Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

WiFi connects me to the Internet; it even allows me to watch TV. Bluetooth lets me – or used to let me – connect my phone to my ears from 20 feet away.

So why am I still tied down by so many wires?

Like many frequent travelers, I carry so many bundles of wires to connect my electronic devices that I feel like Gulliver overwhelmed by the infernal Lilliputians. Let me show you what I mean.

I mean, it’s 2015. Weren’t we supposed to be living in a wireless future by now?

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between hype and reality is the AC power adapter for my MacBook Pro “laptop.”At over eight pounds, it’s a lie to even call it that. But never mind. The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is rightly revered for his love of industrial design.

But that Macpro AC power adapter, which pundits often point to as an example of his supremely evolved attention to detail, is definitely not Apple at its best.  First and foremost, you have to wrap that sucker very carefully, or it will tend to bend at the exit point from the box. Look at the photo I shot below. You can see the loop sticking out to the right. And this is a replacement, for which I spent $79. So I’m really careful with it.

But really, this thing weighs 1.5 pounds — it weighs nearly as much as a 12-inch MacBook air! But there’s no choice. I must lug it around everywhere. This is the first thing to go in the carry-on:

And I’ll need an extension cord. Plugs are rarely close enough to the desk or the bed where you want to use your computer. This is always when you need an extension cord. Another must. This is another thing to pack:

And I need the standalone mouse. This, for me, isn’t optional. Track pads wear out and they’re clumsy. If you must use Photoshop on the road, as I do, this guy is indispensable. And its connector, of course:

And headphones. That’s a must. Gotta have headphones to listen to music or watch a video on the plane. 

What about Bluetooth? Nah. Tried that. I used to have one of those dorky Bluetooth units. It was too fragile. Couldn’t take the road. I had to replae this thing twice after it fell apart. Also, the dorky Bluetooth unit had to have its own docking port, which also needs to be charged by itself. Another item to pack. No, thank you.

I have tried the Jaybird Bluetooth earphones, but the most irritating thing in the world has got to be the wire that connects the two earpieces. It pulls on the back of your head, and it’s either long enough to pull your hair or short enough to pull out of your ears. Bluetooth headphones are another imperfect solution.

And so $20 headphones are still the way to go. If these break, I won’t cry too hard.

And then there’s the WiFi equipment. This part is sad. Like other tech companies, Apple seems to assume that everyone lives in San Francisco or Portland, where free wireless Internet access is easy to come by. But in the real world, Wi-Fi can be exorbitant – up to $40 on an airplane or $20 a day at a hotel. Or, worse, it is simply nonexistent. This is why most seasoned travelers rely on a Mi-Fi device that pulls 4G or LTE service from the sky. (I use a Verizon model).

It’s true that upload and download speeds are as slow as molasses with this unit, but it’s a miracle to be able to get online in places where no one else can. Alas, the Mifi requires another wire for a device that, yes, must be charged. So this goes into the bag:

As a cartoonist, I used to hunt down FedEx Office outposts in the cities I visited in search of graphic design computer stations where I could scan my cartoons and work on them in Photoshop. In the age of the portable digital scanner, thank God, instead you can spend just over $100 for a device that will break even after avoiding three visits to FedEx.

On this, I have good news and bad news. The good news: There’s no need to charge them! But the bad news is: They are not wireless. As you can see below, that adds up to another wire to pack.

Note: the outlet for the portable scanner that I use is similar to an almost the same size as the one that I use for the MiFi – but not quite. So I don’t get to cheat by leaving one wire at home.

And there’s the phone charger. Because I’m lucky if my iPhone can make it one entire day without running out of power, I’m always carrying its charger: 

Last, but not least, and probably not even last – who knows what additional wires I’m going to need in the future? – there’s the extra battery pack I carry. I’ve lost power in bad situations, like during power outages and at airports while dealing with canceled flights, and I’ve lost power often enough to know that I might need to charge my iPhone without access to an outlet. So I always have to carry and keep charged, my Mophie battery pack.

Yes, you heard that right. The backup battery pack has to be charged, too. It comes with its own … you know:

Induction charging pads are interesting for home use, but they do nothing for people like me who spend a lot of time on the road. Besides, Apple still isn’t playing — it’s only for Android. Even the charging station for the Apple Watch plugs into the wall.

As a former engineering school dropout, I humbly request my former colleagues now working at various tech companies to please turn their attention to the massive lump of constantly breaking, repeatedly tangling wires clogging up my luggage.

Never mind flying cars.

And for sure I can live without driverless cars like the Google Car, for sure.

But I would give up an organ to get rid of half the wires I carry.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Jack Dorsey, the corporate hipster who is now running Square, looks like he is likely the next CEO of Twitter. As such he will be first major head of an American corporation to wear a serious Nebuchadnezzar beard.

The beard even has its own parody account, @dorseysbeard.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Brian Williams was earning $10 million a year as an anchor for NBC News, where his primary responsibility was mainly reading the news off a prompter. He lost this fat job six months ago, when he was suspended for lying about what happened to him as an embedded war reporter in Iraq. Now Williams is back. He has been demoted, in the network’s eyes certainly, because he returns not as an anchor at NBC but as a reporter on MSNBC. But in reality, he’s in more of a journalistic role. At MSNBC he’ll actually be reporting and interpreting news.

Two questions: Will anyone notice? And will anyone believe anything he reports now?

One thing is certain. Brian Williams and his “misremembered” false memory about being shot down during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq speaks volumes about all of us.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Drone operators are burning out, so the Air Force is cutting back on attacks even as Pentagon and CIA officials demand more strikes against the people of Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Armed surveillance drones will only fly 60 times a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it responds to the attrition of crew members. More drone pilots are worn down by the work than they can train.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Baby Boomers, Generation Xers like me want you to retire. Millennials will really need you to retire.

But in a recent survey, boomers overwhelmingly said no dice. They feel too healthy or worry they are too financially insecure to retire at the traditional age of 65.

Won’t you please retire anyway, Boomers? Make some room, for once …

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Online dating is a lonely, disgusting holdout. It is the last bastion of brazen, unfiltered racism in America.

From OKCupid to Yahoo! Personals to Match, digital romance sites and apps do something that’s become socially unacceptable everywhere else, except for maybe a Klavern meeting: Discriminate against other people because of their race. It’s as easy as point-and-click. You don’t like African-Americans? Filter them out of your searches. Poof! No more blacks!

This, in the world of Internet dating, is considered perfectly adorable behavior. Online dating racism runs rampant.

The dating section of Craigslist doesn’t allow filtering. Nevertheless, the racists run wild there, too. “No African-Americans,” people write in their posts, as though MLK and Rosa Parks and Malcolm X had never lived, and civil rights never moved.

Craigslisters can flag posts to be removed but, judging from the fact that many of these posts are weeks old, few do. It is just one of those “no offense, just my preference” — they say that! — kinda things.

Oh, I can hear you coming. Dating sites are just serving their customers! Giving the people what they want!

To which I would ask you: Where else are racists allowed to freely express their rancid 19^th-century excuses for opinions?

Not at work, that’s for sure. Public opinion, not to mention a raft of Very Serious Federal Laws, require the boss who just doesn’t like blacks, no offense, just his preference, to not only shut the fuck up, but not give the slightest hint of prejudice.

If you don’t want blacks to move into your neighborhood or apartment building, again, you are more than welcome to keep those thoughts to yourself because (a) it’s illegal to discriminate in housing and (b) everyone would hate you.

Nor in what the law defines as “public accommodation.” Run a bar or restaurant? Welcome all comers or get sued out of business. Work at a fancy boutique on Madison Avenue? Better buzz in that black guy in the hoodie just as fast as you do the white dude in the suit, or you’ll have the city’s newspapers, Al Sharpton and a couple of government agencies way up your ass.

This is all as it should be. You are entitled to be racist. You are not entitled to express your racism in a way that hurts its victims.

What’s that you say — that just because you’re not attracted to members of a race, doesn’t make you racist? Actually, it does. By definition. If you don’t see people of different races as sexual equals, if you think they’re ugly — no offense, just my preference — if the thought of rolling around naked licking the skin of a generic member of Race A is more distasteful than doing the same exact thing with a generic member of Race B, then yeah, you’re racist like Bull Connor and Donald Sterling and David Duke.

There’s no controversy about this in the scientific community. One way sociologists measure racism is to examine the prevalence of interracial dating and marriage in a society. For example, Japan is famously homogenous, has a low rate of what they used to call “miscegenation,” and has a big problem with racial discrimination.

Though there have been increases in interracial marriage rates in the United States in recent years, there is a higher rate of marriages between whites and Asians than between whites and blacks, which reflects the fact that Asians have been more successfully integrated into “mainstream” white-dominant culture than blacks.

The result? Asian-Americans are less likely than blacks to get shot by cops, to be turned down for a job because of their race, to get a long prison sentence for a crime, or to be poor. In fact, Asian-white couples earn more than Asian-Asian or white-white couples.

Dating racism reflects societal racism. On OKCupid, for example, African-American women — a low-status, low-income demographic that disproportionately suffers discrimination — receive by far the lowest number of responses when they contact men of other races, even though they send the highest number of messages.

I assume that companies are catering to racist online daters because no one has ever brought this up before and that, once they realize that they’re enabling some of the most-hurtful and disgusting discrimination around, a variety of bigotry that literally says “you are so gross, I could never love you” to millions of people, they’ll take the 10 or 15 minutes necessary to delete those racial filters — and flag those offensive posts.

Well, there. I’ve brought it up.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Want to know when political correctness crosses the line from noble social justice war to unfair censorship? When someone gets fired for saying something unrelated to their job.

That is clearly the case with Tim Hunt, a 72-year-old Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who was forced to resign from his post as an honorary professor at University College London after he brainfarted some sexist comments at a scientific conference in South Korea.

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Hunt said.

“Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

Social media went crazy, and that’s fine: a Two Minutes Hate is exactly what Twitter is for.

And, to be charitable, what Hunt said was stupid. You don’t have to fall in love with your female colleagues. It is, or it should be possible, to note silently and with a pokerface said colleague’s hotness, and then get back to work. But, really. Can’t we open our minds a little?

What Tim Hunt said isn’t that terrible: After all, people do hook up at work, and you’d have to be an idiot to argue that women don’t cry more than men. Plus, Tim Hunt is 72. Not old old, but old enough not to know the finer points of political correctness.

In context, Hunt’s words, though archaic, are harmless. And Hunt was an honorary professor. He didn’t run a lab. And he was in no position to hire or fire anyone — specifically, he wasn’t in a position to hire or fire any women.

If free speech means anything, it guarantees the right to mouth off about whatever, without having to worry about having your career trashed — especially when what you mouthed off about isn’t even related to the job you stand to lose.

I feel this stuff personally. After 9/11, when my political cartoons were controversial because they opposed Bush and his wars, I didn’t fault the newspapers, like The Washington Post and New York Times, that dropped me. The editors were cowards, yes, but they had that right.

But when Men’s Health, which didn’t run my political work, got rid of my cartoons about men, sex and relationships, now that pissed me off.

On the other side of the coin from the Tim Hunt case are those of former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and ex-Harvard president Lawrence Summers.

Sterling and Summers’ remarks were far more offensive than Hunt’s comments.

Summers, the ex Harvard honcho, said women don’t have the “intrinsic aptitude” for science and engineering.

And former LA Clippers owner Sterling told his girlfriend that her other (black) boyfriends weren’t welcome at his (supposedly public) games: “You can sleep with (black people). You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want …the little I ask you is … not to bring them to my games.”

Summers was forced down and Sterling was pushed out, and that’s fine. As president of the most prestigious university in the United States, Summers held power over thousands of women faculty, staff and students. How could they work for him, knowing that he thought they were stupid?

And, more importantly, how can Summers, the now-former president of Harvard, be so stupid as to think that women are dumb at math? On the grounds of low intellect alone, he deserved to get canned.

As for Sterling, he owned a professional NBA team. Many professional basketball players are black, as are many of its fans. It would have been an abomination to continue to allow a racist to own a team whose stars included many African-Americans — all of whom would have to wonder if they were being discriminated against by their boss.

This is neither the first time nor the last time we will see this, but it must be said: The sacking of Tim Hunt is something that politically correct Internet “warriors” ought to be ashamed of.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

President Obama is deploying 450 troops, trainers of Iraqi soldiers, back to Iraq. To fight ISIS this time. The media says this sort of half-measure, neither big enough to make a difference but not nothing, either, reflects the wisdom of compromise. Because “both sides” will criticize.

Both sides are right. It’s a stupid move doomed to failure.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Marking the total integration of lesbian and gay soldiers into the U.S. military, the Pentagon has announced that gay and lesbian troops will be covered by the equal opportunity policy that prohibits firing Americans due to their sexual orientation.

Film critic Cole Smithey’s video essay of “Tales of the Grim Sleeper” and Pedro Almodovar’s Classic of Spanish Cinema “Live Flesh.”