August 7, 2025

Between Tim Cook's Apple and Jeff Bezo's Amazon, using them is a bitter pill to swallow when you see how hard it is to ditch them. By Hal M. Brown


Correction: I previously wrote that Mark Zuckerberg was the CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezo is. I had Zuck on my mind since his Facebook banned me. See story here.

Yesterday, seeing how Apple CEO Tim Cook was sucking up to Trump, I thought about trying to extricate myself from the world of Mac. I’ve had iPhones and Mac laptops for years. I’ve been frustrated with how glitchy my 2016 Mac laptop had become. Just about once a day my laptop freezes with what Mac users call the spinning wheel of death on the screen:

To undo this you have to reboot the laptop and wait for it to reopen. I’ve also been annoyed with how the Apple operating system (OS) Safari is beyond slow when I try to open some web pages. It frequently just stops. When I switch to Firefox the same website opens almost instantly. In fact, for the first time I am composing a Substack from Firefox.

I’d been considering buying a new Macbook when their latest version is released hoping that it would be less gltichy than what I am using currently. I didn’t want to buy one now only to find that their yet to be released version was much better. 

I’m satisfied with my iPhone 15, so I won’t consider upgrading to the iPhone 17 when it is released unless it is very much improved, especially if the camera has major features the 15 doesn’t have.

To make an already long story even longer, I searched online for the best laptop currently available that met my needs. Since I am not a gamer or professional (or power) user it was the Macbook that topped every list. The other runner-up laptop that would meet my needs was made by Microsoft. While most people associate Microsoft with Bill Gates currently it’s CEO is Satya Nadella. This is what my web search found about him:

Microsoft’s chief is cozying up to Trump.

Satya Nadella and Microsoft president Brad Smith joined Elon Musk, JD Vance, and the US President-elect on Wednesday to discuss cybersecurity, tech policy, and Microsoft’s pledge to invest $80 billion into global AI infrastructure.

Microsoft is among the list of tech companies and leaders that have each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, with many making similar appearances at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

By now you are getting the drift of what I am trying to say so I doubt I have to go into being stuck with Bezo’s Amazon. Bezos is another pal of Trump:

Between using Amazon to order at least one item a week, often to save a trip to an actual store, but frequently to buy something which would be almost impossible to buy anywhere else, and watching many shows on Amazon’s streaming video service, I can’t see a way to extricate myself from the company.

The third cyber-billionaire in thrall to Trump is, of course, Elon Musk. It has been easy to avoid his internet plaything, X, by using BlueSky (here).

I won’t go into the technicalities which would be involved in changing from using a Mac laptop to a Microsoft or other laptop, or from an iPhone to an equally good Android cellphone. Suffice to say it wouldn’t easy for me, and there would be lots of things I’d have to learn to do differently. In addtion from what I can tell my ability to send text messages the way I do now, and have my photos in the Cloud would be lost.

On the plus side there was an easy way to free myself from Google whose CEO, Sundar Pichai, is another Trump suckup (see article). I use DuckDuckGo (here) for internet searches. If you aren’t already doing this I suggest you do. They also have a browser which I’ve downloaded, but so far haven’t tried it. I am using Firefox as my alternative to Safari.

What this all boils down to is my swallowing the bitter pills of still using Apple products and Amazon services. 

What can I say? I even ordered a small table -from Amazon - to go next to my front door for them to put our orders on.

Afterthought:

When I was a child, I used to listen to the radio show “Let’s Pretend.” It ran from 1934 to 1954. I was 10 when it went off the air. I thought of this when it occurred to me that the billionaire are starring in another kind of show which could be called “Let’s Pretend Trump Is Not Another Hitler.”

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You’ve probably heard about the Operation Trojan Horse story out of LA.

When I heard about the name ICE used for this operation, the first thing I thought was “these thugs don’t even know their Greek mythology.” The story of the Trojan Horse should be well known to even the most ignorant dolt. Should be, but obviously the people at ICE proved how stupid they are.

In their war against the Trojans the Greeks didn’t pull their horse with the soldiers hidden inside into the walled city f Troy. They pretended to leave and left it outside the gates. The Trojans thought that they had won the war and pulled it inside as a victory trophy. Wikpedia tells us what happened next: “That night, the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under the cover of darkness. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city, ending the war.”

Trump using ICE as his personal Gestapo shows how we are becoming a police state, which I wrote about the other day here

Now we have this story, “FBI granted request to locate fleeing Texas House Democrats, Sen. Cornyn says.” If it happens that FBI agents arrest and transports Texas legislators to the Texas House, possibly in handcuffs, we have what may be the final proof that Trump has implemented a police state.

There are those who think our being a police state is a good thing. They believe that as long as the police are doing God’s work, which is for them the same thing as Trump’s work, we need to have a police state. One of these people is an actor named Dean Cain. 

He played Superman in the 1990s series "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." 

Read above article.

The 59 year old has joined ICE. While he may not be in the field arresting immigrants (no doubt seen by him as evil doers), he has already made a recruitment ad to tout the "great benefits" of working for ICE. See story here.

August 6, 2025

Who at NBC decided to use this apropos photo of Trump to illustrate the article about the DC attack on Big Balls? By Hal M. Brown

 The best place to read these posts are here on Substack.

Who at NBC decided to use this photo of Trump among the thousands they could have chosen to illustrate the article about the Musk staffer nicknamed “Big Balls” and his being assaulted in DC (click to read)

I saw this when just after I got up I checked my email and clicked the most recent emailfrom Yahoo about Trump threatening federal control of D.C.

I read the article and thought it was yet another example of Trump being Trump, but wasn’t sure I wanted to do more than make a brief reference to it on BlueSky using a screenshot. Then I decided to look at the actual NBC article which looked like this:

This is not a big story, certainly not when compared to everything else going on as Trump moves closer and closer to becoming the Al Capone of his much larger and more powerful criminal enteprise. You remember this?

In the photo above Trump actually looks far more dangerous than Capone. 

In the photo NBC News used Trump doesn’t look particually dangerous. However, the second time I looked at it I realized it deserved a speech bubble.

As for taking personal control of D.C., aside from another having another personal power grab, he might entertain thoughts of having several blocks of buildings condemned and ripped down. There is ample room to do this:

Read: Empty Eyesores: Dozens of Blighted Homes Sit for Decade or More.

He could then be the first former president to have their personal library built in the nation’s capital. 

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I posted this on BlueSky:

This relates to Trump’s plan for DC:

Trump is sending a dark signal with his White House expansion

Donald Trump's "White House Ballroom" is unlikely to be finished anytime soon. So who is it for?

August 5, 2025

If the GOP or MAGA are having problems, does it even matter in the long run if Trump is planning to implement a police state? By Hal M. Brown

 .




The first two articles on RawStory at 6 this morning (Pacific time) were 'This is an earthquake': Strategist warns town hall furor signals midterm disaster for GOP and 'Back-of-the-napkin stuff': GOP senators feel double-crossed by deal cut by Trump. 

Just down their page, half the articles have either GOP or MAGA in the titles, and all of them are about difficulties Republicans, including Trump and Kristi Noem, are having.

Here are the main stories on HuffPost this morning:

The featured story is “How Trump Caved And Went Home With 'Nothing' In Talks With Chuck Schumer.” It is about how “The dramatic collapse in talks over the weekend doesn't bode well for the tougher job lawmakers are facing of funding the government next month.”

Does any of this matter? 

What if Trump’s move to make ICE into a small army targeting immigrants is just a trial run to see how much he can get away with?

It is an understandment to observe how often we are subjected to seeing pictures of federal agents and sometimes local law enforcement armed like they are about to raid a drug kingpin’s lair on our streets.

By now many Americans, especially those who haven’t seen this happening in person, have become complacent about this. They are so inured to seeing the images that they don’t feel any empathy for the people being terrorized or pang of horror that America has taken the first step to becoming a police state. 

Excerpt:

police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systemsas well.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

If the ICE actions were the first step, we may be seeing the beginning of the second step with the DOJ investigating Barack Obama and Jack Smith. While we haven’t seen Pam Bondi posing with a gun, another player in this dystopian drama, Kristi Noem, has been on numerous occasions:

Noem isn’t as intimidating looking as the ICE agents, but Trump would like nothing better than to see Obama, Smith, and his other enemies arrested by federal agents, who while not in SWAT gear, will be carrying guns too. 

I think he dreams, perhaps literally, of seeing Obama in prison. In between other actual dreams that arouse him (I’ll leave what they are about to your imagination), I wouldn't be surprised if he’s had actual dreams about Obama being in the notorious CECOT prison.

Putting the current news about Trump’s difficulties, and about what is going on the the Republican Party and MAGA in perspective, what does it all matter if Trump has implemented a police state before the next election? He could render Congress irrelevant, so who controlled the House, or even the Senate as well, wouldn’t matter.

The same would apply to the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court. When you have armed soldiers doing your dirty work, whether they are part of the actual military or not, traditional civil authority has evaporated and you have a police state.

The only thing that can stop a police state once it is entrenched is for another more powerful force to resist and destroy it.

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Very much related to this is Thom Hartmann’s Substack today:

Excerpts:

This is now the Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis. 
— Declare an “emergency.” 
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant. 
— Bypass Congress. 
— Bully or ignore the courts. 
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents. 
— Send people to foreign concentration camps. 
— Build concentration camps within the United States. 
— Prosecute lawyers and judges. 
— Assert control over universities. 
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes. 
— Then call it all “law and order.”

This sums up what both Thom and I are trying to say although Thom seems more optimistic that American’s are becoming aware of what is going on:

Increasingly, Americans are realizing that Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump are all reading from the same authoritarian script that Hitler first authored, and if we don’t recognize the pattern soon, we may find ourselves locked in Act III with no exit.

Kristi Noem’s DHS made a stunning ‘confession’ with new Bible-quoting ads: column, RawStory

My comment: This quote, inaccurately attributed to Sinclair Lewis ( see Snopes) from his prescient novel "It Can't Happen Here" certainly applies to this article:

.

Between Tim Cook's Apple and Jeff Bezo's Amazon, using them is a bitter pill to swallow when you see how hard it is to ditch them. By Hal M. Brown

Correction: I previously wrote that Mark Zuckerberg was the CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezo is. I had Zuck on my mind since his Facebook banned me....