Today Adobe announced its annual MAX conference would take place in Florida. A US state the NAACP has declared unsafe for Black travelers. 500 employees signed an internal letter, condemning the decision…
Serif’s Affinity suite of apps: Publisher, Photo, Designer are excellent alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. A one time purchase, option to buy a universal license to use all three apps on 3 platforms: Windows, Mac and iPad.
Not a surprise but with the latest UN Security Council Veto the US is alone in its ongoing support of Israel’s genocide against Palestine. In our support of war crimes and genocide we are guilty of war crimes and genocide.
US veto sinks Algeria’s ceasefire resolution at UN Security Council…
The United States has once again vetoed a draft resolution on Gaza at the UN Security Council. It’s the third veto by the US since the start of the war. The text put forward by Algeria called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, and had 13 members voting in favour. The US was the only country to vote against it.
More Than 50 Countries Argue Before World Court Against Israeli Occupation of Palestine…
Arguments are underway at the International Court of Justice, where more than 50 countries are asking the World Court to issue a nonbinding legal opinion against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967. The request is separate from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. “Israel has been instrumentalizing the rules of international humanitarian law … to further its settler-colonial project in Palestine,” says Ahmed Abofoul of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, which submitted an advisory opinion on the case. “I have no doubt that the court will decide that Israel’s occupation is illegal,” he says. We also discuss what comes after the ruling and Israeli society’s reaction to the war.
Hearing on Israeli occupation could help peace process under international law…
Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project think tank, says the likely response of Israel’s allies to this week’s proceedings at the ICJ is that the court should “keep its nose out” of an issue that they will argue is political and not legal. “Why is that so important? Because the question here is whether the peace process, the 30 years of agreements, … is something that should be untouched by international law,” Levy told Al Jazeera.
Momentum grows for protest vote against Biden in Michigan primary…
Activists are calling for a ballot protest at Michigan’s February 27 primary, in an effort to push President Joe Biden to support a ceasefire and end the administration’s support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza.
Our Revolution has become the latest organization to back the movement. The progressive action group recently sent an email to 87,000 of its members in Michigan and nearly 225,000 supporters in other states, calling on them to vote uncommitted.
“We need to send President Biden a message: We are outraged by U.S. complicity in the destruction of Gaza, the killing of thousands of civilians, including more than 10,000 children, and it must STOP!” read the email. “By voting uncommitted on 2/27, Our Rev supporters can push Biden to change course on Gaza now and increase his chances of winning Michigan in November.” I’m the Mayor of Dearborn, Mich., and My City Feels Betrayed…
Dearborn does not sleep. We have not slept. Our entire city is haunted by the images, videos and stories streaming out of Gaza. Life seems heavily veiled in a haze of shared grief, fear, helplessness and even guilt as we try to understand how our tax dollars could be used by those we elected to slaughter our relatives overseas.
We don’t have to imagine the violence and injustice being carried out against the Palestinian people. Many of us lived it, and still bear the scars of life under occupation and apartheid.
“What I Saw Wasn’t War — It Was Annihilation,” Says U.S. Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza Hospital…
We speak with an American doctor just back from Gaza about the “unimaginable scale” of its humanitarian crisis. Irfan Galaria, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, recently wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times describing Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilians as “annihilation.” Dr. Galaria, who has worked in conflict zones around the world, says he and his team witnessed “a collateral humanitarian crisis of an unimaginable scale,” involving the “deliberate attempt” to both target civilians with military assault and to deprive them of aid. “I thought I was going to be prepared, but I was not prepared for what I saw,” he says.
Hey hey, look, the Apple pundit club have gotten together to do their Apple report card again! Not a surprise but they’re all declaring the iPad is still dying? And then of course there are the folks like Steve Troughton-Smith chiming in on Mastodon but he and other commenters in the thread aren’t offering anything new either. It’s just a repetition of the pundit echo chamber.
Even worse, many commenters proudly proclaim that they’re still using old hardware from before 2020. One even stating he uses a 2017 iPad Pro while complaining about poor multi-tasking. They’re so busy proving that they can’t be bothered with the iPad they are that they apparently haven’t stopped to consider that 3GB of memory in a 2018 iPad might not function as well as a modern M1 iPad with 8 or 16GB of memory. Maybe base your judgment on the real-world capabilities of current hardware?
Let’s see, no, really, this is going to be fun. A year ago, February 2023, “the iPad guy” as he calls himself spent 12 months complaining that the Stage Manager was broken. He made a big show of switching to the Mac.
Many others said the Mac and iPad OS’s needed a “Snow Leopard” year. Yes, that’s an Apple trope when they all conclude that there are too many bugs and that Apple should go easy on new features, take a year fixing bugs. Yes, the Pundits were in quite an uproar about the redesign of the Mac Settings app. Meanwhile they were all also saying that the iPad Pro was overpowered with no pro apps.
Now, keep with me here. In late spring Apple released Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, their two most well known pro apps. The pundits reaction? “Finally!” But many of them immediately panned the releases because the new iPad apps lacked some features. You know, sort of ignoring that these were entirely new, version 1 apps for iPad. BUT, BUT, BUT not perfect, lacking full feature parity… FAIL!! Also, same day, BUT, BUT, BUT, no Xcode!!! FAIL!!!!
By late May the Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro releases were old news and hardly mattered. WWDC was around the corner. And yes, some new features were announced but, you know, nothing that interesting according to the pundits. At least Stage Manager seemed to be getting a fix. In summary, big MEH. Never mind that they’d all been clamoring for a “Snow Leopard” release which is what they got. Though not really as there were quite a few new features but not enough to impress. And yes, Stage Manager was fixed. And even enabled for older iPads which had been a big complaint. But, you know, MEH. The star of the show was Vision Pro.
Jump forward to the end of 2023, no new iPads! Oh, this is terrible. No new iPads!! Where’s the new new? The new hardware? Where is it!!! A thousand pundits needing clickbait fodder cried out.
But wait, the previous group think was that the iPad hardware with the M2 was way over-powered. How is the lack of new over-powered hardware a problem?
My take on the pundits and their iPad “analysis”: Garbage. It’s self-contradictory, confused cry-baby group think. They ignore the progress that’s made and forget what they’ve complained about the previous year. And when prevous critiques are addressed they ignore it, likely having forgotten what a big problem they’d claimed it was.
And they ignore the fact that tens of millions of iPads continue to be sold even with the boring old design.
Do none of these people have family that they still speak to? Does my family happen to be a bunch of weirdos? Because I’ll tell you, in my family of weirdos iPads are the second most popular computer to the iPhone. There are only 5 Macs, 3 PCs and 8+ iPads.
Pundits think themselves the center of the tech world but seem to forget that, in fact, they’re the weirdos that change their to-do apps, notes apps, text editors 3 times a month. It’s pundits that complain that the iPad can’t be used to code apps in Xcode or be used to record multiple streams of audio at the same time. Pundits that are the edge cases.
So a few pundits can’t seem to figure out what to do with their iPads. Meanwhile millions of iPads are, in fact, being sold. Millions of users are buying apps on the App Store. Huh. What are millions of users getting from the App Store?
Here’s just a quick sample of some of the big hitters I guess at. These are the number of ratings and average rating, not the number of app downloads:
- Microsoft Word, 2 million ratings, 4.7 stars
- Microsoft Outlook, 6.6 million ratings, 4.8 stars
- Microsoft Teams, 3.2 million ratings, 4.8 stars
- Microsoft Excel, 1 million ratings, 4.8 stars
- Microsoft OneNote, 855,000 ratings, 4.7 stars
- Microsoft Power BI (I’d never heard of it but it’s for business data analytics ) 67,000 ratings, 4.7 stars
- Salesforce, 295,000 ratings, 4.7 stars
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 42,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
- LinkedIn Learning, 78,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
- Procreate, 40,000 ratings, 4.5 stars
- Sketchbook, 216,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
- Canva 1.9 million ratings, 4.9 stars
- Lightroom, 38,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
- AutoCAD, 6,000 ratings, 4.4 stars
- Morpholio Trace - Sketch CAD 9,600 ratings, 4.7 stars
The list goes on and on and on. Gosh, well, I mean, maybe I’m getting the wrong idea here, but it seems like if one were to step outside of the pundit club and spend just a minimal effort thinking about sales numbers, app downloads, app ratings, one might actually come up with another narrative, one in which millions of iPads are not just purchased but then put to actual use out there in this big world.
But no, no, that doesn’t fit well with the story these guys are telling each other.
Do better pundits. If you’re going to make a living demanding that Apple do better, that Apple meet your high standards, hows about you raise your standards for yourselves. Do some actual thinking. Step outside your own preconceived notions about how tech is used.
Try doing your jobs.
Palestine awakens the revolution…
Since Israel began its slaughter in Gaza on October 7, I have felt my own heart become a grave for over 25,000 people in Palestine. I, along with the rest of the world, have borne witness to the world’s most documented genocide in history. I have watched, from my phone, the attempted annihilation of an entire nation.
These 100 days of genocide have replaced every cell in my body and made me into a different person. I am not the same as I was before witnessing these atrocities; my soul has shifted to revolve around this revolution. I’m not alone. The world has changed right along with me.
Total Chaos: What A Palestinian American Doctor Saw In Gaza…
Dr. Thaer Ahmad, emergency room physician and assistant program director of the Advocate Christ Emergency Medicine Residency Program, discusses his recent experience volunteering at the Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip.https://www.instagram.com/tahmadmd/?hl=enhttps://christem.com/Thaer Ahmad then walks through his assessment of the already shaky state of the healthcare system in pre-October 7th Gaza, as well as his relationship to the healthcare system, as a first-generation Palestinian-American doctor, before tackling the extensive effort it took to get into Gaza as a healthcare worker. Next, Dr. Ahmad explores the extreme changes in quality of life in Southern Gaza from his previous experiences providing healthcare, parsing through the impact of mass displacement into Rafah alongside the dwindling number of functioning hospitals in the region creating a system of severely overworked, underfunded, and under-resourced healthcare workers.
Gaza Besieged, Jews Divided, & a World in Pain: Gabor, Aaron, & Daniel Maté in Conversation…
This conversation took place in early 2024, three months into Israel’s bombardment and invasion and the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Gabor Maté and sons Aaron and Daniel got together in Vancouver BC to discuss what’s happening in Gaza, Israel, and the worldwide Jewish community.
Which Countries Supply Arms to Israel…
As civilian casualties continue to mount in Gaza, global calls for countries to halt arms sales to Israel grow. The United States Senate has approved a bill committing $14bn to support Israel’s war on Gaza this week.
Even before the start of the war last October, the US firmly supported Israel with the supply of military equipment, contributing $3bn annually in military aid. Many other countries provide military support to Israel via arms sales.
Civilian casualties continue to mount in Gaza – currently standing at more than 28,000 dead with thousands more trapped under rubble and presumed dead in just four months of bombardment and ground invasions. The rising death toll is prompting international condemnation.
Human Rights Discourse Has Failed to Stop the Genocide in Gaza…
Four months into the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has forced over a million refugees to the edge of the Egyptian border and is now bombing them while threatening to mount a ground assault against them. In the following text, Jonathan Pollak, a longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, explains why we should not look to international institutions or protest movements within Israeli society to put a stop to the genocide in Gaza and calls on ordinary people to take action.
Finished reading: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi 📚
Climate fiction about the future of the southwest of the US after decades of extended drought. Seems about right.
The iPad Pro, Mac and Vision Pro can all co-exist
Linked: Climate Emergency
Apple getting weird?
Ongoing link round-up of events in Gaza
Jon Stewart Tackles The Biden-Trump Rematch That Nobody Wants | The Daily Show - YouTube
He’s back. And his take on the upcoming presidential election is spot on.
Photos: Superb Owl Sunday VIII - The Atlantic
A special Sunday event: our eighth annual photo collection celebrating the magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, and are depicted here in photos from recent years. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely), we invite you to take a look.
Kimberley Rose - The definition of antisemitism that has become a weapon to defend Israel…
The Palestinian death toll is over 28,000 and yet here I am debating words? Why? Because words, in particular the working definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance IHRA, is being used as a weapon to silence people and defend Israel. And these words are increasing being worked into laws. Lawmakers in more than half-dozen US states are pushing laws to define antisemitism
As millions in the US entertained themselves with the Super Bowl Sunday night Israel, with the full support of the US, continued its genocide in Gaza.
Noura Erakat: Israel’s Looming Invasion of Rafah is the “Worst-Case Scenario” - YouTube…
As the United States, the European Union and countries around the world are warning Israel against a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, we speak with Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat. “This is disproportionate, excessive force that is meant to terrorize a population,” says Erakat. “Israel must stop its genocidal campaign now.” Erakat also responds to news that one of President Biden’s top foreign policy aides has admitted the administration has made “missteps” in the Middle East, and discusses calls to stop arms transfers under international law to prevent war crimes.
An easy hack for an ever present clipboard history for iPad!
Prince at 3:30.
2021 Remastered Edit: Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison & Prince pay tribute to George Harrison at the 2004 Induction Ceremony
Linked: Palestinian Gaza News
For activists or anyone following the current situation in Israel this is an excellent pamphlet written by April Rosenblum: The past didn’t go anywhere.
The Past was an activist effort, not an academic work, and was written just after my undergraduate years. It tends to resonate most with people on the activist Left. Other audiences might find these resources helpful.
I’ve been posting a lot recently about Israel’s ongoing actions against Palestians. On February 5th I wrote:
It’s been many years but one thing I remember about being in school and learning about the Holocaust is that it was a common refrain for kids to ask “Why or how did the people of Germany let it happen? Why did they go along with it?” It’s the sort of question that echoes into adulthood and into the public consciousness on the question of the Nazis, fascism and the crimes of the time.
But I look around today and I think, well, we can see how it happens. It’s happening again. If history demonstrates that Israel committed genocide in 2024 how will you feel about your silence, your role as an enabler?
A reader sent this message:
Can I offer a suggestion? I appreciate the intention, but making comparisons between Israel’s actions and those of Nazi Germany is considered antisemitic. It’s a very painful comparison that is hard to have reasonable discussions about.
They shared this link: Working definition of antisemitism
Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
The particular bit that stood out to me in the context of my post was this:
- Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
The reader went on to share this:
Unfortunately, there are many other instances of genocide in recent history. I’ve found the Rwandan and Armenian genocides, where government forces blamed a whole people for a rebel group’s actions and collectively punished them, to be a good comparison point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
It’s a list worth looking at. We should bear witness to all genocide. But my primary concern right now, in 2024, is the fact that in the near future it’s likely that Israel will be on that list and along with it should be the United States.
I may not have been clear in my writing but I’m not just referring to the state of Israel but the US as well. My point is that if genocide is being committed in 2024 by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people the citizens of the US are complicit. We aid and abet Israel and have for many decades. The crimes being committed today are an extension of previous crimes that we have supported.
And to be clear our criminal, interventionist and violent foreign policy goes far beyond our support of Israel.
I’m certainly not attempting to spread anti-Semitic views and I’ve bookmarked the site for further reading. But that said, Israel may well be, at this moment, committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Certainly the ICJ thinks this is a very real possibility.
I want to make clear that I understand that Israel does not equal the Jewish people and that not all Jewish people agree with the policy of Israel. In no way should blame be directed at Jewish people as a collective whole.
But at the end of this, it may well be that Israel on that Wikipedia page, noted as a state that carried out genocide along with many others over the course of history. And the US should be listed along with it.
I would also add this link to another page on Wikipedia that deals specifically with the genocide of Indigenous peoples.
Linked: Climate Emergency
Israel Has Killed Nearly 900 Palestinians Since ICJ Order to Prevent Acts of Genocide…
In the week since the International Court of Justice ruled that the Israeli government is plausibly committing genocide and ordered it to prevent potential further acts of genocide, Israeli forces have only continued committing atrocities against Palestinians.
Buoyed by the staying support of American officials, Israeli forces have killed at least 874 Palestinians and injured at least 1,490 in Gaza since last week’s ICJ ruling…
Ex-UNRWA Official: Funding Cuts Make Donor Countries Complicit in Starvation of Gaza - YouTube
As Israel’s assault on Gaza has displaced the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, more than half are sheltering in facilities run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Despite being the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza, UNRWA says it may run out of funds by the end of the month, after at least 18 states or institutions, including many of the agency’s biggest funders, announced they were suspending their donations in January. The cuts came after the Israeli government accused several UNRWA employees of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7. Israel made the allegations in a document it provided to foreign governments which apparently contained no direct evidence of the claims. “As of now, the evidence simply does not exist” outside of this “dodgy Israeli dossier,” says Chris Gunness, former chief spokesperson for UNRWA. He slams donors who have pulled their funding as “doing Israel’s political bidding” in its “scheme to dismantle UNRWA” and further dispossess Palestinians in Gaza.
Sam and Emma speak with Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, to discuss his recent book Good Jew Bad Jew: Racism, anti-Semitism and the assault on meaning. Steven Friedman then joins, parsing through the birth of his recent work from the severe backlash to anti-Zionist and anti-racist Jews as “self-hating,” alongside a severe perversion of the concept of anti-Semitism from the hatred of Jews as a people, to a narrow opposition to the apartheid state of Israel, also touching on the growing union between the state of Israel and the biggest celebrity symbols of anti-Semitism. Stepping back, Friedman explores the evolution of Zionism in relation to a largely Europe-based Jewry, with OG Zionists like Theodor Herzl and A.D. Gordon seeing the exclusion of the Jewish people from the European elite as a cultural failing of their people – one that can be solved via the establishment of a Zionist state and thus a Zionist elite.
‘Overshadow Gaza crimes’: World reacts to US attacks on Iraq and Syria | Al Jazeera
The United States has conducted a wave of air strikes on Iran-aligned targets in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for an attack that killed American soldiers in Jordan.
On Saturday, Iraq said 16 people, including civilians, were killed on its soil, and a monitoring group reported 18 people were killed in Syria. … Here is how the world reacted to the US action:
Iran
“The attacks are a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria, international law, and a clear violation of the United Nations Charter,” said Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Nasser Kanaani.
Iraq
“This aggressive strike will put security in Iraq and the region on the brink of the abyss,” the Iraqi government said in a statement, and denied Washington’s claims of coordinating the air raids with Baghdad as “false” and “aimed at misleading international public opinion”.
Syria
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the strikes served to “inflame the conflict in the Middle East in an extremely dangerous way” and added to Washington’s “record of violations against Syria’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the safety of its people, proving once again that it is the main source of global instability”.
“U.S. officials regularly — and often rightly — condemn the actions of other warring parties in other places like Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Sudan,” Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “But on Gaza, U.S. officials are avoiding passing judgment on Israel’s conduct.”
“Complicit” in Israeli Atrocities
On a near-daily basis, a State Department spokesperson takes questions from the media and is routinely pressed about the latest atrocity alleged to have been committed by Israeli forces, whether it’s gunfire aimed at civilians in a church; the bombing of hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, or residential buildings; or the cutting off of food, fuel, and medicine. Generally, the questions refer to either video evidence or on-record statements from Israeli government ministers.
The State Department consistently declines to cast judgment, often saying that the views or actions of some elements of the security forces or some ministers don’t represent the official Israeli position.