it's the latest edition of

The Recommentunde Newsletter

For the week that began 2 February 2020

Me with Rickey Payton, Sr. who helped teach me the power of music and art to change the world. See my Black History Month celebration of him on Instagram.

I won the Iowa caucuses.

Well, that was weird, right. I admit it was kind of fun to watch the tv news people just outwardly berate the people of Iowa from their shiny towers in New York City in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning. They all but called them corn-fed country bumpkins. But here’s the thing: I won the caucuses.

They don’t want you to know, and so they tried to block the results. What you ultimately hear will be the biggest coverup in coverup in US politics since… well since last week when Senate Republicans went on record allowing our future democratic president — which is me — to do all the crimes I want and never be removed from office.

As your new president, let me tell you about testing your app before you launch. What really seems to have happened in Iowa is some genius promised “there’s an app for that” to replace the totally working solution of precinct captains calling in their results. They didn’t adequately test the software, and when they needed it most, it failed. This is the launch of healthcare.gov all over again. This is early Twitter and the fail whale. This is America, where we worship at the altar of business, technology, and so-called “innovation” while outsourcing our most critical infrastructure to anyone with a good PowerPoint deck

The real loser isn’t Iowa or its state Democratic Party or even the app developers. The loser is us. Democracy is a faith-based institution. It requires people to believe in it, like “God” or “the dollar” or “Popeyes.” When we lose that faith, that trust in the legitimacy of the system, the system becomes less legitimate, which gives us more reason to lose trust, which weakens the system, which reduces trust and so on and so forth. It’s a death spiral.

In between the turns of that spiral, bad actors like our president will point to this to prove that “the system is rigged” and a subreddit agitator will rant on YouTube about the deep state and people too busy to know who to trust will opt out which further erodes the legitimacy of the system.

Fun right? Don’t worry. I’m the president now, and in the future, we won’t have elections to worry about. We’ll just ask Alexa for things and bow down to Lord Bezos who will provide everything we could ever desire so long as it isn’t freedom or self-determination. Those are overrated anyway.

And now, for your regularly-scheduled content.

Lots of dark stuff in the world, so I'm starting with a fun video that explains all of Christopher Nolan's movies.

Opinion | Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists - The New York Times

If you attend an evangelical or a Catholic Church, a women’s rights march or a political rally of any kind, especially in a seriously contested state, the odds are that your cellphone ID number, home address, partisan affiliation and the identifying information of the people around you will be provided by geofencing marketers to campaigns, lobbyists and other interest groups.

Why Are Canadian TV Shows So White? Diversity Problem - Refinery29

The past few years have ushered in a “Black renaissance” on American television… In Canada, though, it might as well still be 1998…”

Amazon Engineer: ‘Ring should be shut down immediately and not brought back’ - The Next Web

The deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society. The privacy issues are not fixable with regulation and there is no balance that can be struck. Ring should be shut down immediately and not brought back.

Vanessa Nakate: Ugandan Climate Activist Cropped Out Of AP Photo Featuring Greta Thunberg - Buzzfeed News

“I cried because it was so sad not just that it was racist, I was sad because of the people from Africa. It showed how we are valued. It hurt me a lot.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. on What Really Happened at Obama’s ‘Beer Summit’ - The New York Times

“The fantasy is that my 10th-great-grandmother and -grandfather were out on a picnic and some white people jumped out of the bushes and they ended up on a plantation in Virginia. That’s not how it happened.”

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why - Bloomberg

“…as many as a fifth of new results published in the last year have come in with anomalously high climate sensitivity. There are dozens still left to report, and their results will determine whether these grim forecasts are outliers or significant findings.”

Screen reading can wear on your attention. Here?s how to make it better. - The Washington Post

Basically, you should have printed out this email and read it on paper

TREATS. All video this time.

• I Flew Katie Hopkins to Prague to Win a Fake Award

• Adam Driver’s Chill Monologue - SNL

• It’s John Wick with Lightsabers!!!!

SIGNING OFF

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Peace and Love.