Link Blog
A brief video with Ari Berman on the constraints built into American “democracy”. From the very beginning US political institutions concentrated power in the hands of the elite, propertied white male minority. You know, white supremacy by design.
More than 200 years later, the series of compromises the founders made have increasingly vested the majority of political power in the hands of a minority of the population—a reactionary conservative white minority that is seeking to entrench and hold onto power through a wide variety of anti-democratic means.
Blue Maga: we need to talk about the cult-like turn of the Democratic Party | The Guardian
Is the Democratic party, the self-proclaimed party of liberal values and scientific data, morphing into a Maga-like cult in front of our eyes?
Over the past few weeks, the calls for Joe Biden to step aside have been met not with thoughtful critiques or reasoned counter-arguments but with furious accusations of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal.
Whatever happened to the importance of voicing dissent? Of speaking truth to power? Weren’t liberals supposed to be the folks who value open debate and discussion?
The US is a circus of white supremacy. The violence of today rooted in the violence of yesterday, a thru line from our foundation in settler colonialism to economic gains based upon slavery to this moment. Our domestic violence is exported as war profiteering and a foreign policy rooted in constant interventions. A repeating cycle of violence with the goal of resource extraction, resource theft. It is fundamental to America.
Brother Ali - Uncle Sam Goddamn (Official Video) - YouTube
Smoke and mirrors, stripes and stars Stolen for the cross in the name of God Bloodshed, genocide, rape and fraud
The Real Gaza Death Toll - Susan Abulhawa - YouTube
While the official death toll stalled at 30,000 for months before climbing to 37,000, they grossly underestimate the true death toll. These figures only account for identified victims of ‘direct fire’. Hundreds of thousands more remain uncounted—unidentified bodies or body parts, those who died due to a lack of medicine and healthcare, those buried by their loved ones without getting to hospital, those who starved to death, those trapped under the rubble, those who succumbed to torture while abducted by the IOF and/or those missing.
“The scope of the problem is vast.”
Even that is an understatement. We cannot be ready because this is now an existential crisis for civilization as we know it. It’s that simple.
The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change » Yale Climate Connections
The situation has now reached the point where the government can’t possibly make whole all those wiped out by a disaster, let alone buy out all of the properties that have flooded repeatedly or finance all the beach nourishment projects that could defend coastal property against sea level rise and stronger storms.
Brutal truth.
Listen to this conversation with Saul Williams about the historical and ongoing colonialism by the Global North of the Global South. It’s white supremacy in service of resource extraction, plain and simple.
“I think people just really have no idea what is coming, because we have no way of visualizing that through our own personal experiences, or that of the last 250 years,” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It’s not something where you go, ‘I know what that might look like because I’ve seen that.’ Because we haven’t.
Living and surviving in the climate emergency will become increasingly difficult and, frankly, miserable.
Have you tried to imagine what it will be like in 20 years?
The New York Times reports on soaring heat related emergencies and deaths in the US:
Extreme heat, intensified by climate change, has blanketed much of the United States this summer, killing more than a dozen people in Oregon in recent days. Large parts of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah have been under excessive heat warnings, which local officials believe contributed to more than 90 deaths in the West this month.
Mother Jones reports on the July 5th Lancet report on the counting of the dead in Gaza:
Factoring in a possible ratio of four indirect deaths to each direct death, researchers Dr. Rasha Khatib, Dr. Martin McKee, and Dr. Salim Yusuf wrote that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” That is nearly five times the 38,000 dead reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, the only organization conducting regular counts of the dead on the ground. That number is equivalent to 8 percent of Gaza’s population.
Tiny Life Journal - My mornings start with a dog walk followed by a 30 minute bike ride and, finally outdoor chores. Lately those chores start with picking blackberries. A beautiful view of the nearby Missouri countryside then, while picking blackberries I met a female widow skimmer dragonfly that was sunning itself.
The widow skimmer is one of the group of dragonflies known as king skimmers. The nymphs live in the water, molting and growing until they are ready to emerge from the water and then molting a final time to reveal their wings.
How Science Fiction Can Inspire Environmentalism and Climate Action - ZNetwork
As the rhyme suggests, cli-fi is a sub-genre of sci-fi. It tends to be speculative, to focus on anthropogenic global warming, and to examine the effects of climate change on human communities. Frequently, as with Atwood’s trilogy, there is a dystopian slant.
In keeping with the complexity of climate change itself, cli-fi is multiform, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller, magical realism, fable, satire, and everything in between.
CrimethInc. : Why Stop at Removing Biden? : The Center Cannot Hold
It would seem like a heavy-handed metaphor if it weren’t our actual reality. A doddering patriarch, representing the collapsing centrist political project, refuses to step aside even as it becomes certain that he faces defeat at the hands of an even more authoritarian autocrat. This encapsulates the global prospects for democracy today.
It’s not a particular politician that has grown senile, but an entire political system.
The war crimes and genocide continue with another school bombing by Israel. 4 schools in 4 days. One school each day. When you’re bombing kids playing football you are on the wrong side.
Video shows moment of Israeli strike on Gaza school | The Guardian
Asmaa Qudeih, a witness who lost some relatives in the attack, told Reuters: “Bodies flew in the wind, body parts flew, I don’t know how to describe it.”
Videos from Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the casualties were taken, showed dozens of dead and seriously injured people, including children, strewn across the floor of a room.
Sarah Kendzior: Last Chance, USA
Because Trump is widely loathed, beating him should have been easy — in the debate, and in the 2024 election. All Biden had to do was remain marginally coherent and not do something unforgivably sadistic, like abet a genocide of children, but no.
It is telling that bombing the debate instead of bombing the children of Gaza was the dealbreaker for Biden’s backers.
Our new reality is constant adaption to extreme heat and other effects of the ongoing climate emergency: The mayor of Athens, Greece on extreme heat in the capital city: “It’s about survival”. The plan includes more cooling centers, water stations and planting a lot more trees for shade.
The Guardian reports on the mayor of Athens’s top priority:
Ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already witnessed record-breaking temperatures and wildfires.
What a fucking joke. Shameful.
Pier, which has delivered the equivalent of a single day’s pre-war land aid deliveries in two months, will reportedly be removed in a few days’ time
Meanwhile, as the war crimes and genocide continue: Researchers Estimate True Gaza Death Toll at 186,000 or More | Truthout
A well articulated, sobering assessment of the motivations of the Democratic and Republican parties in terms of the past 30-40 years and how it’s playing out in the current election.
Apple’s marketing of the iPad as a general computing device
Riley Hill at SlatePad has an interesting look back at Apple’s marketing of the iPad as a laptop replacement
Sometimes the iPad is (sort of) marketed as a laptop replacement. Sometimes it’s marketed as a unique kind of device. Being something of an in between product can make iPad difficult to clearly market, but it’s fun to look back at some of the ways Apple has tried to communicate its value over time.
From day one Apple positioned the iPad between the iPhone and Mac. And I’m sure that many buyers were well established Apple users that had both. But in my extended family the iPad was not an in-between device for nerds that already had an iPhone and Mac. Rather, it was the first and only computer for the older generations that had never had a computer. Apple didn’t have to do much to market the iPad to this group. They saw the initial round of iPad ads and bought them without question. And it’s been my observation in the years since that they have all continued using iPads and upgrading every few years when batteries eventually failed or storage ran out.
For my parents, aunts and uncles, the iPad is a fun, easy, safe, no-maintenance device for people that want to use a computer without really thinking about computing. What makes the iPad special is that it gets out of their way. It’s just magic glass. Did Apple know what a hit the iPad would be with the older generations?
My original iPad docked in Apple’s Keyboard Stand
I was a Mac user that bought the first iPad and the Keyboard Dock and not long after I found the Gusto app which was likely the first built-for iPad text editor that included an ftp client and an interface specifically for managing web sites. So, early on I was using the iPad for managing client websites.
Jump forward five years to the introduction of the iPad Pro in 2015 and the accompanying statements by Tim Cook in this interview with The Telegraph:
“Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones."
My guess? Apple thought the iPad Pro really could be a notebook/laptop replacement for a few very specific groups of users like students not yet attached to Macs. They really leaned into this group a year later with the smaller 9.7" iPad Pro and the infamous “What’s a Computer?” ad.
But certainly they expected most Mac users would continue using Macs. They weren’t bothered by the idea that a few would switch to the iPad Pro because they knew that many would just end up using both. And they probably hoped that they might add new users that had, up to that point, been using an iPhone along with a Windows laptop.
There’s no way to know if they’ve met their goals with the iPad Pro but they’ve certainly stayed the course in the 9 years since its introduction. Slowly but surely they have iterated iPadOS while improving hardware. They’ve spent considerable time and resources bringing Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad with version 2 just released.
My hunch is that they are satisfied with the open-ended role of the iPad in the larger Apple ecosystem. I doubt they feel the need to nail it down in the way that pundits want.
Another hunch partly based their Why iPad website is that Apple is primarily marketing the iPad to the younger age brackets. Everything about that page seems to speak to students, creatives and young professionals.
Researchers Estimate True Gaza Death Toll at 186,000 | Truthout
Public health experts have estimated that the true death toll in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza could be five times higher than the official toll reported by Palestinian officials — a chilling figure that they say is, in fact, a conservative estimate based on historical death tolls in times of conflict.
In a letter published on Friday in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the researchers said that the current death toll in Gaza could be 186,000 or more. This amounts to roughly 8 percent of Gaza’s population before October.
Equally predictable: the 10% of the Global North will keep on flying to vacations, driving SUVs without concern and otherwise carry on as though there is no problem and nothing they can do.
Earth sees warmest June on record, boosts odds of warmest year
June was the warmest such month on record worldwide, according to figures released Monday, extending a heat streak even longer.
The monthly milestone increases the odds that 2024 will eclipse 2023 as the warmest year on record, and adds to the consecutive months that exceeded the crucial 1.5°C threshold in the Paris Agreement.