Mitch's Blog

America loves happy warriors; it’s why we loved FDR and Reagan. Biden was a happy warrior as VP, but by 2020, his age caught up with him, and mostly, he seemed tired and angry. That’s not his fault, but it worked against him.

Trump seemed like a happy warrior in the 2016 election — or at least he did in the primary — but now he’s an angry, bitter rageaholic, as are his supporters. A happy warrior can do extremely well against angry, bitter rage.

Wait, does America really still employ a ton of news reporters? Searching for bright spots in the twilight of the newspaper industry. wapo.st

Surprisingly, given the dire state of the journalism industry, America employs about as many news reporters as it did three decades ago.

That’s not a win—America has nearly 20% more jobs and people than it had 30 years ago.

But it doesn’t point to an industry in collapse either.

The catch is that many of these reporters work outside of journalism organizations, often in PR and marketing.

Having read the article, it describes my winding career path well. I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter, covering local government, crime, community and features. I’ve been a business-to-business tech journalist, which some might argue is not actually journalism. I’ve been a content marketer. And now I’m an analyst. During all that time, I’ve been using the same skills. Even the transition from print to the Internet was gradual and involves many of the same skills.

Israeli former national security leaders and military officials blasted Netenyahu. Biden supports Israel and Netenyahu returns that support with disdain, sending a message to American leaders, particularly Democrats, that there is no benefit to supporting Israel — NextDraft

I decided I don’t like having the memes, vintage photos and other found media on mitchw.blog, so I spun up a couple of separate places for those.

If you’re reading this in Mitch’s Newsletter, you’ll soon be getting two newsletters, one for my posts and the other for the memes, etc. One is Mitch’s Newsletter and the other is Mitch’s Other Newsletter.. You can tell by those newsletter names that I have worked as a marketing professional.

You can also find the memes, etc., on zestymonkey.micro.blog.

More changes to come.

This is Robert A. Heinlein’s bibliography. I love nearly all the books listed here in his Early Period and have re-read many of them multiple times. I dislike almost everything later, even though those later works include novels that are generally considered his best work, “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” to name two.

“The racism distracts from all the other ways in which this is a terrible novel, one that foreshadowed terrible Heinlein novels to come.”

I love Heinlein, and several of his novels and stories are explicitly anti-racist. This novel is hard to fit with that body of work.

Walton:

Friday is one of Heinlein’s “late period” novels. The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick. But of his later books, I’ve always been fond of Friday. It’s the first person story of Friday Jones, courier and secret agent. She’s a clone (in the terms of her world an “artificial person”) who was brought up in a creche and who is passing as human. It’s a book about passing, about what makes you human. I think it was the first female out-and-out action hero that I read. It’s also a book about being good at some things but with a large hole in your confidence underneath. No wonder I lapped it up when I was seventeen!

What’s good about it now? The whole “passing” bit. The cloning, the attitudes to cloning, the worry about jobs. The economy. It has an interesting future world, with lots of colonized planets, but most of the action taking place on Earth–that’s surprisingly unusual. There’s a Balkanized US and a very Balkanized world come to that, but with huge multinational corporations who have assassination “wars” and civil wars. There’s a proto-net, with search paths, that doesn’t have any junk in it–that’s always the failure mode of imagining the net. It was easy enough to figure out you could sit at home and connect to the Library of Congress, but harder to imagine Wikipedia editing wars and all the baroque weirdness that is the web.

Also:

Heinlein’s ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled.

The novel predicts a near-future California that is an independent nation. If I recall correctly, the chief executive is called a Sachem and wears a feathered headdress as a token of office. The whole government is structured like B-movie American Indians. Friday, the hero of the novel, says the government is ridiculous — but it works, and California is a good place to live.

I thought about that sequence often during the special gubernatorial election in 2003, when leading candidates included a washed-up action hero, an even more washed-up former child star and a porn star. The washed-up action hero won. He actually was a pretty good governor and has emerged since as an elder statesman.

Much after the election, I came across a retrospective on the former child star, Gary Coleman, which acknowledged he never had a chance of winning but actually had excellent grasp of the issues.

Cory:

Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there’s real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there’s a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime.

But that’s not what’s in the Cybercrime Treaty.

Here’s a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty.

The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), “cybercrime” has come to mean “anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer.” “Cybercrime” can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights.

Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight “cybercrime” – however those nations define it. They’ll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users' private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring.

These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What’s optional? The human rights safeguards.

Many homeless and formerly homeless San Diegans expressed reservations about a plan to build a 1,000-bed mega-shelter in the city citing concerns about infectious diseases and conflicts. “The hard truth is that though life on the street can be dangerous and miserable, many who spoke with us would rather deal with the unforgiving nature of life outdoors than move into a 1,000-bed shelter.” By Emily Ito and Lisa Halverstadt. voiceofsandiego.org