Last month, I was mostly lying on my back and groaning, but also reading:

• Anti-vaxxers are weaponizing Yelp to punish bars that require vaccine proof — Tanya Basu in MIT Technology Review makes one so glad to be a member of this species: On the first hot weekend of the summer, Richard Knapp put up a sign outside Mother’s Ruin, a bar tucked in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. It had two arrows: one pointing vaccinated people indoors, another pointing unvaccinated people outdoors. The Instagram post showing the sign (above) quickly went viral among European anti-vaxxers on Reddit. “We started receiving hate mail through the Google portal,” Knapp says, estimating he’d received about a “few dozen” emails: “I’ve been called a Nazi and a communist in the same sentence. People hope that our bar burns down. It’s a name and shame campaign.” It wasn’t just the emails. Soon, his bar started receiving multiple one-star reviews on Yelp and Google Reviews from accounts as far away as Europe.
• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• Not ‘Apartheid in the West Bank.’ Apartheid — Gideon Levy in Haaretz: It’s impossible to separate the territories and Israel, and it’s impossible to consider the occupation temporary. The conclusion: Israel is an apartheid state. Just as in South Africa it was ludicrous to talk about democracy, even though elections were held, it’s ridiculous to view Israel as a democracy. If part of it is tyranny, all of it is tyranny. It’s impossible to argue with the fact that in the occupied territories two systems of rights and laws exist based on the separating of nationalities. No fact is more certain. The temporariness of the occupation is also an outdated argument. That’s why we have to stop trying to terrify people and claim that the right wing is leading us to apartheid. Apartheid has been here since 1948.
• Simulated Person Monthly — Phil Are Go!:
  
• YouTube Financially Deplatforms Swath Of Indie Media Accounts — : Progressive commentators Graham Elwood, The Progressive Soapbox, The Convo Couch, Franc Analysis, Hannah Reloaded and Cyberdemon531 have all received notifications from YouTube that their videos are no longer permitted to earn money through the platform’s various monetization features, as has Ford Fischer, a respected freelancer who films US political demonstrations. No explanation has been offered for this decision beyond the vague claim that “your channel is not in line with our YouTube Partner Program policies” due to “harmful content”. […] Financial deplatforming is censorship. People were given an opportunity to devote themselves to the vocation of creating media outside the gatekeeping apparatus of billionaire news institutions, which is arguably the single most important vocation anyone can give themselves to in our world right now, and they built their lives around their ability to do this. Now it’s being ripped away from them; their literal jobs are being taken away. They were offered a reason to think they’d be able to make a living doing very important work, and then they were sucker punched with what amounts to political censorship. As Yves Smith succinctly put it, "if your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business".
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
  
• YouTube Bans and Then Unbans Right Wing Watch, a Media Watchdog Devoted to Exposing Right-Wing Conspiracies — Justin Baragona at the Daily Beast: Right Wing Watch senior fellow Kyle Mantyla told The Daily Beast that this had been an ongoing problem with YouTube for years, despite their efforts to make clear to the platform that their videos worked to expose extremism and contained disclaimers to that effect. […] Launched in 2007, Right Wing Watch has posted thousands of clips of prominent right-wing figures making controversial comments, perhaps most famously including televangelist Pat Robertson and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In fact, Right Wing Watch’s exposure of Jones’ false and conspiratorial rhetoric was key to YouTube and other social-media platforms eventually removing his channel InfoWars from their sites. Notably, many of the right-wing outlets and personalities that Right Wing Watch chronicles are not currently suspended or banned from posting content to YouTube, while RWW has been booted for merely exposing their comments and content—something Mantyla noted as being particularly ironic.
• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed: