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.

Even though I have negative feelings about Bezos it is noteworthy that while he tired to mess with The Washington Post, which he owns, you are still able to buy a wide assortment of anti-Trump protest signs there (here’s the link). Jusy a few shown below:

We have three of the signs, and we also bought our American and our Pride flag from them.

Update:

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.”

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.

Cain should not be confused with David Corensweet who stars in the just released new Superman movie.

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