An Angel Giving You the Finger, and Other Notes

“Garterbelt, you keep slappin’ my butt around. Answer line: Freaky girl coming your way.”

―TeddyLoin featuring Debra Zeer

You know, some days you just don’t feel like you’re in the groove, so you end up saying, “Here’s a list, read this.”

Right.

Here’s a list. Read this.

• Sally Kohn on “How the GOP Invented Elizabeth Warren”. (The Daily Beast)

• If you ever wondered how long Chris Christie would remain in consideration as a serious GOP presidential contender, Perry Bacon, Jr., explains how “Christie Faces Growing Doubts Within GOP About his 2016 Campaign”. (NBC News)

• Amanda Terkel notes that “Apple Breaks Ties With Anti-Gay Alabama Lobbyist”, which seems almost inevitable, when you think about it. (Huffington Post)

• Shaun King reports on the Lone Star Republic values after “Texas students flash ‘White Power’ signs at rival team, may have defecated on rival team bus”. (Daily Kos)

• Conservative family values advocacy takes another hit “MO’s Country Club Committee Meeting Goes Wrong for Republicans, Get Caught on Camera talking Choice”, and we know that one doesn’t work out quite right as a sentence; deal with it. (Daily Kos)

• And speaking of things that don’t work out quite right, Caitlin Dewey explains why “Pinterest deleted Rand Paul’s sexist and unfunny Hillary Clinton ‘parody'”. (Washington Post)

And now, Anarchy, just because:

Apple (Solar Son Mix)

Tom Randall for Bloomberg Business:

It was a year ago this week that Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook responded to a climate-change heckler at the company’s annual shareholder meeting with an impassioned rebuttal in which he famously told investors who care only about profits to “get out of the stock.”

Now Cook is putting his prodigious sums of money where his mouth is, proclaiming the “biggest, boldest and most ambitious project ever,” an $850 million agreement to buy solar power from First Solar, the biggest U.S. developer of solar farms. The deal will supply enough electricity to power all of Apple’s California stores, offices, headquarters and a data center, Cook said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco.

You know, in case you hadn’t heard.

Carry on.

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Randall, Tom. “What Apple Just Did in Solar Is a Really Big Deal”. Bloomberg Business. 11 February 2015.

A Tweet

Acknowledging that I would not disparage one for making the point, the question remains: Is there any reason we should find this surprising?

The Danger of the Closet

Ah, Russia ....

A memorial to Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs has been dismantled in the Russian city of St Petersburg after the man who succeeded him at the helm of the company, Tim Cook, came out as gay.

The two-metre (more than six-feet) high monument, in the shape of an iPhone, was erected outside a St Petersburg college in January 2013 by a Russian group of companies called ZEFS.

Citing the need to abide by a law combating “gay propaganda”, ZEFS said in a statement on Monday that the memorial had been removed on Friday — the day after Apple CEO Cook had announced he was homosexual.

“In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law,” ZEFS said, noting that the memorial had been “in an area of direct access for young students and scholars”.

“After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values.”

(Golubkova)

Believe it or not, this nonsense actually makes sense if we acknowledge reality. That is to say, it is a real fact that the Russian government believes straight men will somehow become gay and leave their wives if homosexuality isn’t suppressed.

Putin reiterated his concern that Russia must get rid of the-gay, lest the country’s birthrate not rebound sufficiently. Which is to suggest that somehow gay people will steal otherwise heterosexual Russians away from their opposite-sex spouses. And the only people who think that straight men would gladly leave their wives for a gay guy are men who would gladly leave their wives for a gay guy. They’re called bisexuals (or closeted homosexuals).

Welcome to the club, Vlad!

(Aravosis)

And, well, right; this is why Putin’s government is acting like a self-loathing closet case.

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Golubkova, Katya. “Russian memorial to Apple founder dismantled after CEO comes out”. Reuters. 3 November 2014.

Aravosis, John. “Putin wants to ‘cleanse’ Russia of gays, may have just admitted he’s bi”. AmericaBlog. 20 January 2014.