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Three things Elon Musk and I have in common.

I’ve been listening to the Age of Napoleon podcast for months now, which covers Napoleon’s life, career and world in exhaustive detail. I am coming away a great admirer of Napoleon, while also acknowledging that Napoleon did terrible things. (Haiti.) That is one thing I have in common with Musk.

I also love Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.

So that’s two things I have in common with Elon.

Also, like Musk, I have not and never will fight in a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.

The Marion County Record was investigating sexual misconduct charges against police chief Gideon Cody before police raided the newspaper, according to publisher Eric Meyer. Meyer says the allegations, and the names of the people making the charges, are on computers the police seized.

Police in the small town of Marion, Kansas, raided the local newspaper office, leading to worldwide protest by free speech organizations. The newspaper publisher’s 98-year-old mother died the following day; the publisher says the raid triggered her death.

What if generative AI turns out to be a dud?

Gary Marcus:

… we are building our entire global and national policy on the premise that generative AI will be world-changing in ways that may in hindsight turn out to have been unrealistic.

I have found generative AI uses to be limited at best.

I use it to generate illustrations for articles. In the past, I used public domain and Creative Commons images, and those were just as good as AI imagery.

AI produces mediocre writing that’s filled with errors. In the time it would take me to bring AI writing up to standard, I can just do the writing myself. And that’s what I do.

So yeah maybe generative AI will be the biggest thing since the invention of electricity or fire, but I don’t see evidence that will happen.

The most promising application for generative AI is to deliver voice-activated Star Trek like computers. That would be a big deal—but we’re not there, and may never get there.

Jamelle Bouie: Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires

Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes.

Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.”

Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.

I could watch a 2-1/2 hour movie of Peter Quill and his grandpa eating breakfast and gossiping about the neighbors.

We just watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I hope they make about ten more of those movies. So good.

Kottke: Glamor photos of vintage calculators, 1968-83.

In the 1970s, calculators weren’t just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.”

My Dad was an accountant and started using calculators very early. I remember visiting his office as a boy around 1970 and seeing a desktop calculator. All it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and it was the size of a cash register.

Reddit seems to have successfully put down its moderator revolt, but is destroying the site in the process

Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators.

If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit. I’m just not finding those images and videos there as much anymore, and I’m starting to check Reddit less often.

I saw this leaflet on a utility pole when walking with Minnie.

Cory Doctorow: Verizon’s “repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.”

“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company.

Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It:

These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.

Daring Fireball: “Colonel Harland Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, sold the company to a conglomerate in 1964, and then remained their paid spokesman for the remainder of his life, despite the fact that he despised their food and professed deep regret that he sold the chain.”

Caleb Sasser writes about “Turn-On,” a legendary hyperactive sketch comedy show from “Laugh-In”’s creators, canceled in 1969 midway through its first episode, reportedly because it was too far ahead of its time. The show disappeared for 54 years but surfaced (possibly illegally) on YouTube. Via Waxy

Don’t give your heart to Bluesky or Threads

Cory Doctorow hasn’t joined Bluesky or Threads, and is sticking with Mastodon, because Bluesky and Threads aren’t federated and Mastodon is. Bluesky and Threads have captive user bases, while Mastodon users are free to leave.

Cory Doctorow:Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again: There’s a crucial difference between federatable and federated.

Cory is also on Tumblr, which isn’t federated either, and he doesn’t talk about why he’s there. I suspect his reasons are the same as mine for being on both Tumblr and Facebook: I’ve been on Facebook and Tumblr for years, and made connections on those platforms. I don’t want to just walk away from that.

Indeed, 80% of my social media conversations are on Facebook. If I could only stay on one social media platform, it would be the Facebook blue app. I wish that were not the case.

(Cory isn’t on Facebook. Smart man, Cory.)

And Cory leaves off my primary reason for focusing on ActivityPub-enabled platforms, specifically micro.blog and Mastodon: They have legs. They’ll be around. I invested a lot of time and energy in Google+, only to watch all of that vanish. I don’t want to repeat that mistake.

Mastodon was announced in 2016. The ActivityPub standard launched in 2018. Those technologies have legs. The Lindy Effect suggests they’ll be around for several more years at least.

Bluesky has been around only a few months, and it’s still in closed beta. Threads have been around only a few weeks, and it’s still in alpha. Maybe they’ll be around a long time. Maybe they’ll be fly-by-night. I don’t see any reason to rush onto those platforms. There is no early adopter benefit to social media. If those platforms are a big deal in a year or two or five, I can think then about whether to jump on.

Yes, Bluesky, Threads and Tumblr all say they will federate. Bluesky has its own protocol for that, and Threads and Tumblr say they’ll adopt ActivityPub. Let’s talk again if those things actually happen.

I already spend too much time staring at screens. I’m reluctant to invest much time in Bluesky and Threads.

The American Dream has lost its hustle: Young workers just aren’t buying it

Felix Salmon at Axios: Even before the pandemic, young people mistrusted capitalism. “Now, with a strong labor market at their backs, they are increasingly proud of, and being lauded for, turning the tables on their employers – the exploited have become the exploiters.” The behavior now called “quiet quitting” is nothing new: the phrase “phoning it in” dates back to 1938 “and the novelty then was the phone, not the conduct.”

According to Axios, what’s new is that people used to be ashamed of slacking off and now they’re proud of it.

The 1999 movie “Office Space” came this close to making slacking off heroic – but then, in the final scene, it turns out that the protagonist, Peter Gibbons, is perfectly happy to put in an honest day’s work after all. It wasn’t the all-American paragon of hard work he was rebelling against, just soulless corporate drudgery.

…

Hard work used to be part and parcel of the American Dream. For millions of younger workers, that’s no longer the case.

I wonder whether young people are really lazier today, or have they returned to a more healthy view of work being a part of a balanced life? Most people shouldn’t live to work; they should work to live.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” musical episode trivia

Actor Bruce Horak, who played Hemmer, returns as the Klingon general. In real life, the actor performs in a musical group, the Railbirds, which explains his superior singing chops.

And Christina Chong, who plays La’an, and Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura, both have musical theater backgrounds. Gooding got a Tony nomination for her performance on Broadway in “Jagged Little Pill.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Just Pulled Off a Secret Cameo | Den of Geek

“Fighting junk fees is ‘woke’: Visa and Mastercard want you to pay credit card swipe fees to own the libs.”

A dark money campaign is claiming that legislation to rein in credit card junk fees is bad because it’s “woke," and compares reining in credit card fees to Communism.

The campaign is “literally that stupid,” says Cory Doctorow, who notes that Mastercard and Visa skim 3-5% of every of “every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy.”

Not quite true but close—according to statista.com, cash accounted for just 12% of retail transactions in the US in 2022. Nearly other transaction is either a straight-up credit card or some variation like a debit card, ewallet, or a prepaid card.

Nowadays, the only thing I pay for with cash is my monthly haircut. Until this year, I also paid cash for pizza, but the pizza place we order from finally went to app delivery. Every other retail transaction I do goes through Visa.

Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to ‘Date-Me Docs’

The youngs today are burned out on dating apps so they’re posting long personal profiles to the Internet, often using Google Docs or Notion. These are essentially resumes, but for romance instead of jobs.

Connie Li, 33, a software engineer, “described herself as monogamous, short and prone to wearing colorful outfits. She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, ‘just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.’”

Cooking With Gas: The decades-long marketing campaign by big business to get us to love our gas stoves. On the 99% Invisible podcast.

Casey Newton at Platformer: How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk. KOSA gives the Republican Party power to censor the Internet and eliminate LGBTQ content and anything else Republicans don’t like. And yet Democrats are on board with it, because if you wave the flag of child protection in front of a politician their brain switches off.

Hard Fork: “Researchers in Korea claim they’ve identified a material that could unlock a technological revolution: the room temperature superconductor.” Kevin Roose and Casey Newton at the Hard Fork podcast explain why that’s a big deal.

Twitter is doing its own research on the subject, including @iris_IGB, who claims to be Russian, uses a manga character for an avatar, and says they’ve reproduced the experiment in their kitchen.

Things I saw while walking with the dog this morning. 📷

I’m happy to support the Kickstarter for the audiobook for Cory Doctorow’s next book, “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation,” a guide to breaking up tech monopolies and incidentally saving the planet. Backing the project supports the great work Cory does on his blog and podcast.

Maybe you’re saying I should watch where I’m walking more carefully. And maybe you’re right. But I’ve lived with cats nearly forty years and the dog for ten and it hasn’t been a problem before. I have suddenly acquired dog poop and cat throw-up bad karma.

In recent weeks I have cleaned my shoe soles of great masses of dog poop twice and an extraordinary quantity of cat throw-up once.

I have become a reluctant expert on this subject. Warm water and dish soap. Easy peasy.

This is what it’s like to spend your life in prison.

Listening to the men in the short Opinion Video above is like encountering visitors from another planet. They are serving life sentences at Angola prison, in rural Louisiana, with little to no hope for release. Many are elderly; they have not seen the outside world, or their families, for decades. They do not face execution, but they have been sentenced to death all the same, their lives spooling out endlessly on the cellblock and in the cotton fields, then ending in a prison hospice bed.

My essential and useful Obsidian plugins

A friend is getting started with Obsidian, making the switch from Evernote, and he asked me for recommendations on plugins—which ones I, personally, find most useful. Here’s my list:

Essential

Command Palette This is the main way I invoke commands in Obsidian. You type a keyboard shortcut (Command-P on my Mac) and a little text popup comes up. You start typing and Obsidian auto-suggests possible commands, until you quickly narrow down to what you’re looking for.

Command Palette is a core plugin. It comes with Obsidian. If you want to use it, just switch it on from the Preference settings in Obsidian. The same is true for all core plugins.

Slash Commands does the same thing as the Command Palette plugin, but you start by typing a slash into the text of your note. I often use this as an alternative to the Command Palette. (Core)

Quick Switcher. A palette for quickly finding files and documents. It’s similar to the Command Palette. The Quick Switcher is my primary way of navigating between Obsidian documents. The keyboard shortcut on Mac for that is Cmd-O. (Core.)

I’m in Obsidian all day when I’m working. Most of the time, I’m writing, but when I’m in Obsidian and not writing, most of the time I’m hitting Cmd-P or / to invoke a command, or Cmd-O to switch between documents.

Daily Note. For writing daily notes. (Core.)

Files. See the files and folders in your vault. (Core.)

Better Word Count. Obsidian comes with its own word counter plugin, but this one can count the words and characters in a text selection.

I see now that Better Word Count has a couple of useful settings I have not explored, like excluding comments from word counts, and counting pages in addition to words.

My work as a writer requires me to write to length, and Better Word Count is how I keep track of that.

Better Word Count is a community plugin. Community plug-ins are made by people in the Obsidian user community. To get Better Word Count, or any Community plugin, go open Obsidian preferences, go to the Community plugins section, and search for the plugin by name.

Pandoc Plugin. Export Markdown documents in a variety of formats. I use it to export documents to the DocX format, for sending to clients. (Community.)

Useful

Backlinks. Shows other documents that link to the current document. (Core)

Search. Searches the vault. (Core.)

Outline. Displays an outline of the document you’re working on. (Core.)

Page Preview. Hover over an internal link to view its content. (Core.)

Templates. For creating note templates. (Core.)

Auto Link Title. When you paste in a Web URL, this plugin automatically fetches the title of the page. Works almost all the time. (Community.)

Calendar. Displays a calendar. Useful for navigating between daily notes. (Community.)

Daily Notes Viewer. View your most recent daily notes in a single page. (Community.)

File Tree Alternative. Displays files and folders separately. (Community.)

Minimal Theme Settings. Customizing the look of the minimal theme. Also, Styles. (Community.)

Natural Language Dates. For example, typing @today enters the current date, @yesterday enters yesterday’s date, and so on. (Community.)

Typography. Automatically replace dumb quotes with smart quotes, three hyphens with an em dash, and so on. (Community.)

AidenLx’s Folder Note. Creates a note with the same name as a folder. You can use the folder note as an index to the folder, with notes about what’s in the folder. The folder note can either be inside the folder, or in the parent folder. (Community.)

That’s seven plugins in my “Essential” category, and 13 more in the “Useful” category. This level of complication might be holding Obsidian back from mainstream adoption.

On the other hand, this level of customizability is precisely what appeals to Obsidian’s core user base.

And there’s more:

Trying these out to see if they are useful

Properties. Manages custom metadata you can add to your file: Dates, descriptions, links, whatever you want. Uses YAML formatting, which is just plain text at the top of the file. Obsidian has supported YAML for a while, but previously you had to work with the plain text; Properties puts an easier to use and prettier face on it. (Core, currently available only to people in the Obsidian Catalyst early-access program.)

Tags. I’m experimenting with switching to a very tag-heavy organizational structure for my vault. Previously I used folders. (Core.)

Tag Wranger. Rename, merge, and search tags from the tag pane. You can also create tag pages—pages with the same name as your tag. (Community.)

DevonThink. Helps to pair Obsidian with the very sophisticated Apple-only DevonThink document and information management tool. (Community.)

Very useful to many people, but I’ve never found a need for them

Bookmarks. Saves files and searches as favorites. (Core.)

Workspaces. Save and restore workspaces layouts. Frequently used for displaying multiple notes on one screen. (Core.)

Dataview. Turns your vault of text documents into a database you can query. I lack the technical chops to use this plugin. (Community.)

Templater. A powerful alternative to the Templates core plugin. As with Dataview, this seems to require more technical chops than I have. (Community.)

Canvas and Graph View are core plugins you use to visualize relationships between notes. Graph View generates maps automatically, using the links between notes. Canvases are built manually, by dragging notes and cards on a two-dimensional surface. I am an extremely non-visual thinker, so I do not find these two plugins useful. At least not yet. Maybe one day.

I’m working on an article about Snowflake Inc. and trying to get in just the right amount of puns about snow and winter.

Yesterday afternoon, I went into the sunroom to lie down for a few minutes, and found that Minnie had peed all over the daybed in there. She had been extremely difficult to potty train when we first got her 10 years ago—many, many accidents for about the first 18 months we had her—but she hasn’t had an accident in years. She has been rock solid. But she broke that record yesterday. And boy this was a big one.

We keep a canvas cover on the daybed for just such accidents as these, and also because Minnie can be a high-energy dog at times and she goes in and out of the backyard all day and we want to keep the daybed clean and unshredded. The canvas cover was allegedly waterproof. It is not—not the least little bit. Minnie’s urine soaked through the canvas cover, and into the blankets and sheets.

So, no nap for me, and Julie cheerfully pitched in and took the lead on the clean-up for which I was and am grateful.

I brought the canvas cover out back and hung it on the fence and sprayed it down with Urine Destroyer (great product name) and hosed it down and went back inside. Around nine at night, I went out back to check to see if the canvas cover was dry, and on the way back to the house, I stepped in a big pile of dog poop. I was wearing the only shoes I have that I like to wear with shorts and no socks.

This morning, I went to let the dog out and looked for the key to the backdoor. A few days ago, I decided I didn’t like the place I usually keep the key, and put it somewhere else. I didn’t like that place either, so I put it in a different place. I didn’t like that place either, so I found a third place for it. And now I can’t find the key anymore.

And how is your week going so far?

Fortunately, we have had no repeats of indoor doggy accidents. And I found another pair of no-socks-shorts shoes that turn out to be quite comfortable and look better than the ones I had been wearing.

I started reading “Pursuit of the Pankera,” which is I think the only book by Robert A. Heinlein I have not read. I am enjoying it so far. I’m finding it a pleasant surprise.

The book was initially published in 1980, as “The Number of the Beast.” The first third of “Pankera” is the same as “Number,” and then they go off in different directions. They are two different novels with the same beginning, and many of the same characters throughout. “Pankera” disappeared for 40 years, and was finally published in 2020.

So far, I’m still in the first third, which is the same as “The Number of the Beast.”

I read “Number of the Beast” when it first came out. I was 19 years old. I was and am an avid Heinlein fan–he was and is my favorite writer by far.

“Number” was Heinlein’s first novel after a hiatus of six or seven years, nearly as long as I’d been reading real books (as opposed to children’s picture books). So the availability of “Number” was a big deal for me.

Like many fans, I found “Number” very disappointing.

Now I see something I managed to miss then: The book is an action-comedy. I think many critics missed that too. The situations and much of the dialogue are ridiculous, but they’re supposed to be. Their ridiculousness is not a failure of the book.

The Life I Never Intended to Love: Dog Owner. Katherine Bindley: “During the pandemic I chose a breed often compared to a velociraptor. It ruined my life–until I discovered that he’s the best dog who’s ever lived.” www.wsj.com/articles/…

I can absolutely relate. Minnie is a high-energy dog. She’s mellowed now, but in her first few years she ran us ragged. Even today, I walk her for more than 90 minutes a day and she’s ready for more. Many times when we get home from walks, she does zoomies just for the heck of it.

And she’s 10 years old. In dog years, that’s the same age as I am. I do not do zoomies.

Also, Minnie is a hybrid between a german shepherd and basenji. German shepherds are highly trainable, which is the reason why so many of them are working dogs. Basenji are among the most stubborn, hardest-to-train breeds. You might think that would even out and make Minnie average in trainability. But no, she swings wildly from one extreme to the other. Sometimes it seems like she can read my mind and does exactly what I want as soon as I think it. Other times we give her commands and she knows exactly what we want, and she says nope.

So yeah in several ways Minnie was a poor choice for us as sedentary first-time dog owners … but we would not part with her. There’s a lesson about life decisions in there.

The Criminal podcast: A Glamour and a Mystery.

In the summer of 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright took a photograph of her 9-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths. It was the first photograph she’d ever taken – and it became the source of a mystery that lasted for most of the 20th century.

thisiscriminal.com/episode-2…

The girls' photos appeared to show them interacting with fairies: winged humans a few inches tall. Spiritualists worldwide, including Arthur Conan Doyle, were fascinated. More than a half-century later, one of the girls, now an old woman, admitted the thing was a hoax (although she said one of the five photos were real). She said the girls only intended to fool their family for a couple of hours.

The Cottingley Fairies en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cott…

Related: The Fox Sisters were three sisters from Rochester, New York, who became worldwide celebrities when they claimed to be in communication with ghosts in 1848, launching the spiritualism movement. In later life, the Fox sisters said they made it all up. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_…

When posting memes, is it a good idea to put the text of the meme in the alt-text of the image? Can screenreaders read the text of a meme, if the text is in a simple, legible font?

Things I saw walking the dog this morning. I like the lines of that building, and the stone facade. There was a shopping cart in the way of the shot, so I moved it.

A small office building, with a classic mid-century California suburban design. Rundown but still beautiful. Typical suburban house—with a totem pole in front.

The Eagles are the ultimate 70s band, and “Take it Easy” is their ultimate song.

A surprising number of you seemed to enjoy the video of Minnie walking down stairs. Here is another.

On my walk with the dog this morning, I saw this gentleman living his best life.
Scenic photo of a man fishing in a small boat on a peaceful lake, surrounded by succulent foliage.

The San Diego Human Relations Commission is a safe space for anti-semitism and transphobia. Or it was—the Human Relations Commission is losing humans, as three commissioners resign in protest over the bigotry. www.msn.com/en-us/new…

Things I saw walking this morning: That lawn has a lot going on. And Purple Snoopy does not live up to his publicity.

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: 'The machines we have now are not conscious'

Chiang is the author of brilliant stories which explore themes of consciousness and free will, including “The Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the Hollywood movie “Arrival,” starring Amy Adams.

Chiang says machines learn language differently from human children, which leads journalist Madhumita Murgia to talk about how their “five-year-old has taken to inventing little one-line jokes, mostly puns, and testing them out on us. The anecdote makes [Chiang] animated.”

“Your daughter has heard jokes and found them funny. ChatGPT doesn’t find anything funny and it is not trying to be funny. There is a huge social component to what your daughter is doing,” he says.

Meanwhile ChatGPT isn’t “mentally rehearsing things in order to see if it can get a laugh out of you the next time you hang out together”.

…

… he asks me if I remember the Tom Hanks film Cast Away. On his island, Hanks has a volleyball called Wilson, his only companion, whom he loves. “I think that that is a more useful way to think about these systems,” he tells me. “It doesn’t diminish what Tom Hanks’ character feels about Wilson, because Wilson provided genuine comfort to him. But the thing is that . . . he is projecting on to a volleyball. There’s no one else in there.”

www.ft.com/content/c…

In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the front lines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation.

— Children of Zorin, on the Last Archive podcast www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/…

Buck Martinez needs a spinoff series because that name is awesome.

Thunderation! The Speaker Demands Bean Soup (1904) On July 27, 1904, Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon went to the Capitol dining room looking forward to his usual bowl of bean soup, “and is met with an unfortunate surprise.” Cannon raised a fuss (because I guess there was nothing more important going on in 1904). Bean soup has been on the menu every day since—except for one.

On the “This Day in Esoteric Political History” podcast, which points out that it’s bonkers to want a hot bowl of soup for lunch in Washington D.C. in July before air conditioning was invented.

beta.prx.org/stories/4…

The FBI is once again violating legal restrictions on spying on American citizens, querying communications with a state senator and US senator. The queries are a violation of FISA Section 702, which provides limited permission for the FBI to tap American communications overseas. The FBI has shown its disregard for the law. Moreover, “we live in a globalized world where U.S. persons regularly communicate with people in other countries,” making Section 702 excessively broad even as written, writes Matthew Guariglia at eff.org. www.eff.org/deeplinks…

Red Hat’s recent decision to restrict the source code for its enterprise Linux build has led open-source projects big and small to come up with creative strategies to continue to serve their users. www.vice.com/en/articl…

It’s uncomfortable when you’re at the supermarket and you hear a song that you once thought was edgy and dangerous. This is not a problem if you’re into death metal or Yoko Ono.

A brief history of making out. Turns out “romantic, sexual, steamy” kissing isn’t instinctual behavior; it’s a learned cultural practice. A lot of societies don’t do it, most primates don’t do it, and people only started relatively recently, a few thousand years ago. On the Decoder Ring podcast, hosted by Willa Paskin and produced by Paskin and Katie Shepherd. slate.com/podcasts/…

This podcast pairs nicely with this week’s episode of Savage Lovecast, where host Dan Savage talks about primate masturbation with evolutionary biologist Dr. Matilda Brindle. savage.love/lovecast/…

Ghost Church: The delightful Jamie Loftus looks at the American spiritualism movement, including its history, and she visits the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in Florida. Loftus is funny, wise and takes a friendly but skeptical view. www.iheart.com/podcast/1…

Loftus previously did podcasts about joining Mensa for a year and the comic strip Cathy.

Her podcast about Nabokov’s “Lolita” discusses how nearly 70 years of critics and filmmakers completely miss the point of the novel by portraying Humbert Humbert as a victim of a seductress. He’s not the victim—he’s a pedophile who destroys a little girl’s life. www.avclub.com/jamie-lof…

“Majorly” seems to me like it’s just plain wrong. Bad English. Not a real word. But apparently, I’m wrong about that. Majorly is a real word, albeit relatively recent. It was first used in 1955.

However, I think it’s going to be a while before I stop majorly cringing every time I see or hear it.

I am in awe of the mental gymnastics required to conclude that there's any solution to homelessness other than finding housing for people. It's like telling a drowning person that their real problem is they eat fatty foods.

“Housing First” policy does what it says—it attempts to address homelessness by finding housing for homeless people before attempting to solve other problems these people might have.

This common-sense solution has come under fire by critics, mostly Republicans, who claim that it fails to address the real causes of homelessness: Mental health and drug abuse. (And then the Republicans don’t want to do anything about mental health or drug abuse either. Well played, Republicans!)

However, numerous studies show Housing First works.

Two examples of Housing First implemented in San Diego “show that formerly homeless people are remaining housed and may be more open to rehab than if they had stayed on the street,” according to a report by Gary Warth in the San Diego Union-Tribune. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/home…

Out of 400+ tenants in two properties purchased for homeless housing in 2020, most original tenants are still there, and of the 15% who have moved away, nearly all are in other permanent housing or temporary housing.

But what about substance abuse? Some 25% of tenants self-identified as having substance abuse disorders. The actual number may well be higher because people are going to lie about that kind of thing.

Of those self-identifying as having substance abuse disorders, few seek treatment: Just 12%. That’s not much, but if you put these people in housing, more of them will live long enough to get into treatment, because the mortality rate of people on the street is four times higher than the general population.

Moreover, treatment is more likely to work if people are housed. Substance abuse treatment is difficult and painful, and even harder to do if you’re also dealing with the daily traumas of homelessness.

Also: the Voice of San Diego’s Will Huntsberry looks at four common beliefs about homelessness. voiceofsandiego.org/2023/07/2…

One myth is that homeless people are coming to California and San Diego to take advantage of the better weather and more generous social programs. But the reality is that most homeless people aren’t coming to San Diego from elsewhere; their last residence was right here, Huntsberry reports.

That makes sense: If you find yourself homeless, that’s a traumatic event, and you’re not likely to leave your support network of friends and family and go somewhere where you don’t know the neighborhoods, you don’t know where it might be safe to sleep, or how to go about finding work or benefits. www.nytimes.com/2023/07/1…

California has a bigger homeless problem than most places. The state is home to 12% of the country’s total population, but 30% of its homeless, Huntsberry reports.

Another belief is that many homeless don’t want to get off the streets. Even San Diego’s Democratic Mayor Todd Gloria supports that idea. But the reality is that shelters in San Diego are functioning at nearly full capacity every day of the week. “Far more people ask for shelter every day than receive it,” Huntsberry says.

The third belief is that mental health problems and substance abuse cause homelessness. It’s true that mental health problems and substance abuse are prevalent among the homeless–but those conditions don’t cause homelessness. We know this because places like West Virginia, which have high rates of drug use and mental illness, have low homeless rates.

Homelessness is caused by housing that is expensive and hard to find, which describes San Diego. timesofsandiego.com/business/…

Huntsberry cites a book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern.

In their book, the researchers compare finding housing to a distorted game of musical chairs. In this game, some people have broken ankles and other ailments. These people are the most likely to be left standing when the music stops. So it is with housing. People with mental illness and substance abuse problems are the most likely to have problems getting housing in a tight housing market.

But in places where housing is affordable and abundant, people with mental illness and substance use disorders can usually maintain housing.

Republicans want to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to suppress LGBTQ+ voices. “Pass it, pass it, pass it, pass it, pass it,” says Biden. www.techdirt.com/2023/07/2…

It’s not just LGBTQ+ voices that are at risk. KOSA gives broad enforcement authority to states’ attorneys general. In blue states, that could mean suppression of conservative views.

The San Diego Police Department is being scrutinized for reliance on CalGang, a California database that’s been dropped by many state law enforcement agencies. Once added to the database, “You’ve moved out of the human species and into the species of being a gang member,” says Jaime Wilson, co-chair of San Diego’s Commission on Gang Prevention and Intervention and the mother of a young man who was added to the database in 2017. voiceofsandiego.org/2023/07/2…

Our Long, National Taco Tuesday Nightmare Is Finally Over. Taco John’s was happy to bully smaller companies with threats of trademark litigation, but when a bigger company—Taco Bell—came along wanting to fight, suddenly Taco John grew principles and decided that litigation would be wrong. www.techdirt.com/2023/07/2…