Welcome to onfocus—a weblog by pb where I post recommended links, my photos, and occasional thoughts. Subscribe here if you like RSS.
The New Yorker
Yeah. So, I mean, to me, the experience was about, yes, being a reporter—being a cinematographer in a documentary, and doing my best to make Melania look visually beautiful with the lighting.

One thing reporters try to do is to spotlight ideas or news stories, and what you’re trying to do is spotlight her face and its beauty. I do see a real similarity there.
savage
OPB
In his statement Saturday night, Portland Mayor Wilson called for accountability.

“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame. To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children,” the mayor wrote.
Tear-gassing families with children in Portland.

See also: How to tear gas children
Wired
All of those means of accountability show how powerful visual evidence can be when it’s recorded carefully and ends up in the right hands. “Unquestionably, video has the power to expose the tactics that ICE and authorities are using against people and to challenge the ‘official’ narrative,” Witness’ Zammuto says.
Since it seems like ICE is only ramping up, everyone will eventually be dealing with them in their community. This is some good advice about filming them.
Loopwerk: Home
I think Apple is going downhill on almost every front that matters to me: software quality, user interface design, usability, and accessibility. Their Human Interface Guidelines used to feel close to sacred. They meant something. Instead, we now have Liquid Glass.
Ugh, unfortunately I agree with this assessment and I'm also trapped in the Apple ecosystem. There isn't an easy exit, especially on the phone front.
YouTube (Technology Connections)
Some essential viewing about the current state of solar energy along with a healthy dose of righteous snark about the current administration.
mprnews.org
"I'm not getting into the legality of everything," One agent responds tersely.
This kind of hits the nail on the head, doesn’t it? I hope more local law enforcement sides with people over lawless thugs. The history of that happening hasn't been great, but that's where we are.
The Atlantic
Now, as then, when a direct path to justice is blocked, states need to find a work-around. The federal prosecution of the Minneapolis officers responsible for George Floyd’s death offers a model.
Some legal methods that might be available to states for justice when the federal government is willfully breaking the law.
The Atlantic
If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. ...That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.
Absolute heroes. This impulse for helping neighbors is saving lives. I also think this article demonstrates that having an entire party that believes its own most extreme propaganda via Fox News is a disadvantage when interacting with the real world.
a submerged rock reflecting in a pool of water on the beach with distant waves in the background
Beach Reflection
a pool of water on the beach with rocks on the right side and waves on the horizon in the distance
Beach Pool
New York Times
After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.
We have to reject this way of life every way we can.
Gillian Brockell
I am using the term “third-country removals” instead of “third-country deportations,” because the latter is a legal process in which a migrant is resettled in a safe third country. What is actually happening, in nearly all cases, more closely resembles chain refoulement, rendition, or kidnapping – and often violate domestic and international law.
The scale of human suffering inflicted by Republicans is difficult to grasp.
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