I have decided to make a drastic life change: I am throwing out all empty boxes, no matter how sturdy, clean and perfectly sized they are (with the exception of the original packaging for expensive electronics). I will trust in the universe to provide boxes when boxes are required.
Please pray for me during this difficult transition.
Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: The first lawn Santa of the season.
Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: The Goodyear Blimp
If Back to the Future was made today, Marty would be going back to 1995.
Reading “Lord of the Rings” continues. The scenes about the barrow-wights are pretty good. At least it’s not descriptions of eating or forests and Tom Bombadil doesn’t show up until the end.
The smallest hill I’m willing to die on: I dislike virtual backgrounds that are representations of rooms. Virtual rooms are all bland and dystopian. Just use the blur effect or an abstract virtual background. It is acceptable to use a virtual room or some other real-world image if it is very, very clever — but they never are.
I made a disparaging comment about Los Angeles to an angeleno on a team call, and the angeleno agreed. Angelenos are usually willing to agree heartily with any disparaging remark you make about Los Angeles. Makess needling them less fun.
I went on the San Diego subreddit to see if anyone can see the Northern Lights from here, and I fell down a rabbithole of reading a thread of people ranting about people who don’t pick up dog-poop on the sides of hiking trails. The original poster included photos to make their point. Why did you feel that was necessary, u/Adventurous_Yam_5?
I very nearly quit reading Lord of the Rings. I’m about 350 pages in and a third of that is description of forest. I don’t even like forest — we live very nearly in the desert. Another third of the book is description of food, and none of it is pizza or burritos. They just left Tom Bombadil’s cabin. Tom Bombadil is extremely annoying. He is the guy in “Animal House” who was playing the guitar and singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and John Belushi smashed his guitar.
But I will keep reading.
Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.
This has been much on my mind lately.
Sign of the changing seasons: Today is the first day since the spring that I’ve had to turn on the lights in my home office before dinner.
Chris Arnade walks the city of Zhengzhou, China, and shares his self-described “oversimplified take on all of China, which is that it’s the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech.”
The analogy isn’t perfect given the fundamental differences on the essential question of “what is a good life, and how do you obtain it but China has the energy, optimism, and trajectory that the US had then. This isn’t confined to only the narrow minority of the exceptionally fortunate, but rather is manifest across the whole economic bell curve, because the entire population is getting richer at velocities approaching ten percent a year, levels of growth that tend to make everyone giddy and forgiving of other issues. I’m not a rigid ideological materialist, but having your economy double roughly every decade absolves a lot of other sins, and tends to put smiles on people’s faces.
When I was doing my work in the US Rust Belt, talking to the elderly in decaying cities, one of the common laments I heard over and over was some variation of, “Back then, you could walk straight out of high school onto the factory floor, and build a good life. If you worked hard enough, played by the rules, you could get married, buy a house, raise a family, go on a few vacations a year, and see your kids and grandkids do better than you did. You can’t do that now, not without going away to get some fancy college degree that puts you so far in debt you might as well be chained to the bank.”
While the Chinese version differs–“playing by the rules” is more stringent, home is a tiny apartment in a forty-story tower, vacations are to Shanghai’s Disney World rather than Orlando–the trajectory remains intact. They can walk out of high school into the iPhone factory and build themselves a good life, certainly as measured against what their parents had, which is how optimism is forged, through comparison to local expectations.
Perhaps they looked at the harm that would be caused by a shutdown and decided to just kick the problem down the road. There were never going to be any good outcomes to this particular standoff.
The only good outcome is going to be voting the Trump government out of office and prosecuting its leaders to the fullest extent of the law. No clemency “for the good of national unity.” We did that with the Confederacy, Nixon and after Trump’s first term, and it has brought us 150 years of misery.
“Low skilled” workers are a myth. “[Minimum-wage jobs are] not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” The author, Rachel Moody, is half-right here. I’m not convinced that minimum-wage jobs are not low-skilled. But Moody is right that these jobs are important, and the workers are entitled to dignity and a living wage.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
“Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.” I visited every country in the world without flying. Here are eight things I learned.
Chris Arnade walks Taipei and other parts of China, and reflects on the temples, materialism and pigeon keepers. “Six flights higher is where I found Mr. Li, an especially kind man, who like all pigeon keepers around the world, was giddy to meet someone else who loves the rats with wings.”
Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became one of the biggest hits of 1976, “less than a year after the disaster it commemorates.” writes Neda Ulaby for NPR:
The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.
“He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit,” writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song – whatever it was – was deeply personal.”
…
“From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes,” Bacon told NPR. “So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century.”
The Trump government says it will use the military against American civilians and is openly preparing to do it. They’re getting ready to steal the 2026 election. This is not some bullshit TikTok conspiracy theory; it’s happening in the open.
Trump’s domestic militia is growing. “The President repeatedly says he’ll use the military against American civilians and is creating special units to do so.”
Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Work to Send Full Food Stamps — “They would rather go door to door, taking away people’s food, than do the right thing and fully fund SNAP for November so that struggling veterans, seniors, and children can keep food on the table."
Today is, of course, not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. It’s even too soon to say it’s the end of the beginning.
But it’s a good day. The first day in more than a year that I’ve looked at the news and felt good. That’s enough for today.
Democrats sweep about every election they’re in, particularly Mamdani in New York. Prop 50 passes. And there’s going to be a fourth Mummy movie, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Today has been a good day.
AT&T’s grounded AI strategy defies bubble warnings. My latest on Fierce Network. With executive backing, cross-team collaboration, and a relentless ROI focus, AT&T is proving you don’t need to ride a hype wave to generate value.
“Reflecting on their partnership, Weissmuller later said, ‘He was a natural on set, fearless in the water, and always ready to jump into a scene.'”
After Tarzan, Sheffield took the lead in “Bomba the Jungle Boy,” starring in 12 adventure films from 1949-55.
By his mid-twenties, Sheffield retired from acting. He earned a business degree from UCLA, married Patricia Berg in 1959, and raised three children: Patrick, Stuart, and Regina. He worked in real estate, construction, and even lobster importing, quietly shaping a life in Chula Vista far removed from Hollywood’s spotlight.
Son Stuart, his wife, Elaine Lancaster, and their son Draygon Wylde Sheffield-Cassan still live on the family property. “Draygon shares a striking resemblance to his grandfather, including the iconic curly, golden hair.”
People long associated the instrument with polkas, elephants, clowns, and players at the back of the band, imprisoned by conductors' preconceived notions of what the horn, and those who play it, were capable of. But today, tuba players have found freedom and, through hard work and focus, they dazzle, unconstrained by others' views.
“‘Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically,’ Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, wrote in an X post that has been viewed more than five million times. ‘To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.'”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta at The New York Times
(This article ran on Thursday. This morning, French authorities arrested
suspects charged with being the Louvre thieves, according to headlines.)
Happiness is not achieved by pursuing happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of finding life purpose and pursuing that purpose.
Dana Milbank reports at The Washington Post:: The best way to achieve happiness is focus on others and how you can contribute to them and their well-being. We need to find meaningful ways to contribute, “and often that will lead to the happiness that you’re seeking,” says psychologist Kendall Cotton Bronk of Claremont Graduate University.
Ask yourself what “the world is missing” and how you uniquely “fill that gap a little bit,” says psychology professor Todd Kashdan, who runs the Well-Being Lab at George Mason University. “The specific purpose doesn’t matter; it’s just a question of ‘what lights you up. Then commit to make a specific regular contribution – particularly time – toward that purpose.”
The contribution doesn’t need to be “a major life-changing allocation of time or energy” but rather “things we can fit into our everyday routines,” says Cornell psychologist Anthony Burrow, who runs the university’s Purpose and Identity Processes Lab.
Milbank writes:
There’s no right or wrong purpose. It could be related to family or work or anything else that gives you meaning and helps you order your goals. It’s not necessarily altruistic (evil people can have purpose) but often is. Your purpose can change over time.
Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House. “Our homes are filled with cameras, microphones, and mobile sensors connected to companies we barely know, all capable of being weaponized with a single line of code.”
Anteaters evolved independently at least 12 times in the 66 million years since nonavian dinosaurs went extinct.
Ants and termites are good eating and there are plenty of them. They outweigh all other insects, mammals, amphibians and birds combined in the rainforests of South and Central America. And globally, termites alone outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of 10.
Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country’s continued operations, huh?
In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump’s DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE’s roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites.
There’s more: Decades of protectionist tech regulation gives the Trump government control of the world’s cloud applications, networks, tractors, phones, game consoles, medical implants, ventilators and more. “It’s well past time for a post-American internet.”
One of the benefits of using Amazon frequently is that we have a gallery of great photos of the front gate of our house.
ICE vs. NYC. Hamilton Nolan: “As dark as these times are, we can all take a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that ICE agents are going to have a terrible fucking time in New York City.”
Brilliant advice for any aspiring creative person, from an art teacher critiquing a student’s work:
My biggest critique is, I only merely dislike this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.
Heather Cox Richardson: “The president is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat. And Congress is letting it happen.”
Pierce is one of my favorite tech journalists and podcasters, and it’s not just because he does great work and because of his winning, upbeat personality. It’s also because his mental processes and work style are similar enough to mine that I find it useful and enjoyable when he nerds out about his tools and work style.
He talks about the style of podcast where the hosts are friends and talk about a subject they love. The Vergecast, which he co-hosts is a great example. He and Mike Hurley praise two podcasts in that style: The Rest is History and Rewatchables. Those two podcasts and The Vergecast are three of my favorite podcasts. Locally, here in San Diego, the Voice of San Diego podcast is yet another great example I love of that type of podcast.
David says the friendships the audience feels for podcast hosts are real, that we spend more time with our favorite podcast hosts than we do with nearly all of our real-life family, friends and co-workers.
I definitely feel those feelings, but I am skeptical whether those friendships are real. I sometimes refer to my favorite podcast hosts as “imaginary friends.” I don’t know whether those feelings are mentally healthy.
I do occasionally write to my favorite podcast hosts (I just sent a quick note to Pierce), and I always keep in mind when I do that these people don’t actually know me. The relationship is 99.95% in one direction.
Further complicating things: I currently have two favorite podcast hosts and writers who are also real-life friends. I have met up with them many times in person, and they have been to my house. However, I only see one of them every few years, and the other one is someone I have not seen in more than 40 years. These two people occupy very oddly-shaped emotional spaces in my head.
David and Myke also nerd out about productivity tools. They both agree that they would love to be the kinds of people who sit down and do a weekly review of their plans every Sunday, and that they never do it. Same here.
“WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company’s Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure — but one he hasn’t given up on yet." I continue to love Tumblr, and I am so very far from its target demographic. I’m basically the Tumblr creepy old guy.
Hey, I’m going to add that to my Tumblr profile.
“Even Oedipus is like, ‘whoa, that sounds overly incestuous.'" Newsletter editor Dave Pell on “circular financing” in AI, where a company — like, recently, AMD — pays another company — like, recently, OpenAI, to buy the first company’s products.
We finished watching The Diplomat Season 3, a fantasy series where the United States is run by competent, intelligent adults who have the best interests of the country and world at heart. It stars Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell and a whole lot of fabulous wallpaper. 🍿
I’m still reading “Lord of the Rings.” Blorbo is getting ready to peace-out from Bag End. He’s got this souvenir ring that he means to leave behind for his nephew, whose name is Froyo I think. But Blorbo can’t stand to give up the ring and he’s being super-weird about it. I’m sure this will not be a problem for the rest of the book.
Currently reading: The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 📚
I read Lord of the Rings when I was in my 20s and did not like it, but I’ve become a fan of The Rest Is History podcast and the hosts there love it. I’m intrigued by their comments that the book is, weirdly, a realistic portrait of medieval European history.
The podcast covered the life of JRR Tolkien, and how it likely influenced the Lord of the Rings, in particular his experience growing up in rural England, threatened by industrialization, and his later experience in World War I. Although, if I recall correctly, Tolkien himself denied the influences.
The podcast has talked a good deal about medieval European history, and British history in particular, and it is fascinating.
So I figured I’d give Lord of the Rings another go and see if I like it better.
I’ve barely started.
The books start with a long introduction or foreword about Hobbit history and major works of Hobbit scholarship, which is excruciatingly dry and is an odd creative choice by Tolkien. If I were picking up the book when it was first published in 1954, and knew nothing about it, I would have read no further.
Oddly, I’m reminded of the opening chapter of Snow Crash, which deals with the adventures of a cyberpunk pizza delivery driver. I found that childish when I first read the book. A couple of years later, I mentioned this opinion to a friend, and he said, yeah, the first chapter is dumb, but push through. You’ll be glad you did. And I did, and my friend was right — Snow Crash is brilliant. But the first chapter is dumb.
I pushed through with Lord of the Rings, and am now reading the first chapter, about Bilbo Baggins’s birthday party. When I first read the book, I found that section unbearably twee, but I took myself a lot more seriously then, and I’m enjoying this chapter now.
Overheard: “No, Chip Roy. Jesus is not my king. There is only one king in America and that’s Elvis.”
President Trump posted an AI video of himself spraying explosive diarrhea on peaceful protesters. I’ll point this out next time a Trump supporter tut-tuts and says the left loses elections because we’re not civil.
Help pass California Proposition 50, the Election Rigging Response Act (ERRA). You just need to walk around your neighborhood and talk to your neighbors. Sign up at mobilize.us
It’s easy to feel hopeless as the Trump government sends masked agents to invade our communities, uses government as a personal revenge apparatus, executes extrajudicial killings and creates economic chaos with tariffs. Even billionaires and the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world are bending the knee. It seems that surely the rest of us can’t do anything to stop the U.S.’s downward spiral.
But you can make a difference if you stop obsessing about national decline and turn your attention to local change. Join a community association, become active in your church, synagogue or mosque, and reach out to your neighbors. Change doesn’t just come from the top down; it also spreads from the bottom up. Down here at the bottom is where regular people like you and me can help bring about positive change, or at least slow the decay.
One such opportunity for positive change is available now: You can help pass California Proposition 50, which redraws state Congressional maps to create five additional Democratic Party-leaning seats in Congress. Prop 50 is a reaction to a naked power grab by Republicans in Texas who gerrymandered five Democratic-leaning districts to Republican.
What the Republicans did in Texas is corrupt and against the principles that our Founders held dear. To be clear, Prop. 50 is also gerrymandering. But it’s necessary to counter Republican cheating. The California measure will help Democrats retain a voice in national decision-making. As California State Assembly Member Chris Ward explains, Democrats need a five-point majority in the popular vote to gain majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives, because of decades of prior Republican gerrymandering. Texas’s gerrymandering will make that situation worse.
In Texas, the legislature decided the measure, after Republicans threatened to arrest Democrats, required Democratic representatives to submit to state police escorts and confined one representative to the state capitol overnight. But California’s Prop 50 won’t be decided by the governor or the legislature; it will be decided by the people, in a special election Nov. 4. Moreover, the California redistricting is temporary; California will revert to the independent redistricting commission, of which we are justifiably proud, after 2030.
Republicans are using their control of Congress and the White House to cheat California, threatening to withhold funding to fight wildfires, opening floodgates in the California Central Valley to waste water, driving ICE into our communities with no accountability, and threatening to withhold housing, education and healthcare funding, Ward notes.
Proposition 50 is a terrible measure — but it’s necessary. Republicans have stopped playing by the rules. Democrats need to stop bringing pencils to the knife fight.
You can help pass Proposition 50. You don’t need to donate money. You just need to canvass — walk around your neighborhood and talk to your neighbors. To sign up, go to San Diego Mobilize and look for the Prop 50 activities. Or sign up for any of the other great causes at San Diego Mobilize. If you can’t walk, you can make phone calls or text.
Even today, in the era of TikTok and AI, door-to-door canvassing is a highly effective means of getting out the vote. That’s been true for more than a century, and it’s still true.
I’ve been active in the local Democratic Party and walking door-to-door to get out the vote since 2017. At first, I hated the idea — it seemed like an unnatural act. I hate being on the receiving end of door-to-door solicitation, and I did not relish the idea of doing that to my neighbors.
But I soon learned canvassing is different. We’re not asking for money or trying to get you to change your religion. We just want you to vote and suggest which candidates and issues to vote for.
Every time I canvass, I’m pleasantly surprised by how friendly and grateful people are to hear from me. Sometimes I get into lovely conversations. Though, to be honest, any kind of interaction is rare — mostly, when we ring a doorbell, nobody’s home, and we leave a door-hanger and move on. Still, it’s nice to get out and walk — and to feel like we’re doing something. Because we are.
After you’ve canvassed a few times in your neighborhood, people know who you are. One time, a neighbor chased me down — I wasn’t canvassing that day, I was just walking the dog — because she knew I canvassed, and she was upset because she thought she missed the deadline to vote in a previous special election. I reassured her that no, she had not; the ballot just needed to be postmarked by Election Day. I got out my phone and showed her where she could drop the ballot off in a dropbox if she didn’t want to mail it in. Another time, while canvassing, I rang the doorbell of a woman in her 90s who lived alone, and her caregiver let me in. The woman was unable to walk more than a couple of steps and breathed with an oxygen tank, but we sat a while and had a lovely conversation. She had been an activist herself when she was younger and more mobile.
A few weeks ago, a neighbor in his 80s greeted me with a big grin — and a fake severed head. He had been decorating for Halloween and thought that answering the door with a fake severed head was a splendid idea. He was 100% right about that, and we had an excellent conversation.
That’s another great thing about canvassing: You’re a volunteer. You’re not on a clock. If you want to stop and have a nice conversation with someone, do it. That’s what we’re out there for.
Negative interactions are extremely rare; I’ve knocked on hundreds of doors and can only think of two or three times when people were rude. And sometimes even the negative interactions can be entertaining; goats chased State Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson. Twice. In one day. Two separate goats, at two separate houses.
Local action is your best bet for breaking the MAGA wave sweeping the country. Canvassing to support Prop 50 is a great way to make a difference; sign up at mobilize.us, or sign up for any of the other great causes there. Or just get active in your community — your church, synagogue, mosque, school or any other club or activity. If you choose to canvass, you’ll almost certainly find it a rewarding experience, and you’re highly unlikely to be chased by goats.
Mitch Wagner is a board member at large for the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club, serving La Mesa and surrounding communities — but all are welcome. We meet the first Wednesday of the month at 6:30 pm for a social half-hour, with programming starting 7 pm, at the La Mesa Community Center, 4975 Community Drive, La Mesa.
More often than meeting people who were strongly in favor or against redistricting, I met people who either had not heard of Proposition 50 or didn’t understand it. Others simply felt disillusioned by politics. They didn’t believe that politicians, no matter from what party, would have a positive impact on their lives, and they didn’t expect help from them.
Chris Arnade:: “…. Hong Kong is not walkable, [but] that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.” As always, I love his travel writing and street photography.
Photos from yesterday’s No Kings rally and march in downtown San Diego, in Waterford Park. There were three rallies in the city, and more than a dozen around the county. I was one of thousands of people who turned out.
Eight years ago today I attended my first meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. It has been quite a ride since.
I marched at the San Diego No Kings event this morning. I’ll have photos later. It was intense. My phone needs recharging and so do I.
Loni Anderson, Star of ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ Dies at 79 — “In 1980, she starred in the biographical drama and made-for-TV movie ‘The Jayne Mansfield Story,’ opposite a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Hungarian actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.”
I’m going to the No Kings event Saturday. I didn’t want to shlep a sign but then I thought — T-shirt! Ordered one, but it arrives Sunday. Oh, well — there will be other protests. Sadly, we’re not going to get rid of the 🤡and his 🍩enablers in one day.
My hotel room has no desk. It has an ironing board and iron but no closets, so once you’ve ironed your clothes, there is nowhere to hang them up.
I haven’t ironed anything since I ironed my shirt on our wedding day in 1993, but don’t you need to hang things up immediately after you iron them, if you’re not going to wear them right away?
Here’s something I saw today — this restaurant next door to my hotel. Colombian. It wasn’t great, but I’m glad I tried it anyway.
President Donald Trump is desperate for an enemy to justify the extreme force he wants to deploy on blue states and is trying his hardest to convince people that antifa is so dangerous that, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the roundtable this week, they need to be exterminated like ISIS or Hamas. The Trump administration also has a nearly pathological habit of accusing their enemies of being exactly like them. Which is why they think the left is a dark money-funded domestic terror cell full of pedophiles and spree shooters that wants to destroy America.
…
[Jack] Posobiec, an influencer who never ascended to Kirk’s level because he just can’t stop going full Nazi, said at the roundtable, “Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.” What happened to antifa after that, Jack?
— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, The war against giant frog costumes
The Romantic: How Diane Keaton’s quest for beauty left an imprint on American culture — A beautiful appreciation of a beautiful spirit and woman.
The Oatmeal’s comic/essay about AI art starts as yet another AI rant, but then goes in an interesting direction that more or less aligns with how I think about using AI for writing. I use it for what the Oatmeal calls administrative drudgery — dragging cans of paint up the stairs to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I do not use it to write.
New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic. “… when [AIs] were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics, the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lying and spreading hateful messages or misinformation.” Fortunately, this is not a problem when people use social media.
Scott Alexander reviews Julian Jaynes’s alternative-science masterpiece, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” and argues Jaynes is half-right:
Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.
Alexander argues that what Jaynes discovered is not the breakdown of the bicameral mind — left-brain and right-brain merging into an integrated whole. Jaynes discovered the origin of theory of mind.
Until the Bronze Age, people operated without theory of mind, and they hallucinated gods to compensate. When theory of mind emerged, it spread like a virus.
Turn on what Terry Pratchett called “first sight and second thoughts” and try to look at the Bronze Age with fresh eyes. It was really weird. People would center their city around a giant ziggurat, the “House of God”, with a giant idol within. They would treat this idol exactly like a living human – feeding it daily, washing it daily, sometimes even marching it through the streets on sedan chairs carried by teams of slaves so it could go on a “connubial visit” to the temple of an idol of the opposite sex! When the king died, hundreds of thousands of men would labor to build him a giant tomb, and then they would kill a bunch of people to serve him in the afterlife. Then every so often it would all fall apart and everyone would slink away into the hills, trying to pretend they didn’t spend the last twenty years buliding a jeweled obelisk so some guy named Ningal-Iddida could boast about how many slaves he had.
If the Bronze Age seems kind of hive-mind-y, Julian Jaynes argues this is because its inhabitants weren’t quite individuals, at least not the way we think of individuality.
The Trump government is like those episodes of MASH where Henry Blake leaves the camp and Frank Burns is in charge.
… when people say, “How come you were never mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I wasn’t paying attention.” … I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by nature. … So I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer, but it’s not, it’s a great answer. If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey…
— John Mulaney, “There’s a horse in the hospital."
I was today years old when I heard John Mulaney’s “Horse in the Hospital” routine, and it’s brilliant. “If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey… "
I am a heavy user of dictation on the iPhone — I probably dictate as much or more than I type — but don’t use it on the Mac or iPad. If I have a full-size keyboard available, it’s easier for me to type.
The online conversation community seems to gravitate toward corporate-owned silos rather than commons, and seems to like its arbitrary 300-character limits. These two trends are frustrating to me.
When I turned 50, I decided to get a tattoo, but I did not follow through because it seemed like too much of a commitment.
When I get dressed in the morning, I don’t like putting on T-shirts with messages on them because I may not agree with the message in the afternoon.
I used “harrumph” in a work chat this morning. I’m at an age now where I can “harrumph,” and I plan to take full advantage of this privilege.
The Best Apples to Eat Right Now, According to an Apple Reviewer
I love apples. I literally eat an apple a day. My go-to apple is now Cosmic Crisp.
For a few years, I loved Honeycrisps, but I now find them barely edible. I think Honeycrisps are different now.
Reviewer Brian Frange ranks SweeTango as number one. I’ve never had one but I’ll watch for it.
I work on a core team of eight people, five of them women, including the manager. We use ❤️ to acknowledge messages on Teams. But lately, I have been uncomfortable with the ❤️ and I am using a 👍 instead. On the other hand, I don’t want to send a message to my colleagues that I don’t like them — I’m just not comfortable with the ❤️.
Unrelated: I’ve been told I overthink things.
For me, the answers are:
I don’t like Discord, so I decided to drop all the Discords I participate in. If those communities go to a proper community platform, I’ll gladly rejoin.
I do LinkedIn for professional reasons.
I don’t do Instagram and Threads now, but I might go back.
C Spire overcomes AI ‘stigma’ — C Spire accelerated trustworthy AI adoption via a CEO-backed Center of Excellence, a customer-first strategy, and early tooling wins that saved time and blocked threats. My latest on Fierce Network.
Congratulations to Cory Doctorow on the publication of his new book, “Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it,” and his blockbuster profile in The New York Times.
Times writer Joseph Bernstein met with Cory over “an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner:”
Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.
Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad – even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.
“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”
Cory’s theory of enshittification in a nutshell:
First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.
Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.
Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.
In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.
“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”
Minnie does zoomies.
This is Tina and Ray’s dog Walter. Tina had about a dozen people over to her house this morning, and Walter greeted every one of them at the front door with a rope-toy in his mouth. Walter excels at tug-of-war.
What’s Wrong With Las Vegas? Prices are rising, international tourism is falling, and visits are down 11% year-over-year.
Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.
By Ben Fritz at the Wall Street Journal:
Los Angeles is full of transplants who moved here to pursue dreams of working in movies and TV. Few earned millions as stars or A-list directors. They build the sets, operate the cameras, manage the schedules and make sure everything looks and sounds perfect. The work isn’t steady, because film shoots end and TV shows get canceled. But established professionals had rarely gone more than a few months between gigs—until now.
The entertainment industry is in a downward spiral that began when the dual strikes by actors and writers ended in 2023. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the heart of L.A.’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.
“This is the first year since 1989 that I haven’t had a show to work on,” said Pixie Wespiser, a 62-year-old production manager and producer who has worked on 36 TV series, including the original “Night Court” and its recent revival. “I look around and I see so many people who are seriously suffering.”
At the end of 2024, some 100,000 people were employed in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two years earlier, there were 142,000.
The primary reason is that Hollywood is making less stuff.
…
Thomas Curley won an Oscar recording the sound on 2014’s “Whiplash” and had more job offers than he knew what to do with as recently as 2022. The 49-year-old hasn’t worked since April of last year, save for one week on a movie that was made in Europe but needed to shoot exteriors in San Francisco.
The hardest part isn’t watching his savings wither while he does home improvement projects and hunts for jobs, Curley said. It’s missing the creative camaraderie he has enjoyed for most of his adult life on movie and TV sets.
“Feeling like you’re part of a team that’s making something that can provide joy for millions of people around the world is what drew me here in the first place,” said the native of upstate New York. “That level of purpose is a really hard thing to let go of.”
Many Germans look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Bach and Goethe succumbed to rule by Hitler and his enabling thugs. Americans may someday look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Washington and Lincoln surrendered to Trump and his enabling thugs.
Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years. By Edward Packard, writer, whose work includes the prototype Choose Your Own Adventure book and many other books in that series, and native son of Huntington, NY, where I grew up.
Rebekah Riess and Bill Kirkos at CNN:
Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”
Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.
…
…. Eboni Watson, said she and others ducked for cover when hearing several flash bangs go off.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson told WLS, recalling trucks and military-style vans were used to separate adults from their children.
If ICE doesn’t want to be compared to the Gestapo, they could maybe try not acting like terrorists.
One of my neighbor kids is doing trumpet practice. This is a sentence one hopes never to utter.
We had a great meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club yesterday. It was wonderful to get together with people doing the work of preserving democracy against fascism.
Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy
I discovered Crocs a few weeks ago and I love them and want to wear them 24x7 and be buried in them when I die. They are very fashionable and I look great in them.
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
