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.

A quick note for my San Diego friends

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.

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.”

… 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

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.

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

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.

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

… giving more rights to a creative worker who has no bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, the bullies will take it and your kid will remain hungry. To get your kid lunch, you have to clear the bullies away from the gate.

— Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights, by Cory Doctorow

RIP Earl Holliman, 96, who appeared in “The Twilight Zone,” “Giant,” “Forbidden Planet” and the 1970s TV series “Police Woman."

Alex Williams at the New York Times:

Earl Holliman, an iron-jawed actor who earned a star on Hollywood Boulevard for a prolific career that included a corral full of Westerns, an appearance on the first episode of “The Twilight Zone” and a turn as Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s television drama “Police Woman,” died on Monday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 96.

…

Despite a promising trajectory, Mr. Holliman was open about not burning for stardom the way many in Hollywood did.

“Money is getting important to me,” he said in a 1967 interview with The Los Angeles Times, for an article headlined “He’d Rather Be an Actor Than a Star.” “The trouble is, I can’t handle success.”

After starring in the Western series “Hotel de Paree,” which ran for a season starting in 1959, he told the newspaper he received four movie offers and a recording contract from Capitol Records.

“So what did I do?” he said. “I went to Europe instead, bummed around for a whole year.”

A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History.

Zeynep Tufekci at the New York Times:

The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.

Biden has failed to take action to defend against H5N1, and Trump wants an anti-vaxxer and advocate of dubious herd immunity pandemic prevention in charge of public health. This is not OK.

On the Mac Power Users forum, I’m following a discussion about the search for perfect headphones for different use cases.

I mainly use my headphones to listen to podcasts and make calls, both videoconferencing, for work, and the occasional phone call. Over the years, I’ve gone from AirPods to AirPods Pro and now I use AirPods Pro 2, which I like very much. The noise canceling is great.

I am blessed because, apparently, I have perfectly average earholes; AirPods have always fit great for me.1

I used SoundCore sleep earbuds for a while but they stopped working after a few months.

Now I use foam earplugs.

I tried using the AirPods Pro as sleep earpods but they jammed deep into my ears when I slept on my side and started beeping a warning, completely defeating the purpose. However, those were first-gen AirPods Pro; I now have the second-gen so maybe I’ll give those a try.

  1. Once I figured out how to wear the blasted things. For a couple of years I jammed them in my ears with the stems facing outward because I did not trust that they would just rest effortlessly on the ear bottom-part. ↩︎

Tim Chambers: A Quick Snapshot of the Microblogging Landscape

I like Chambers' vision: Mastodon should evolve to be easier to use, like Linux evolved into Chromebooks. BlueSky and Mastodon should become more interoperable. Threads should fully adopt ActivityPub. Ultimately, microblogging — and blogging! — should become one big thing, like email, where the underlying platform and protocols are unimportant.

Tumblr can continue to be Tumblr, and that’s OK. Matt Mullenweg said the platform would embrace ActivityPub two years ago, but that’s the last we heard of it. I don’t think he meant it; he just blurted it out without considering it.

h/t @manton

The far right grows through disaster fantasies

Cory Doctorow:: The right thrives on fantasies about urban collapse, “FEMA death camps, ‘great replacement theory,’ the ‘Great Reset,’ fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines,” while denying the existence of real-world catastrophes like climate change.

Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon’s child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement’s fixation on “the unborn.”

It’s not just that these kids don’t exist – it’s that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump’s “kids in cages” family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.

The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving “the unborn” – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the “culture of life” that would rescue hypothetical children.

Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.

Let’s All Take a Breath and Get Off the Plane Like Grown-Ups

I got in a shouting match with a guy last month over this issue — which, to be clear, means I was a jerk. I’m not proud of that moment.

Then, when I got home, I did some Internet research and determined I had been wrong about this for 35 years. But no more! I have learned! I am a new de-boarder! Or I will be the next time I fly.

Simplifying! I decided to stop posting to Threads, check in there only occasionally and consolidated my two personal newsletters into one. Also, I’m going to quit checking Reddit daily. I feel lighter already!

John Scalzi: Holden Caulfield in middle age. Like Scalzi, I never got the appeal of “Catcher in the Rye.” And my reasons were similar to his: I grew up reading science fiction.

If you were going to give me a teenage hero, give me Heinlein’s Starman Jones: He traveled the galaxy and memorized entire books of log tables and became Captain of a starship (for procedural reasons, granted). All Holden did was bitch, bitch, bitch.

I stepped over one of the cats this afternoon and she panicked and bolted and I changed the direction my foot was coming down and she changed her direction and I stepped on her a little bit and nearly fell on my face and she bolted out of the room.

That was eight hours ago and we have not seen her since.

I’m sure she’s plotting to kill me.

I’ll be sleeping with one eye open.

Presumptive Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is Trump's "most dangerous cabinet pick."

Hegseth has written multiple books describing is conspiracy theories that the US is ruled by a Communist conspiracy launched by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and which is now embodied in the Democratic Party, writes Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic.

He believes officers who obeyed orders from Obama and Biden — in other words, officers who did their sworn duty to obey the lawful orders of their commander-in-chief — are traitors who should be dealt with accordingly.

He believes Democrats are traitors who should be overthrown by any means necessary, and he makes no exemptions for any Democrat (including me!).

Chait:

A defense secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

This House Democrat Keeps Winning in Trump Country. Here’s What She Knows.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won a “long-shot Democratic campaign for Congress in a solidly Republican, heavily rural part of Washington State…. FiveThirtyEight estimated her chance of victory at a mere 2 percent. But she won, defeating a burgeoning star of the MAGA movement named Joe Kent,” writes Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times.

Gluesenkamp Perez, whose father immigrated from Mexico, ran an auto shop with her husband and lived in a house they’d built themselves. Her campaign emphasized both her blue-collar bona fides and her support for abortion rights, and she was frank in her denunciations of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism….

But if many on the left were delighted by her victory, they were disappointed by how often she broke with her party once she was in office. Gluesenkamp Perez voted to scrap Joe Biden’s plan for student debt relief. She supported a Republican bill to bar the use of public lands to house migrants and a resolution censuring her colleague Rashida Tlaib for her anti-Israel rhetoric.

…

I’ve heard you say that there’s no “one weird trick” that will end the Democratic Party’s woes. But it seems like maybe the closest thing to one weird trick would just be recruiting more working- and middle-class people to run for office.

Yes. I don’t think more lawyers running for office is the solution here.

Given that you won in a Trump district, you must have won some percentage of Trump voters. When you talk to people who voted for both you and Donald Trump, what do they tell you? Where is the center of that Venn diagram?

Probably cost of living and border security.

Was it just that they felt like you both cared about those issues? Or did they feel like you both had solutions?

It has been a priority for me. The world I’m living in, I’m going to the grocery store and seeing people take stuff out of their cart. Fentanyl is just running rampant. A lot of us felt like Joe Biden’s administration did not take it seriously, and there was a very, very late pivot on the border.

I think there are voters who see Trump and I as real people who are candid. They don’t agree with us about everything, but they have a sense that I’m telling them what I actually think and am listening to them with curiosity and honesty.

On the question of whether Trump is “marching us toward fascism.”

I think one of the dangerous things about that line of questioning is that democracy is not based on a binary vote for president. It is a muscle in normal, ordinary Americans who are showing up to volunteer at school, who are helping their neighbors out, who have a relationship with their community. It is all of these ways that we live our lives. And so when you say it’s just about one person, I think you damage the long-term muscle to resist a drift.

You’ve been forthright in support of the rights of trans people, which Joe Kent tried to use against you, especially when it came to things like trans women in sports. How did you navigate an issue that proved so difficult for Democrats nationally?

I do not think that is why Democrats lost the presidential race. He tried to come for me on it and it did not work.

Because it wasn’t a priority for your voters?

That’s right. In town halls and things like that, people are talking about, like, Spirit Lake and flooding in the Chehalis River Valley. I think views are nuanced on this, and there is some electoral liability for Democrats, but it’s not an Achilles' heel.

She favors reforms such as expanding the House and ranked-choice voting as means of bringing greater representation to the US government.

I think 90 percent of Americans really do agree about 90 percent of the issues, and instead we are allowing 10 things to push us into camps that are not going to build a coalition that could actually pass laws. So power continues to accrue to the most senior members and the least representative districts.

The framework here is that it is a bipartisan, equally divided commission that is thinking in large terms about what will deliver the most utility, not something just for a particular area. If we want more normal, working-class people here, we need electoral systems that open the door to more people participating.

I think rural America has not been well served by single-party control, and I also think our current system means that the most bipartisan members in the middle are also the ones who have to fight for their lives every election. That’s a lot of energy, right? It’s exhausting. It’s hard on your family, and it eliminates the deal makers.

You live in a community where Trump won. How many people in your district do you think voted for him because they want him to do the things he promised, like set up immigrant detention camps and use the Justice Department to take revenge on his enemies? And how many do you think voted for him because they don’t believe he’ll do those things?

When you’re fixing a car, right, I would much rather have it make the same noise predictably. Like, it always clunks when I turn left. Whatever it is, a predictable problem is much better than an unpredictable one. And so that confidence that this person is not trying to make themselves acceptable to you. They’re not putting out celebrity surrogates. They’re just showing up, and you can take it or leave it.

We cannot let this one pass. New bathroom bill would essentially make it illegal for trans people to use bathrooms in American airports. Don’t be surprised when it’s followed by national bills preventing people from being trans in public.

— Annalee Newitz

This is that idiot Nancy Mace’s latest brainstorm. It pertains to any federally owned bathroom: Airports, museums, office buildings, parks, etc.

AOC:

The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou… in front of who, an investigator? If a woman doesn’t look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect your genitals to use a bathroom? It’s disgusting.

I’m about to fill out my passport application form for the fifth time. I made two errors the first time, had computer problems the next two, and made another error the fourth.

The most recent error: My legal name is Mitchell. The form asks for other names used. I put down “Mitch,” which is of course the name I go by everywhere but on legal documents. Turns out other names are only supposed to be legal names.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

I am about to fill out the passport renewal application form for the third time today because the process keeps glitching. I may instead climb into the wheel well of a jetliner and smuggle myself out of the country. It would be easier.

The Sol Reader is an ebook reader built into glasses frames. The epaper fits where the lenses of the glasses go. Not gonna lie — I am tempted by these silly things, but the price tag is high — $400.

I found this photo of the cover of David Gerrold's novel "Yesterday's Children"

I read the book when I was about 12 and thought it was amazing. It was my first exposure to the type of main character I would learn, years later, is called an “antihero.” I loved the worldbuilding, the imagined technology, and how the characters interacted with it. Some scenes were just dialogue, characters describing what machines were doing and what they were doing to try to get the machines to obey them, and I loved that.

I read it several times as a teen-ager but not since. I wonder whether I would love it today.

Good cover too. Captured the spirit of the book.

It occurs to me now that “Yesterday’s Children” echoes “The Caine Mutiny.”

Close-up photo of a thin paperback book with an abstract cover illustration of a starship comprising about a dozen attached spheres of various sizes stuck together like Tinkertoys, hanging inside what looks like a bare cubical room with purple and blue walls covered in clouds. On the floor of the room are about a dozen stylized human figures. The lettering on the cover reads, 'For one man _survival_ — for the other, _attack!_ Yesterday's Children a conceptual journey into war by David Gerrold.'

While walking with the dog this morning, I saw a half-dozen people set up a commercial coffee machine in the park

It was the kind of machine you’d see behind the counter at a Starbucks or in a cafe that serves fancy coffee drinks. They had hooked up a generator and a five-gallon water tank. I asked one of the men what was happening; he said it was a joint promotion between a local running club and a British shoe brand coming to the US.

When we returned that way again about 30 minutes later, a dozen runners were standing around, and they’d set up a 7-foot high shelf unit with cubbies of running shoes for the runners to try the shoes.

A group of men and maybe one woman gathered outdoors near a table and a rack filled with shoes in neat cubbies.

You can barely see the coffee machine in the photo above, peeking out behind the cluster of men in the center.

They offered me coffee, but I declined. I do not think about drinking coffee along with strenuous exercise.

Republicans like the First Amendment when it's convenient for them

Texas education officials are expected to vote this week on a public school curriculum that focuses on Christianity.

From the curriculum:

What is the Golden Rule?
The Sermon on the Mount included many different lessons. Some of these included do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy. Beyond the Sermon on the Mount, there are many rules included throughout the Bible. Jesus said that the Golden Rule sums up all of the important teachings from scripture. “So in everything, do unto others as you would have done unto you."'

These are the same types of people who claim, perhaps even sincerely, that Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday because so much of the celebration is secular.

John Gruber:

“Do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy” – the very words that Donald Trump himself lives by.

Julie and I have not done a family Thanksgiving for years but from what I gather from the news and social media, the event has evolved into a joyless occasion where people yell at each other about politics for several hours.

Also, I am a Boomer and an uncle so apparently, I am supposed to play an integral role in this — I’m supposed to be the guy who ruins everything. I am shirking this responsibility.

My coffee is chewy this morning. The grounds broke containment in the coffeemaker.

TV shows we are currently watching: NCIS Origins, High Potential, Matlock, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Diplomat, Evil and Yellowstone. Except for Yellowstone, all of these shows are procedurals. Even Evil is an ecclesiastical procedural. And even Yellowstone has a procedural-driven storyline.

The Verge Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel breathes fire on Elon Musk and Donald Trump's Big Tech enablers

Oliver Darcy at Status.news:

America now has an unelected defense contractor sitting in the White House doing ketamine and twiddling the algorithmic knobs of an influential right-wing echo chamber while fulminating against traditional standards-based journalism, threatening to revoke network broadcast licenses, and suing advertisers who don’t want to spend their money on his dwindling user base. What could go wrong?

On top of that, Trump’s most likely FCC Chairman is Brendan Carr, who was tasked in the first Trump government to crack down on platform moderation by taking control of Section 230, literally wrote the Project 2025 chapter laying out a plan to do so, and is now begging to punish NBC for having Kamala Harris on “SNL.”

To be as clear as I can be, the second Trump administration with Elon Musk embedded within it represents the most direct and sustained threat to the First Amendment and the freedom of the press any of us will ever experience. If you’re a media executive or editorial leader and you haven’t met with your legal team to understand the current landscape of First Amendment threats, let alone the ones to come, you’re already behind. Get on it.

Regarding Big Tech leaders congratulating Trump on his victory:

All of these men are now hopelessly trapped in a problem their own platforms and algorithms created: they have to manipulate Trump’s narcissism to secure tariff exceptions and regulatory largesse, while knowing that the vast majority of their employees and half of their customers will see any engagement as moral bankruptcy.