Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

If you were expecting Triumph of the Will, you were disappointed because what you got instead was fat, disoriented Elvis stumbling through his set. Except that it wasn’t funny. It was dangerous.

I promise you that the flag officers in attendance were more alarmed than amused. And you should be, too.

1. “The Enemy from Within”

President Trump did not have many bad things to say about America’s foreign adversaries. He spoke about Vladimir Putin in largely neutral terms (only saying he was “disappointed” in him) and barely mentioned China.

He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat:

• The American left: “They’re really bad. They’re bad people.” Again, he’s talking about Americans here.

• His own domestic political opponents: “They’re vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are a different kind of vicious.”

• American journalists: “sleazebags.”

• Residents of American inner cities: “animals.”

I fit three out of four of those categories. I also support LGBTQ rights and DEI, which Trump and his supporters have declared war on.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
— General William Tecumseh Sherman

They have declared war on 1/3 to 1/2 of the American population: Three of our largest cities plus San Francisco, the residents of America’s inner cities in particular, LGBTQ people, women, nonwhite people, the American Left and all Trump’s political opponents.

He’s 100% hero, lives by the Scout oath (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent¹), loves his fellow humans and is never even tempted by evil.

I’ve never liked Batman, because he seems to me to be on the edge of being a supervillain himself. On the other hand, a friend who is a deep comics fan once said I was doing Batman a disservice. Batman, he said, has all those qualities I love in Superman, but Batman is in a bad mood about it. Superman loves humanity because of our capacity for good, while Batman sees the capacity for good and is angry that so many of us choose evil.

Looking at online reviews of this year’s “Superman” movie, I’m surprised that many people say they’d never seen a good Superman movie before, or that this was the first good Superman movie they’d seen. I guess the Christopher Reeve Superman is lost to the mists of prehistory.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

The MAGA movement needs violence and intimidation to function, both online and off. Without its central bundle of grievances and universe of enemies — LGBT people, people of color, leftists, Democrats — Trump’s supporters might notice that he’s ransacking the country’s institutions and making their lives worse. So they can’t acknowledge that a decade inside the pressure cooker of political violence has turned Trump supporters in spree shooters in waiting.

And the U.S. will have to weather that storm under the most inept and corrupt national government we’ve known.

How should I prepare for that? I have no answers, and have been continuing along as we always have been.

I hope that living in California will provide protection.

This is something that keeps me awake staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at 4 am in the dark.

Previously

Here’s something I saw walking the dog, giving a Lincoln Lawyer vibe. I have not seen this car or license plate before. It was parked about a half-dozen houses away from us on our street.

Lately when I think of going to the movies I think of driving across town, parking and paying money to sit in a dark room and watch things on a screen. I have screens at home.

Hamilton Nolan: “The ‘imperial boomerang’ is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are.”

“Workslop: Bad study but an excellent word”, by David Gerard at Pivot To AI:

The word of the day is: “workslop.” There’s a new article in Harvard Business Review: “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” [HBR]

Workslop is when a coworker sends you some obvious AI-generated trash and you have to spend your time redoing the whole thing. They save time by wasting your time:

Workslop is a result of top-down AI mandates, Gerard says. However, the report identifying the trend is an “unlabeled advertising feature” for enterprise AI, not a real study. The report blames workers, but bad management is the real culprit.

Cory Doctorow: " … a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and … this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it…. "

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.

Cory’s advice to Cornell University, during a visit to lecture there:

I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there’s a buyer’s market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there’s a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

There’s plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”

It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.

That’s what a big business should do. But what about individuals? That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and getting nowhere.

People today aren’t more productive than they were in 1975, despite advances in computers and the Internet.

I spent a couple of hours this weekend processing and closing browser tabs.

I’m sure these two things are completely unrelated.

‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast. “If you found history boring at school, this podcast will have you intently listening to 20 hours on the French Revolution – and that’s before even getting to the Terror.” Can confirm. I love this podcast.

Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes. By Chris Arnade. American decline is much on my mind lately. I take it very personally – I am not built to do well in a failed nation. Arnade, like me, is cautiously optimistic, seeing our current rapid decline as reversible.

What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?. “One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage.” (Via @sjvn@mastodon.social. Thanks!)

White Lotus season one: I don’t know if it would be right to say we liked it. This is a show about essentially likable characters who chronically self-sabotage due to their acute cranial-rectal inversion. The show featured brilliant, subtle performances by Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett as Armond, the put-upon resort manager. Just kidding: They weren’t subtle — they were outrageous and ridiculous and delicious. We will watch season two.

We liked Superman. But it was too long and it made me miss Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.

Krypto stole the movie.

The supporting characters were better than the main action: Nathan Fillion as the Green Lantern, Hawk Girl, Mr. Terrific, Drunk Party Supergirl.

Wendell Pierce was terribly underutilized. I’m going to start walking around with a big cigar in my mouth.

If this is the start of a DC Cinematic Universe, I’m there for it.

I was planning to see this in the theater — our first theater movie in at least five years. But I changed my mind. And I’m glad I did. It’s more comfortable to see it at home, where we can take breaks and enjoy our own snacks.

I have only a half-dozen phone numbers in my iPhone tagged as favorites. I actually looked at all of them for the first time in a long time this week. How long? One of the numbers was for voicemail for a job I left more than five years ago.

The next items on my to-do list are filling out expense reports and dropping stool samples at the vet. Gosh — hard to choose what to do next!

What Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100B agreement means for telcos. OpenAI just inked a $100B “memorandum of understanding” with NVIDIA, which could lead to a tectonic industry shift for telcos. Or it could all be vaporware — a “memorandum of understanding” is not a signed contract. By me on Fierce Network, earlier this week.

My latest on Fierce Network: Telcos tackle AI’s impact at Fierce Network Research event. At the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, a bunch of telco execs got together to figure out what the heck to do about AI.

Here’s Minnie one evening this week, letting me know it’s time to quit fooling around and put out her food. Priorities, man!

The Advocate: “The man Meta has appointed to help address ‘ideological and political bias’ in artificial intelligence is a conservative influencer who believes that pesticide turns children LGBTQ+ and that the COVID-19 vaccine caused Matthew Perry’s death.” Crazy as a hatful of snakes.

The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy. By Matt Stoller. “Americans, broadly speaking, hate both parties, because [Americans] subscribe to an entirely different vision of what it means to be free. That version means freedom from coercion and a basic equality before the law.”

Brandon Vigliorolo at The Register:

Grok’s racist, conspiracy-riddled responses led public advocacy groups last month to send a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) demanding it declare Grok unfit for government use due to its “clear ideological judgement,” which it said is in violation of Trump’s own executive order that aimed to prevent “woke AI” from infiltrating federal agencies.

It might not be woke, signatories argued, but Grok is definitely aligned with a political point of view. As the letter pointed out, Grok has called holocaust statistics into question, allowed itself to be used to generate non-consensual deepfakes, advanced unfounded claims of white genocide in South Africa, and even declared itself “MechaHitler.”

“This goes beyond disappointing - it’s reckless, a safety issue - it’s very concerning,” J.B. Branch, a Public Citizen big tech accountabilty advocate, told The Register.

… the White House’s own science advisor, Michael Kratsios, said in a Senate hearing earlier this month that Grok’s antisemitic and conspiratorial outputs are exactly the kind of behavior Trump’s EO was meant to prevent.

When asked whether antisemitism, hate speech, and conspiracy theories complied with Trump’s EO, Kratsios described such statements as exactly the type of behavior the EO was designed to avoid

“Today’s announcement is yet another example of the president’s actual AI action plan: handing the keys to the federal government to his Big Tech patrons,” Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress, said.

Rick Moranis is returning for the Spaceballs sequel, his first screen outing since 1997. Tangentially related: I saw a fan theory recently that the 99-year-old Mel Brooks is aware he’s got a good chance of dying before Spaceballs 2 finishes, and he has worked his death into the movie as a gag.

Dave Pell: “Trump promised to bring manufacturing back to America. And he has. The Justice Department is actively manufacturing cases against the president’s enemies…. Case in point: The targeting of James Comey.”

I use Grammarly for all my online writing, to check grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation and to find typos. I got a notification that my Grammarly annual plan expires in a month, and I started thinking about whether to renew it, and whether to ask my manager if I can expense it.

Then I reviewed the free plan, which I think turns out to have everything I use and turns off the annoying bits.

I value Grammarly’s suggestions to tighten up language, but I’m told that the free plan offers that too. And if that doesn’t work, I bet ChatGPT will do the job.

Another thing I rely on Grammarly for: Commas. I have only a vague idea of how to use commas.

Language pet peeve: Writers who say “may be” when they mean “is.”

Lucinda Price, a writer and comedian, writes about the “reply guys” who slide into her DMs, making casual conversation but never following through:

Unlike more traditional cases of being “led on”, true reply guys aren’t hanging around hoping for casual sex. This fact frustrates many of the women I spoke to – they’d actually prefer transactional intimacy over taking care of a Tamagotchi with limited conversational skills

The West Is In A Far Worse Position than the Warsaw Pact Was At The Start Of the Cold War

A Brief History of The Flatiron Building

Trump’s imperial court includes a gay evangelical Christian and a Jewish Nazi. I never thought the end times would be so ridiculous.

Peter Thiel Wants Everyone to Think More About the Antichrist. This guy is the kingmaker who lined up J.D. Vance to be the next President and he’s crazy as a soup sandwich. Meanwhile, Trump is ranting about Tylenol and antifa. But I’m sure everything will work out fine.

Cory Doctorow:

The answer is contained in the concept of “centaurs” and “reverse centaurs,” found in automation theory:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).

Also: AI is a bubble. When it bursts it will leave behind a wealth of useful tools and skilled workers, but at terrible cost.

“Three Days of the Condor” is a 1975 thriller starring Robert Redford as a bookish CIA analyst who stumbles on a lethal conspiracy and has to run for his life while unraveling the mystery as he goes. I admired the movie and enjoyed watching it, but I was not engaged.

Redford is cool and handsome. I loved the clothes and cars. The CIA gadgetry is delightfully retro high-tech (transistorpunk). Faye Dunaway is beautiful and warm as Redford’s love interest; she effortlessly steals a scene at a New York deli. Max Von Sydow is delicious as a weirdly friendly assassin. The movie also features Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.

The plot is complicated and confusing. Redford does thriller-movie shtick, using Dunaway as a go-between to deliver a menacing message, getting into brawls and gunfights, racing across town and hacking a phone switching office. He is infinitely resourceful and confounds experienced field agents, explaining that he learned everything from books. In the end, of course, Redford figures everything out, but I don’t know how, and I’m not 100% sure what he figured out.

Although I enjoyed the movie, it didn’t pull me in, partly because it’s been overtaken by headlines. The movie premise is that a hypercompetent conspiracy of government agents drives U.S. affairs. In reality today, the government is run by clowns. I wish “Three Days of the Condor” were an accurate depiction; instead, we’re living in “Idiocracy.”

Redford’s character’s relationship with Dunaway’s character is disturbing. She is a stranger whom he kidnaps at random so he can use her as cover to get out of Manhattan and hide out in her apartment. He holds her at gunpoint and ties her up in her own bathroom for hours while he goes out and does spy things. Nonetheless, she decides he’s a nice guy and has sex with him. Sometimes I’m shocked by how rapey pop culture was in the 20th Century.

It’s a good example of a 1970s New York movie, like “The French Connection” and “Annie Hall,” showing off the grittiness of the city.

The movie takes place just before Christmas, but it’s not a Christmas movie. It’s like “Die Hard” that way. There’s no snow on the ground. There’s almost no discussion of Christmas. You hear some Christmas carols in ambient music and see some Christmas decorations in stores, and that’s it for the Christmas angle.

Sloppy Internet research:

• Redford wears an excellent, preppy wardrobe. He wears a herringbone tweed jacket or a pea-jacket at different times in the movie, over a navy crew-neck sweater, chambray shirt and tie (the crew-neck sweater and tie are not, to be honest, a good look), flared jeans, and hiking boots. Men’s fashionistas have struggled for decades to find that exact tweed jacket.. The look is iconic, like Steve McQueen’s tweed jacket and roll-neck sweater in “Bullitt,” which set off a fashion trend for men when that movie was released.
• The film has been interpreted as a political statement or propaganda, but director Sidney Pollack says it’s just a thriller — nothing more. It was released at about the same time as a scandal broke in the news about illegal CIA activities; Pollack says the movie was already well underway when the scandal hit, and he is frustrated by people who think he was sending a message.
• At the beginning of the movie, Redford’s character orders lunch for his office from a luncheonette, the Lexington Candy Shop. It was founded in 1925, is still in business, and still looks the same.
• Faye Dunaway is still alive and seems to be still working. I’m happy to see it.

Cheap shots from Letterboxd:

• “crying that the book was called six days of the condor–sydney pollack snorted a line and was like don’t worry girls i can do it in three”
• “A movie about sinister forces at work in the CIA with big scenes set at the World Trade Center and in a Ford Bronco? It’s like the nexus of all conspiracy theories!"
• “Men get so hot when their lives fall apart and they stop shaving”

I need to explore the new OpenGraph support in Micro.blog. I saw a truncated post show up as a screenshot of the text when viewed from Mastodon, which I quite like. Presumably, the same thing happens for BlueSky? Thanks, @manton.

Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )

I just got a notification that my Tumblr blog turned 17 years old today. Tumblr has rarely been my primary social media platform, but it has always been easy to syndicate posts from whatever my favorite is to there, and I’ve come to be quite fond of Tumblr.

The Verge staff lists books that changed their lives. My friend Barbara Krasnoff adds class to the list by naming “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott. Nobody names “Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter books, which I would have expected to see on such a list. However, Harry Potter is now, as they say, problematic. Same for Neil Gaiman, another writer whose work I might have expected to see on a most-influential-books list not long ago.

If I were contributing to a list like this, and being honest, I would name “Red Planet” by Robert A. Heinlein. It was the first chapter book I read, at age 8, and awakened in me a lifelong love of reading, science fiction and Heinlein. It’s no longer one of my favorite Heinleins; I think that would be “Citizen of the Galaxy.”

If I wanted to impress people, I’d pick Mark Twain’s Autobiography, “Life on the Mississippi,” or “Roughing It.” I do love Mark Twain; I am currently reading Ron Chernow’s biography of the writer. Twain’s work has been influential in my life, but honestly, not as influential as the science fiction I read as a boy.

Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike. I am 100% ebike-curious, but I don’t feel like I can justify the expense in addition to the car, and an ebike doesn’t seem like it would be a car replacement. Also, riding an ebike seems like it would be dangerous on our local roads.

In search of Robert Redford’s most iconic jacket. It’s the herringbone tweed he wore in “Three Days of the Condor,” which we watched last night.

American Billionaires Are Competing To Be King Shit of Turd Island

I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog, again. Great thing about both platforms is you can just do that, easily and without inconveniencing anybody. I may switch back in a bit because why not?

“Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century." By Derek Guy.

How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. By Anil Dash. “The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.”

Hate the player AND the game: But above all, hate the crooked ump.. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. “The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:”

A short history of business cards, from the 17th Century to today. “Today, the format is functionally dead, displaced by email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and QR codes (see also: the slow decline of paper menus, postcards, and real concert tickets). Without a practical reason to make one, the business card has become something of a fetish object. If one bothers to make one at all, it’s often letterpressed within an inch of its life and on paper thick enough to fix a wobbly table.”

What’s the Difference Between a Sport Coat, a Blazer and a Suit Coat? A sport coat is meant to be worn with pants that don’t have the same fabric or pattern. A blazer is a solid jacket with contrasting buttons, often metal. A suit coat has pants made from the same pattern and fabric as the coat.

Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. The defining experience of fascism. By Hamilton Nolan

The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing. “Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority. ‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don’t need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says. Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”

AI psychosis and the warped mirror. Cory Doctorow: “While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won’t generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.”

Netscape Navigator was released 30 years ago.. By Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees.

UPDATED: My initial version of this post said 20 years, and I was sure that’s what the original said.

Read Whatever the Hell You Want charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/read-wh…

💯

You’re not going to believe the number of headphones I think you should have jasper.tandy.is/blogging/…

I admire the spirit of this article, though I stop at one headphones, the AirPods Pro 2. I am tempted by the AirPods Pro 3 but so far am not having trouble resisting.

Construction workers in Iowa rushed into a burning house to save a family, and used a backyard trampoline to save a boy trapped on the burning third floor. wsvn.com/news/us-w…

If Trump is concerned that 97% of the coverage about him is negative, maybe he should try doing something right more than 3% of the time.

Because if 3% of the news coverage of Trump is positive, they’re going easy on him.

Ocasio-Cortez Statement on Charlie Kirk Resolution and Trump Administration’s Assault on Free Speech  ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/pre…

Petulant sexual predator and convicted felon Donald Trump “reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is ‘illegal’ and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech. ‘When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,'” the orange manbaby said. www.politico.com/news/2025…

It’s so embarrassing being an American now.

Republican Ted Cruz says FCC chair’s threats about Kimmel are ‘dangerous.’ “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’" www.seattletimes.com/nation-wo…

I think a person can stay sufficiently well informed on five minutes of news consumption daily, 360 days of the year. That excludes professional news, news you legitimately enjoy consuming and news about events that directly affect your life, like natural disasters in your neighborhood. Spend as much time as you need or want to on those types of news

The other five days are days like early in the Covid pandemic or Jan. 6 2021, when you’ll feel the need to dig in. But even then an hour a day should be more than sufficient.

Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’ www.theguardian.com/society/n…

OpenAI released a report on who’s using ChatGPT and how. Most chats aren’t work-related, younger people are core users, most people use ChatGPT for writing, advice and information. www.theverge.com/news/7797…

Nobody knows what socialism means. Perhaps a better way to say this is that everyone who says “socialism” means something different. The worst person to ask about what socialism is is a Republican, who doesn’t know what socialism means, and will tell you that everything is socialism. The second worst person to ask is a leftist college professor, who knows exactly what socialism means, and will tell you that nothing qualifies as real socialism. Somewhere between these poles lies the elusive Practical Definition of Socialism, which nobody ever stops long enough to lay out before launching into their various tirades.

— Hamilton Nolan www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/new-yor…

New York Socialist City. Where taking care of everyone is common sense. “… what socialism really means in the context of US politics is public services for the public good. Using government to socialize the things that can help everyone, rather than allowing the private market to run everything in a way that preys on the public for private gain. As a practical matter, this is what most people trying to Do Socialism in American politics are trying to do. Full state control of the economy is not and has never been on the table.” www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/new-yor…

In retrospect it is obvious that drinking 48 ounces of cappuccino and Coke Zero in the two hours prior to my taking a window seat on a full three hour flight was not conducive to my comfort and would not endear me to the two other people seated in my row.

Like many people, I swear a lot, and I’m even a little proud of it. But I have resolved to reduce swearing to special occasions after reading this article in The New York Times: “Why Does Everybody Swear All The Time Now?". And that’s even though I disagree with the conclusions of the article.

Swearing has become meaningless noise, like saying “um” or “like.” It’s just something people say to convey unearned edginess or rebelliousness. Dropping “F” bombs doesn’t make me cowboy, it just makes me like millions of other people who also swear a lot.

As a writer, I am aware of economy of language and too often swearing serves no purpose. Save it for times when it really matters.

As for the Times article: It starts out well enough. Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, talks about the previous rules of decorum for when swearing was appropriate. “These days, curse words fill the air like angry drones – an ambient buzzing of bitter, nasty words,” he says, which is a nice turn of phrase. Also, this: “A sprinkle of salt gives your dinner savor; a handful kills it.”

But here’s the part where I disagree:

When you curse compulsively you produce a view of the world that’s smaller and meaner.

…

Omnipresent cursing, the programmatic reduction of nearly everything, pollutes our worldview. It makes it harder to see what is true and good and beautiful. We become blind to instances of courage and compassion. Our world shrinks. And we shrink along with it.

On the other hand, the willingness to use decent words suggests a decent heart and mind.

To that I say: Bulls—

I mean, nonsense.

I don’t think swearing makes us meaner people. Plenty of great people swear a lot, and plenty of awful people refrain from profanity. But swearing has become noise, and I’m aware it makes some people uncomfortable, so I’m just going to dial it back and save it for rare occasions.

Yesterday I unplugged as much as I could from social media and national political news, to the extent that’s possible for someone like me. I felt pretty good about that so I think I’ll see if I can do the same today.

Alas, my idea of “unplugging” looks like a normal person’s “fanatically online.”

I am trying to at least partly unplug from the national political news today.

Micro.blog, the service I use to host mitchw.blog does not support likes and reblogs. Micro.blog proprietor Manton Reece @manton decided deliberately to not support likes or reblogs, because he sees those as contributing to social media toxicity.

I fundamentally disagreed with Manton when I started on Micro.blog, but I have come around to his view about “likes.” They’re just noise. I try to avoid looking at them on my posts. I do still sometimes click a like on other people’s posts. Other people seem to like “likes,” so why not?

But I still think reblogs are great. They are a primary means of sharing content on Mastodon, BlueSky and especially Tumblr. I don’t mind that I can’t publish reblogs on Micro.blog — linking, cutting-and-pasting and screenshots are fine. But the fact that Micro.blog won’t show me boosts on Mastodon keeps me from shutting down my Mastodon account and just relying on Micro.blog as my presence in the fediverse.

An E-bike For The Mind. E-bikes and what they can teach us about AI. joshbrake.substack.com

Four Theories of Meta. Laughable, smart, evil and terrifying. www.infinitescroll.us/p/four-th…

Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap of patented, vitaminized kibble. In no time the meal is gobbled down and the dish licked clean and, like as not, poked noisily about the kitchen like a hockey puck, amid waggings. But I can recall another era, when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut. It went down just as fast and probably did no harm, but what I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. A mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything. A dog’s breakfast.

— Roger Angell, “This Old Man: All in Pieces.”

I have found a simple fix for a pebble in my shoe since I resumed blogging in earnest a few years ago: Finding some way to signal to people that I’m posting almost entirely the same things on my blog and all my socials. Today, I saw the easy answer on Nick Heer’s blog pxlnv.com : Instead of saying “follow me… “ say “follow this blog.” Problem solved! I have added the appropriate text to my blog header.

A new bill would grant Marco Rubio the right to declare any U.S. citizen a terrorist supporter based solely on their speech, and revoke their passport. “In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stripped Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk’s of her visa based on what a court later found was nothing more than her opinion piece critical of Israel.” The proposed law would give Rubio similar power over U.S. citizens. theintercept.com/2025/09/1…

Nicholas Kulish at The New York Times:

In February 2020, the actor Noah Wyle decided the moment was ripe to bring back his most successful television character, Dr. John Carter from the hospital drama “ER.”

Mr. Wyle wrote an email to John Wells, who had served as the showrunner on “ER,” to propose a “character study in the vein of LOGAN, PICARD and JOKER.” He described his idea for the show as “a 12-episode Hulu limited series, where we take another look at the guy who showed us the world the first time,” adding: “Darker and grittier. Aged. But still him.”

“Get a few band members together,” he suggested to Mr. Wells, “and write a beautiful new song in an old and familiar key.”

From the kernel of that idea emerged the hit HBO Max hospital drama “The Pitt"….

I find this question of copyright law fascinating. When does using genre tropes trend over into copyright infringement? A serialized TV show set in an emergency room is going to have to follow certain story formulas. It’s going to be fast-paced, will use a lot of medical jargon, etc.

My gut feeling as an Internet lawyer is that “The Pitt” is going to lose this one if it goes to court. No one is disputing that “The Pitt”’s creators and the Crichton estate were in talks to make an ER sequel. And Noah Wylie plays the main character, an ER attending physician.

As the article points out, it ended up being a better creative choice to not have the show be an ER sequel. When you create a sequel, it’s creatively limiting — cameos and guest spots by former stars, and so forth. Hard to maintain the fourth wall of viewer disbelief.

Also: copyright should not extend 17 years past the death of the author. “ER” should be in the public domain. I am firmly a Doctorovian on this matter; copyright is a brilliant invention and should be limited, as America’s Founders intended.

Also: We love “The Pitt.”

Also: Noah Wylie’s character on “ER” vs. “The Pitt” are internally inconsistent in a fundamental way: John Carter on ER was heir to a fortune who, by the end of the series, was running his own clinic with the support of that fortune. His character on “The Pitt” is head of the ER, but he answers to the hospital bureaucracy and is apparently living on his doctor’s salary. Different people.

Charlie Kirk’s allies warn Americans: Mourn him properly or else. Republicans love cancel cuture when they’re the ones doing it. www.reuters.com/world/us/…

San Diego Navy doctor fired after right-wing activists find pronouns on social media. Hate, ignorance and bigotry score another win. www.kpbs.org/news/loca…

Shocked by Epstein’s birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism [Rebecca Solnit]. Child sexual abuse was everywhere in the U.S. in the 1970s and was celebrated in pop culture in movies like “Pretty Baby,” and stories abut rock stars and teen groupies. www.theguardian.com/commentis…