The story of the coronavirus in this state is one of government inaction in the name of freedom and personal responsibility. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has followed President Donald Trump’s lead in downplaying the virus’s seriousness. She never imposed a full stay-at-home order for the state and allowed bars and restaurants to open much earlier than in other places. She imposed a mask mandate for the first time this month—one that health-care professionals consider comically ineffectual—and has questioned the science behind wearing masks at all. Through the month of November, Iowa vacillated between 1,700 and 5,500 cases every day. This week, the state’s test-positivity rate reached 50 percent. Iowa is what happens when a government does basically nothing to stop the spread of a deadly virus.

[..]

[Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds] did not require Iowans to wear a mask in public, ignoring requests from local public-health officials and the White House Coronavirus Task Force and arguing that the state shouldn’t make that choice for its people. “The more information that we give them, then personally they can make the decision to wear a mask or not,” Reynolds said in June. She also wouldn’t require face coverings in public schools, where she ordered that students spend at least 50 percent of their instructional time in classrooms. When Iowa City and other towns began to issue their own mask requirements, Reynolds countered that they were not enforceable, undermining their authority.

All we need to do as a society is to achieve 95% mask usage and the pandemic would be controlled and life can began to return to normal. This is isn’t wishful thinking. Just look to South Korea as an example. South Korea has a total of 35,703 cases with 529 deaths as of this writing - the United States has 13,999,385 cases with 273,518 deaths.

Wear a damn mask.

Apple is about to disrupt the microprocessor industry. The M1 chip is as industry shaking as the iPhone.

John Grubber at Daring Fireball sums it up perfectly:

M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs — all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux. Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Well, that just doesn’t happen, your instincts tell you. One company, even a company like Apple, doesn’t just embarrass the entire rest of a highly-competitive longstanding industry. But just because something hasn’t happened — or hasn’t happened in a very long while — doesn’t mean it can’t happen. And in this case, it just happened.

[...]

For the industry as a whole, though, the M1 Macs have dropped as a bit of a shock. One reason for this, I think, is that Apple’s silicon prowess in iOS devices has been a slow boil. iPhones and iPads are better computers — faster and more efficient — than their Android competitors. But it’s been an annual incremental game. And it’s hard to tell what’s attributable to iOS’s software efficiency vs. Android and what’s attributable to Apple’s silicon prowess vs. Qualcomm and Samsung and whoever else is making chips for Android devices.

M1 Macs completely upend what we can and should expect from PCs. It’s a breakthrough along the lines of the iPhone itself in 2007.

The adage is, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Emphasis on probably — the M1 Macs are an exception. They really are that good.

Intel x86 is the modern Zune. Believe the hype - lest you sound like this guy:

Derek Thompson in The Atlantic

We’re also likely to see a historic increase in testing from all these people returning from their Thanksgiving vacation. On Sunday, the White House coronavirus-task-force coordinator, Deborah Birx, told CBS that everybody who traveled should “assume that you were exposed and you became infected.” That would mean tens of millions of people trying to get tested in the next week or so, leading to a backlog on top of the backlog.

In sum, the next few weeks are going to be a statistical blur at the very moment when families are looking for clarity regarding the winter holidays. As COVID-19 hospitalizations reach an all-time high, we are facing a normal weekend testing delay, exacerbated by a major holiday, complicated by the already rising COVID-19 caseload, and further burdened by the imminent wave of tests that will be demanded by people coming back from their Thanksgiving trip. For that reason, state and local governments, businesses, and families might have to fly blind for a while in the fog of pandemic.

The safe assumption is that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths will all reach new highs before Christmas. The virus is simply everywhere. While the spring wave slammed into the Northeast and the summer surge swept over the South, the latest surge, while concentrated in the Midwest, is truly national. Almost every state has seen an increase in cases since September, and nearly 40 states saw COVID-19 hospitalizations reach record highs in the past three weeks. Right when Americans should have separated themselves from new exposures, millions of them shuffled and reshuffled themselves into new combinations of people. This epidemiological experiment seems destined to produce more deaths, more grieving, more illness, and more exhausted health-care workers, who were already on a “catastrophic path” before 9 million people filed through TSA checkpoints in the past week.

Seriously? What the hell is wrong with people? Buckle up - we are headed for the worst public health catastrophe in US history. Stay home. Hibernate.

Why do they keeping paying respect to Atlas by referring to him as a doctor? He has clearly shown that he has violated a doctor’s primary oath - do no harm. Scott Atlas should have his license revoked. At the very least stop giving him professional respect.

From November 23rd through December 31st, all classes in Nikon School Online can be streamed for free. All you need to do is sign up for an account with your name and email address.

Awarded the prestigious Candido Cannavo Award at the Milan Sport Film Festival 2018.

Built around the 100m men’s final in Rio de Janeiro, ONE SHOT explores the important role sport photographers have in capturing history. ONE SHOT is narrated by Olympic Champion Jonathan Edwards and features many multi-awarded photographers including Lucy Nicholson, Dave Burnett, Bob Martin, Tim de Waele and Japan’s own Tsuyoshi Matsumoto.

It also features 146 images representing some of the best works of another 96 photographers who have covered multiple Olympics going back over 50 years , with famous names such as Tony Duffy, Mike Powell, Heinz Kluetmeier, Franck Fife, Peter Read Miller, Doug Mills, Carl Yarbrough, John G. Zimmerman, Michael Kappeler, Kai Pfaffenbach, Gary Hershorn, Charlie Riedel, Simon Bruty, Jerry Lampen, Al Bello, Chang W. Lee to name but a few.

‘ONE SHOT looks at Olympians caught in time. The history makers of the Games captured in a single iconic moment. A story that has taken a lifetime to create and told in One Shot. One freeze frame.

With its official screening at the The Olympic Museum and then on the Olympic Channel and NBC Sports, in November 2018 ONE SHOT was awarded the prestigious Candido Cannavo Award at the World Final of the Milan Sport Film Festival 2018.

A grand jury issued two indictments ​on Thursday, Nov. 19, against Undersheriff Rick Sung, 48, and Capt. James Jensen, 43, who are accused of requesting bribes for concealed firearms licenses, also known as CCW licenses. Insurance broker Harpreet Chadha, 49, and Apple’s Chief Security Officer Thomas Moyer, 50, are accused of offering bribes to receive the permits, District Attorney Jeff Rosen said during a press conference on Monday morning.

The two-year investigation by the district attorney’s office found that Sung, who was allegedly aided by Jensen in one instance, held up the distribution of CCW licenses and refused to release them until the applicants gave something of value. […]

Sung and Jensen allegedly held up four gun licenses from Apple employees and extracted from Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the sheriff’s office. A donation of 200 iPads worth nearly $70,000 was ended at the last minute after Aug. 2, 2019, when Sung and Moyer learned that the district attorney’s office had issued a search warrant seizing all of the sheriff’s office’s CCW license records.

Can’t understand this obsession with carrying firearms…

Virologist Dr. Ian Mackay has visualized the Swiss cheese Covid-19 defense in a wonderful way (pictured above). Each layer of cheese represents a personal or shared intervention — like mask wearing, limiting your time indoors w/ crowds, proper ventilation, quarantine, vaccines — and the holes are imperfections. Applied together, these imperfect measures work like a filter and can vastly improve chances of success. He even added a “misinformation mouse” chewing through one of the cheese slices to represent how deceptive information can weaken these defenses.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

Max DeNike aggregated the richest families in the United States, by state.

So whats common among all of these? You guessed it - they are all white.

Van Jones on CNN expresses what we are all (at least the 75 million plus Americans that voted for Biden) are feeling today.

Trace back why you like the thing, and learn the thing that made the thing you like, and you'll be five times better every time you do that.

Jordan Klepper on what hopefully is the last Trump rally of the 2020 campaign:

Tony, I need my sheet. I’m gonna give you facts. That fact sheet.

That fact sheet is in my car.

Trump supporter pulling out her cell phone to find those facts.

Okay, jobs added 4 million. Under Biden and Obama negative 2.8 million.

What is your website you are on?

I don’t know.

And what is going to happen if Trump doesn’t win the 2020 election? What are his bat shit crazy supporters going to do?

I will not live under a socialist government. Just look up the three red flags on the Biden campaign poster, there’s three red lines.

yea

Look it up on Google.

Well I think it’s an E

Its supposed to be an E but look at the tree red flags or red banners.

And they mean?

Communism

He snuck communism right there on the flag?

You got it.

you don’t want to be in a place with socialized medicine?

Nope.

So where would you go?

I am gonna look at Costa Rica.

Costa Rica? Which has universal health care?

Yea, I mean, I’m not gonna live under socialist rule. I don’t think Biden is gonna make the four years, and the camelback, forget it.

Camelback? Who’s that?

Kamala.

These people are so ignorant. Whats scary and disturbing is how they all revel in their ignorance. And ignorance would be bad enough - if not for their racism. Here is hoping that this is an anomaly in American political history. Seven More days to go…

We are just over one week till the 2020 election (8 days, 11 hours, and 27 seconds of this writing). Regardless of where you stand on policy or what your political affiliation is, it is time to return to decency and intelligence in the White House. That doesn’t mean that we agree on everything, but it does mean that we can have a constructive, reasoned and intelligent conversation.

And just in case you forgot what that looks like:

So go out and vote. Leave no doubt.

Hard to believe Back to the Future is 35 years old this year.

One of the greatest movies ever made. Easily the best time-travel story. The writing is rock-solid, the double-act of Michael J.Fox & Christopher Lloyd are the heart and soul of this story and the timeless and epic score of Alan Silvestri gives the movie so much heart that makes it feel larger in scale.

This movie has something that modern Hollywood lacks - a soul. Very few movies today have performances that make you want to watch them again. I have lost count of how many times I’ve seen it over the years but I still laugh every time Biff gets “the make like a tree” line wrong and the penultimate Clock Tower scene is a still a pulse-racing experience to this day. Doc Brown is on of my favorite characters of all time.

35 years. Watch it today and its just as charming, funny, nail biting as when I saw it when I was as 12. They just don’t make movies like they used to. Here is a reimagining using 8 fan made animations that Universal strung together to reimagine Back to the Future.

And here is a recent cast re-uniting:

And I am still waiting for my hover board.

William McRaven, in an op-ed for the The Wall Street Journal:

This week I went to the polls in Texas. Truth be told, I am a pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, small-government, strong-defense and a national-anthem-standing conservative. But, I also believe that black lives matter, that the Dreamers deserve a path to citizenship, that diversity and inclusion are essential to our national success, that education is the great equalizer, that climate change is real and that the First Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy. Most important, I believe that America must lead in the world with courage, conviction and a sense of honor and humility.

If we remain indifferent to our role in the world, if we retreat from our obligation to our citizens and our allies and if we fail to choose the right leader, then we will pay the highest price for our neglect and shortsightedness.

I voted for Joe Biden.

Apple has launched Apple Music TV, a free 24-hour curated livestream of popular music videos that will also include “exclusive new music videos and premiers, special curated music video blocks, and live shows and events as well as chart countdowns and guests,” according to the announcement.

You know what would be great? If they bring back the original MTV VJs like Mark Godman and Martha Quinn. Sting said it best:

Somehow “I want my Apple Music TV” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Rebecca Boyle recently asked her followers to share their local Covid-19 signage and their responses are here. My favorites:

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is doing well after his bought with COVID-19 and spending 7 days in the ICU. He was given Eli Lilly anti-body treatment along with Remdesivir. In his own words:

so I received both of those in combination very early on in my illness. The doctors decided that because I am an asthmatic tat they wanted to be very aggressive with the treatment and I am, you know, very fortunate that I have a great hospital right near my home, I have health insurance and I was able to have myself taken care of quickly before the disease got out of control.

While I am glad that Governor Christie is doing well, he received health care that most Americans do not have access to. We have almost 40 million people who don’t have insurance. Most that do, have insurance that would not fully cover the treatment that Governor Christie has received.

And his party is working to remove what little protections that most Americans do have. The privilege on display is repulsive.

I wish you all health and recovery and a long life. But we have to note the tragedy here. It is horrible, and awful, and profound. Sick and in isolation, Mr. President, you have become a symbol of your own failures — failures of recklessness, ignorance, arrogance — the same failures you have been inflicting on the rest of us. Get well and please — for the rest of us who don’t get to go to Walter Reed — get well and get it together.