Headlines

Workers file 1.5m unemployment claims, as infections spike

Supreme Court rules against Trump’s bid to end program to shield ‘Dreamer’ immigrants

President Trump responds to ‘dope’ John Bolton’s allegations

Corporate America floods social justice causes with cash amid protests

New U.S. broadcasting chief fires agency heads

Apple CEO Tim Cook praises Supreme Court’s decision on dreamers

Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation says they were not consulted before DA filed murder charges against officer

... Atlanta cops walk out in protest ...

Poland’s Duda gets White House invitation

Coronavirus updates: Staggering jobless claims persist, global deaths near 450,000

30% of households missed their June housing payments

Farage: BLM wants to destroy the West

Polishing the Apple

Apple is featuring a huge Mac Pro manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas where its CEO, Tim Cook, visited yesterday with President Trump. This move conforms with Trump’s pledge to emphasize domestic manufacturing over offshore venues. We also know that Apple has gotten tariff relief from Trump for its China-manufactured iPhones ... but will also bring some of its manufacturing of this product to Mesa, Arizona.

Is this all quid pro quo? Very likely. And will this help Trump’s re-election chances? Most certainly, since this is a fulfilling of his campaign promise to expand domestic manufacturing and return the US to robust economic expansion.

The question then presents itself ... will Rep. Adam Schiff hold more impeachment inquiry hearings on this bit of Trump’s political self-dealing? I think we all know this answer.

Headlines

Schiff accuses Trump of ‘witness intimidation’ for twitter attack on Yovanovich

Dow jumps more than 200 points to 28,000, posts 4-week winning streak

Roger Stone guilty on all 7 counts in federal trial ...

Dems build case for making diplomats sad?

Trump fires back at claims he’s intimidating witnesses, ‘I have the right to speak’

Trump, Apple CEO Tim Cook set to tour computer plant in Texas Wednesday

Brennan warns Trump: ‘May your downfall be swift’ ...

Marie Yovanovich compares herself to diplomats killed in Benghazi

Twitter rolls out total ban on ads from political figures

Fed cautious about debt, liquidity issues, but says system is stable otherwise

Kissinger warns of ‘catastrophic’ conflicts between China, U.S. ...

U.S. industrial production slumped again in October

Headlines

Omar, Tlaib denounce Israel over travel restrictions

Alarm in Texas as 23 towns hit by ‘coordinated’ ransomware attack

Pentagon conducts 1st test of previously banned missile ...

Tim Cook warns Donald Trump that China tariffs could hurt Apple

Twitter, Facebook suspend China-linked disinformation campaigns targeting Hong Kong

Powell gets a chance this week to make up for his ‘mid-cycle adjustment’ [comment]

White House mulls payroll tax cut ... Effort to revive economy

Michael Savage slams media silence over [his] UK travel ban after Tlaib uproar

Democrat leaders assail Trump’s apparent reversal on background checks

More than 1,000 Google employees implore leaders to stop working with US Customs and Immigration

Attorneys General of 12 states to move forward with antitrust probe of big tech ...

Barr removes Federal Prisons chief in wake of Epstein’s death

Headlines

Eric Swalwell ends c White House bid, citing low fundraising, polling

Apartment rental demand soars as more millennials believe it’s cheaper than owning a home

Swamp floods chaos hits Capital, White House flooding

Food stamp population lowest in 10 years

Trump says administration ‘will no longer deal with’ British ambassador

US judge halts Trump administration’s rule requiring drug prices in TV ads

Record 60 million Hispanics in USA, 52% of population growth ...

Poll: Trump hits 50% approval rating after Independence Day

Minimum wage bill could eliminate 1.3 million jobs, CBO says

When angry, Steve Jobs was highly critical of Tim Cook, says biographer Isaacson

APPLE co-founder Wozniak: ‘Get off FACEBOOK’ ...

Poll: Plurality of likely voters support criminally prosecuting illegal aliens

Headlines

GOP in the dark as president makes the case for emergency declaration

Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I'm very optimistic about US-China trade talks'

LEFT TURN: NYC guarantees free healthcare for all ...

Poll: Plurality agrees with Donald Trump's 'border crisis' description

Supreme Court turns down mysterious Mueller subpoena fight

BP just discovered a billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico

Trump campaign chairman gave polling data to Russian ...

Former Facebook employees compare company to 'cult'

Trump gets reprieve from economic freak out. But will it last?

Chinese middle class is buying up American residential real estate

Another black man dies in home of West Hollywood Dem donor

Obama-appointed Border Patrol chief: Trump right about the wall

Headline

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

5 shot dead at Ft. Lauderdale airport ...

Bomb threat closes key Canada border crossing ...

Report: Obama family building wall around new [DC] home

54 shot in first four days of 2017 in gun-controlled Chicago ...

Report: Obama releasing Gitmo prisoners who have vowed to behead Americans

Obama to Armed Forces: 'Women are at least as strong as men'

House Dems plot inauguration boycott ...

Trump orders all Obama diplomats home on day 1 ...

Former Snapchat employee says books are cooked

Biden to Trump: 'Grow up Donald. Time to be an adult.'

Record 95,102,000 Americans not in labor force ... up 18% since Obama took office

Apple cuts CEO Tim Cook's pay, citing performance ...

Visionaries

Nikola Tesla

It must be in the California water ... the little of which is still around, that is ... but the Golden State seems to breed Golden Boys, such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs ... visionaries who grab technology by the throat and make it bend to their will. Add the Evergreen State's Jeff Bezos to this cadre and you have the Three Musketeers who are changing our lives ... much faster than many of us can cotton to.

Of these three, the one who seems the most outré to me is Musk. Some of his pronouncements sound a lot like those kooks who used to be pushing cold fusion ... only he delivers often enough to keep us skeptics from saying "ah ha" ! (Example ... recently landing his returning spent SpaceX rocket on a barge.) And Musk just predicted to an enthralled audience that humans would start populating Mars in nine years (shades of JFK) ... see: CNN Article. A little nutty, no? But this guru has been saying and doing nutty things for a number of years now and ... delivering! This keeps us skeptics back on our heels.

Will Musk's auto company, Tesla, manufacture one million electric cars by 2019? Many skeptics, like myself, believe that this is a pipe dream ... particularly if our federal government doesn't keep the subsidy tax rebate tap wide open. And, I suspect that, if the Republicans win the presidency in November, some fiscal sanity might interject itself into this "evil carbon" debate ... after all, as a few sane heads recognize, it is burning carbon that produces most of the electricity that recharges Tesla's sexy status-provoking cars.

Of the other two visionaries, Jobs and Bezos, I think Bezos might have the largest long-term effect on our lives ... if, of course he can keep getting the financial markets to supply the funds to keep his Amazon enterprise going ... and he avoids having a cage match with Trump were he to become president. If Steve Jobs were still alive, I think that he might have used Apple's huge cash reserves to pull another rabbit out of his hat ... something that I doubt that the current CEO, Tim Cook, will be able to do.

More on Apple vs. the FBI

Just heard James Comey, the Director of the FBI, testifying in front of Congress regarding the contretemps between Apple and the FBI about opening up the IPhone of the San Bernardino terrorist ... hoping to find more about possible further plans or accomplices. The interesting aspect of this testimony was that the FBI was not just asking for the simple solution of providing it with the access code (which I previously suggested that they do) but the FBI wanted Apple to disable two functions in this particular IPhone:

- the function that erases everything in memory after ten tries at entering the access code, and
- the function that requires a few second pause between each attempt at entering this access code (thwarting super-computer attempts to try every possible combination)

Now, to me, this request is an around-the-barn way of getting into this particular IPhone vs. my previous recommendation and suggests that the FBI has its eye on bigger fish to fry in the future ... and is probably why Apple is pushing back.

However, Apple's Tim Cook's riposte that all security mechanisms would be futile in the future if Apple relented in this instance is also a little disingenuous. Why not just offer to provide the access code in this instance in the manner I had suggested? And then see what happens.

Apple vs. the FBI

Apple's dilettante CEO, Tim Cook, to me, is grandstanding about not giving the FBI access to the terrorist Syed Farook's IPhone ... see: ABC News Story. Already the FBI has a court order and, the way I read it, it doesn't want to compromise Apple's security mechanism on this or any other of its devices. This is not magic. I have a little experience in this area. Apple knows exactly how and where the access code is stored in this IPhone's memory ... which is the property of San Bernardino County anyway. All Apple would have to do is to recover this access code ... without revealing its process ... and provide it to San Bernardino County which then would provide it to the FBI.

Problem solved ... and, possibly, a few more terrorists might be caught ... and Tim Cook would have grown a few inches taller in the eyes of the American public. And in the future, this court-order process might be repeated whenever there is a sufficient and compelling need for such access into IPhones. I'm sure that the government might even be willing to pay Apple for their efforts.

Yes, I also realize that Apple might not sell quite as many IPhones to criminals and terrorists ... small price to pay.

Afterward: See how Apple treats digital privacy issues in China: Breitbart Article.

Apple Butter

After much travail, my son just upgraded the operating system on our Apple IPad ... and I think I might understand why Apple's stock price has been going nowhere of late. The old IPad user interface, to me, had a few problems ... but the new one is even worse. I do believe that Steve Job's defining strength at Apple was his obsession for an intuitive user experience. And I don't think that the new CEO, Tim Cook, has this same neurosis ... and this may point to a declining future for this great technical enterprise.

If users of this new IPad operating system yell AAARG! too often ... like I have ... it suggests that there is not someone corralling the system developers from making their own silly decisions as to what the user really needs or wants. This apparent loss of mojo at the company located on Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California will gradually erode its dominant position in its many marketplaces. Even the Apple Watch's tepid roll out reinforces this unfortunate trend.

What was once a crisp ripe Apple is slowly becoming apple butter.

Conscription

If I am invited to a gay wedding and choose not to go for whatever reason, should our government force me to attend else I would be accused of homophobic intolerance? David Brooks has an op-ed that deals with the issue of the trade-offs between religious liberty and equality ... all in the light of Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act that has created a firestorm of religious intolerance ... this time spewing from those who normally require tolerance in others ... see: New York Times Op Ed. Like most of Brooksie's writings, this op-ed skates back and forth between the liberal and conservative takes on this religious-freedom controversy, but I think he is really saying that the ham-fisted backlash against Governor Mike Pence of Indiana is overdone. I agree.

"No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" ... this is a frequent sign found at beach-side establishments. It seems to me that business' have certain rational prerogatives when it comes to what are acceptable for employees and customers. Yet these prerogatives have been proscribed so that certain groups are protected from arbitrary discrimination. Besotted drunks can be denied service at a bar, but cross-dressers cannot. Yet women can be forced to sit in the balcony of an Orthodox Jewish temple. Why? Because of the Constitutional notion of religious freedom. The rub obviously comes when such religious freedoms bump up against the latest fashion in protected behavior.

I can understand bakers being forced to cater gay weddings if they are the only game in town. But it seems a little conscripting to force them to violate their religious principles if there are multiple other willing options. Will President and Michelle Obama accede quietly to their girls entering into same-sex relationships? Can cross-dressers claim that no shoes and no shirts are part of their protected costumes? Will Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Computer, ever allow fundamentalists Christians to bring poisonous snakes to work as religious idols? Will a same sex marriage ever take place in a mosque?

This issue is far more complicated than our media is now allowing ...

Afterward: George Will has a nice turn of phrase when he labels those ranting about this new Indiana law (Apple's Tim Cook) as having "selective indignation" ... see: Daily Caller Story. And it also occurred to me that such phobics as Cook also are very quick off the blocks whilst people like Pence are a little more cerebral ... and often unprepared for such media sucker punches.

After Afterward: I had a analogous thought today ... how is the government forcing a fundamentalist Christian to cater a gay wedding any different from forcing a conscientious objector to serve in the front lines of the military? (Hint, also substitute fundamentalist Muslim for fundamentalist Christian and see if your answer is the same ... see: Louder with Crowder Video.