (The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s curriculum has been updated since Brooks’s 2016 training and “now includes these areas,” according to a police spokesperson.)

American cops are poorly prepared for trauma on the job, too: They get just six hours of training in stress management, compared with 25 hours in report-writing, according to a 2016 study by the U.S. Department of Justice.

And after officers graduate from police academies, such deficits in their training are difficult to make up. “Once a person is out, and picks up habits and gets acculturated, it becomes harder to change directions,” Harris says. “How do you shift their worldview and their way of doing the job that they’ve been in already?”

New officers are often paired with field-training officers, but many of those officers learned the wrong techniques themselves, and are passing them along to their trainees. Derek Chauvin, who was convicted on Tuesday of murder, was acting as a field-training officer when he killed George Floyd. Kim Potter, who shouted “Taser! Taser! Taser!” before fatally shooting Daunte Wright with her pistol last week, was also acting as a field-training officer at the time.

The Marshall Project recently looked at 10 big-city police departments and found that most allow officers who have faced allegations of aggressive behavior to become trainers; one academic study found that officers whose trainers had a history of citizen complaints were more likely to draw complaints themselves in their first two years on the job.

Better training alone can’t solve every problem with American policing. But because officers are licensed to use force against their fellow citizens, they should at least be equipped to use it wisely.

Despite only being released in November, sales of the M1-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini now represent the majority of Mac sales, outperforming Mac computers powered by Intel processors, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. MacRumors reports: Cook made the remarks during Apple's "Spring Loaded" event yesterday, where it introduced a completely redesigned 24-inch iMac powered by the M1 Apple silicon chip. Cook says that the M1 and Apple silicon "isn't just an upgrade, but a breakthrough," while touting Mac's industry-leading customer satisfaction. According to Cook, the four M1-powered Macs now outperform the five remaining Intel-powered computers in its lineup in terms of sales. During the keynote, Cook's comment went largely unnoticed but is likely to be a key point the CEO makes during Apple's upcoming earnings call, which is being held on April 28.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The online angst among white nationalists and other far-right extremists was neck-deep Tuesday following Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd.

“God help you if you’re a white male in this anti-white country,” wrote Andrew Torba, founder of the white nationalist-friendly chat site Gab, to his 3.2 million followers.

Many of the reactions were collected by Chuck Tanner at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who noted that “the response across the far right and white nationalist movement demonstrated its base lack of compassion and lack of mooring in reality.”

“Does anyone really see a way out except Civil War/secession?” asked Peter Brimelow, founder/publisher of the white-nationalist site VDare, on Twitter. Brimelow quote-tweeted an article he wrote in 2017 predicting that “it will come to blood.”

Michelle Malkin, the so-called “Groyper mommy,” wrote on Telegram: “Chauvin was sacrificed.” Another Groyper figure, America First students head Jaden McNeil, chimed in: “He never stood a chance.”

Scott Greer, a speaker at the recent white-nationalist America First PAC convention and a former writer for the Daily Caller, tweeted earlier in the day that “White boy summer starts with Derek Chauvin's acquittal,” but then updated that: “Uhhh... it appears white boy summer has been postponed.”

“Why even remain a cop?” Greer added. “This system hates you and only needs you to enforce mask regulations. Get a job that won’t send you to jail for doing your job.”

“If you’re a white police officer you should quit or move to a rural district. You could be next,” tweeted far-right maven Cassandra Fairbanks.

At the Klan-boosting League of the South account on Telegram, the messages were even more explicit. “America is suffering from a bad case of N****r Fatigue. And for that, you can thank the jews (sic).”

“The US is a failed state with an organized communist criminal cabal for a government,” they added. “If you’re White middle-or working-class, you have not good future in this system. The late Dr. Samuel Frances predicted this state of affairs and called it Anarcho-Tyranny. He was right on the money. What indeed is the meaning these days of a ‘jury of your peers?’ ”

“Why don’t whites riot?” wondered a white-nationalist “Groyper” fan at the message board 4chan. “Blacks rioted their way into forcing the state to pander to them, so why not whites? I just feel so angry right now.”

“Now twitter leftists are gonna go on /pol/ [a 4chan section dominated by white nationalists] to take screencaps and make fun of us,” complained another.

A Proud Boys group based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, posted a meme to Telegram reading: “Derek Chauvin Did Nothing Wrong” (a play on previous Proud Boys memes, the original version of which read “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong”). At the Boogaloo Intel Drop channel on Telegram, the racism was more explicit: “Derek Chauvin, the cop that legally restrained a feral ni****, George Floyd, was found guilty on all counts. This is not ni**** vs pig, this is being white in America… The system is rigged by the international jew (sic) for the subhuman hordes. THERE IS NO POLITICAL SOLUTION.”

And on the far-right My Militia website, the conclusions were similar, if less hysterical: “Yep, the left are emboldened over this,” wrote the user “Wolfenstein.” “They will not quit until they achieve what they describe as justice which is the death and destruction of the United States (its rebuilding in their image), the death and destruction of the culture and people that created it all while giving the world over to Communism. The chaos is just getting warmed up.

Far-right conspiracy theorists, particularly those from the authoritarian QAnon cult, were frothing similarly, primarily on Telegram. John Sabal, a popular influencer who uses the nom de plume “QAnon John,” claimed the whole Chauvin trial was merely a “movie.”

“The silver lining in what’s going to come out of another series or riots, and looting is that EVERYONE, regardless of which side of the aisle will KNOW that this NEVER had anything to do with ‘Justice for George Floyd,’” wrote Sabal, who is organizing a large QAnon conference in Dallas next month.

That followed the line of thinking among other QAnon believers writing on Telegram, Gab, and elsewhere—namely, that Chauvin’s trial was a media-produced sham and the defendant himself merely a “crisis actor” playing a role as part of a massive plot to spark a race war.

“I’m just going to go all out and say there is no Derek Chauvin,” wrote Tiffany, a QAnon fan on Telegram. “It's just another show; this actor is a fall guy. Agenda to stage race war or civil unrest. Take your pick.”

Another user called Christine said that “nothing is a coincidence. They are trying to start a race war.”

Tucker Carlson’s rant on Fox News on Tuesday—in which he claimed that Chauvin couldn’t receive a fair trial—was echoed widely on far-right channels.

“Everyone understood perfectly well the consequences of an acquittal in this case,” Carlson said. “After nearly a year of burning and looting and murder by BLM, that was never in doubt.”

Blaming Democrats for the verdict, Carlson echoed white nationalist themes as well: “No mob has the right to destroy our cities,” he said. “No politician or media figure has the right to intimidate a jury. It’s an attack on civilization.”

The far-right We The Media channel on Telegram agreed. “I don't think any police officer can have a fair trial due to them by our Constitution,” wrote one member. “I don't think the public should be jury, because of situations like this. I'm just saying he didn't get a fair trial. He was already tried by the judges/juries of the media and politicians.”

A little earlier, Alex Jones depicted a scenario identical to Carlson’s, but with the conspiracist anti-Semitism more explicit: “This is a defeat for the globalists at certain levels,” Jones said on his Infowars “War Room” program. “They wanted to go ahead and burn the country down. But at another level, they wanted to show we control juries by intimidation and threats, which means they can threaten any police department and make them go under globalist control. That’s what George Soros is financing, that’s what he’s funding.”  

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Thanks in no small part to organizers on the ground, relentless marches and peaceful protests calling for justice continued pressure on our justice system from all sectors of society, and video evidence of the crime, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of the murder of George Floyd. The results of the Chauvin case would have been easily predictable were it not for the long-standing history of systemic racism in our country. It is a history filled with extrajudicial killings of people of color, predominantly Black American men, by our law enforcement apparatus and ultimately sanctioned by our justice system. Chauvin’s conviction does not change the past and whether or not it marks a long-fought pivot toward a universal justice for all Americans, regardless of race, will take decades to inform.

One thing that the Chauvin case has done is put right-wing organizations and conservative folks back on their heels. This is not the result they expected, even if they know it is the correct judgement. The thorny spot they find themselves in is one where an institution that they have blindly defended to keep a certain type of white supremacist law and order in place has returned a judgement on a foot-soldier in this racist system. A police officer doing something that has been done time and time again—killing an unarmed citizen—has been judged and punished as the crime it is. No one is taking it harder than the water-logged mind of Tucker Carlson.

The day Derek Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd, Carlson went on his show to imply that the convictions were politically motivated and that we should no longer discuss the systemic issues that led to the death of Floyd. Most importantly, Carlson wanted everyone to understand what was really lost in today’s judgement: this was a victory for liberals in their war on (white) civilization.

Carlson began his show with the sped-up drivel we have come to expect from him, saying that “the jury in the Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict this afternoon please don't hurt us.” Explaining that “everyone understood perfectly well” that there would be mob rule in our cities if the jury had not come to this conclusion. The conclusion—based on numerous witnesses, multiple cameras’ video footage, and medical experts’ testimony—is not the result of this avalanche of evidence, according to Tucky, it’s politics. And for Carlson, “politics” means liberal culture war to destroy and replace white Americans.

Then Carlson pivots the only way a vapid-minded bigot and coward can, by saying that Chauvin, depending on sentencing, could spend the rest of his life in prison, wondering aloud “Is the officer guilty of the specific crimes for which he was just convicted? We can debate all that and over this hour we will.” Spoiler alert: He won’t, and he doesn’t. This is where Carlson gives his rhetorical straw-man argument for the night, saying that “we can’t debate,” that the “mob has the right to destroy our cities not under any circumstances not for any reason.” That’s a good thing because no one was ever debating that except Carlson. And he finished by equating the public outcry and support for Floyd and his family with “an attack on civilization.”

In fact, you can go back and watch Carlson debate that very thing, saying that the mob indeed has the right to destroy our cities, back on Jan. 6, 2021, during the Capitol building insurgency. He remembered to bring up this debate just three weeks ago on his vacuum-sealed television program. 

Carlson then goes on to argue that politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and even President Joe Biden influenced this decision with their statements about Chauvin’s guilt. “No politician or media figure has the right to intimidate a jury.” Spoiler alert: Barf. Before we point out that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi spoke after the Chauvin decision was handed down, let’s remember how Donald Trump—the president of the United States at the time—spoke out publicly in defense of fraudster Paul Manafort while the jury was deliberating on one of his cases, saying the case was “very sad,” and that Manafort was a “very good person.”

Carlson’s show proceeded to have guests on to “discuss” everything but the guilt of Derek Chauvin. First up was a very British-sounding reporter from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post saying some of the same. Then Candice Owens—the intellectual equivalent of a methane leak—came on to demand that everyone be thrown in jail who isn’t a regular on Carlson’s show. Finally, after all of that wheel turning, Carlson had on Ed Gavin, a former New York City law enforcement official to talk about Chauvin’s actions against Floyd. It was supposed to be what passed for analysis of why the Chauvin conviction was excessive, but sadly for Carlson, Gavin thought that “the verdict was just,” calling Chauvin’s treatment of Floyd “pure savagery.”

Carlson attempts to turn the case into a conversation about police being afraid to arrest people and “the mob” looting the world. Gavin very clearly says that he isn’t arguing against the need for police to protect the public from bad actors, he’s saying that in this very specific case, it is clear that the police had handcuffed and “subdued” Floyd and then killed him. That’s not right. In fact, it is murder. Carlson, unable to argue facts, and not intelligent enough to use rhetoric to get his way around this, loses his nonexistent cool. 

You can see and feel Carlson, clearly reddening with the humiliation he feels when things don’t go his way, as he tries to make his point through the uncomfortable smiling face of a truly underdeveloped emotional inner-world:

TUCKER CARLSON: The guy who did it looks like he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison, so I'm kind of more worried about the rest of the country, which thanks to police in-action, in case you haven't noticed, is like boarded up. So that's more of my concern but I appreciate you coming on Ed Gavin, thank you.

But he isn’t thanking Gavin at all. As they cut away, a clearly angry Carlson says “Nope. Done.” It’s pretty gross.

When your entire intellectual rationalization of our white supremacist judicial system is based on the belief that law enforcement is always right, and that the judicial system makes correct judgements, it is quite the conundrum when that very system reports back to you that it is racist.

The addendum to the entire night was a strange last segment where Carlson got super snarky, saying that Jeff Bezos was spending money to try and embarrass people like Carlson by researching their teenage behavior. It was a strange piece that made many people wonder a) what the hell Carlson was going on about; and b) what the hell was Carlson going on about?

A side note: Carlson very clearly says that his show is a “news show, this is not a political campaign.” As many people pointed out online, this runs counter to the Fox News argument in court that shows like Carlson’s white supremacist happy hour is very much not news.

Maybe it was this story?

Dan White murdered Harvey Milk less than a decade before Carlson made this joke to add the context. Turns out Carlson was always exactly as smart as a mediocre, privileged 17-year-old can be.

Apple’s new AirTag looks and works a lot like the trackers produced by Tile.

On Tuesday, Apple announced the release of AirTag, a small, electronic tracker people can attach to keys, a piece of luggage, or anything, really, and then use Apple’s Find My system to find that item. For Apple fans, it’s another handy product. But for Tile, the maker of a similar tracker, the long-awaited announcement is another sign of Apple’s anti-competitive behavior.

Tile once again encouraged Congress to take a closer look at Apple in a Senate antitrust hearing, where Tile’s general counsel, Kirsten Daru, testified alongside executives from Spotify, Match, Google, and Apple. The hearing came as Apple has repeatedly been accused of anti-competitive behavior due to its requirement for all iOS apps to be distributed through Apple’s App Store, where Apple takes a commission for sales.

But in the case of the new AirTags, the criticism goes further. Tile says that Apple is not only creating hardware that’s similar to its own, but is also designing Apple software in a way that favors its own products and disadvantages Tile’s products.

“Apple launched this product, and its competing app, with a knowledge of a lot of information about our business,” Daru told senators on Wednesday. “They know how our devices do in stores. They know who our customers are. They know our subscription take rates. They know what features people use. I mean, the list goes on and on.”

This sentiment echoed that of Tile CEO CJ Prober, who issued a statement soon after Apple’s AirTag announcement on Tuesday. “We welcome competition, as long as it is fair competition,” he said. “Unfortunately, given Apple’s well-documented history of using its platform advantage to unfairly limit competition for its products, we’re skeptical.”

Apple AirTags, which go on sale at the end of April, do what Tile’s products have done for a while: keep track of things. The new trackers use Bluetooth technology to locate these lost items. AirTags also feature the U1 chip, which uses ultra wideband technology for more precise object location. This approach — and even the physical design of the trackers — is very similar to what Tile’s been doing for years. Tile also uses Bluetooth to locate objects, and the company is in the midst of launching ultra wideband capabilities (along with an augmented reality feature) on its trackers.

One big difference between the new AirTags and Tile trackers: Tile relies on Apple to keep its location-tracking tools running smoothly in the Apple App Store and iOS, but not the other way around. Tile has long argued that Apple unfairly designed its mobile operating system, iOS, and the Find My app to favor its own location-tracking tools. Tile did not respond to Recode’s request for comment ahead of Wednesday’s hearing.

Apple, for its part, has pushed back against this criticism.

“Apple created Find My over a decade ago to help users locate and manage lost devices in a private and secure way,” the company told Recode in a statement. “We have always embraced competition as the best way to drive great experiences for our customers, and we have worked hard to build a platform in iOS that enables third-party developers to thrive.”

But Apple was hesitant to let Tile expound on its allegations of anti-competitive behavior. At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Mike Lee, the ranking Republican on the Senate subcommittee that deals with antitrust and consumer rights, asked Apple’s chief compliance officer, Kyle Andeer, to release Daru, Tile’s general counsel, from a nondisclosure agreement so that she could to speak about the terms of Apple’s Find My system. Apple’s Andeer declined. He also said during the hearing that AirTags would bring something that’s “extremely different than anything else in the marketplace.”

The standoff between Apple and Tile has been years in the making. Rumors emerged back in 2019 that Apple was working on a tracker system that would compete with Tile’s products. Daru told Congress last January that Apple was making it harder for users to connect their iPhone to Tile devices by requiring permissions in iOS 13.5 that were buried in settings, and prompting users to turn off those permissions after the devices had been set up. Daru also claimed that Apple’s Find My app competed with Tile’s own app. Tile sent a letter to European authorities accusing Apple of anti-competitive behavior, saying that iOS 13.5 was built to favor Apple’s Find My app over Tile’s app, among other complaints. Apple “strenuously” denied the allegations.

Following the volley of lawyer letters, Apple announced last summer that it would be launching a new program that would enable third-party trackers to work with its Find My app. But it wasn’t until early April of this year — two weeks ahead of the AirTags launch — that Apple finally updated the Find My app to allow it to work with third-party devices.

The argument that Apple unfairly nudges users toward the Find My system over Tile’s system has gotten traction in Congress in the past, however. An expansive House antitrust report from last October claimed that “Apple’s service would require companies like Tile to abandon their apps and the ability to differentiate their service from Apple’s and other competitors” and put companies like Tile “at a competitive disadvantage.”

After calling Apple’s announcement of AirTags “timely,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar did not mince her words at the hearing.

“I just don’t think this ‘We built it so trust us and we can run it’ is going to work anymore,” said Klobuchar at the end of the hearing. “Because if you look at history as a guide, of course people build things, and they do great things — they employ a bunch of people. And then at some point it becomes monopoly and then it becomes a problem.”

Update, April 21, 2021, 6:30 pm ET: This piece was updated to include details of Wednesday’s hearing.

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