Florida Bloggers Face First Amendment Challenge →

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment in this country. It does not protect you from being banned from Twitter or moderated on Facebook or even in a Discord. It’s all about the relationship between the individual and the government when it comes to terms of speech. No matter how loud your conspiracy-slinging uncle cries foul, it’s just not the issue he claims it is.

Jon Brodkin over at Ars has a story that much more to the point where the First Amendment lives:

A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican.

If enacted, the proposed law would likely be challenged in court on grounds that it violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. Defending his bill, Brodeur said, “Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn’t paid bloggers?” according to the Florida Politics news website.

Bloggers-as-lobbyists is just a wild argument. No one tell Brodeur that blogging is dead and all the real action is on social media.

That aside, this clearly seems to be an attempt to limit the speech of influential writers in Florida politics, as well as random folks writing on Medium.

Why Vaccine Cards Can’t Fit in a Wallet →

Amanda Mull at The Atlantic:

When you hold one of the vax cards, you can see how people would immediately misunderstand it as something that’s meant to be kept on your person. Although too big for a wallet, they’re also too small to easily keep track of outside a wallet. “It’s absolutely the wrong size,” Alison Buttenheim, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who has studied vaccine documentation, told me. She noted that the cards don’t match the dimensions of any other common vaccine documentation she knows of, including the yellow booklet that the WHO uses for international travelers, which is bigger. As we were talking, Buttenheim briefly misplaced her own folded-over vaccination card; it slid a little too far into one of her wallet’s compartments. (At this point, I should admit that I again lost mine in my apartment for most of a day after getting it out to examine for this article.)

I not only have mine scanned as a PDF in Craft, but I also have a picture of it in Photos, saved as a favorite for quick access.1


  1. Not that it matters in my state at all. 

The Moon Rock in Biden’s Office →

Swapna Krishna:

Every president gets to change the decor of the Oval Office, allowing them to personalize and put their own stamp on the room. I found it fascinating that apparently, President Biden requested the loan of a moon rock from NASA to put on display in the Oval Office.

According to NASA, this moon rock was collected on NASA’s last crewed voyage to the Moon, Apollo 17. This mission launched on December 7, 1972, and was crewed by Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ronald Evans (who remained in the command module orbiting the Moon while the other two astronauts touched down on the surface). The sample was collected in the Taurus-Littrow Valley and is 3.9 billion years old.

So, so cool.

What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say →

John Hendrickson, writing at The Atlantic:

Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like that night in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss. He stutters— if slightly—on several sounds as we sit across from each other in his office. Before addressing the debate specifically, I mention what I’ve just heard. “I want to ask you, as, you know, a … stutterer to, uh, to a … stutterer. When you were … talking a couple minutes ago, it, it seemed to … my ear, my eye … did you have … trouble on s? Or on … m?”

Biden looks down. He pivots to the distant past, telling me that the letter s was hard when he was a kid. “But, you know, I haven’t stuttered in so long that it’s hhhhard for me to remember the specific—” He pauses. “What I do remember is the feeling.”

This is a powerful piece about something a lot of people deal with, including one of my children.

While I didn’t stutter, I spent over a decade in speech therapy as a child, and while my former struggles don’t often show their hand, I’m always thinking about what words or combinations of sounds may give me trouble. It’s exhausting, and I’m not speaking to the entire nation.

Facebook Blocks Trump’s Accounts Until Inauguration, If Not Longer (Updated: Twitter, Too) →

Mark Zuckerberg:

The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.

His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world. We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect — and likely their intent — would be to provoke further violence.
Following the certification of the election results by Congress, the priority for the whole country must now be to ensure that the remaining 13 days and the days after inauguration pass peacefully and in accordance with established democratic norms.

[…]

We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.

A big move from the world’s largest social media company, but it’s pathetic that it took the events of January 6 to make it happen. Facebook and others have seen incredible user engagement and raked in political ad money since Trump first announced he was going to run in June 2015.

2021-01-08 Update: Twitter just permanently suspended the @realDonaldTrump account.**

Wear a Mask for Those Around You →

James R. Downing, president and CEO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, writing at The Daily Memphian:

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year, life across the country and around the world transformed nearly overnight. At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, we moved quickly to protect the health and safety of our employees, families, and the most vulnerable members of our community – our patients.

During the past four months, we have created one of the safest harbors against COVID-19 in the nation. Protection measures include a first-of-its-kind COVID-19 testing program for employees, patients and families; campus zoning; reduced personnel and visitor access; and heightened infection-control procedures. We need your help to ensure that this haven remains as secure as possible.

My request is simple: Please wear a mask whenever you are in public. In doing so, you can help save children fighting cancer and other deadly diseases.

You may think that wearing a mask is about keeping yourself, and to a degree it is, but it’s also to protect those you may come into contact with in public.

It’s pathetic that mask wearing became political, but we live in a pretty messed up time here in the United States. If you think putting a mask one is somehow infringing on your personal freedoms, shame on you. Our current circumstances require us all to make sacrifices for the good of everyone, and this is a pretty small ask.

Trump Campaign Removes Video Featuring NASA Astronauts and Families →

Marcia Smith at Space Policy Online:

The Trump Campaign took down an ad today that included footage from the launch of Crew Dragon on Saturday and touting what it claimed was the President’s role in the program. It included video of the two NASA astronauts, both civil servants, as well as their wives and young children waving goodbye. One of the spouses, a former NASA astronaut, strongly objected to use of the video of her and her son for “political propaganda.”

She goes on:

NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken were aboard and they now are on the International Space Station. Both are married to astronauts. Behnken’s wife, Megan McArthur, is still in the astronaut corps and thus a civil servant like her husband. Hurley’s wife, former astronaut Karen Nyberg, retired from NASA in March.

The Hatch Act prohibits civil servants from taking part in partisan political activities while on duty.

I saw the video when it went up, and I’m glad it’s been taken down.

On Trump’s Internet Censorship Order →

Adi Robertson at The Verge, writing about Trump’s executive order concerning how Twitter, Facebook and others should moderate user content:

The order follows a feud with Twitter after it fact-checked one of Trump’s tweets, but it’s been brewing since at least 2019 when a social media “bias” rule was rumored but never revealed. An unfinished draft of the order leaked on Wednesday, full of nonsensical demands and pointless blustering, with many dismissing the rule as simply illegal.

But the final order released yesterday is significantly different from that draft — and a good deal more troubling. It’s still a tangle of vaguely coherent bad rules, legally baffling demands, and pure posturing. But it’s easier to see the shape of Trump’s goal: a censorship bill that potentially covers almost any part of the web.

Spend some time this weekend looking at this.