Mitch's Blog

Meta wants to fill your social media feeds with AI-generated characters. They’ll have bios and profile photos and generate content, but they’ll be bots.

Nick Heer:

A big problem for Meta is that it is institutionally very dumb. … There are lots of smart people working there and its leadership clearly understands something about how people use social media.

But there is a vast sense of dumb in its attempts to deliver the next generation of its products.

I’m still very active on Facebook, but getting less so as Meta overthinks its products and my real-life friends and family wander away. I just want Facebook to just get the hell out of my way and let me see posts from the people, groups and pages I follow. That’s it. I’m fine with them throwing me the occasional ad to make money; Facebook ads are entertaining.

I don’t post these links to Facebook anymore because nobody sees them.

h/t @manton

Even Boomers who have saved for retirement are worried about outliving their money, and are living frugally to get by, according to a new study by Prudential Financial. This article focuses on wealthy retirees, but the study looks at retireees who are married with as little as $100,000 in assets, which is not much at all.

Today, I learned that HFY science fiction is a thing and that the acronym goes back at least 10 years. Although the subgenre goes back much longer — Isaac Asimov called it out.

Jimmy Carter Deserved Our Thanks and Respect, Not Our Sneers — Nicholas Kristof says Carter, who was reviled and ridiculed, will be remembered as one of America’s great Presidents and statesmen. “Hundreds of millions of people around the globe are living better lives because of his relentless efforts to overcome violence and disease.”

Military families scramble as new a anti-LGBTQ+ rule is poised to become law. — Republicans endanger military families.

A conservative organization led by Trump adviser Stephen Millier is threatening prison time for elected leaders and employees in San Diego and other California jurisdictions that enact immigration sanctuary policies.

I posted a multi-paragraph post to mitchw.blog earlier today, and my blogging software deleted all the paragraph breaks. Argh! However, I finally got it sorted, so if you are curious to read about my favorite TV shows of the year, it’s safe now.

A couple who met as teen penpals separated by 7,000 miles are now celebrating 30 years of marriage.

Trump’s Immigration Policies Could Create a Dystopian Humanitarian Crisis

Google Street View helped solve a year-old Spanish murder cause. Caught photos of what appeared to be a man dragging a corpse down a street and stuffing it into the trunk of a car.

The images were captured in the incredibly small town of Tajueco in Spain. And by small, I mean it’s home to barely over 100 people.

… this was a return trip for Google, but the company’s last visit occurred nearly 15 years ago.

It’s doubtful United Healthcare is abusing the DMCA to takedown Luigi Mangione apparel, but someone is

Heather Cox Richardson analyzes the infighting in the Trump coalition. It’s the DOGEs, led by Elon Musk, versus the MAGAs. I can’t believe I agree with Laura Loomer here, but really I want both sides to lose.

Man on the Inside. Ted Danson plays a retired and widowed engineering professor who answers an ad from a private detective to go undercover in a fancy San Francisco retirement home to find out who stole a resident’s valuable ruby necklace. Danson’s character approaches the job with verve and gusto. He falls in love with the community. He’s never in any physical danger (it’s not that kind of mystery). 

The show is funny, entertaining and also philosophical and wise about aging, which I’ve been thinking a lot about lately because it is something I’m doing and plan to continue. 

Sally Struthers stands out among many good performances, a reminder that she is a fine actor. Her career and reputation got done dirty after “All in the Family.” Yeah, she got fat. So what?

Ted Danson’s character lives in a beautiful house, immaculately kept. Every day, he puts on nice pants, a nice shirt, and often a neatly pressed sports jacket and tie with matching pocket square. This has inspired me to start dressing better every day — no, I’m not going as far as Ted Danson’s character, but lately I’ve been putting on a shirt with a collar rather than a T-shirt, and I’m easing out the sweatshirts in favor of sweaters and a flannel shirt. Hey, it’s a start. 

Evil. A Black priest, Muslim-American atheist science wiz and lapsed Catholic woman psychologist investigate a Satanic cult in New York, on behalf of the Catholic Church. Scary, dramatic and funny. Watching it, I was many times reminded of an interview by actress Dee Wallace Stone, in which she said she loved doing horror because of the range it gave her as an actor: You got to do all the emotions portrayed in comedy and drama, plus terror (obviously) and murderous rage. 

Katja Herbers plays the psychologist Kristen Bouchard, and she goes from wholesome Mom to professional psychologist, cool-headed demon hunter and occasional sex vixen when the role demands it. She’s a Dutch actor, but she believably plays an educated native New Yorker. Mike Colter (“The Good Wife,” “Luke Cage”) plays David Acosta, who is at first studying to become a priest and then becomes one. He’s a big, handsome fellow, and of course there is much sexual tension between him and Dr. Bouchard. Aasif Mandvi, formerly a correspondent on The Daily Show, plays Ben Shakir, the Muslim-American atheist and science wiz. Also watch for the four Bouchard prepubescent daughters who are almost always together and talk at the same time; Christine Lahti as Dr. Bouchard’s hot Mom; Michael Emerson, known to me from “Lost,” playing a smarmy villain in that actor’s excellent, smarmy style; Andrea Martin, known to me from SCTV and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” as a tough nun; and Wallace Shawn as a priest.  

The show is surprisingly smart on the conflict between faith and science, and on portraying the Church as a corruptible human institution and also a vessel of God. As I become more spiritual, one of the characters' throwaway lines about religion and science has become a touchstone for me — that God exists and loves us, but reveals Himself entirely through the workings of the universe. 

The Lincoln Lawyer. Mickey Haller, a high-priced Los Angeles lawyer, defends murder suspects who happen to be innocent and also happen to have scads of money to keep him in fancy suits and Lincoln cars. Becki Newton steals the show as Lorna Crane, Haller’s ex-wife, friend and office manager, who looks, dresses and talks like a Real Housewife but is smart and ruthless in defense of the innocent. It’s a lighthearted, unchallenging show. 

The Diplomat. Keri Russell, ex of “The Americans” and “Felicity,” plays a U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and Rufus Sewell plays her husband, a former diplomat who can’t stop meddling in state affairs. Light, complexly plotted and fun, with a “West Wing” vibe. 

High Potential. A quirky former cleaning lady for the LAPD turns out to be a genius and helps them solve crimes. 

Slow Horses. I loved the first season, but Julie hated it, so I’ll either find time to watch it on my own or forget about it. I’ve got two ten-hour flights in February and March, and I’ve already got about 73 hours of TV lined up for them. 

Bad Monkey. Based on a Carl Hiaasen novel, and the only thing I’ve ever seen onscreen that captures Hiaasen’s dark humor — one gag in the show involves a severed arm — his big heart, quirky characters and keen sense of Florida locations. The show stars Vince Vaughn. Gen X irony seems to be the extent of his acting range, but he’s great at that, so he’s cast pretty well here. 

Doctor Who.

Fallout. A gross-out post-nuclear apocalyptic science fiction comedy-drama. Walton Goggins has a dual role, in flashbacks as a handsome, wholesome cowboy actor of the late 1950s and early 1960s, who becomes a murderous mutated ghoul with a missing nose. Goggins is such a great actor he doesn’t need a nose.  

Shogun.

Manhunt. A 19th Century procedural about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth in the days following Lincoln’s assassination. Oligarchs take advantage of the power vacuum following Lincoln’s assassination to ensure they get their payday and that American Blacks get Jim Crow instead of true emancipation.

Resident Alien. Comedy science fiction starting Alan Tudyk as an alien trying to blend in in a present-day American small town and slowly falling in love with the community. It’s “Northern Exposure,” but it’s an alien in Colorado instead of a New York Jew in Alaska. Hey, both main characters are doctors. 

All Creatures Great and Small. Life in a country veterinary practice in rural Yorkshire, England in the 1930s. Peak comfort TV. Lots of people wearing sweaters. 

Funny Woman. Based on a Nick Hornby novel and set in the 1960s, a beauty contest winner from England’s Blackpool comes to London dreaming of becoming a comedy star like her idol, Lucille Ball. After some struggling actress travails, she stars in a hit sitcom of the era and rubs shoulders with the beautiful people on Carnaby Street. Season Two is currently airing in the UK, but I’ve seen no indication of its coming to the US. However, I’m in no rush; much as I loved the show and novel it was based on, the story seemed complete in one season. 

Julia. A historical drama about Julia Child’s cooking show launch in the early 1960s and her rise as a celebrity chef. Disappointingly canceled after two seasons. 

1923. Angst and gunplay in 1923 Montana, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, and created by Taylor Sheridan. A prequel series to “Yellowstone.” The characters are miserable and violent all the time, and any joy they feel is fleeting and merely a setup for more misery and violence. So we loved it.

For All Mankind 

Currently watching

The Rockford Files. The 1970s TV series is finally streaming without commercials, on Amazon Prime. It still holds up. The dialogue is fast and witty, the plots are complex and twisty, James Garner as Rockford is as dry and cool as a good martini. Yeah, the clothes are goofy but the cars are cool. 

“Columbo” is on Amazon Prime too, also presumably without commercials. I’m looking forward to watching that. 

Shetland. Season nine of the murder mystery set in the remote, desolate and beautiful Shetland Islands in northern Great Britain. If you didn’t get enough people wearing sweaters in “All Creatures Great and Small,” you’ll get even more here. So much wool it makes me scratchy to watch. 

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Pew pew pew. 

WSJ: The Progressive Moment in Global Politics Is Over . Maybe so. But what next?

Steve Bannon Calls Elon Musk a ‘Toddler’

House GOP Fixin' To Screw Up Speaker Vote, Imperil Trump’s Inauguration, Cause Us To Die Laughing. Gary Legum at Wonkette: “It’s wild to think that at some point down the road, the fate of the planet could really hinge on what decision these fuckwits make here.”

Tijuana isn’t ready for mass deportations.

The NYPD and New York City government are in freefall. Fun to watch, unless you live in New York, as Tim Cushing at Techdirt notes:

Lately, I’m keeping in mind George Carlin’s line that when you’re born you get a ticket to the freakshow and when you are born in America you get a front-row seat.

Carlin was dark in his final years, or at least his stage persona was. And I don’t think you can maintain a persona for as much time as Carlin did without it being true. He cheered for mass death. He hated the human race but loved people, which are two views I am finding more sympathy for as I am now just eight years younger than he was when he died.

When I read the news, I am disgusted by the human race, but when I meet people in life or work, I’m more inclined to love them as they are, without judging them.

I started using my current barber soon after the pandemic lockdown ended. I’m pretty sure that at that time, they did not take Apple Pay, and they had an ancient, slow credit card reader, so I just paid them cash, because it was more convenient. The last time I went in for a haircut, I forgot to bring my wallet, so before I sat down, I asked if they take Apple Pay. They do now.

That’s the last place on Earth I paid cash for anything. I’m living the cash-free life now.

Brett’s @ttscoff@nojack.easydns.ca mention of Drafts as a place he stores lists makes me think I should use Drafts more as a place where some text lives, not just a place where it starts. Then I think that sometimes I like to save images too, which makes Drafts less useful to me. Then I think, should I use Bear? Then I think: Why use anything else when Apple Notes is right there?

This is far from the first time my brain has gone around this particular hamster wheel.

Our stop was the Lafayette Hotel, which has been remodeled recently and looks delightfully bonkers, with an over-the-top early-midcentury theme.

Here’s a reproduction of the hotel in gingerbread.

And the view from the hotel lobby bar, where we sat for 15 minutes waiting for a table, with an estimated 25 minutes to go and getting hungry.

So we opted for the traditional Chinese food dinner.

Trump isn’t joking about wanting to control Greenland and the Panama Canal. Trump’s talk will push America’s allies closer to China.

Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots. State health officials are spreading anti-vax lies that will kill many people and immiserate families.

“Do I condone murder? No, obviously. But I’m also sick and tired of people pretending that what is happening to the American people every day isn’t eugenics through class warfare."

RIP Michael Brewer, whose “One Toke Over the Line” was a hippie anthem.

Michael Brewer, half of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, who scored an unlikely Top 10 hit in 1971 with “One Toke Over the Line” — one of the most overt pop odes to marijuana of the hippie era and presumably the only one to be performed on the squeaky-clean “Lawrence Welk Show” — died on Tuesday at his home near Branson, Mo.

I had to put Minnie out in the backyard for a half hour this afternoon to keep her out of the way of the cleaners. She looked at me like I’d abandoned her on the side of the road in the North Dakota woods in February at midnight, where she would be eaten by bears.

I am reading: The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson 📚. Published in May of this year, this book is a history of the violent anarchists of New York 110 years ago and the police investigations of them. The book has become timely with the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and Luigi Mangione’s arrest.

Jamelle Bouie: “when you have anti-DEI proponents openly going after black military officers for recruiting from HBCUs and suing schools for their black and Hispanic enrollment *even after the schools ended any racial preferences* then the only honest label for these people is ‘segregationist’"

“The Democratic Party needs to be the party of ‘fuck you.'"

Yes to this. No compromise with MAGA.

Tonight’s movie:

You called down the thunder, well now you’ve got it! … The cowboys are finished, you understand me? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it! So run, you cur! Run! Tell all the other curs the law’s coming. You tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me, you hear? Hell’s coming with me!

“When you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook."

The UK Online Safety Act is killing communities. Small, locally run communities cannot afford to comply. Only billion-dollar tech monopolies will survive.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Policymakers have repeatedly brushed off warnings about these consequences, insisting that concerns are overblown or merely fear-mongering from big tech companies looking to avoid regulation. But it’s not. And we’re seeing the impact already.

The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it’s a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.

This trend is coming to the US too.

Via @cstross@wandering.shop

Elon Musk Boosting German Fascists, What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a bigoted industrialist who owns a giant car company has endorsed a far-right German political party full of Nazis that aims to purify Europe by casting out groups of people it considers to be its lessers, if not downright subhuman. Ha ha, no, it’s not Henry Ford, but we sure fooled you….

He’s a right-winger who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, and one of his first actions when he bought Twitter two years ago was to let tons of racists and bigots the previous ownership had banned back onto the platform, such that it now resembles a Munich beer hall in 1933 or a meeting of the White Citizens Council in Alabama in the late 1950s….

So, we hate to engage in hyperbole or cause a scene, but we think it is maybe bad that Musk on Friday endorsed a far-right party full of neo-Nazis to take over Germany. Not to be too alarmist, but historically such takeovers have gone poorly not only for Germany and all of Europe, but also for the rest of the planet….

…

The endorsement falls neatly in line with the support the AfD has received from other people in Donald Trump’s orbit, who share the party’s virulent anti-immigrant views.

Trump’s first-term ambassador to Germany “famously pissed off the German government by cozying up to the Afd.” Steve Bannon “tried to recruit the party into his plan to unite all the far-right national populist parties in Europe to form a sort of supergroup” in the European Union Parliament a few years ago."

Imagine if Henry Ford had been Herbert Hoover’s closest advisor in 1931, at the same time the Nazis were on the rise. That would have been bad, right? Well, somehow that’s what America is getting. First time as tragedy, second time as farce, etc.

— Gary Legum at Wonkette

Here’s something else I saw walking the dog today: This tiny dog wearing a coat and shoes.

I love a dog wearing shoes.

Something I saw while walking the dog

We watched the first episode of the new Dexter prequel series: “Dexter: Original Sin.” Dexter’s back and he’s got lots of plastic wrap.

Many readers feel compelled to finish any book they started. I am one of those readers. But that’s a bad compulsion. It makes you cautious about trying new things. You read more books, and greater variety, if you quit reading any book you’re not enjoying.

I’ve been reading an acclaimed science fiction trilogy that totals 1,100 pages. I liked the first book, but did not love it. I liked the second book less. Tonight I got within 100 pages of the end of the third book and said, “I’m done.”

I went to the Wikipedia page for the book and read the plot summary, which is something I do when I’m considering abandoning a book, and confirmed I was not interested in finishing.

The trilogy could have been a single good novel. Say, 250 pages.

Though the series is hard science fiction, the structure is fantasy. A band of characters, led by a hero, travel through a series of lands populated by strange aliens to defeat an antagonist that’s essentially a powerful evil wizard. This is not a genre I enjoy.

I’m intentionally not saying the name of the series or author. The author is aging, and I hear they’re having a hard time. I don’t want the karma of saying anything bad.

“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under ‘Wizards.’”

Currently reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚

Flipboard’s Surf joins several existing apps designed to view Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms, as well as BlueSky and ActivityPub.¹ I love Flipboard CEO Mike MkCue’s vision of the “social web,” as described by David Pierce at The Verge with feeds superseding websites.

“You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.

Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds.

I have tried Tapestry and Reeder, which have a similar philosophy of combining feeds from multiple sources and platforms into a single place. I found those apps not quite ready for me to use regularly, but I love the promise of that direction.

It’s what Dave Winer calls Textcasting and I’m eager to see it mature.

The Take It Down Act, written to combat non-consensual intimate imagery posted to the Internet, has the best intentions, but the implementation is a disaster, says Mike Masnick at Techdirt. After receiving a complaint of such imagery, the law would require platforms to act to take down images and duplicates quickly. But the proposed law does nothing to combat false complaints.

The only current law in the US that has a similar notice and takedown scheme is the DMCA, and, as we’ve been describing for years, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision is widely and repeatedly abused by people who want to takedown perfectly legitimate content.

There have been organized attempts to flood systems with tens of thousands of bogus DMCA notices. A huge 2016 study found that the system is so frequently abused to remove non-infringing works as to question the validity of the entire notice-and-takedown procedure. And that’s the DMCA which in theory has a clause that is supposed to punish fraudulent takedown notices (even if that’s rarely effective).

Here, the law doesn’t even contemplate such a system. Instead, it just assumes all notices will be valid.

On top of that, by requiring covered platforms to “identify and remove any known identical copies” suggests that basically every website will have to purchase potentially expensive proactive scanning software that can match images, whether through hashes or otherwise.

Yet another proposal to regulate the Internet that would see to it that only billion-dollar-companies can afford to run platforms.

Ageism and ableism are the stupidest prejudices. Most of us will become old and disabled. Ageism and ableism are delayed self-hatred.

It’s OK if you want to argue that Gerry Connolly is a hack, incapable of inspiring Democrats, and his health makes him physically incapable of doing the work as party leader on the Oversight Committee. I love AOC and was extremely disappointed to see her passed over.

But age has nothing to do with it. If Connolly is unfit, it’s not because of his age. The MAGA leadership, except Trump himself, is young. The leaders of the MAGA-manosphere are even younger.

Bernie Sanders was 75 in 2016, a year older than Connolly is today

Calling out party leadership for their age sends a message to progressives over 60 that we are not welcome. We are merely tolerated.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in California over bird flu.

“This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak,” Newsom said in a statement. “While the risk to the public remains low, we will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent the spread of this virus.”

With the federal government about to be taken over by bumbling criminals, Newsom reminds me why I’m relieved to live in California, which has a functioning government.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine misinformation campaign helped cause a measles outbreak in Samoa [in 2019] that killed 83 people, mostly kids."

Since I upgraded to Apple Intelligence a couple of days ago, it has twice started talking to me while I’m wearing my AirPods and conversing with an actual person. I was on a videoconference with my boss’s boss this afternoon, and the AirPods started talking and would not shut up. This is highly annoying at best and it potentially made me look like an idiot in front of someone who signs my paycheck. Utter failure on the part of Apple product design; I am highly dissatisfied.

Following up on my friend Steven J. Vaughan-Nicols' article praising the Perplexity search engine, I decided to do a fast, spontaneous test.

Reading the news over lunch, I saw that an actress named Jill Jacobson had died. The obit said she was in Star Trek.

I said to myself, “I wonder who she played on Star Trek?”

The article said she appeared on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine.”

First I asked ChatGPT what characters she played. ChatGPT replied that she only ever appeared on TNG. I asked about DS9, and it said she had not appeared on that show.

I searched Kagi. Interestingly, Kagi turned up several articles titled “Who did Jill Jacobson play on Star Trek”—the exact words of my query.

I know that’s a common SEO trick (“What time is the Super Bowl?”) but would not think that would be implemented for such a specific question.

Google’s AI summary says “Vanessa” on TNG, with no mention of DS9.

And here is Perplexity’s answer — complete, concise, and impressive.

What’s the real answer? I can’t say for sure; I’m not a superfan of those particular iterations of Trek. However, I consider the Memory Alpha wiki definitive on issues of Trek lore, and it agrees with the IMDB.

“All eyes are on Bend, Oregon, where a mysterious vandal (or group of vandals) has been sticking large, plastic googly eyes on public art sculptures around the city." The photos alone are worth a click.

Looking around for places to have Christmas dinner. I asked ChatGPT what restaurants are open. First two on the list: Denny’s and IHOP. lol no

“With the polio vaccine in the news, I want to tell some of my mom’s story: My mom got polio when she was a kid living in southern California, pre-vaccine…. Polio didn’t ruin her life, but it has stolen it in slices."

"… if you legislate as if everyone is big tech, big tech is all you will end up with."

Daring Fireball: On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople.

Unnamed public relations spokespeople are unaccountable for errors and lies.

I go along with the journalism custom of using unnamed PR people. Perhaps I should not.

Hamilton Nolan:

If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war–and there is–and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs.

And if the decline of labor unions is robbing the working class of its most powerful tool and undermining the general health of society, the reasonable thing for the labor movement to do is not to play footsie with a political party that has shown repeatedly through words and deeds that it stands against the existence of organized labor. The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either–the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)

…

When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today. Radicalism is only getting more and more correct. Recognize it or get run over.

“We are the king makers.” How San Diego’s Awaken Church pushes politics from the pulpit

Schools say they’re spending the money on legal fees, added security, additional staff time and additional costs for community, school board and government relations, according to a report by Diana Lambert at the Times of San Diego. Districts are picking up the financial burden of staff turnover related to conflicts and because staff had to take time away from other duties to deal with conflict.

Half of superintendents surveyed said they’d been personally harassed at least once during the school year, 10% said they’d been threatened with violence and 11% had their proprty vandalized.

“A Pennsylvania superintendent called the emotional stress and anxiety ‘nearly crippling.'”

This article doesn’t say who’s causing all this strife, but I bet it’s the usual MAGA/Qanon/anti-vax/anti-LGBTQ/Dominionist suspects. Trans people and drag queens aren’t bothering anyone.

A law proposed by Sen. Ron Widen would give the FCC greater power over telecom’s lax cybersecurity in the wake of the ugly Salt Typhoon hack.

How to read 100 pages in books daily.

Awaken Church, an anti-LGBTQ charismatic sect closely aligned with Trump, wants to expand into Coronado, a suburb of San Diego. It’s facing pushback from local leaders (good!).

Church leaders compare Democrats to evil Biblical figures and say the LGBTQ community is the devil. The church partners with a right-wing organization that says it’s building an “army” to “save” America.

The Ingenuity helicopter is permanently grounded on Mars following a crash, after 72 flights. The NASA interplanetary probe was built to be affordable, using off-the shelf components where possible, and was designed for only five flights.

Police have determined who put the body of an 81-year-old former nurse in a home freezer in Allied Gardens, a suburb of San Diego: It was her husband, who died in February, weeks after the body was discovered.

But the cause of death and motive are still unknown.

Julie and I have an agreement that if one of us predeceases the other — which is, of course, likely — the survivor will not put the body of the deceased in a home freezer.

Unless it involves an awesome prank, in which case anything goes.

Ross Douthat: It’s Going to Be Normal to Have Extreme Beliefs. “Going to be”? It already is.

ChatGPT is getting support for Projects. You will be able to group related chats together and add source documents and custom instructions. This looks extremely useful and makes ChatGPT more like NotebookLLM.

I’d love to be able to pin or bookmark chats.

Another new Twitter? Good luck with that. “Users are now flocking to Bluesky. But every social media platform becomes a wasteland in the end.”

In a short article, J Wortham casts a skeptical eye on whether BlueSky will be the new, better Twitter and widens the discussion to examine Silicon Valley and California history. Racism and violence aren’t late additions; they were there from the beginning.

Kennedy’s lawyer has asked the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. A suicide cult is being put in charge of US health policy.

Chris Arnade Walks the World:

The last few months has provided two moments that emphasize how central McDonald’s is to American life, both physically and culturally. First there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop where he “worked” for an hour, and now the news that Luigi Mangione, the charged and alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was caught in an Altoona franchise because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.

Those who have followed me for the last decade know that McDonald’s is also central to who I am. My first viral piece, that effectively launched my writing career, was about how McDonald’s has become America’s community centers, especially for communities where so much else has fallen apart, or disappointed people.

…

Trump’s McDonald’s photo op, which while it has been adjudicated to death, is a great illustration of what many elites still miss about his appeal.

Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s “just like you” despite being on the surface anything like them. His love of McDonald’s, which I believe is as genuine as any politician can ever have, is one of those signals, and maybe his most effective, because it makes his critics go hyperbolic in a way that signals that they are not “just like you.”

I recently discovered Arnade as a writer and I think he’s fantastic. I prevously read his piece on how McDonald’s has become America’s community center, and loved it, but I didn’t register the byline.

Like me, Arnade is an ambler but he is far more dedicated than I.

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic:

We could use a new category [for adulthood], one reflecting the fact that longevity is inserting one, two, or even three decades between middle age and old age.

As it happens, such a category is available: late adulthood. Associated with such thinkers as the sociologist Phyllis Moen, the psychologist Laura Carstensen, the social entrepreneurs Chip Conley and Marc Freedman, and the activist and writer Ashton Applewhite, the notion of late adulthood captures the reality of a new stage of life, in which many people are neither fully retired nor conventionally employed — a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard” jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God.

And no, this is not a pipe dream. Copious evidence shows that most of what people think they know about life after 50 is wrong. Aging per se (as distinct from sickness or frailty) is not a process of uniform decline. It brings gains, too: greater equanimity, more emotional resilience, and what Carstensen and others have called the positivity effect, a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings. Partly for that reason, the later decades of life are, on average, not the saddest but the happiest. Contrary to popular belief, aging does not bring mental stagnation. Older people can learn and create, although their styles of learning and creativity are different than in younger years. Emotional development and maturation continue right through the end of life. And aging can bring wisdom — the ability to rise above self-centered viewpoints, master turbulent emotions, and solve life’s problems — a boon not only to the wise but to everyone around them.

Late adulthood is a time when the prospects for earning diminish but the potential for grandparenting, mentoring, and volunteering peaks. It is — or can be — a time of reorientation and relaunch, a time when zero-sum goals such as social competition and personal ambition yield to positive-sum pursuits such as building community and nurturing relationships.

… Right now, Americans are receiving more than a decade of additional time in the most satisfying and prosocial period of life. This is potentially the greatest gift any generation of humans has ever received. The question is whether we will grasp it.

I found myself nodding along to a lot of this.

… a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard” jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God.

Check. I come in to work, I work hard, I try to do great work, and when I’m done I’m done. I am no longer interested in advancing my “career” — I don’t want to be the VP of anything or grind or have a side-hustle go into founder mode or be an entrepreneur.¹ I do want to give back more to the community (I’m working on that) and family (more challenging because our families are thousands of miles away). As for God: My idea of God is that all They ask of us is we do right. (Which is asking too much a lot of the time.)

… a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings

Check. I had a very bad cold the past week, but even as I was lying in bed hacking and coughing, I was grateful to have a warm bed to lie in, and Julie to nag me to take better care of myself.

I don’t know about the need for a new category of adulthood, and a label — “late adulthood” — go go with it. Ashton Applewhite,² whose work on aging I admire enormously, uses the word “olders.” I think that type of language eventually becomes euphemisms, like the phrases “golden years” and “senior citizens” in previous generations, and the euphemisms eventually become as toxic as the original. Maybe instead we should copy the example of our queer³ friends and family, reclaim the bad word, and make it our own: “old.”

On the other hand, I have occasionally described myself as “old” to younger colleagues.⁴ “You’re not old,” they say. And I find that conversation to be a waste of time. Which is becoming more precious to me on account of my being old.⁵

Karl Bode at Techdirt:

Academics have spent generations warning about what happens when you let journalism and media consolidate in the hands of rich people and corporations. As this season’s election coverage demonstrated, the end result is usually a lazy simulacrum of journalism that looks like real reporting, but tends to reflect ownership interests and (usually) lacks the courage to challenge wealth and power.

The coverage tends to be feckless and shallow. It tends to hew toward false ideological symmetry (what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere"). It tends to give short shrift to issues like labor and consumer rights, and extra attention and credence to corporatist beliefs. It very often demonstrates sexist, classist, and racist bias. It’s generally not subtle.

When white male billionaires jump into the news business they are conditioned to see none of this. Most of the time, as we’ve seen with outlets like Politico (run by German billionaire CEO Mathias Döpfner) they’ll generally whine about “bias," but believe most of the bias in journalism is coming from “the left” end of the ideological spectrum (too much “divisive” coverage about class and race issues).

How Easy Rawlins Built a Real Estate Empire, One Crime Novel at a Time. “Walter Mosley talks about how his fictional hero frees himself from wage labor through America’s favorite side hustle: landlording.” — I loved these books. I got out of the habit of reading them. Time to resume!

Thanks to AI, the Hottest New Programming Language is… English

Predicting the Present: Cory Doctorow reflects on his 2019 story, “Radicalized,” about men on a message board who see their loved ones murdered by medical insurance companies, and who “egg each other on to spectacular acts of mass violence against health insurance company employees, hospital billing offices, and other targets of their rage.”

“Radicalized,” of course, foreshadowed real-life events, specifically the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Cory says he’s surprised there hasn’t been more violence directed against health insurance companies, given their flagrant abuses and given that the U.S. is awash in guns.

Cory:

Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe."

Think about hospital exec Ralph de la Torre, who cheerfully testified to Congress that he’d killed patients in pursuit of profit. De la Torre clearly doesn’t fear any kind of consequences for his actions. He owns hospitals that are filled with tens of thousands of bats (he stiffed the exterminators), where none of the elevators work (he stiffed the repair techs), where there’s no medicine or blood (he stiffed the suppliers) and where the doctors and nurses can’t make rent (he stiffed them too). De La Torre doesn’t just own hospitals – he also owns a pair of superyachts:

pluralistic.net/2024/02/2…

It is a miracle that so many people have lost their mothers, sons, wives and husbands so Ralph de la Torre could buy himself another superyacht, and that those people live in a country where you can buy an assault rifle, and that Ralph de la Torre isn’t forced to live in a bunker and travel in a tank.

It’s a rather beautiful sort of miracle, to be honest. I like to think that it comes from a widespread belief by the people of this country I have since become a citizen of, that we should solve our problems politically, rather than with bullets.

But the assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence. As a character in “Radicalized” says, “They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.”

Read Radicalized here.

Trump’s pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel, sent a bogus legal threat to an MSNBC commentator and was threatened with repeated taunting in response.

Khamenei Loses Everything

Agenda item 29 on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting prohibits the sherriff’s department from participating in deporting undocumented people.

Amy Reichart has rallied her troops to send comments to the supervisors asking them to vote no.

Please send a short message to the supervisors asking them to vote yes on agenda item #29.

Here is a sample:

I urge the supervisors to vote YES on this item (agenda item #29) to protect our communities. The county should not be using its resources to engage in immigration enforcement, which is a federal function. County resources should be used to support, not separate, families.

And here is the link to submit your comment.

FBI files uncover the inside of ISIS’s graphic design arm. Sure, they’re terrorists but that’s no excuse for unprofessional marketing.

It’s Impossible to Pee Legally in San Diego. Public restrooms are scarce.

Telecom Industry ‘Think Tank’ Feebly Tries To Smear Community Owned Broadband

Six hours under martial law in Seoul. Sarah Jeong, features editor at The Verge, was in South Korea on a personal trip and got caught up in the attempted coup. She wrote this engaging account. “… on the ground, at the protests that would prevent the president from seizing power, people were organized, angry, and a little drunk.”

Hamilton Nolan: Privatized America. The decline in publicly held companies is bad for worker prosperity and corporate accountability.

‘Appeasement in the New Age of Trump’, MSNBC Edition

Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong Is Tanking the LA Times’s Credibility

DOJ Investigation Proves That If A PD Isn’t Known For Its Constant Rights Violations, It’s Because It Hasn’t Been Investigated Yet

… America will decline, but will decline less fast than its allies, and the world will split into two competing blocs. Only this time the “Western” bloc will be the weaker, less technologically advanced one.

— US/China Trade War Heats Up, Ian Welsh

LA Times Owner To Personally Review Opinion Headlines To Avoid Offending Elon Musk

In Japan, takkyu-bin services conveniently forward your luggage to your destination.

RIP Trent Zelazny. A moving tribute by his friend George. R.R. Martin georgerrmartin.com/notablog/…

Trump fans are suffering from Tony Soprano syndrome. They don’t see that characters like Tony, Walter White and Judge Dredd are villains. They think Trump is an anti-hero who will fight for them, whereas Trump fights only for himself.

I’m skeptical of this kind of analysis; it’s lacking original research and too on-the-nose to make Trump opponents feel superior.

John Gruber on using generative AI for Internet research: “I direct (and trust) ChatGPT as I would a college intern working as a research assistant. I expect accuracy, but assume that I need to double-check everything.”

Same. I also use ChatGPT to help me write descriptions, summaries, headlines and introductory and concluding sections for reports and articles. Keyword is “help” — I’m in charge and doing the work.

The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms. By Zeynep Tufekci. We’re in the Gilded Age 2.0, with yawning wealth inequality and political violence. Only now the guns are bigger and more dangerous.

How Trump Targeted Undecided Voters Without Breaking the Bank. The Trump campaign was outspent by Harris, but made up for it with microtargeting.

The UnitedHealthcare Gunman Understands the Surveillance State

A delightful review of the McDonalds McRib):

I had a McRib yesterday, which for the uninitiated is a sandwich from McDonald’s that was introduced in 1981 and discontinued in 1985 due to poor sales. This should have been the end of the McRib story, but some people — people who live among us!! — desperately wanted the sandwich to return, and McDonald’s then began rolling it out semi-annually in certain markets as a limited time menu item to satiate the most deranged people alive.

h/t Club MacStories

Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor. By Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

We watched Yellowstone 5x12 “Counting Coup”

New technology from World Labs, a startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, can generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. The tech “lets you step into any image and explore it in 3D.” Wild! I’d love to play with this with old family photos.

The Great Grocery Store Squeeze.

Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s.

Easing restrictions on “discriminatory pricing” allowed major supermarket chains to drive local groceries out of business, and forced residents of low-status city neighborhoods and rural towns to travel long distances to buy food.

“The Biden administration has begun to connect the dots.” But Trump’s re-election puts that work in doubt.

By Stacy Mitchell at The Atlantic.

h/t Garbage Day

The dog got into the cat food today. I hope your day is going as well as hers.

We watched Evil 4x08 “How to Save a Life”

Currently reading: Demon by John Varley 📚Book 3 in the Gaea trilogy.

Finished reading: The Closers by Michael Connelly 📚. Another good Harry Bosch yarn. Spoiler alert: Bosch catches the murderer, but only after near catastrophic failure.