Rodgers complained that the “cancel culture” was coming for him, but his own words cancel him as a liar and a bad thinker. If he had a principled objection to the vaccine, he could have chosen not to play, like Kyrie Irving, who at least is honest. What really sacked his whining stance was his refusal to wear a mask during interviews to protect others from sickness and death.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes an excellent, scathing opinion piece on Aaron Rodgers, who seems to keep finding new ways to shoot what little is left of his own foot off. Amazing how someone can go from National Hero to Holy Shit, What A Dick in mere seconds.
Jen and I have been talking for years about how we can’t understand the white evangelical embrace of the Great Pumpkin and his predecessors. A new book goes into the history of evangelicalism and traces its roots back to the beginning of the previous century, and the racism, misogyny and intolerance at its foundation.
Instead of theological criteria, what comes to define evangelicalism is instead your stance on issues of gender and sexuality, the embrace of patriarchal authority, belief in female submission. That’s how you determine who is in and out of the fold.
There’s an excellent interview with the author in the Jacobin; I highly recommend reading it for the overview.
Oh fucking hell. Apparently the asshats that run AT&T are super-conservative and have been funding and supporting OAN, the right-wing propaganda outlet our departed Pumpkin loved so much. Which means I’ve (through my wireless bill) been supporting this whole mess since 1999, when I got my first cellphone.
“If there was any story involving Trump, we had to only focus on either the positive information or basically create positive information,” said Marissa Gonzales, an OAN producer from 2019 until she resigned in 2020. “It was never, never the full truth.”
I’ve been slowly traversing the archives of a blog called Last Stand on Zombie Island, where the author does a weekly post on different warships from the post Civil War era up until the present day. He’s very good at the context of the time and place, and is able to find all kinds of fascinating examples from periods in history I wasn’t ever aware of.
Six Colors has an excellent upgrade guide for the new iPhones based on your current model; you choose the one you have and it tells you what new stuff you’ll get with one of the new models. I’m not ready to upgrade yet but I’ll keep this handy for when we need to make the jump.
A long time ago, I worked with a bunch of guys who were hired from a Name Brand Consulting Firm to take our dot-com public. I was enlisted to build the pitch deck for the roadshow, which meant I was making edits to Powerpoint slides at all times of the day and night with these guys (they were all guys). One late afternoon, two of them were talking about catching important flights, and one of them claimed he’d called in a bomb scare to hold a flight at the gate until he could make it. This was before September 11, but I remember thinking how sociopathic that sounded, and revolted by how proud of himself he was.
Here’s a cool story with a tool I’ll be looking into: a book author is reproducing old halftone images in his book but keeps running into moiré patterns when he scans them. He uses a tool to view the image’s Fast Fourier Transform—the frequency pattern behind the moiré—and is able to paint it out with a simple interface, cleaning up the image with math and magic. File this under useful.
Apple has announced a plan to adopt driver’s licenses/state ID’s into Apple Wallet. Maryland is one of eight states working with the company to add personal ID into an iPhone or Apple Watch; all you’ll have to do is tap the device like you do with Apple Pay.
- Driver’s licenses and state IDs in Wallet are only presented digitally through encrypted communication directly between the device and the identity reader, so users do not need to unlock, show, or hand over their device.
In the Before Times, when I was commuting, I was using Apple Pay with my watch and phone quite a bit, and I found it extremely handy.
“At that point, I said that whereas I had risked my life to defend my country while in the Air Force, I was not willing to risk my life to teach a class with an unmasked student during this pandemic,” Bernstein said in an email to The Red & Black. “I then resigned my retiree-rehire position.”
An 88-year-old psychology professor, who came out of retirement to teach a class at the University of Georgia, abruptly resigned after a student refused to wear a mask properly—this after he’d explained that he was at risk for dying from COVID.
Fuckin’ A, sir.
Yay! the new Chvrches album will be out this week. Here’s hoping it’s better than the last one.