Et Tu, Tim?

Tim Cook’s personal donation of $1,000,000 to Trump’s bribe fund inauguration fund has left a bad taste in the mouth of Apple fans across the net.

First, the situation from Mike Allen via Axios:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell Axios.

Why it matters: The donation reflects a long, collaborative relationship between Trump and Cook that included many meetings during Trump’s first term, and dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month.

Other CEOs and companies have made seven-figure inauguration contributions in their efforts to build bridges to the incoming administration.

John Gruber via Daring Fireball:

It seems pretty obvious that it was Apple/Cook that leaked this to Axios, not Trump’s side, given the eye-roll-inducing “proud American tradition” spin, but more especially the nugget that only Cook personally, not Apple as a company, is contributing. That’s Cook asking for any and all ire to be directed at him, personally, not Apple. Good luck with that.

Marco Arment via Mastodon:

Is it that hard to believe?

Why do we think Tim Cook couldn’t possibly support Trump, while all of these other billionaires support him for their own billionaire self-interests?

Why do we keep making excuses for him?

Why do we keep making excuses for Apple?

Nick Heer via Pixel Envy:

Call this what you want: bipartisanship, diplomacy, pragmatic, outright support, or “the spirit of unity”. But one thing you cannot call it is principled. We have become accustomed to business leaders sacrificing some of their personal principles to support their company in some way — for some reason, it is just business is a universal excuse for terrible behaviour — but all of these figures have already seen what the incoming administration does with power and they want to support it. For anyone who claims to support laws or customs, this is not principled behaviour.

Daniel Jalkut via Daniel Punkass :

On the occasion of Apple’s slithering CEO Tim Cook donating $1M to a neo-fascist insurrectionist, it’s FINALLY time to deploy the often overused expression “this never would have happened if Steve Jobs were still in charge.”

Monton Reece via Manton.org:

Tim Cook has led Apple to incredible success, but his words are hollow. Even the principles he seems to care most passionately about, like user privacy, are in doubt. I’m increasingly thinking it’s an act.

I’ve been an Apple developer since the 1990s when the company was doomed. Fans propped up the company because we believed they were different. They focused on design and creativity. They were the rebels and troublemakers, trying to push the human race forward through technology.

Most of the employees at Apple still care about these things. Tim Cook cares about appeasing a would-be autocrat and taxing developers in an app distribution monopoly. It’s time for new leadership.

Cabel Sasser via Mastodon:

I wonder how Tim would answer the question: “why are you donating to this one, but didn’t donate to the last one?”. That’d be fascinating to see.

It’s a sad day for Tim Cook, Apple, and the of course the USA. How can they expect the world to choke down their claim of American exceptionalism when its leaders both in and out of government are so transparently corrupt?

His Grandpa was a Nazi

I found it shocking — having grown up in multicultural Canada — when an older relative of mine, who grew up in Germany during the war, shared that Hitler wasn’t all bad and had a lot of good ideas. I pushed back but mostly chalked it up to them being in their 90s and maybe losing a bit of their senility.

Bastian Allgeier, a designer and developer from Neckargemünd, Germany shares his grandfather’s story and ultimately how the world is cultivating Nazis like it’s 1930.

Nazism isn’t dead, it’s just dormant searching for willing hosts.

(via)

Political Tribalism in America

I just received a copy of the book, “Political Tribalism in America” in the mail today. Subtitled, “How Hyper-Partisanship Dumbs Down Democracy and How to Fix it” this book (Amazon.ca) by Timothy J. Redmond includes a paragraph on the expectation bias and uses my backmasking page as an example of how being primed can change your perception.

From p.79-81 of the book:

The expectation bias occurs when our expectations about an outcome influence our perceptions of that outcome. To illustrate this point, go to http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking/stairway-to-heaven-backwards.html, click on the “play forward” button, listen to the clip of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, and follow along with the accompanying lyrics (Figure 4-2). Trust me. It’s well worth the effort.

After walking through my backmasking page, he goes on to compare the priming one needs to hear the backward message to the priming we bring with us when we watch the news.

And as supposed backwards messages in rock music go, so go allegations of media bias. When Democrats and Republicans expect to find partisan biases in the news, they tend to find them. A study by Matthew A. Baum and Phil Gussin presented subjects with a transcript of a news report on the 2004 presidential election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat John Kerry, and asked them to evaluate whether the material was favorable, neutral, or unfavorable toward either of the nominees. Each participant received an identical transcript that was painstakingly crafted to be balanced “in terms of positive, negative, and neutral references to the candidates.” The first section of the transcript, reproduced below, is a case in point (bracketed remarks are mine).

Good evening. We start tonight with the presidential candidates on the attack [neutral]. Today with just 13 days left in the campaign, John Kerry was explaining why he believes the president does not understand the problems of ordinary people [anti-Bush] while, for President Bush, the message was mostly about why Senator Kerry’s plans will leave Americans worse off [anti-Kerry]

But there was, of course, a twist. While the content of each transcript was the same, some subiects were told that the news report originated from CNN while others were informed that it came from Fox News. The result? Participants who believed that CNN was liberal concluded that the CNN version of the transcript favored John Kerry. Yet those who presumed that CNN was conseryative thought that the CNN news report was partial to George Bush.

Likewise, those who considered Fox News to be conservative, maintained that the Fox News version of the transcript favored Bush, while those who believed that Fox News was liberal concluded that their report privileged Kerry.

He went on to explain that some of the priming comes from party leaders themselves.

In a 2010 study. political scientist Jonathan Ladd similarly found that Democrats and Republicans were more likely to evaluate the media as biased when they were told that their party leaders believed that the media was “being too friendly with President Bush” or “being overtly critical of President Bush,” respectively. We see what we expect to see.

The scientific evidence belies the charge that the mainstream media is infused with a partisan bias. Unfortunately, when we’re repeatedly told otherwise, we expect the media to be slanted and will discern it as such. Thus, if we want to perceive the news media more clearly, we must first relieve ourselves of the expectation bias. For if we heed the scientific evidence — as opposed to the screeds of politicians or pundits — we might just start to see things a little differently.

I look forward to reading the rest of it.

The True Story of Family Day

Vice News recaps the origins of today’s family day holiday. As the story goes, the creation of the holiday was linked to the arrest and conviction of one of Don Getty’s sons on cocaine-related charges. Getty himself, however, has said over the years that the two events were not related. I had heard this story before, but I had mostly forgotten it.

In 1988, Dale Getty tried selling an ounce of coke to an undercover cop in an Edmonton motel room, and Family Day was born. Seriously.

Happy Family Day.

Running for Mayor

Last August while traveling through Medicine Hat I met-up with an old high school friend, Linnsie Clark. I’d heard she was running for mayor and I wanted to hear more about her campaign and catch up.

We talked for hours. She told me about some of the concerning proposals within the current council and why she was running and how she didnt even have a Facebook account before this and how difficult it was to find the right people to help with a campaign.

Clearly she found a great team because last week after the election I woke up to the news that not only had Linnsie won, she won in a landslide making her the youngest and the first woman mayor in the history of Medicine Hat.

The Medicine Hat News has a Q and A with Linnsie Clark.

(Previously)

Lawyer wants inquiry into alleged threats of retaliation against MLA and CBC journalist by Lethbridge police

A Calgary defence lawyer is calling for a public inquiry into allegations that members of the Lethbridge Police Service have threatened retaliation against NDP MLA Shannon Phillips and CBC journalist Meghan Grant for exposing misconduct within the force.
— Read on www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/lethbridge-police-threats-public-inquiry-1.6195354

Previously

Trump Acquitted

The US Senate has voted to acquit Donald Trump.

In theory he could run again in 2024.

After the vote finished, Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit, got up and spoke at length about how Trump was directly responsible for the riot. He justified his not guilty vote by saying it was too late now that Trump is out of office.

The Twitterverse had opinions:





Sedition!

I’d never heard of Randy Rainbow, but he’s got quite the collection of song parody YouTube videos. I especially liked this one about sedition.

It’s amazing the amount of work he must have put into this video and the speed in which he put it out. Mark Evanier suggests Randy Rainbow is a one man show:

Supposedly, he does all this himself from a not-huge apartment in New York…and he’s got to do it quickly because these days, current news has — as Jon Stewart used to say of The Daily Show — the shelf life of potato salad. “Topical Humor” used to be about something that had happened in the last month or so. Now, folks like him and Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and Jimmy Kimmel are going on-air or on the web with material about what happened six hours ago…or less. No wonder MAD Magazine with its six-week lead time couldn’t compete.

Kieran Healy on the Mob at the Capitol

Required reading: author and researcher Kieran Healy on what happened during the mob raid of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

From the moment he knew he’d lost the presidential election, Trump absolutely wanted to get the result overturned. Some large proportion of his own staff and Congressional Republicans thought there was no harm in humoring him. Many surely knew him well enough to realize he was quite serious about it. But most, falling into a way of thinking that Trump has repeatedly benefited from over his entire career, and especially during his Presidency, figured that he could not possibly overcome the weight of institutional and conventional pressure behind the transition of power. Still, by the first week of January he had not relented in his efforts to find some way to do it, whether through bullying local election officials, chasing wild geese through the courts, or directly intimidating state officials. That all failed, or looked like failing. The next thing on the horizon was Electoral College certification.

She points out that she doesn’t have any more information than anyone else following the story, but she does paint a coherent and plausible outline based on the facts we know of what Trump and the Whitehouse might have been thinking. I think this is exactly what happened.